Multiculturalism | Multicultural Meanderings

Surrey imam who misrepresented himself to immigration officials jailed for sexual assault

2020/12/09 4 Comments

Of note, particularly how the British Columbia Muslim Association mishandled the complaint and the community’s shunning of the complainant:

The emotional wounds from a sexual assault at the hands of a Lower Mainland imam four years ago continue to affect the daily life of his victim, who says if immigration officials and the B.C. Muslim Association had intervened sooner, the attack may never have happened.

The woman, whose identity is protected by a B.C. Supreme Court order, says she has received no community support for her turmoil and is being shamed as a victim.

“When people see me, they think I am not good woman,” she said. “I got with priest and put him in the jail.”

Pakistani national, 46-year-old Abdur Rehman Khan, is serving a three-year sentence on one count of sexual assault and will remain a registered sex offender for 20 years.

In 2017 he was convicted for assaulting the woman who he came to know through his work in the Muslim community in Surrey.

His story shows the lengths he went to in misleading immigration officials to stay in Canada and the lack of intervention provided by the B.C. Muslim Association, which described his criminal case as a “personal matter.”

The assault happened in July 2016, three months after he had been ordered to leave the country.

‘Nobody support me’

His victim is outraged that Khan continued as an imam at Masjid-Ur-Rahmah after he was charged and granted bail, as well as after he was convicted and awaiting sentence.

She also doesn’t understand how he was able to avoid discovery by immigration officials for years.

She, in the meantime, has had to give up her job and many activities to avoid being ostracized by some people in the Lower Mainland’s Muslim community.”Nobody support me,” said the woman who has no family in the country.

Multiple names and attempts to immigrate

Abdur Rehman Khan’s attempts to live in Canada span almost three decades.

In 1993, he was included as a dependent in an application by his brother Mohammad Tayyab to sponsor their mother to Canada but when Khan’s application for permanent residency was denied, he appealed but didn’t wait for a decision.

During the appeal process, Khan successfully obtained a visitor visa under the name Abdul Rehman and once in Canada, in February 1999, he made a refugee claim under the name Ibuhuraira Khan.

The claim was refused in October 2000. One month later, Khan tried again to stay here through the sponsorship of a wife. At an immigration hearing, Khan conceded the marriage was not genuine and solely for immigration purposes.In September 2001, he was deported from Canada, under the name Ibuhuraira Khan.

It was only after he’d been removed from Canada that in 2003 he was actually accepted for permanent residency to Canada under the original 1993 application.

Misled officials

Upon his arrival, in Vancouver, in April 2003, as Abdur Rehman Khan, he was asked by immigration officials if he had ever been “convicted of a crime or offence, refused admission to Canada or required to leave Canada.”

Khan said no according to transcripts of his immigration hearings.

Officials did not know he’d been to Canada before, used other names, had travel documents in those names, nor that he’d made a previous refugee claim and had been deported.

In 2014, Khan’s past caught up with him when the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) received word that the information he had provided officers was false.In June of that year when asked directly if he’d ever used any other names, including nicknames, he stated “no.” When asked whether he knew the name Ibuhuraira Khan, he said “no.”

In April 2016, the Immigration and Refugee Board issued an exclusion order against Khan but he appealed the order on the basis of humanitarian and compassionate considerations.

A year later, in April 2017, the Immigration Appeal Division dismissed his appeal and at that point it was up to the CBSA to execute his removal order.

Two months later, though, when Khan was arrested and charged with sexual assault the removal process was stalled.

‘Personal matter’

Khan was granted bail on July 6, 2017 and once released, he returned to his position as imam at the mosque Masjid-Ur-Rahmah where he continued to lead prayers, inter-faith meetings, teach youth and officiate at marriages and funerals.

After his trial and conviction in January 2020, he again went back to work until August when he was sentenced to three years in prison.

BCMA president Iftab Sahib says Khan submitted a resignation letter in August 2020.

The association, however, considered Khan’s reasons for quitting as his “personal matter,” he said and asked no questions.

Sahib declined to be interviewed further about why Khan was allowed to stay on the job after he was charged and convicted.

In an email, BCMA spokesperson Tariq Tayyab said, “at no time was BCMA made aware of the serious allegations and criminal charges brought against the individual.”

His employment with the BCMA ended in August of this year and Tayyab directed any other inquiries to the association’s lawyer.A member of the BCMA Women’s Council also reneged on an interview after initially saying it was important to address the issue and to ensure the community knew what had transpired.

Multiple marriages

Khan’s subterfuge with immigration officials also involved multiple marriages aimed at achieving residency in Canada.

The woman Khan married in the fall of 2000 was the divorced spouse of his brother Mohammad Tayyab. The marriage ended when it failed to secure Khan permanent residency in Canada.

The woman later re-united with Tayyab.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, Khan already had a wife and five children which he never disclosed to immigration officials. At his August 2020 sexual assault sentencing, in B.C. Supreme Court, the judge acknowledged Khan visited his overseas family every other year until 2016. The oldest of those children now lives in B.C.

According to Immigration Appeal Division (IAD) documents, it’s unlikely he ever divorced his wife in Pakistan. As well, he remains married under a different name to his brother’s wife.The IAD also says Khan married and separated a third time, in 2014, in B.C., representing himself as single when he got that marriage certificate.

CBC News has learned that in spring of 2016, Khan married again in the midst of his latest Immigration and Refugee Board removal hearing.

The woman was a Canadian citizen living in B.C. The marriage lasted only a matter of months.

Victim shaming

Other people from the province’s Muslim community say the web of lies and deceits and ultimately Khan’s crime of sexual assault should be better addressed.

Yahya Momla, an imam from Masjid-Al-Salaam, in Burnaby, has often spoken out about victims who come forward with their trauma and are further marginalized.

“It would be untruthful to say victim shaming doesn’t happen in certain communities,” he said. “Why this happens? Partly it is a misconstrued sense of honour.”Momla says some people feel they must not speak openly about victims of domestic or sexual abuse happening in relationships. That attitude though, he says, is not faith-based.

His message to the Muslim community is that victims should never be blamed, but provided with support.

‘Open your eyes’

Khan’s victim says as long she continues to be shunned the matter will never be over.

Her message to the community is to, “open your eyes. Don’t look down on [victims] even if [the attacker] is a priest.”

Vancouver Immigration consultant Divya Bakshi Arya says in cases like this one, removal orders are not acted upon until the person has served their sentence.

