GM takes new approach to worker diversity as Oshawa production returns

2022/03/08 Leave a comment

Of note:

The hulking grey shell of GM’s Oshawa assembly plant looks just like it did when the company shut down production on a frigid December day in 2019, but much of what’s inside is strikingly new. 

There’s a new product — as of the November restart, the plant makes huge (and hugely profitable) Chevy Silverado pickup trucks — fancy new robots to swing them about the plant, and kilometres of new conveyor lines to usher them through to completion. But maybe the biggest change is a workforce that is not only largely new to the plant, but to the manufacturing sector at large after the automaker made a concerted effort to hire women for about half of the 1,200 line positions.

“I didn’t even know how to use a hammer until I came here,” said Adriana Wilkinson, who is now a production team leader in the body shop.

Like many of the new hires, Wilkinson’s previous job — she ran an escape room — was disrupted by the pandemic, so she said she jumped at the “life-changing opportunity” for her and her family when GM started hiring last year, and now says she’s here for life. 

“I never thought I’d be working with vehicles, never knew how to use a tool, and totally out of my comfort zone, but I jumped right in and I love it.”

Others on the line include people like Heather MacLeod, who is starting a new career after retiring from the RCMP; Honey Panchal, a controls system engineer who moved to Canada from India last year; and Crystal Cooper, who moved from customer care at GM to working as a group leader on the final assembly line because she wanted to get out of her element. 

“Coming into the manufacturing world was completely different, but it was challenging, and I really wanted to be a part of something bigger,“ said Cooper. 

The gender parity on the production line is a big shift for an industry where in Canada, women make up only about 23 per cent of auto assembly jobs, according to the Future of Canadian Automotive Labourforce Initiative. 

GM Canada president Scott Bell said diversity has been a priority for some time at the company, which is led by Mary Barra and has a gender-balanced board, but he said it was the restart of the plant that led to the push for gender balance.

“We just recognized the fact that we’ve got a unique opportunity, and let’s put the effort in.” 

To encourage more women to apply to the job, GM highlighted stories of women who had already worked there as part of its campaign, as well as made sure to do targeted social media advertising, They hardly had to worry though, with some 13,000 people in total applying from across Canada as well as internationally for about 1,800 positions including skilled workers. 

The opportunity to hire a whole new workforce, however, came at the expense of the many early retirements, layoffs and disruptions to those who thought production would never return.

“I am not thrilled that GM closed our plant,“ said Rebecca Keetch, who is back working at the plant after choosing to stay on standby when production was suspended.

She said she’s excited that production is back, but that the rapid closure and reopening was disrespectful to workers and the community, and led to the loss of higher-paying senior positions. Workers at third-party suppliers were also hit without getting the same supports as GM workers. 

Keetch is active in a group pushing for electric vehicle production in Oshawa, and was disappointed that the plant didn’t get new commitments from GM on that front.

“I just don’t see a sense of long-term security unless they decide to make Oshawa part of their autonomous, electric, connected vision of the future.”

GM Canada’s Bell said the 2019 plantclosure was unfortunate, but that it was part of a wider restructuring. With better-than-expected demand for pickup trucks, GM has spent $1.3 billion on Oshawa as part of its commitment to the plant, he said, that will help fund the company’s transition to electric. 

“It’s a substantial investment. Trucks are going to be around for a long time, so we feel good about that. From an EV perspective, you know, we’ve got to fund that business.”

Demand for pickups has increased during the pandemic, with plants working overtime to produce them, said Sam Fiorani, head of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions LLC.

He said that with GM already twice announcing the closure of Oshawa, first in 2008 and then in 2018, it’s risky to bet on the plant’s future, but he also doesn’t see pickup truck demand waning, and Oshawa is the only GM plant that can produce both light and heavy-duty models.

“This is the most hopeful outlook for any plant in Canada, any Detroit Three plants in Canada, for a longer-term future.”

Many in the plant are hoping that’s the case.

“I plan to be here for the next 30 years,” said Stephanie Waudby, 38, a production team leader on the trim line.

Waudby had her own cleaning business before the pandemic slowed things down and she jumped into manufacturing for the first time. She wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the auto manufacturing though, asshe isa now third-generation GM worker at the plant.

She said she’s proud to carry on the family legacy, and that everyone’s excited about building trucks again in Oshawa.

“It was really heartbreaking for a lot of people when the plant had to shut down, so just being able to bring that back to this area is amazing.”

Source: GM takes new approach to worker diversity as Oshawa production returns

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China seeing new surge in cases despite ‘zero tolerance’

2022/03/08 Leave a comment

Of note (assuming numbers are reported correctly). According to John Hopkins, actual numbers are close to 600,000 infections and 7,000 deaths:

China is seeing a new surge in COVID-19 cases across the vast country, despite its draconian “zero tolerance” approach to dealing with outbreaks. 

The mainland on Monday reported 214 new cases of infection over the previous 24 hours, with the most, 69, in the southern province of Guangdong bordering on Hong Kong, which has been recording tens of thousands of cases per day. 

Another 54 cases were reported in the Jilin province, more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) to the north, and 46 in the eastern province Shandong. 

In his annual report to the national legislature Saturday, Premier Li Keqiang said China needs to “constantly refine epidemic containment” but gave no indication Beijing might ease the highly touted “zero tolerance” strategy.

Li called for accelerating vaccine development and “strengthening epidemic controls” in cities where travelers and goods arrive from abroad. 

“Zero tolerance” requires quarantines and lockdowns on entire communities and sometimes even cities when as few as a handful of cases have been detected. Chinese officials credit the approach — along with a vaccination rate of more than 80% — with helping prevent a major nationwide outbreak, but critics say it is taking a major toll on the economy and preventing the population from building up natural immunity. 

No new cases were reported in Beijing and the city was largely back to normal, although masks continue to be worn in public places indoors. 

One area that continues to feel the effects of tight COVID-19 control is the religious sector. Three of Beijing’s most famous Catholic churches, Buddhist temples and mosques stated Sunday they had been ordered closed in January with no date given on reopening. 

Even before the pandemic, such institutions were under heavy pressure from the Communist authorities to follow through on demands from leader Xi Jinping that all religious centers be purged of outside influence, including the physical appearance of places of worship. 

The latest daily case numbers mark some of the highest since the initial outbreak in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019 that is believed to have sparked the pandemic. 

They bring China’s total to 111,195 with 4,636 deaths, according to the National Health Commission. At present, 3,837 people are receiving treatment for COVID-19, many of them infected with the omicron strain. 

Source: China seeing new surge in cases despite ‘zero tolerance’

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Delaware is shrinking racial gaps in cancer death. Its secret? Patient navigators

2022/03/08 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Sussex County, in the heart of southern Delaware’s poultry-farm country, is home to many people like Michelaine Estimable, a 62-year-old native of Haiti who came to work on the factory lines of a chicken-processing plant.

But Estimable hasn’t worked in two years, because of a leg injury that made it impossible for her to drive. Now, she relies on family members she lives with to get rides to medical appointments — one of the logistical headaches that’s kept her from scheduling her mammogram for the past year.

Luckily for her, she’s getting some help this year accessing preventative care from the state of Delaware. At the clinic where she gets primary care, she meets with Margarette Osias, a patient navigator for the Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition, who sets up shop here every Tuesday, hoping to find people in the community due for mammograms or other cancer screenings.

Osias schedules exams for patients, sends them reminders, and arranges rides for them to get there. A bilingual Haitian Creole speaker herself, Osias also deals with insurance — or even goes with patients to appointments to serve as a translator.

Whatever obstacles the patient faces, “I am basically the connection between that individual and receiving that care,” Osias says.

Patient navigators like Osias play a critical role in how the state of Delaware has reduced its cancer death rates, and narrowed — even eliminated — racial disparities in some forms of cancer. Both are high priorities for the Biden administration, which last month relaunched the Cancer Moonshot initiative, pledging to cut cancer deaths in half in 25 years and address persistent disparities in screening and treatment among people of color. Nationally, cancer kills Black people at higher rates than other groups.

Delaware’s approach to cancer care stands out in the U.S. Two decades ago, the state had one of the highest cancer death rates in the country, so it used funds from the 1998 tobacco settlement to set up universal cancer screening and treatment for its residents. Its Screening for Life program will pay for all cancer screenings and, if cancer is found, will also cover up to two years of treatment — even for residents who are undocumented, have no insurance, or earn up to 6.5 times the federal poverty rate.

Now, that program is a model for addressing racial inequity in health care.

But access to screening and treatment can only help if residents like Estimable, who’s lost a sister and a cousin to cancer, know about it — which is where patient navigators like Osias come in.

Osias schedules exams for patients, sends them reminders, and arranges rides for them to get there. She also helps patients with insurance and translates for them at medical appointments.

Every five years, the state identifies zip codes where screening rates run lowest. Navigators then fan out across grocery stores and laundromats in those communities, dropping flyers, setting up booths, and meeting with religious leaders. They arrange mobile screening vans to factories and other workplaces during work hours.

The process is neither quick, nor easy; it takes time to be seen and develop a rapport with people who have a distant or skeptical view of the medical system, says Mary Jo Vasquez, another patient navigator.

People will often approach only after seeing her multiple times, at their church, or where they shop. “They need to trust you,” she says. “They have to learn that we’re there for them, that we want to help them and that we’re not going to abandon them.”

Having patient navigators on the front line is essential, says family nurse practitioner Nadya Julien.

Julien opened Tabitha Medical Care three years ago, and started working with navigators like Osias. The clinic serves mostly her fellow Haitians, as well as some Latino immigrants. She says many are illiterate and didn’t grow up with preventative medicine back home, which puts them at especially high risk of getting late-stage cancers.

The role of navigators isn’t just logistical, she says, they also reduce fears and help people feel supported through a scary and unfamiliar journey, whether it’s screening or treatment.

“When you have the navigator that speak the language that’s can schedule the appointment, that can go to the house and pick them up and also be there with them to translate it gives comfort,” Julien says.

Delaware’s progress against cancer inequities has been slow and steady, and not without its challenges. The state’s overall cancer death rate has gradually fallen from the 2nd highest among states in the 1990s to the 15th highest. Black men’s improvements stand out: From the period of 2003-2007 to that of 2013-2017, the death rate from all cancers declined 26% for non-Hispanic Black men in Delaware, compared to a 15% decline for white men.

The success varies by cancer. The state’s colorectal cancer mortality rates declined 37% among Black men in that time, and compared to 20% for white men. On the other hand, death from breast cancer only decreased by 3% among Black women compared to 15% for white women in that same period.

And a new challenge emerged in the pandemic: screening rates dropped off, temporarily hampering outreach efforts, so — like many other places — the state is now focusing on making up for lost ground.

But solving shifting challenges has always been a big part of navigators’ work. Through trial and error, they’ve discovered they get fewer no-shows if they conduct free screening events on Thursdays, instead of Fridays, for example. They’ve learned to confirm appointments by text instead of by phone, after noting texting helped cut back on confusion and missed appointments.

Learning and tweaking the program like that has helped remove more roadblocks to care, says Stephen Grubbs, a medical oncologist and a founding member of the advisory council of the Delaware Cancer Consortium, which developed the state’s approach.

“This program has been so successful I think because it’s built on data and evidence,” Grubbs says. The state didn’t just screen more people, it also got them into earlier treatment, which ultimately saved lives, he says: “The final end point was, did we change mortality? And the answer was yes. And that’s where you’ve got to get to. If you don’t get there, the other stuff really doesn’t matter, does it?”

Grubbs says it helps that the economics of the program work, too. Catching cancers earlier means less invasive, less costly treatment with better outcomes which, in turn, helps reduce overall cancer costs. All that is possible, he says, because of patient navigators.

“We took the barriers down, the navigators grease the system and made sure it all flowed through — that’s exactly what it was,” he says.

The state now hopes to build on its success, getting more funds to hire more navigators to target other cancers.

Delaware benefitted from having a unified approach, with support from politicians, physicians, community health centers and patient advocates, says Karen Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society. “Having a state cancer plan is something they embrace, and that 20 years of work is starting to bear fruit,” she says.

The state demonstrated the importance of patient navigators, who now play big role in cancer care nationally.

“Everybody knows it’s the right thing to do,” Knudsen says. “And I think there’s a good, strong business case for it as well because of the lower cost of care for patients who are navigated.”

The problem, she says, is insurance doesn’t cover navigation services, which means cancer treatment centers or nonprofits like hers have to fund the cost.

She says she hopes that will change, especially after she spoke to President Biden last month at the White House’s Cancer Moonshot announcement.

“He did not specifically talk about navigators using that word, but he did talk about eliminating disparities and increasing access,” she says. “What I hear when I hear that, I hear “navigation.”

Back at Tabitha Medical Care, after patient navigator Margarette Osias completes scheduling her mammogram, she tells Michelaine Estimable she will call her and send her a text message to remind her.

Then, as she does with every patient she sees, Osias turns to Estimable to ask her to help spread the word: “If she goes to a church or if she’s in the community, if she can share that information with maybe other women that she can let them know that they can come.”

Will she do that?

“Yes,” Estimable answers emphatically. “Yes.”

Source: Delaware is shrinking racial gaps in cancer death. Its secret? Patient navigators

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Russia’s attack on Ukraine sparks outrage in Canada’s multilingual media

2022/03/07 Leave a comment

Useful overview:

In a dramatic shift, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused a complete pivot in ethnic media attention in the past week. While for many Eastern European outlets the war triggered vivid memories of the past, media across the board expressed outrage and concern over the attack and focused on responses from Canada and the international community.