At that time though Khan could apply to federal court to have his removal order stayed and that could spin into months or years of additional hearings.

His victim says she is afraid of him still living in the Lower Mainland if he is not sent back to Pakistan

Source: Surrey imam who misrepresented himself to immigration officials jailed for sexual assault

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with Abdur Rehman Khan, BC Muslim Association, Masjid-Ur-Rahmah, sexual assault, shunning, Surrey

Our attitudes to race are complex. Our response to racism should be complex too

2020/12/08 Leave a comment

Indeed. Interesting findings from detailed interviews:

Is a mass-produced jerk chicken burger a symbol of cultural appropriation or a celebration of British multiculturalism? This is an old debate that periodically resurfaces and so it was a couple of weeks ago when McDonald’s launched its latest festive offering.

In this case, a story that got echoed across much of the tabloid press was constructed out of a few random comments criticising McDonald’s on social media; it was journalists who built and amplified this narrative. But occasionally, others who should know better get drawn in, such as the MP who picked a fight with Jamie Oliver over his jerk rice.

I have long thought that reducing debates about racism to flippant questions about fast-food burgers and supermarket curry kits is damaging to the antiracist cause. But new research on public attitudes to racism by the Runnymede Trust and Voice4Change England helps us understand why.

The study is all the better for shunning mass polling as the primary way of understanding how the public thinks about race. Instead, researchers undertook two one-hour conversations with 60 people from a range of backgrounds. What emerges is both good and bad news for those of us who care deeply about ending racism. The good news is that the weight of public thinking is that racism matters, that it is something that is learned and education has an important role to play; also, that racism is part of our national history.

The less good news is that some people buy into the idea that racism is “natural”, that we all have an affinity with people who look more like us. There is a lack of understanding about the nature of structural racism; public thinking gravitates towards the idea that racism is about individual actions and responsibilities. There is a strong sense that there is no going backwards and that things will inevitably get better over time.

Yet in the 20 years since the Macpherson report, black people have gone from being five to nine times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than white people. And there is a strand of zero-sum thinking: the worry that tackling racial discrimination will inevitably mean majority groups giving things up.

Importantly, researchers found people hold beliefs that would be considered both warm and hostile to antiracism campaigns: it is possible for someone to believe both that racism is ingrained in human nature and will never change, but that we are making progress as a society, or that it is important we all do something about racism while at the same time worrying about the consequences for themselves.

The populist right is very good at activating the more hostile strands of thinking by stoking this idea that if a minority benefits, the majority must lose. When Conservative MP Ben Bradley calls the education of white, working-class boys a “taboo” subject, he implies that white, working-class children have been unfairly overlooked by people more interested in promoting the interests of minority children; if it were Asian or black children, “heads would roll”, he says (the lack of accountability for institutional racism in the Met suggests they wouldn’t).

By confecting this into a conflict between white and non-white children, he conveniently obscures the role of class. Far from being taboo, the class attainment gap for poor children, the vast majority of whom are white, was one of the key drivers of Labour education policy, which on any objective measure was far better than what followed, including Conservative chancellors slashing thousands of pounds a year in tax credits from parents in low-paid work and Tory education reforms that have done little to address the fact that working-class children remain far less likely to attend a good quality school.

The intellectual underpinnings of this zero-sum thinking lie in notions of “white identity” from academics such as Eric Kaufmann. Kaufmann argues that the rise of right populism is primarily the product of white communities’ opposition to increasing racial diversity. He attacks the notion that structural racism exists at all and encourages politicians to promote the need to maintain “white culture”.

But this is to take far too simplistic and patronising a view of the way white, working-class communities think about race. It cannot account for all the historical examples where a predominantly white labour movement built solidarity and common cause with campaigns for equality.

The Runnymede research shows that there are strands of public thinking that the right can activate to achieve its ends of sowing division. But there are also positive ways of thinking about race that antiracist campaigners can connect with and build on, sometimes in the same person and certainly within the same community. In particular, antiracism campaigners need to find ways to explain the often counterintuitive idea that racism is not just about individuals but systems. “We need to communicate to people that racism is something that’s designed into our system, which means we can design something better,” says Sanjiv Lingayah, the lead author of the research.

But there are also traps. Certain ideas risk playing into the damaging idea that majority white and minority interests are directly in conflict, which antiracism campaigners need to challenge. Cultural appropriation often fits into that category, as do terms such as “white privilege” and “white fragility”. Yes, there is an overall structural advantage to being white compared with being non-white, but, no, it does not build solidarity to imply that if you are white, you are automatically “privileged”. Yes, men who went to Eton may have to loosen their grip on the levers of power, but that would, frankly, be good for all the rest of us.

This research gets us away from reductivist, static accounts of public attitudes to race. It shows that, while there are aspects of public thinking that antiracists need to challenge, there is also a lot of positive stuff to work with. But to get lured into giving the impression that this is a fight between “them” and “us” is only to serve the agenda of the populist right.

Source: Our attitudes to race are complex. Our response to racism should be complex too

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with public opinion research, Runnymede Trust, Sonia Sodha, Voice4Change England

Survey Finds Asian Americans Are Racial Or Ethnic Group Most Willing To Get Vaccine

2020/12/08 Leave a comment

May have missed it but have not seen any comparable data for Canada:

A wide-ranging survey shows Americans’ willingness to receive a coronavirus vaccine when it becomes publicly available and confidence in its effectiveness are on the rise.

But when broken down by racial or ethnic group, Black respondents show the most reluctance, with less than half saying they will do so.

The survey by the Pew Research Center found that 60% of Americans overall say they would definitely or probably get a vaccine for the coronavirus if it were available today.

While that figure is 9% higher than it was in September, it still lags behind the 72% of Americans who said in May they would get the vaccine, when clinical trials for a vaccine were just getting underway.

Roughly four in 10 respondents overall (39%) say they would definitely not or probably not get a vaccine, according to Pew.

However, about half of that cohort did leave open the possibility they could change their mind once more information is available and once others get vaccinated. The other half said they are “pretty certain” more information will not change their decision.

Pew found quite a bit of variance when responses were broken down by racial or ethnic group on willingness to get a vaccine.

A whopping 83% of “English-speaking Asian Americans…say they would definitely or probably get vaccinated,” outpacing all other racial or ethnic groups, according to Pew.

White and Latinx respondents answered about the same, with 63% and 61% respectively saying they definitely or probably would get the vaccine.

“Black Americans continue to stand out as less inclined to get vaccinated than other racial and ethnic groups,” according to Pew, which found that just 42% of African Americans said they would get one when made publicly available.