The events in Ukraine are of particular interest to Canada for two reasons, as the Russian Canadian portal Russian Week put it in its commentary. For one, “as a smaller country sitting next to the world’s largest superpower, Canada has a massive stake in ensuring international norms and laws are respected to protect itself and global stability. Those include preventing one country from being allowed to invade or otherwise seize parts of another country. The fear is that ignoring Russia’s actions weakens this prohibition.”

In addition, “the fate of Ukraine is a personal matter for the more than 1.3 million Canadians of Ukrainian descent, many of whom still have strong connections to their ancestral land and are opposed to Russian interference in the country,” Russian Week wrote. “Because of its size, the Ukrainian community is seen as having significant influence, and it is demanding Canada support Ukraine.”

At the forefront of these demands, and of solidarity rallies and marches in Canadian cities, has been Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Chrystia Freeland, who is herself of Ukrainian descent.

“But not all the outraged voices are Ukrainian,” says MIREMS President Andres Machalski, whose father comes from Western Ukraine. “These demonstrations have been reflected widely in the ethnic media of all language groups in Canada.”

The Canadian Punjabi Post highlighted that Canada is home to the world’s largest population of Ukrainians after Ukraine and Russia, and that several Canadian political leaders are of Ukrainian origin. The paper sees Ukraine as a bridge between Russia and Europe, and “the collapse of that bridge is like inviting a major flood.”

The Tamil East FM radio reported that protests were held in Toronto, Montreal and other major cities in Canada to urge the Canadian government to undertake stronger action against Russia. Speakers at the protest condemned Russia’s action and expressed shock and dismay over this “senseless act” by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Punjabi Red FM radio in Calgary reported on the rally in Calgary and interviewed several participants, including a Russian citizen there to show his solidarity with the Ukrainian people and to send the message that ordinary Russians do not support their president’s “insanity.”

Russian Canadian media condemn the invasion of Ukraine

Obviously the most active discussion has been in the Ukrainian and Russian community media, but with a Canadian twist. The Russian website Knopka cited Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) Quebec branch head Michael Shwec saying that the whole world has a duty to rally behind Ukraine, as a failure to act would send a signal to other authoritarian countries and spell trouble for democracies across the world.

The Russian Torontovka quoted several UCC representatives who organized the protests in Montreal and Edmonton calling the events “an opportunity for people from the community to come together and raise awareness about Russian aggression in Ukraine” and to express their disappointment with the international response to the conflict.

MIREMS Ukrainian and Russian languages analyst Oleg Schindler says that most Russian Canadian ethnic media condemn the aggression and support sanctions against Russia. Yet, on Facebook pages of different media sources as well as different Canadian public groups, there is a strong verbal battle between the communities. It appears that quite a lot of Russians in Canada write comments in support of Putin’s invasion. The Ukrainian side accuses them of being brainwashed by the Russian narrative about “fascists” in Ukraine.

Eastern European outlets rally behind Ukrainians

Other Eastern European media in Canada were also deeply triggered by the events, says MIREMS Editor in Chief Silke Reichrath. Many of the outlets and their readers have long considered Russia an “uncomfortable neighbour” and vividly remember a past life behind the Iron Curtain. A Latvian protester explained on OMNI Italian News that having been occupied by the Soviet Union for years, Latvians understand the consequences of Russian aggression.

The Polish Gazeta featured the Polish-Canadian organization Konekt, which joined the Sunday march for Ukraine in Toronto organized by the UCC. Konekt stated, “what has been to our generation a nightmare from the past century has become an unthinkable reality for our Ukrainian neighbours.”

The Polish newspaper Goniec described how Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Poles and others joined together in the protests to support Ukraine. The Polish Radio 7 Zycie aired a heartbreaking interview with a Ukrainian woman living in Toronto who worries about her family in Ukraine. The woman suggested donations to Come Back Alive, a Kyiv-based NGO, and thanked people in Poland for opening up their homes to those fleeing the war. The broadcaster has also launched its own crowdfunding campaign.

The Romanian Observatorul showcased in a long article how Romanians are rallying to help Ukrainian refugees arriving in their country, despite the sometimes difficult history of the two countries.

Echoes of Second World War and fears of another global conflict

The Jewish community has close ties to the Jewish community in Ukraine, which is the second largest in Europe and, by some counts, fourth largest in the world. The Canadian Jewish News has been posting podcasts of interviews with Jewish leaders in Ukraine: a rabbi spoke of spending Shabbat in synagogue basements for safety. Funds for Ukraine are being raised by the TanenbaumCHAT high school in Toronto and the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg.

One of the podcasts featured Ukrainian-Canadian Alti Rodal, a Ukrainian-Canadian historian and daughter of Holocaust suvivors. She has been running a group called Ukrainian Jewish Encounter to bridge the longstanding distrust between Jews and Ukrainians that dates back to the Second World War. Rodal said Putin’s claims to want to de-nazify Ukraine were absurd because Ukraine has a Jewish president and defence minister.

Some German outlets see spectres of a potentially nuclear Third World War. An opinion piece in the German monthly Der Albertaner reflected that Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine by saying he was restoring peace in the Donbas, which is reminiscent of Hitler justifying the invasion of Poland with the argument that he was retaliating for a Polish attack on a German radio station in Silesia.

Concerns about emboldening China

Chinese community media are clearly concerned that Russia is setting an example for China to follow with respect to Taiwan. A1 Chinese Radio host Mary Yang called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “heartbreaking” and wondered if it was giving inspiration to Chinese President Xi Jinping to attack Taiwan.

Sing Tao Daily referenced Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Rae, who said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could inspire other invasions if it is not stopped. Rae’s comments came as speculation was growing over whether Russia’s invasion would embolden China to invade Taiwan.

Mixed reactions to expected inflow of Ukrainian refugees

Many ethnic media outlets have also zeroed in on the prospect of a large number of Ukrainian refugees, as immigration is generally a topic of great interest to newcomer communities.

Russian Week featured Michael Bociurkiw, a Canadian security expert, who argued that many Ukrainians are talented and have multiple degrees, so they are exactly the type of immigrants Canada needs. OMNI Filipino News featured immigration lawyer Chantal Iannicielo, who pointed out that Ukraine is the only country in the region whose citizens require visas for Canada, so if Canadian authorities really want to allow people to leave Ukraine quickly, they should lift the visa requirement.

Countering foreign media reports that some people of colour fleeing the war cannot get through the Ukraine-Poland border due to the colour of their skin, an article in the Polish Goniec quoted Polish UN Ambassador Krzysztof Szczerski, who said that assertions of race- or religion-based discrimination at Poland’s border were “a complete lie and a terrible insult to us.”

MIREMS Chinese-language analyst Vivian Kwan notes that the Chinese media have traditionally held a more negative view of refugee acceptance in Canada, especially when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accepted a large number of Syrian refugees between 2015 and 2016. To that point, the Chinese website Van People quoted Trudeau’s statement that Ukrainian immigrants will be prioritized. The editor commented that Canada has a goal to recruit 1.3 million newcomers in three years, but the spots have all been reserved for “these people” (i.e. refugees).

Van People also reported on increasing animosity between Russian and Ukrainian residents of Toronto, who have been tearing flags off and damaging each other’s cars. “Other than history, one part of the explanation for this cleavage … is that people in both communities do their best to follow homeland news and media as well, perhaps out of concern for families there, and become polarized by the atrocities of war,” says Machalski.

Source: Russia’s attack on Ukraine sparks outrage in Canada’s multilingual media

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Nicolas: Le choix des mots

2022/03/04 Leave a comment

Another good column on the differences on how groups are portrayed differently, particularly Ukrainian compared to other refugees:

L’invasion de l’Ukraine par la Russie n’a débuté qu’il y a une semaine. L’issue de la situation demeure incertaine. Toutefois, il apparaît déjà clair qu’il s’agit d’un conflit pas comme les autres, et surtout d’un conflit dont on ne parle pas comme les autres.

D’abord, on assiste à un mouvement de solidarité quasi unanime envers le peuple ukrainien. Au Conseil des droits de l’homme de l’ONU mardi, la presque totalité des diplomates a quitté la salle lorsque le ministre des Affaires étrangères russe a commencé son allocution. Des manifestations en appui aux Ukrainiens sont organisées partout dans le monde, et la colère face à l’invasion de l’armée russe semble tout aussi forte même au Canada. Un sondage de la firme Maru publié cette semaine montre que 91 % des Canadiens sont en « opposition totale avec la tyrannie de la Russie de Vladimir Poutine ». J’aurais du mal à nommer une autre situation de guerre où l’opinion publique mondiale s’est montrée aussi campée, aussi rapidement, contre une agression armée. Il semble plus simple de décrire l’horreur d’une bombe qui tombe sur des civils innocents lorsque cette bombe n’est pas, par exemple, américaine.

Ensuite, la vague de solidarité pro-ukrainienne ne semble pas, du moins pour le moment, se traduire en tsunami de haine envers le peuple russe ou les personnes d’origine russe. Plusieurs leaders importants ont donné rapidement le ton, à commencer par le président ukrainien lui-même, Volodymyr Zelensky, suivi par la vice-première ministre du Canada, Chrystia Freeland, aussi d’origine ukrainienne. Tous deux ont lancé des messages au cours des derniers jours pour marteler que le conflit en cours n’est pas avec le peuple russe, mais avec le président Vladimir Poutine et son entourage. On relaie également des images de manifestations antiguerre dans les grandes villes de Russie — des rassemblements qui seraient certainement encore plus importants si ce n’était de la violence de la répression policière dans ce pays. À la télévision, on semble éviter d’utiliser des formulations comme « les Russes » pour désigner des responsables de l’agression militaire, préférant parler de Vladimir Poutine lui-même ou de son régime.

Cette conscience du poids des mots et du risque de dérapage est rafraîchissante. On sait que les débuts de la pandémie dans la région de Wuhan et que les relations diplomatiques pour le moins tendues avec la Chine ont donné lieu à toutes sortes de commentaires sur « les Chinois » et à une montée des crimes haineux envers les personnes d’origine asiatique.

On sait aussi qu’un nombre déplorable de nos concitoyens n’hésitent pas à dériver d’une critique du régime saoudien ou d’un groupe comme Daech vers des généralisations sur « les Arabes » ou sur « les musulmans ». Pas plus tard que l’été dernier, des imbéciles ont aussi commis une série d’actes antisémites dans l’arrondissement de Saint-Laurent, comme s’il s’agissait là d’une manière de critiquer l’État d’Israël. Et on se rappelle que, durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le Canada a notamment cru bon d’interner ses propres citoyens d’origine japonaise.

Puisque la liste de tristes précédents est longue, le souci actuel des mots détonne. Je ne vois personne de sérieux lancer l’hypothèse que l’autoritarisme de Poutine trouverait ses sources dans une tare particulière de la religion orthodoxe ou que la culture russe prendrait ses racines dans un éloge unique de la violence. L’analyse porte surtout sur les enjeux politiques, économiques et humanitaires. Enfin, croisons les doigts pour que ça dure.

Finalement, des réfugiés ne se sont pas présentés comme des menaces à refouler aux frontières. Le président de la Bulgarie, Roumen Radev, a peut-être eu la déclaration la plus candide à ce sujet. « Ce sont des Européens », a-t-il lancé plus tôt cette semaine. « Ces personnes sont intelligentes, éduquées… Ce ne sont pas les vagues de réfugiés auxquelles nous sommes habitués, des gens à l’identité incertaine, aux passés incertains, qui auraient même pu être des terroristes. » Des commentateurs, des experts et des journalistes ont aussi parlé de leur choc devant la guerre touchant le monde « civilisé » — omettant de transmettre du même coup une liste des régions du monde « barbares ». Cette nouvelle ouverture aux victimes de la guerre semble donc venir de l’identité des Ukrainiens : on leur ouvre les portes au nom de leur européanité et non de leur humanité. Le mauvais traitement réservé aux Africains et aux Asiatiques résidant en Ukraine à la frontière polonaise, dénoncé mardi par le Haut-Commissariat aux réfugiés de l’ONU, vient d’ailleurs démonter cette nuance importante.

L’humanisation particulière du peuple ukrainien joue un rôle positif très important dans le sort de cette population. Il y a la guerre, les blessés, la mort, les familles déchirées. Il y aura encore peut-être la faim, le manque d’eau et de ressources, et on ne sait quoi encore. Aucun individu ne devrait avoir à endurer ces horreurs, déjà. Il est encore plus abject d’avoir à affronter en plus, au milieu de ces tourments, l’indifférence du monde, ou son hostilité. Pour le moment, le respect de la dignité de la population ukrainienne semble être une préoccupation centrale d’une grande partie de la planète. Espérons que ça durera et que d’autres victimes des guerres contemporaines pourront bientôt en bénéficier.

Je ne veux pas ici faire un portrait jovialiste de la couverture de la guerre en Ukraine. L’actualité des dernières semaines est très difficile, ses implications sont historiques, et les défis qu’elle implique sont nombreux. Cela dit, j’ai rarement vu un souci d’humanisation aussi généralisé des parties prenantes d’un conflit, et je crois qu’il est important de le souligner. Plusieurs semblent regarder ce qui se passe dans l’est de l’Europe en se disant : « Ces gens sont comme moi, ça pourrait être moi. » La vérité, c’est que chaque être humain est en bonne partie comme soi, et qu’il offre un miroir de soi. C’est une chose de le dire, et une autre de transformer son regard sur les nouvelles internationales à partir de ce principe.