This figure may be surprising to some, given that 71% of Black respondents told researchers they knew someone who has died or been hospitalized due to the virus, nearly 20 points higher than Americans overall (54%).

But there is a long history of mistrust on the part of Black Americans toward public health officials, much of it stemming from the notorious Tuskegee experiment of the 1930s, when researchers lied to hundreds of Black men, telling them they were conducting research on treatments for “bad blood.”

Source: Survey Finds Asian Americans Are Racial Or Ethnic Group Most Willing To Get Vaccine

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with COVID-19, vaccine

21 racialized Canadians who could help the Order of Canada look more like Canada

2020/12/07 Leave a comment

Did a quick diversity analysis: 10 Black, 5 Chinese, 2 South Asian, 1 Japanese, 1 Indigenous (surprising that Murray Sinclair has not already been awarded the Order), and no Arab/West Asian or Southeast Asian. 15 women, 5 men. Weighted towards activists:

Earlier this week, the BlackNorth Initiative made a point that seemingly too few people had realized: the 114 people named to the Order of Canada this year were overwhelmingly white and men.
The organization, led by the Canadian Council of Business Leaders Against Anti-Black Systemic Racism, sent a letter to Gov. Gen. Julie Payette, whose office hands out the awards, calling for change.
Only one Black Canadian, Denham Jolly, was listed when the honours were announced Nov. 27, along with a few Indigenous and Asian recipients. Outside of this year, the more than 4,000 Canadians appointed to the Order of Canada are mostly white. Since 2013, only 4.8 per cent of appointees have been visible minorities, while they account for 22.3 per cent of the population of Canada, based on research from Andrew Griffith, who focuses on diversity in politics, and reported by CBC News.
The Star asked community organizations, staff and members of the public which racialized Canadians they think could receive a nomination in the future.
Anyone can make a nomination and the nominees don’t have to be Canadian citizens, rather simply someone who has “enriched the lives of others and made our country a better place” over their lifetime. Elected officials and judges are ineligible while in office.
These are some of the suggestions:
M. NourbeSe Philip is an award-winning poet, writer and lawyer born in Tobago and based in Toronto. Philip’s work has helped build an understanding of the Caribbean experience in Canada. Before writing full-time, she was a practising lawyer for seven years. Her work includes “Harriet’s Daughter,” “Caribana: African Roots & Continuities” and “Zong!” In 1990, Philip was named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.
Maryka Omatsu was the first Asian woman judge, appointed to the Ontario Court 1993. She is a member of the Order of Ontario as of 2015. Omatsu played a key role in achieving redress for Japanese Canadians interned during the Second World War and is the author of “Bittersweet Passage,” a book that documented the Japanese Canadian community’s campaign for an apology and an acknowledgment of the racism they endured during WWII.
Adelle Blackett is a law professor at McGill University. As a legal scholar, her work has focused on human rights and labour law. In 2009, Quebec’s national assembly appointed her to the province’s human rights commission. She’s received several awards and fellowships over the years, including from Barreau du Québec for her social commitment and her contributions to the advancement of women, and from the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers for her contributions to the legal community and community at large. She was also elected a fellow to the Royal Society of Canada in 2020 and was a 2016 fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.
Gary Yee is a lawyer who has devoted his career and community activities to legal clinics, adjudicative tribunals, access to justice and anti-racism. Yee was the president of the Chinese Canadian National Council, where he spearheaded the redress campaign for the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act.
Paul Taylor has worked in food security and anti-poverty in both Toronto and Vancouver. He is currently the executive director of FoodShare Toronto. Taylor works to both feed and support communities while changing narratives and perceptions about the causes of food insecurity and advocating for workers’ rights. In 2020, Taylor was named one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40.
Dr. Alan Tai-Wai Li has been a physician with the Regent Park Community Health Centre since the 1980s. Li has worked in HIV/AIDS research through the Ontario HIV Treatment Network and the Committee for Accessible AIDS Treatment. His work has focused on many marginalized communities including newcomers and racialized communities living with HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ people, people struggling with mental health and addictions, and those experiencing poverty and homelessness.
Lynn Jones has spent her life campaigning for civil rights in Nova Scotia as an educator, and a community and labour organizer. She grew up at a time when her hometown of Truro, N.S., was segregated in a family of activists. She worked with Saint Mary’s University to create the Lynn Jones African-Canadian and Diaspora Heritage Collection, which documents her family’s activism and 50 years of Black Nova Scotian history. Jones was also a vice-president of the Canadian Labour Congress, where she pushed for an anti-racism report on unions and their communities in Canada in 1995.
Vivek Shraya is a Calgary artist who works across music, literature, visual art, theatre and film. Her bestselling book “I’m Afraid of Men” explores the role masculinity has played throughout her life as a trans woman. Shraya is founder of the publishing imprint VS and has taught creative writing at the University of Calgary. Her album with the Queer Songbook Orchestra, “Part-Time Woman,” was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize.
Amy Go has been a social worker for over 30 years and worked to break down barriers for immigrants and racialized people. Go has worked to promote culturally appropriate long-term care through her work as executive director at the Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care. She co-created the CARE Centre for Internationally Educated Nurses in 2001, helping women around the globe pass registration exams to work in their profession. She is also the founding president of the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice.
Akua Benjamin has been involved in numerous community groups and initiatives advocating for change, and challenging racist policies and structures. Groups in which she has played leadership roles include the Black Action Defence Committee, National Action Committee on the Status of Women and the Congress of Black Women. In 2003, she became the first Black director at Ryerson University. She was a social work professor at Ryerson University for decades and is now head of the Akua Benjamin Project at Ryerson.
Winnie Ng is a long-time social justice and union activist. For more than three decades, Ng championed workers’ rights through her involvement in labour organizations and networks, including as acting executive director of the Labour Education Centre, the Canadian Labour Congress’s Ontario regional director and Ryerson’s CAW-Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy.
Afua Cooper has made contributions to Black studies and art in Canada. Cooper is a sociology professor at Dalhousie University where she was the James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies from 2011 to 2017. She founded the Black Canadian Studies Association and was Halifax’s seventh poet laureate. Her book “The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal” was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award.
Murray Sinclair served the justice system in Manitoba for decades. He was the first Indigenous judge appointed in Manitoba and the second in Canada. The senator was chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, conducting hearings across the country on the impact of residential schools on Indigenous people, culminating in a report on a way forward toward reconciliation. (Note: officials are ineligible while serving.)
Baldev Mutta has been in social work for more than 40 years. He founded Punjabi Community Health Services, which started in Mississauga and expanded across Ontario. He has worked for the last 28 years developing a holistic model to address substance abuse, mental health and family violence in South Asian communities and increase access to services for these communities.
Debbie Douglas is the executive director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants. She has highlighted issues of equity and inclusion including race, gender and sexual orientation within the immigration system and advocated for safe, welcoming spaces in settlement and integration. She has received several awards, including a Women of Distinction Award from YWCA Toronto, the Amino Malko Award from the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture and an Urban Alliance on Race Relations Racial Equity Award.
Susan Eng is a lawyer and has been involved in community efforts, including as a founding board member of the Chinese Canadian National Council and as part of the campaign for redress for the Chinese Canadian head tax. Eng was a chair of the Toronto Police Services Board and a vice-president of Canadian Association of Retired Persons.
Angela Marie MacDougall is the executive director of Vancouver’s Battered Women’s Support Services. MacDougall has advocated for women’s empowerment and against violence against women, and worked on strategies to create gender equity. The City of Vancouver named her a Remarkable Woman in 2014.
OmiSoore Dryden is the James R. Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies in the faculty of medicine at Dalhousie University. She has studied the experiences of Black Canadians in the health-care system. She led research into the barriers that gay, bisexual and trans men encounter when attempting to donate blood in Canada.
Grace-Edward Galabuzi is a Ryerson University professor researching experiences of recent immigrants and racialized groups in the Canadian labour market; race and poverty, and social exclusion. Galabuzi also worked in the Ontario government as a senior policy analyst on justice issues in the early ’90s.
Avvy Go is a lawyer and director of the Chinese & Southeast Asian Legal Clinic. Go has worked largely in legal clinics serving low-income individuals and families, immigrants and refugees. She has also served on several boards and councils including the Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council and the Ontario Justice Education Network. Outside of her legal practice, Go organized in the community for causes related to poverty, racism and Chinese Canadians.
Ingrid Waldron is a sociologist and professor in the faculty of health at Dalhousie University. Her work has encompassed the impacts of racial inequities on health. Over the last eight years, through the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities & Community Health (ENRICH) Project, she has studied the social and health effects of environmental racism in Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian communities.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/12/05/21-racialized-canadians-who-could-help-the-order-of-canada-look-more-like-canada.html

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Andrew Griffith, BlackNorth Initiative, Canadian Council of Business Leaders Against Anti-Black Systemic Racism, Order of Canada

Somin: Rights and Wrongs of the Trump Administration’s Revised Citizenship Test

2020/12/07 Leave a comment

A balanced take, while noting the fundamental but understandable contradiction between testing newcomers and not current citizens. Money quote:

Perhaps the people hired to design the citizenship test should be required to meet certain standards of civic knowledge themselves! To the classic problem of “who guards the guardians,” we might add the issue of “who tests the testers.”

…

The Trump administration recently introduced a new and somewhat more difficult citizenship test for immigrants. The 128 questions that can be used on the new test are listed here.

Some of the changes are reasonable, and arguably improvements over the old version. On the other hand, many of the new questions are badly drafted, incorporating various serious errors. Moreover, the very existence of this test (both the new and old versions) raises the question of why immigrants should be required to pass a test to get voting rights, but not natives.

The changes to the immigration test are far less objectionable than most of the Trump administration’s other changes to immigration policy, most of which are calculated to keep immigrants out of the United States altogether, and have collectively made the US more closed to migration than ever before. By contrast, making the citizenship test harder doesn’t deny people the right to live and work in the US, because all or nearly all of those eligible to take it in the first place already have the right to live and work in the US as permanent residents, and will not be deported if they fail the test. Indeed, they can even take the test again the next time it is administered. The main rights that turn on passing the test are the right to vote, and the right to certain types of welfare benefits.

Unlike the right to live and work in a given location, the right to vote is not just a personal liberty, but also, as John Stuart Mill put it, the right to exercise “power over others.” Thus, there is some potential justification for restricting the franchise to those with at least a minimal level of political knowledge. That is, at least in theory, what the citizenship test is supposed to do. And it is also the reason why we deny the suffrage to children, among others.

Some of the changes from the old test to the new one are reasonable. For example, it makes sense to get rid of questions about geography, while adding more questions about history, law, and political institutions. The latter types of knowledge are far more likely to be useful for voting purposes.

It also makes sense to expand the number of questions on the test from ten to twenty. More questions make it less likely that someone will fail or pass simply because of a fluke related to the questions that just happen to be chosen for that administration of the test. The lower the number of questions, the more likely it is that a knowledgeable applicant will fail because she was unlucky, in that the questions selected for that particular administration just happened to be chosen from among the small number she didn’t know the answer to. Conversely, a badly prepared applicant might get “lucky” if the ten questions chosen just happened to be among the few she is familiar with.

It is also worth noting that, while the new test is more difficult than the old, it still isn’t that hard. The vast majority of the questions are fairly basic in nature, and applicants need only get 12 of 20 right (60%) in order to pass. That is the same percentage as on the old test (6 of 10). Thus, I’m skeptical of predictions by some immigrant rights advocates that the new test will lead to a great increase in the failure rate, though they may well be right to suspect that this is what the Trump administration is hoping for.

While some of the changes made on the new test are defensible, many of the questions are badly designed or based on factual errors. It is particulary ironic that a test designed to weed out bad potential voters includes some egregious errors about the history of voting rights. Two of the questions ask “When did all men get the right to vote?” and “When did all women get the right to vote?” In reality it is simply not true that either”all men” or “all women” have the right to vote—even to this day.

Even if the relevant men and women are only adult citizens, current law continues to deny the franchise to large numbers of both men and women. Most states deny it to substantial categories of mentally ill people, and to many convicted felons. These are not marginal exceptions. They affect millions of people. And, of course, the franchise is also denied to millions of non-citizen residents of the US. That’s why the citizenship test exists in the first place!

Another question asks respondents to name a power that is “only for the states.” Among the possible correct answers are “Provide schooling and education,” “Provide protection (police),” and “Approve zoning and land use.”In reality, the federal government has a major role in each of these policy areas. The federal Department of Education funds and controls a wide range of education programs, there are numerous federal law enforcement agencies, and the federal government imposes a variety of restrictions on land use—especially in the many places where it actually owns large amounts of land!