Source: Le choix des mots

Filed under Multiculturalism, Refugees Tagged with ,

Milloy: The role of religion in the Ottawa protest

2022/03/04 Leave a comment

Of interest:

The end of the “freedom convoy” in Ottawa has already led to much soul searching — how could it have happened? One of the topics certain to be discussed is the role that the Christian faith played in the protest. There wer

The end of the “freedom convoy” in Ottawa has already led to much soul searching — how could it have happened?

One of the topics certain to be discussed is the role that the Christian faith played in the protest.

There were a lot of Christians up in Ottawa — you could see it in protest signs and hear it in media interviews. There were numerous accounts of prayer services and Christian preachers addressing the crowd and an American Christian crowdfunding website helped funnel money to the cause.

As a CBC report concluded: “Christian faith — with an overtly evangelical feel — flows like an undercurrent through the freedom convoy in Ottawa.”

The situation puts me in a bind. Although I watched the protests in horror, I also regularly write, teach and speak about the positive contribution that faith, particularly my Christian faith, can make to public discourse.

So, in response, let me offer several observations.

First, I can’t criticize someone for holding strong religious beliefs. As a person of faith, I recognize that it is part of their identity. People are frustrated and scared, and these are often the circumstances where you most often look to God.

The situation is also far from black and white. Governments have made their share of mistakes in dealing with the pandemic and are not above criticism. I tried to think about the protesters with compassion and take their views seriously.

However, I also held the protesters to account for their actions — particularly those using Christianity as a justification for what they did.

I think it is legitimate to ask how Christians can be associated with something that went far beyond a peaceful demonstration and disrupted the lives of many Ottawa residents. How could they join forces with individuals who reportedly had ties to white supremacist groups? How can they explain the hate that was everywhere — symbolized by the profanity laced signs condemning the prime minister?

The protest was apparently about personal freedom and although that is certainly something recognized by Christianity, it is not its most important message. In my opinion, the core message of Christianity is summarized by the call to love God and to “do unto others as you would have them to do unto you” — even the stranger and those we dislike.

Although I suspect that many of the Christians at the protest were anti-abortion , there were many signs that read “My body, my choice” — an obvious takeoff on a pro-choice slogan. Anti-abortion individuals that I have encountered acknowledge that a woman has rights over her body. They argue, however, that those rights need to be balanced by her responsibility toward others — namely the unborn child.

Isn’t the principle the same here? We certainly all have rights when it comes to vaccines or whether to wear a mask, but don’t those rights need to be balanced by our responsibilities to our fellow citizens, particularly the elderly and those with health issues?

Some will say that religious faith is too divisive to be welcome in our public debates.

On the contrary. A big part of the Christian message is about building bridges to others — even your enemies. There is a constant call for humility and a recognition of the dignity of others.

Perhaps the basic problem is that these days Christians on all sides of public policy discussions too often fail to demonstrate that aspect of their faith.

Source: The role of religion in the Ottawa protest

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

Mood shifts in Polish border town as alt-right supporters go after dark-skinned refugees from Ukraine

2022/03/04 Leave a comment

Sigh….:

The Przemyśl train station is a spot that’s come to be known in the last six days for its heartwarming scenes of volunteers welcoming tired and hungry refugees with a cup of hot tea and a smile. On a grey Wednesday morning, however, under a brooding, overcast sky, tension is building on the ground.

Yellow-vested volunteers, who days before held their positions alone outside, are now crowded out by a heavy police presence. Officers in green and blue uniforms pace through the parking lot of the square, and tall guards frame the entryway to the platforms, scanning everyone who makes their way in and out of the building.

“It’s really scary now,” says Soufiane, an Algerian volunteer who’s been offering translation services in Arabic, French, English and Polish. The change, he explains, was the immediate result of the actions carried out the night before by a group of alt-right supporters targeting refugees who fled the Russian invasion.

Tuesday evening, a Polish outlet shared video footage of a dozen black-hooded men descending on the train station. Their targets, explained the reporter who was quick enough to pull out her phone when she saw the men rushing the station, were the arriving refugees. But, she adds, only the ones who “looked like they weren’t Ukrainian.”

“They began shouting at the group of three Indian men, ‘go back to the railway station, go back to your country,’ ” says Anna Mikulska, a reporter with oko.agency.

Among hundreds of thousands of refugees from Ukraine arriving in Poland are Africans, Indians and others lacking Ukrainian passports. Some reported racist treatment by officials on the Ukrainian side.

Around the same time that night and a bit further down the road, a similar scene, albeit more contained, began playing out in the parking lot of the relief centre in the town of Medyka. There, we saw a similar group of balaclava-clad men prowling the aisles where volunteers were offering free food and clothing while a determined line of police followed closely behind.

While there were no reports of anything serious happening at Medyka, the same cannot be said for Przemyśl.

“We were just going to our car … when we were stopped by some people,” starts one of the three German men in the video captured by OKO. “They slapped us and tried to hit us.”

The group of Germans came to Poland with the NGO Humanity First to assist with volunteer efforts. The attacking football hooligans — as they’re called locally here — appeared to mark them because of their skin colour.

“We’re just trying to find another way to get to our car,” says the German man, timidly.

Football hooligans, Przemysław Witkowski tells me the morning after the incident, are called that because they’re all fans of specific teams. “But they all share similar affiliations of nationalist and anti-refugee sentiment,” says the academic, who specializes in studying the far right in Poland.

“These people represent a small minority of the Polish people,” he underscored. “But they’re still out there.”

Groups like these organize primarily on platforms like Facebook groups to communicate. In recent days, they have begun using the social media tool to co-ordinate street patrols.

“Two beige on beige walking down the street,” reads one of the posts uncovered by a freelance Polish journalist who specializes in tracking the movements of these groups.

This kind of sentiment isn’t new, Witkowski explains. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine prompted masses of people to arrive on Poland’s doorstep, these groups were rife with anti-refugee sentiment.

The recent violence can be traced back to a series of social media posts that began making the rounds in the last few days. The tweets and Facebook posts falsely allege that women and children are being targeted by those who had recently arrived from the Przemyśl train station.

“They then see it as a call to arms, to protect their Polish women,” says Mikulska, the reporter. The pressure from these posts eventually prompted the local police to issue a tweet to dispel the rumours.

The tweet says there is “false information in social media that there have been serious criminal offenses in Przemyśl and border counties: burglaries, assaults and rape. It’s not true. The police did not record an increased number of crimes in connection with the situation at the border.”

Some are attributing this flurry of fake news accounts to a Russia-fuelled disinformation effort. Witkowski agrees that, while he can’t confirm these specific stories were plants, that kind of strategy has been used in the past by the Kremlin and would be advantageous to them now.