I am sympathetic to the argument that the federal government has intruded into these areas far more than the original meaning of the Constitution allows. But the citizenship test should not conflate the normative debate over this issue with a factual issue about the current distribution of power. And even under relatively narrow interpretations of federal power under the Constitution, the federal government would still have a role in each of these areas when it comes to military education, the federal territories, the District of Columbia and federally owned land.

A number of questions on the test dress up normative preferences as factual issues. For example, one question asks who members of the House of Representatives represent, and there is a similar question about who senators represent. The “correct” answers are “citizens” in their respective states (for senators) or district (for members of the House). Whether members of Congress are supposed to represent all residents of their constituency or only those who are citizens is a actually a contested normative issue. As a practical matter, members who represent areas with large immigrant populations often do take non-citizen interests into account in various ways. Presenting this as a factual question with an obvious right answer is wrong.

The same can be said of the question which asks why “[i]t is important for all men age 18 through 25 to register for the Selective Service.” Among the “correct” answers are that it is a “[c]ivic duty,” and that it [m]akes the draft fair, if needed.” The framing of both the question and the list of correct answers overlooks the long history of opposition to the draft, which dates all the way back to the 19th century. There have long been those who oppose it on the grounds that the draft is a form of unjust forced labor, that it is unconstitutional, that many of the wars fought by draftees are immoral and unjust, or some combination of all three reasons. Opposition to the draft (and draft registration) is as much an American tradition as support for it—perhaps even more. The answer that “it makes the draft fair, if needed” overlooks the longstanding argument that the male-only draft is unjust sex discrimination. A recent court decision has even ruled that it is unconstitutional for that very reason, though the ruling was later reversed on appeal.

These are far from the only questions on the test that are either based on factual errors, smuggle in contestable normative preferences, or some combination of both. If the federal government is going to continue to have a civics test for new citizens, they should hire some people to draft it who actually know what they are doing—at least enough to avoid very basic errors.

Some of these flawed questions are carried over from the old test (though not the one about representation). But it is still a mistake to include them in the new one.

Despite the flaws in the current citizenship test, I am not on principle opposed to requiring would-be voters to pass a test of basic political knowledge. Voter ignorance is a serious problem, and such a requirement might potentially curtail it, at least at the margin. Even the current flawed test might still be better (or less bad) than no test at all.

But that, in turn raises the question of why it should be imposed on immigrants, but not native-born citizens. One possible answer is that we can reasonably assume that natives already know these things. But, sadly, that isn’t true. Studies show that almost two-thirds of current American citizens would fail even the old citizenship test if they had to take it without studying. The percentage who would fail the new one may well be even higher.

Perhaps the answer is that voting is an inherent right of citizenship, so all citizens should be given the franchise, regardless of how ignorant they might be about politics and government. But this runs into the fact that we already deny the franchise to large numbers of citizens based on their real or imagined lack of competence to be good voters: children, many of the mentally ill, and numerous convicted felons. In combination, these groups add up to a third or more of the population. If it is morally permissible to deny the franchise to incompetent (or supposedly incompetent) children, mentally ill people, immigrants, and felons, why not to ignorant native-born adults? Indeed, some of these groups (most notably children) are denied the franchise based on crude generalizations about their competence that don’t actually apply to many of them.

Discrimination between politically ignorant immigrants and similarly ignorant natives is another example of morally arbitrary discrimination based on parentage and place of birth, on which most immigration restrictions are based. Why not just impose a knowledge test that applies to all would-be voters regardless of whether they are immigrants or natives, children or adults, mentally ill or not? Any who pass are entitled to vote, and those who fail can try again later.

One possible answer to this question is that we cannot trust the government to come up with an objective test, as opposed to one calculated to weed out opponents of the party in power. This problem is already evident in some of the Trump administration test questions discussed above, which seem designed to privilege more conservative answers to questions (such as the one about who members of Congress represent). The incentive for the government to “rig” the test would be even greater if it applied to all potential voters, not just immigrants. The history of voting tests is not a happy one; it includes, for example, “literacy tests” used to weed out black voters in the Jim Crow-era South. This is the main reason why I am skeptical of adopting knowledge tests as a general solution to the problem of political ignorance. The idea is likely to be pernicious in practice, even if defensible in theory.

But even if they cannot be easily changed, we should at least acknowledge the morally questionable aspects of the citizenship test for immigrants. And if we are going to continue to have one, it should be more competently designed. Perhaps the people hired to design the citizenship test should be required to meet certain standards of civic knowledge themselves! To the classic problem of “who guards the guardians,” we might add the issue of “who tests the testers.”

Source: Rights and Wrongs of the Trump Administration’s Revised Citizenship Test

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with citizenship test, Ilya Somin, USA

‘There is no playbook in dealing with the pandemic’: how StatsCan has mobilized around urgent COVID-19 data collection

2020/12/07 Leave a comment

Of interest:

With the majority of people at Statistics Canada still working from home amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the agency has been working to become more agile in its collection of disaggregated data and the disproportionate effects of the crisis on vulnerable communities, according to Tina Chui, acting director of diversity and social statistics.

“There is no playbook in dealing with the pandemic,” said Ms. Chui. “I think we’ve become a lot more agile, and StatsCan has been undergoing modernization for a number of years, which allowed us to springboard into more innovative ways of doing things.”

The impact of the pandemic has been spread unevenly across the Canadian population, particularly pertaining to people from vulnerable communities and marginalized groups.

“Because of that, we have really mobilized to collect as much information as possible,” said Ms. Chui. “We have been investing our efforts in a number of modernization initiatives for a number of years already, which actually helped us to prepare for the pandemic response.”

Ms. Chui said that during the initial stages of the pandemic, senior management within Statistics Canada took “calculated risks and made some tough choices” to adapt the agency’s response to urgent data needs, including everything from information around mental health to the impact on businesses to enable people to better navigate the impact of the damage.

Crowdsourcing, web panels used for COVID-19 data collection

The agency has engaged in a number of crowdsourcing pushes throughout the pandemic, with first results on the impacts of COVID-19 on Canadians coming in between April 3 and April 24, followed by a focus on the impacts of the pandemic on postsecondary students from April 19 to May 1.

The focus then shifted to the collection of data surrounding the mental health of Canadians from April 24 to May 11; Canadians’ perceptions of personal safety from May 12 to May 25; trust in government, public health authorities and businesses from May 26 to June 8; as well as the impact of COVID-19 on Canadian families and children from June 9 to June 22.