“Presenting Poland as racist and aggressive towards other countries is exactly the kind of soft power that Russia could wield to destabilize the country’s standing on the global stage,” he said.

Indeed, later that day, Witkowski sends along the latest figures from the Polish Institute for Internet and Social Media Research, which found more than 120,000 attempts at disinformation in Poland under the hashtags #Ukraine, #Russia and #war in the last 24 hours. Much of the content related to fuelling anti-refugee hysteria.

The trains are still arriving in Przemyśl — 47,000 people in the last 24 hours, Soufiane tells me — but the feeling on the ground has certainly shifted. Blanket-huddled figures are now being quickly shuffled onto buses to their next destination and volunteers are encouraging people to move onto bigger cities like Warsaw and Krakow instead of lingering.

“I’m afraid today because I’m thinking: what if they think I’m a refugee?” Sanoufie tells me as we jockey between two officers in their own blue balaclavas. He’s been living in Poland for seven years, and this is the first time such thoughts have entered his mind.

“I took the bus home last night. Walking just didn’t feel safe.”

Source: Mood shifts in Polish border town as alt-right supporters go after dark-skinned refugees from Ukraine

Filed under Racism, Refugees Tagged with , , ,

Doug Ford government scraps diversity hiring targets for transit projects

2022/03/04 Leave a comment

UPDATE: Reversed!

The Ontario government will no longer include hiring targets for disadvantaged groups in its agreements for provincial transit projects, a reversal of a groundbreaking policy intended to deliver jobs to marginalized communities where new lines are built.

Advocates warn the decision will undo years of progress toward bringing women, people of colour, and Indigenous and Black residents into the workforce, and raises questions about whether Premier Doug Ford’s subway program is eligible for federal funding.

The hiring targets were first included in a so-called community benefits agreement the previous Ontario Liberal government reached for the Eglinton Crosstown LRT in 2016, which was hailed at the time as setting a precedent that would inject funding, training and employment into neighbourhoods in need.

But the Toronto Community Benefits Network (TCBN), a coalition of labour and community groups, says the targets are being left out of plans already underway for Ontario’s $28.5-billion subway program, which consists of the Ontario Line, Yonge North Subway Extension, Scarborough Subway Extension, and Eglinton West LRT.

Metrolinx, the provincial agency responsible for transit construction in the GTA, will be “on the wrong side of history” if it scraps the hiring thresholds and other key aspects of the benefits framework, said Rosemarie Powell, executive director of TCBN.

The group is expressing “deep concern” about the province’s change of heart, which it says will undermine a program that has helped ensure people who get opportunities through public infrastructure investment “come from and reflect the diversity of local communities.”

Metrolinx is overseen by Ontario Minister of Transportation Caroline Mulroney. Asked why the province is dropping the hiring targets, the minister’s spokesperson Dakota Brasier said the province “will continue to facilitate a pathway for local communities to develop the skills and qualifications needed to find good-paying jobs in the sector.”

She said Ontario’s “historic” transit plans are on course to “generate thousands of jobs, create more connections for people across the province and boost our economy.”

The community benefits agreement signed by the province, Metrolinx, TCBN and the company building the Crosstown LRT six years ago set a target that 10 per cent of work hours for the project go to local groups that have historically faced employment barriers, like racialized residents, women and newcomers.

The target wasn’t a legal obligation under the LRT contract and was described as “aspirational,” but the signatories pitched it as a meaningful way to give hundreds of people from groups traditionally shut out of the construction industry a path to a decent career.

The Ontario government of the day said the agreement would serve as a framework for future projects, and a similar deal was struck for the Finch West LRT.

In addition to not including the 10 per cent hiring target in agreements for the new provincial subways, TCBN says Metrolinx hasn’t committed to other measures around consultation, transparency and local procurement that represent “a minimum standard” for a community benefits agreements.

In a Feb. 11 letter to the group, Metrolinx CEO Phil Verster confirmed the agency is taking a “different approach” to community benefits, but one that it believes will still deliver “the same objectives” and “meaningful change.”

Although it doesn’t include hiring targets, Verster wrote that Metrolinx’s strategy will provide local employment opportunities, require contractors to develop and report on apprenticeship and workforce development plans, and direct contractors to develop “shop local” campaigns and host trade shows to connect employers with job-seekers.

The agency is also committed to making public realm improvements and in some cases could provide amenities like community centres or affordable housing as part of transit projects.

Metrolinx spokesperson Fannie Sunshine said the “broader” approach will give the agency the “flexibility” required “to meaningfully engage” with communities, and allow it to “identify better opportunities.”

Powell acknowledged implementing the original agreement hasn’t been easy. Crosslinx, the private consortium building the Crosstown, hasn’t reached the 10 per cent hiring goal, and is instead hovering around five per cent, according to TCBN. A spokesperson for Crosslinx said she didn’t have up-to-date figures.

But Powell said Metrolinx has been a good partner on the benefits program to date, and she had expected the agency to address problems with the strategy, not weaken it.

“Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” she said.

TCBN also points out that when the federal Liberal government announced more than $10 billion in financial support for Ford’s subway program in May 2021, it said the funding was dependent on the province satisfying a number of conditions, including community benefits agreements and “meeting employment thresholds for under-represented communities including Black, Indigenous, people of colour, and women.”

Sunshine said Metrolinx’s position is that the workforce development plans included in its new approach “will help to enable federal requirements.”

Zoltan Csepregi, a spokesperson for Infrastructure Canada, said community benefits agreements are still a condition of the funding, and the federal government will “work collaboratively with the government of Ontario to ensure that Metrolinx upholds these conditions.”

Source: Doug Ford government scraps diversity hiring targets for transit projects

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Mintz: Reckoning With Inequality

2022/03/03 Leave a comment

Thoughtful analysis and discussion, along with some useful suggestions of how to approach inequality from a variety of lenses:

I was struck in the New York Times obituary of one of the great historians of race, Leon Litwack, by the casual and condescending way his landmark scholarship was dismissed. Sure, the article’s subtitle was positive: “One of Berkeley’s most popular professors, he brought passion and nuance—and a love for blues music—to his award-winning study of the marginalized and the oppressed.”

The obituary also mentioned that his scholarship “illustrated how racism had structured institutions and relations” and “focused on the way Black Americans experienced their freedom and shaped it.”

But toward the obituary’s end, the author observed that “many fellow historians complained that it placed unrelenting emphasis on Black people as victims and failed to tell a more nuanced tale about resistance.” It then quoted the Princeton historian emeritus Nell Irvin Painter:

“Litwack implies that African-American institutions function merely in response to white oppression, as though blacks had no existence beyond their connection with whites—Black Southerners as victims rather than Black Southerners as people … For all its picturesque appeal, ‘Trouble in Mind’ is stale.”

We mustn’t confuse an obituary with a eulogy, and without engaged and rigorous criticism, scholarship isn’t worthy of its name. But I fear that the Litwack obituary feeds into a common misconception: that scholarship in the humanities, like its counterpart in the natural sciences, is progressive, as more recent research supplants and supersedes its predecessors.

I consider this generational condescension utterly wrongheaded. Since the humanities disciplines are interpretive and analytic, humanities scholarship doesn’t necessarily progress and newer works certainly don’t sweep their predecessors into the dustpan of history.

Litwack’s historical scholarship, while focusing on highly specific historical topics—notably, Black lives during Reconstruction and the age of Jim Crow—also represented an attempt to grapple with race and racial inequality multidimensionally. He was as interested in racial socialization, racial etiquette and the intricacies of Black lives in extraordinarily difficult contexts as he was in Black resistance to racist violence.

Reality is multidimensional, but the academy is siloed.

At this historical moment, no issues draw more attention within the academy draw than those involving inequality and stratification. Departments across the humanities and social sciences offer a vast array of courses that speak to issues of anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism, sexism, xenophobia and other forms of bias, prejudice and persistent inequality.

But our students would be hard-pressed to study these topics holistically.

The reasons are obvious. Not only is the subject of inequality too broad to be treated with the nuance and complexity that it deserves, but none of us are knowledgeable enough to speak to the topic with the expertise that we take for granted in more specialized courses.

Also, there’s the danger of conflating inequalities that have different historical roots, trajectories and manifestations.

Classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism and other forms of bias, prejudice and inequality have economic, historical, legal, political, psychological, sociological and even linguistic and theological dimensions. Inequality needs to be understood as ideological and institutional, but also as lived experience. Similarly, resistance to inequalities takes multiple forms: day-to-day resistance, cultural resistance, acts of collective protest and more

Efforts to eradicate inequalities not only involve policy and politics but philosophy, too, as we contemplate the host of ethical issues that the subjects raise involving personal and collective responsibility, atonement, forgiveness, and reparations.

As scholars, our expertise is rooted in particular disciplinary specializations. My discipline, history, focuses on change over time. Historians ask how inequalities are constructed socially and culturally, and their manifestation, meaning and function in specific economic, political and social contexts.

Yet, to take just one facet of the broader issue of inequality, gender inequities, any serious attempt to grapple with the subject would require us to examine, in addition to women’s history:

  • The ideological dimension: How various fields, including medicine and psychology, have pathologized women’s minds and bodies.
  • The legal, economic and political dimensions: How law, the market and policy embed and perpetuate gender inequities.
  • The representational dimension: How gendered depictions in art, advertisements and various media have distorted and misrepresented women’s realities.
  • The psychological dimension: How gender identities are socialized and how sexism has shaped women’s identities, expectations and behavior, pushing women to provide various forms of support to others.

I lead my life according to a series of mantras, one of which is “Anything worth doing is worth doing half-assed.” By that, I simply mean that we need to do the best we can even if we can’t accomplish everything we might wish.

So what if we, as a collective endeavor, tried to structure a multidisciplinary humanities and social sciences cluster around gender and racial inequalities, with a goal of providing students with “the big picture”? How might we address such an expansive and sweeping topic without lapsing into superficiality or punctuating broad themes with excessive narrowness?

Here, I can only begin to sketch what such a cluster might look like.

1. A history class might begin with the oldest, most long-standing form of inequality, patriarchy, and women’s systematic exclusion from “the creation of law, symbolic values, and structures of meaning.” Such a course might begin with the Middle Assyrian Laws of the 15th to the 11th centuries BCE, which required “women to wear head-to-toe veils and forbade them from speaking to non-family males or walking outdoors except in the company of a close male relative,” in the guise of protecting them from male predation.

The notion of separation or segregation as a form of guardianship and a shield against social conflict is a recurrent theme used to naturalize and legitimate restrictions and various forms of segregation.

Such a class might move on to Aristotle’s equation of women with slaves and domesticated animals—which served as the prototype for the “animalization” of other subordinate groups.

This class might also examine how anti-Semitism served as a seedbed for racism, and how, beginning in the 14th century, modern racism emerged, how European expansion and the slave trade reinforced racist thought, and how racism was institutionalized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This class would also need to look at the fluidity of definitions of race, which have varied geographically and chronologically, and the complex legacy of religious sectarianism and the Enlightenment, which at once offered new justifications for racial and gender inequalities while also fostering the first collective challenges to slavery and gender and racial inequalities.

2. An economics course might explore occupational and residential segregation; differentials in wages, owned assets and savings; debt levels; discrimination in loans, mortgages and patronage of businesses; and the concentration of women and Blacks in low-wage occupations. But it should also examine, through economic history, women’s unpaid labor, the intersection of labor systems and race, and efforts to contest subordination and labor exploitation.

3. A political science class might examine the role of law, public policy and civic institutions in promoting, reinforcing and perpetuating racial and gender hierarchies, as well as the political uses of racial and gender ideologies to preserve and exercise power, promote group solidarity, and distance subordinate classes from supposedly inferior groups.

4. A psychology class might reckon with the discipline’s racist and sexist past and examine the affective, emotional and psychological functions of gender and racial bias. Topics might include gender and racial socialization, stereotyping, implicit bias, scapegoating, and the role of emotional aversion in maintaining racial and gender boundaries. It might also examine the psychological costs of racism and sexism.

5. A sociology course might explore:

  • Racism and sexism as systems of structural, systemic and institutionalized privilege and advantage.
  • Racism and sexism through the lens of intersectionality: how gender, race, sexuality and other forms of social hierarchy and discrimination reinforce one another and help define status and power.
  • The relevance of caste, with its stress on heredity, group hierarchy and purity and pollution, to an understanding of gender and racial inequalities.
  • The complex relationship between race, gender and socioeconomic class.

6. A philosophy course might explore ideas of race and gender in the history of philosophy. It might also speak to some of today’s hottest topics: how best to address relics of a racist and sexist past; the meaning and value of meritocracy and the validity of the mechanisms used to assess merit; the desirability and practicality of reparations; and issues relating to atonement, forgiveness and closure.

I am convinced that many students crave the context and perspectives that the humanities and the social sciences offer on the issues of our time. But the discipline-based surveys and introductory courses and the narrow upper-division courses that reflect faculty members’ research interests fail, all too often, to capture students’ imagination or ignite their passions.