Most recently, crowdsourcing was used to analyze the impacts of the pandemic on Canadians living with long-term conditions and disabilities from June 23 to July 6, finishing with a push to determine Canadians’ experiences of discrimination from August 4 to August 18.

Web panels have also been used from March 29 through to September 20 to collect data around the impacts of the pandemic, resuming economic and social activities, information sources consulted by Canadians, as well as technology use and cyber security.

From Jan. 25 to Feb. 1, the agency will be looking into substance use and stigmatization within the context of the pandemic as well.

“We really used those two sources in the last few months to collect very timely information,” said Ms. Chui. “Since the lockdown in mid-March, we worked very quickly to put some new surveys through crowdsource and web panel methods to collect data.”

‘We had to mobilize very quickly’

The federal government introduced its anti-racism strategy in June 2019, designed to unroll from 2019 to 2022 at the cost of $45-million.

Statistics Canada’s role within that strategy is to “support the data and evidence pillar,” said Ms. Chui. “Fast forward to the pandemic: we do need this real-time [data], we had to mobilize very quickly, so how can we leverage the existing work to monitor how Canadians are dealing with the pandemic?”

Calling the agency’s Labour Force Survey their “mission critical program,” Ms. Chui said new questions have been recently added to get a better sense for the impact on visible minority populations.

“That’s how we can find monthly data of COVID on employment,” said Ms. Chui. “Unfortunately we’re still deep in the second wave, but when we’re going through the recovery, certain communities will have a lot more to gain back, so with the monthly survey, we’ll be able to better monitor the situation.”

According to the most recent Labour Force Survey that reflects labour market conditions as of the week of Nov. 8 to 14, growth was “variable across demographic groups.”

Among Canadians aged 15 to 69, according to the report released on Dec. 4, the unemployment rate of those designated as a visible minority decreased 1.5 per cent to 10.2 per cent in November.

Beginning in July, the survey now includes a question asking respondents to report the population groups to which they belong. Possible responses, which are the same as in the 2016 census, include, White, South Asian (e.g., East Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan), Chinese, Black, Filipino, Arab, Latin American, Southeast Asian (e.g., Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Thai), West Asian (e.g., Iranian, Afghan), Korean, Japanese, or Other, according to Statistics Canada’s website.

Long-form census scheduled for 2021

In his mandate letter from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s (Papineau, Que.) office, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Navdeep Bains is responsible for preparing for the long-form census in 2021, including the collection and analysis of disaggregated data.

Ms. Chui said the census is the government’s “best source for disaggregated data.”

“For instance, when we look at socio-economic outcomes of women, we cannot just look at women, because socio-economic outcomes are tied very closely together with age, because age is a proxy for lifecycle,” said Ms. Chui. “So we have to look at the combinations of sex and age, and we can still drill further [into regions]. Then you can further drill into women in their prime working age, who are members of a visible minority.”

“The census is such a big data source that it will allow us to drill down into that level of detail, while also allowing us to protect the privacy and confidentiality of respondents,” said Ms. Chui.

According to the department, the census will contain new content to better identify individuals’ sex at birth, gender, veteran status, religion, registered members of Métis organization or settlements, as well as those enrolled under or a beneficiary of an Inuit lands claim agreement.

Pandemic has highlighted ‘pre-existing inequalities in our society,’ says expert

Malinda Smith, a professor at the University of Alberta who has also sat on Statistics Canada’s Expert Working Group on Black Communities in Canada, told The Hill Times that the pandemic has highlighted the pre-existing inequalities in our society, and “aggravated them for people who are on the front lines, people you see were marginalized, but now we recognize are essential.”

University of Alberta professor Malinda Smith says ‘what Statistics Canada can do from a national point of view is provide clear categories and a coherent strategy where we have data that is collected and comparable.’

There was a need for better race-based data prior to the pandemic in relation to policing, according to Prof. Smith—a need that has been amplified as result of the pandemic.

“What this has all shown is that across the country, across the provinces, is very uneven data collection, and what Statistics Canada can do from a national point of view is provide clear categories and a coherent strategy where we have data that is collected and comparable.”

“And this is as, if not more important—the information will be able to help evaluate initiatives and programs and policies to assess their differential impact, and then to design interventions that will properly address them,” said Prof. Smith.

“Right now, a once-size-fits-all strategy doesn’t allow you to do that, and the uneven data collection doesn’t allow you to even identify hotspots,” said Prof. Smith. “My view is that even though this is framed as an anti-racism strategy, it might just as well be framed in terms of a systematic commitment to what an equitable, inclusive society looks like.”

Source: ‘There is no playbook in dealing with the pandemic’: how StatsCan has mobilized around urgent COVID-19 data collection

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with COVID-19, Malinda Smith, Statistics Canada

How modern mathematics emerged from a lost Islamic library

2020/12/07 Leave a comment

Of interest, to math and history lovers:

The House of Wisdom sounds a bit like make believe: no trace remains of this ancient library, destroyed in the 13th Century, so we cannot be sure exactly where it was located or what it looked like.

But this prestigious academy was in fact a major intellectual powerhouse in Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age, and the birthplace of mathematical concepts as transformative as the common zero and our modern-day “Arabic” numerals.

Founded as a private collection for caliph Harun Al-Rashid in the late 8th Century then converted to a public academy some 30 years later, the House of Wisdom appears to have pulled scientists from all over the world towards Baghdad, drawn as they were by the city’s vibrant intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression (Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars were all allowed to study there).

An archive as formidable in size as the present-day British Library in London or the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, the House of Wisdom eventually became an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, philosophy, literature and the arts – as well as some more dubious subjects such as alchemy and astrology.

To conjure this great monument thus requires a leap of imagination (think the Citadel in Westeros, or the library at Hogwarts), but one thing is certain: the academy ushered in a cultural Renaissance that would entirely alter the course of mathematics.

The House of Wisdom was destroyed in the Mongol Siege of Baghdad in 1258 (according to legend, so many manuscripts were tossed into the River Tigris that its waters turned black from ink), but the discoveries made there introduced a powerful, abstract mathematical language that would later be adopted by the Islamic empire, Europe, and ultimately, the entire world.

*****

“What should matter to us is not the precise details of where or when the House of Wisdom was created,” says Jim Al-Khalili, a professor of physics at the University of Surrey. “Far more interesting is the history of the scientific ideas themselves, and how they developed as a result of it.”

Tracing the House of Wisdom’s mathematical legacy involves a bit of time travel back to the future, as it were. For hundreds of years until the ebb of the Italian Renaissance, one name was synonymous with mathematics in Europe: Leonardo da Pisa, known posthumously as Fibonacci. Born in Pisa in 1170, the Italian mathematician received his primary instruction in Bugia, a trading enclave located on the Barbary coast of Africa (coastal North Africa). In his early 20s, Fibonacci traveled to the Middle East, captivated by ideas that had come west from India through Persia. When he returned to Italy, Fibonacci published Liber Abbaci, one of the first Western works to describe the Hindu-Arabic numeric system.

When Liber Abbaci first appeared in 1202, Hindu-Arabic numerals were known to only a few intellectuals; European tradesmen and scholars were still clinging to Roman numerals, which made multiplication and division extremely cumbersome (try multiplying MXCI by LVII!). Fibonacci’s book demonstrated numerals’ use in arithmetic operations – techniques which could be applied to practical problems like profit margin, money changing, weight conversion, barter and interest.

“Those who wish to know the art of calculating, its subtleties and ingenuities, must know computing with hand figures,” Fibonacci wrote in the first chapter of his encyclopedic work, referring to the digits that children now learn in school. “With these nine figures and the sign 0, called zephyr, any number whatsoever is written.” Suddenly, mathematics was available to all in a useable form.

Fibonacci’s great genius was not just his creativity as a mathematician, however, but his keen understanding of the advantages known to Muslim scientists for centuries: their calculating formulas, their decimal place system, their algebra. In fact, Liber Abbaci relied almost exclusively on the algorithms of 9th-Century Arab mathematician Al-Khwarizmi. His revolutionary treatise presented, for the first time, a systematic way of solving quadratic equations. Because of his discoveries in the field, Al-Khwarizmi is often referred to as the father of algebra – a word we owe to him, from the Arabic al-jabr, “the restoring of broken parts”—and in 821 he was appointed astronomer and head librarian of the House of Wisdom.

Scholars and translators at the library also took great pains to ensure that their work was accessible to the reading public

Al-Khwarizmi’s treatise introduced the Muslim world to the decimal number system,” explains Al-Khalili. “Others, such as Leonardo da Pisa, helped transmit it across Europe.”

Fibonacci’s transformative influence on modern maths was thus a legacy owed in great part to Al-Khwarizmi. And so two men separated by nearly four centuries were connected by an ancient library: the most celebrated mathematician of the Middle Ages stood on the shoulder of another pioneering thinker, one whose breakthroughs were made at an iconic institution of the Islamic Golden Age.

Perhaps because so little is known about the House of Wisdom, historians are occasionally tempted to exaggerate its scope and purpose, giving it an mythic status somewhat at odds with the scant historical records left to us. “Some argue that the House of Wisdom was nothing like as grand as it became in the eyes of many,” says Al-Khalili. “But its association with men such as Al-Khwarizmi, with his work in mathematics, astronomy and geography, is for me strong evidence that the House of Wisdom was closer to a true academy, not just a repository of translated books.”

Scholars and translators at the library also took great pains to ensure that their work was accessible to the reading public. “The House of Wisdom is fundamentally important, as it’s through translations there – Arabic scholars who translated Greek ideas into the vernacular – that we formed the bedrock of our mathematical understanding” says June Barrow-Green, professor of history of mathematics at the Open University in the UK. The palace library was as much a window into numerical ideas from the past as it was a site of scientific innovation.

Long before our current decimal system, the binary number system that programs our computers, before Roman numerals, before the system used by ancient Mesopotamians, humans were using early tally systems to record calculations. While we might find each of these imponderable or antiquated, differing numerical representations can actually teach us something valuable about structure, relationships, and the historical and cultural contexts from which they emerged.

They reinforce the idea of place value and abstraction, helping us to better understand how numbers work. They show that “the Western way wasn’t the only way”, says Barrow-Green. “There is a real value in understanding different numbers systems.”

When an ancient trader wanted to write “two sheep”, for example, she could inscribe in clay a picture of two sheep. But this would be impractical if she wanted to write “20 sheep.” Sign-value notation is a system in which numeric symbols add together signify a value; in this case, drawing two sheep to represent the actual quantity.

A global shift away from Roman numerals underscores a creeping innumeracy in other aspects of life

A vestige of sign-value notation, Roman numerals somehow persisted despite the introduction of Al-Khwarizmi’s system, which relied on the position of digits to represent quantities. Like the towering monuments on which they were inscribed, Roman numerals outlived the empire that gave birth to them – whether by accident, sentiment or purpose, none can say for sure.

This year marks the 850th anniversary of Fibonacci’s birth. It could also be the moment which threatens to undo the journeywork of Roman numerals. In the UK, traditional time-pieces have been replaced with easier-to-read digital clocks in school classrooms, for fear students can no longer tell analogue time properly. In some regions of the world, governments have dropped them from road signs and official documents, while Hollywood has moved away from using Roman numerals in sequel titles. The Superbowl famously ditched them for its 50th game, worried it was confusing fans.

But a global shift away from Roman numerals underscores a creeping innumeracyin other aspects of life. Perhaps more importantly, the disappearance of Roman numerals reveals the politics that govern any wider discussion about mathematics.

The library was home to many groundbreaking texts, such as this book of “ingenious inventions”, published in 850 (Credit: Photo12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

“The question of whose stories we tell, whose culture we privilege, and which forms of knowledge we immortalise into formal learning are inevitably influenced by our Western colonial heritage” says Lucy Rycroft-Smith, editor and developer at Cambridge Mathematics. A former maths teacher, Rycroft-Smith is now a leading voice in mathematics education, and studies differences across global curricula. While Wales, Scotland and Ireland do not include Roman numerals in their learning objectives, and the US has no standard requirements, England explicitly states that students must be able to read Roman numerals up to 100.

Many of us will find nothing special about the figure MMXX (that’s 2020, if you’re unaware). We may dimly recognise Fibonacci for the famous pattern named after him: a recursive sequence that starts with 1 and is thereafter the sum of the two previous numbers.

The Fibonacci sequence is certainly remarkable, showing up with astonishing frequency in the natural world – in seashells and plant tendrils, in the spirals of sunflower heads, in pine cones, animal horns and the arrangement of leaf buds on a stem, as well as the digital realm (in computer science and sequencing). His patterns often make their way into popular culture, too: in literature, film and visual arts; as a refrain in song lyrics or orchestral scores; even in architecture.