I understand the reluctance to tackle a topic as expansive and interdisciplinary as gender and racial inequalities. But please consider following my advice and remember my mantra—if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing half-assed.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Source: Reckoning With Inequality | Higher Ed Gamma

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Feds deny delay as lawyer in multi-billion-dollar Black bureaucrats’ class-action suit calls Crown’s ‘overlap’ arguments ‘insulting’

2022/03/03 Leave a comment

Watching with interest. In terms of the data, clear that the lawyers have cherry-picked the worst departments, and not the overall picture which indicates that Blacks are not unduly under-represented compared to other visible minority groups (see Will the removal of the Canadian citizenship preference in the public service make a difference?):

The leading lawyer in a multi-billion-dollar class-action lawsuit representing current and former Black federal public servants, filed against the federal government and now involving nearly 1,300 individuals, says the government’s lawyers are attempting to delay proceedings by claiming the Black class action overlaps with other ongoing cases—an argument which he calls “insulting.”

“It’s not a secret, we’ve laid it out, we’ve argued it over and over in court. The government has one goal right now: do not let this matter go to court in September,” said Courtney Betty, a former Crown attorney at the federal Justice Department’s Toronto office in the early 1990s, who is leading the class action filed on Dec. 2, 2020.

In March 2021, The Hill Times reported that more than 520 class members had joined a proposed $900-milllion class-action lawsuit alleging decades-long government discrimination, lack of advancement opportunities, and harassment. As of Sept. 21, the number of class members had increased to 1,031, who are now seeking $2.5-billion in damages following an amendment to the claim made on May 13.

The number of class members has increased to 1,293, as of Feb. 28, according to Nicholas Marcus Thompson, who was among the first of the current and former federal employees who filed the class-action lawsuit as a representative plaintiff.

“The Crown’s argument really is that the government is facing a number of class-action lawsuits that raise the issue of systemic levels of discrimination against visible minority groups and racialized groups in government,” said Kofi Achampong, principal lawyer and government relations adviser with Achampong Law.

“Presumably, some of the pleadings in those class actions would cross over or would have some level of consistency with some of the pleadings in the Black class action lawsuit, and therefore it’s difficult for the government to determine who they are responding to in relation to the causes of action for racialized employees,” said Achampong, who is a lawyer and legal strategist for the class-action lawsuit.

“In essence, they are saying there is too much overlap,” he said.

Betty said the government “came up with a very creative argument,” calling it “insulting.”

“What the government says, is that any case in Canada … an Indigenous case, a woman’s case, could be any case—as long as there is racism and discrimination mentioned, then there’s an automatic overlap with the Black class action.”

“That argument carries no weight at all,” said Betty, who noted that this particular case deals with hiring and advancement within the public service.

“Our case is about the hiring and promotion of Black public service workers—there are no other cases that are out there that deals with the hiring and promotion of Black public service workers.”

“The reality is that the basis, the pith and substance of the Black class action, is really the unique experience that Black public servants have undergone across over 100 government departments,” said Achampong, adding that this is “the only legal action, the only class action in the history of Canada, that has ever explicitly sought to address that particular issue.”

Alain Belle-Isle, spokesperson for the Treasury Board Secretariat, said the Government of Canada “has no intention of delaying the certification hearing.”

“The parties in this case continue to discuss the best means of addressing the issue of overlapping claims with the Court, while also preparing for the certification hearing scheduled for September 2022,” wrote Belle-Isle in an emailed response to the The Hill Times. 

He reaffirmed the government’s commitment to creating a “diverse and inclusive public service free of discrimination, harassment and violence,” which was reflected in the most recent mandate letter to the president of the Treasury Board, Mona Fortier (Ottawa-Vanier, Ont).

The mandate letter for Treasury Board President Mona Fortier, pictured during a press conference on Jan. 25, 2021, cites the government’s commitment to a ‘diverse and inclusive public service free of discrimination, harassment and violence.’ 

Black employees ‘last to be hired, first to be fired’: law firm analysis

According to Betty’s legal firm, which has analyzed numbers regarding promotions and demographics within the federal public service, the number of “Black employees” within Natural Resources and the Department of National Defence (civilian staff), was less than two per cent.

In the Department of Justice, less than 20 individuals were appointed on an intermediate basis from 1970 to 2000 who were identified as “Black.”

In Fisheries and Oceans Canada, as of March 31, 2019,  the number of “Black employees” was less than one percent.

And for the 2005 to 2018 period, 35.4 per cent of “Black employees” within the federal public service received zero job promotions.

“What we’ve done is we’ve looked at 30 years of government data, and we’ve demonstrated that on a percentage basis, Black public service workers are the last to be hired, the first to be fired, last to be promoted,” said Betty, pointing to the above data analysis provided to The Hill Times.

“We’ve demonstrated that statistically, so with the harassment of the individual, none of that comes in,” said Betty. “It’s a data analysis case, there’s none of the other cases that are even similar to that.”

Thompson expressed his dismay that there’s “been no appointment in leadership positions” for Black employees in the public service in recent months.

“We’re still in the same position that we were in last year and the year before and the year before,” said Thompson, who added that the government is trying to create a mental health plan, are trying to create developmental opportunities under the mandate of the Treasury Board, “and have acknowledged all of things that we’ve raised as issues that exists for Black workers.”

“But in the courtroom, they are fighting to avoid having to pay for those damages,” said Thompson.

The leadership of the public service continues to remain “almost exclusively white,” said Thompson, as Black workers “continue to be at the bottom of the public service and racialized workers just above.”

“The work of eradicating bias, barriers, and discrimination demands an ongoing, relentless effort, said Belle-Isle. “We are committed to this effort and to using all available levers to improve the experiences of public servants, to ensure that they are able to realize their full potential, and for Canada’s public service to fully reflect the diversity of Canadians.”

Proceed on a ‘case-by-case basis,’ says Justice Gagné

Associate Chief Justice of the Federal Court Jocelyne Gagné said during a Feb. 16 hearing a motion to stay would need ‘substantial overlapping.’ 

The class action will be moving towards certification following a Federal Court justice’s direction for the government and the class action members to file additional documentation.

During the most recent court proceeding on Feb 16, Associate Chief Justice Jocelyne Gagné directed the plaintiffs to serve and file their additional submissions on the issue of overlapping with any other class action brought before the court no later than March 26.

Justice Gagné also directed the Crown to serve and file its record no later than June 29, with the plaintiff’s reply to be file no later than July 14. Certification hearing dates have been set for Sept. 21-23, 2022.

In the Feb. 16 hearing, Gagné said a meeting had taken place amongst the judges who were seized with other class actions, “however all of them, but the two last ones, which quite frankly have nothing to do with the issue before the court on this file—and I can tell you that at this point, it is the general view that these cases should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.”

“In my view, and in the view of many, a carriage motion or a motion to stay, I think you need substantial overlapping, which is absent here in these cases,” said Gagné.

“That said, I understand that the case before me is broader, and although encompasses only one group of people, it encompasses many departments of the government,” she said.

Source: Feds deny delay as lawyer in multi-billion-dollar Black bureaucrats’ class-action suit calls Crown’s ‘overlap’ arguments ‘insulting’

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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