But Leonardo da Pisa’s most enduring mathematical contribution is something rarely taught in schools. That story begins in a palace library nearly a thousand years ago, at a time when most of Western Christendom lay in intellectual darkness. It is a tale that should dismantle our Eurocentric view of mathematics, shine a spotlight on the Islamic world’s scientific achievements and argue for the continued importance of numerical treasures from long ago.

Source: How modern mathematics emerged from a lost Islamic library

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Al-Khwarizmi, Baghdad, Fibonacci, House of Wisdom, Islamic Golden Age, mathematics

Black civil servants allege discrimination in proposed class-action lawsuit against Ottawa

2020/12/05 Leave a comment

EE - Disaggregated Data, Representation and PSES.010

EE - Disaggregated Data, Representation and PSES.013

There is a real disconnect in the proposed class action lawsuit in its broad assertions regarding widespread assertions regarding systemic racism and the reliance on the disturbing personal experiences of 12 Black public servants to justify such broad assertions.

The statement of claim uses no data beyond these personal experiences to justify their claims, surprising given the availability of data from the Census and more recently, TBS employment equity reports and Public Service Employee Surveys as seen in my analyses What new disaggregated data tells us about federal public service … and What the Public Service Employee Survey breakdowns of visible minority and other groups tell us about diversity and inclusion, selected data tables above.

The former shows that overall Blacks are over-represented in the public service but that a number of other minority groups have comparable under-representation to Blacks among executives, i.e., the issues are not unique to Black employees.

On the other hand, Black public servants are more likely to experience discrimination than other groups but even these differences are relatively small.

There are, of course, likely wider variations at the departmental level.

None of this is to discount the experiences of the 12 public servants but underline that calls for systemic change should be evidence-based, not just examples and anecdotes, no matter how strong:

A group of current and former Black civil servants has issued a proposed class-action lawsuit against the federal government alleging it discriminated against Black employees for decades.

They claim the government has excluded Black federal employees from being promoted.

“Our exclusion at the top levels of the public service, in my view, has really disenfranchised Canada from that talent and that ability and the culture that Black workers bring to the table and that different perspective,” said Nicholas Marcus Thompson.

Thompson is one of 12 former or current employees from multiple government departments who are representative plaintiffs in the class action. Lawyers representing them say the suit could ultimately cover tens of thousands of people who have worked in the federal public service since 1970.

The lawsuit comes at a time of heightened awareness about systemic and anti-Black racism.

In June, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said systemic racism “is an issue across the country, in all our institutions.”

The plaintiffs in the proposed class action are asking for $900 million in damages, a declaration from the government that it infringed on the group’s charter rights and a plan going forward to promote more Black employees.

It was filed in the Federal Court of Canada on Thursday and is awaiting certification. The government is expected to be served in the coming days.

Lack of representation

The lawyers representing the civil servants say the suit is likely the first of its kind in Canada involving Black public servants at the federal level. The statement of claim names more than 50 departments and agencies as comprising the public service.

Last year, two Black Ontario government employees sued the Ontario Public Service, among others, alleging discrimination because they were Black women.

In an interview in Toronto with CBC News, Thompson said that when he joined the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) six years ago, something felt off to him.

“When I became a Canadian citizen many years ago, I remember the citizenship judge saying that Canada is a place where freedom abounds and opportunities are endless. But when I joined the CRA, that was my expectation that I could join, start at any position and climb the ranks. And my goal was really to serve Canadians,” he said.

“I quickly realized that the agency was not, you know, as I thought it would be: all inclusive and diverse.”

Thompson, who was a collections officer, said a lack of Black representation in the agency caused his morale and confidence to suffer. He also said the work environment was toxic and led to illness.

When his doctor gave him a prescription for a “workplace accommodation,” Thompson said he was told to clean closets because no other work was available.

The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, which is the employer of the federal public service, said it could not comment on the allegations in the suit because it was before the courts.

“Systemic racism and discrimination is a painful lived reality for Black Canadians, racialized Canadians and Indigenous people,” said spokesperson Bianca Healy in a statement.

“The government has taken steps to address anti-Black racism, systemic discrimination and injustice across the country.”

Read the full Treasury Board Secretariat statement

She said that includes a recently announced $12 million for “a dedicated Centre on Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Public Service.”

The CRA referred CBC News to the Treasury Board statement.

Complaints in multiple departments and agencies

Bernadeth Betchi is another representative plaintiff who also worked for the CRA off and on for several years.

In a Skype interview, she described a toxic workplace where she said she experienced microaggressions and had to go on sick leave. She had to work twice as hard as her non-Black colleagues to get noticed, she said.

Betchi ended up leaving the CRA and eventually found work at the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) — a federal organization that handles complaints about discrimination.

“Everything that they are about was everything that I am about, you know, it resonated with my values. It’s there to help Canadians — Canadians who have been discriminated against, you know, on different grounds. And so I knew that this is where I needed to be,” said Betchi, who’s on a maternity leave from the CHRC.

But her views quickly changed.

“When I started working there, I saw that, unfortunately, what the mandate says and what’s being done inside of the organization is completely different. Black folks within the Canadian Human Rights Commission, my Black colleagues, are suffering. They’re being — there’s a lot of adverse differential treatment.”

When asked to comment on the allegations, CHRC said it “is committed to meeting the highest standards of equality, inclusion and representation” and that it has been “examining how racism may manifest itself within our organization and what steps might be needed to address it.”

“We know that Indigenous, Black and other racialized people face many societal, institutional and structural barriers to equality,” said spokesperson Jeff Meldrum in an email.

“That is why work is underway to ensure that the views and perspectives of Indigenous, Black and other racialized employees on barriers that may exist within the Commission are heard and addressed. ”

Proposing solutions

“There is a grave injustice that’s taking place,” said Courtney Betty, a Toronto lawyer involved in the class action.

“I think every Canadian should be troubled.”

Betty and his colleague, Hugh Scher, decided the lawsuit’s time frame would start in 1970, the year Canada ratified the United Nations international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination.

In a joint interview, Betty and Scher spoke about possible solutions they hope will stem from the lawsuit if it’s certified.

“There needs to be a third-party audit undertaken by an independent body, whether that’s a former Supreme Court justice, whether that’s a Black equity commission,” Scher said.

That third party should do a thorough review “to see what are the barriers to true equality and access and inclusion for Black employees, and what can be done about them,” he said.

Scher said another key element would be amending the federal Employment Equity Act.

Its stated goal is “to achieve equality in the workplace so that no person shall be denied employment opportunities or benefits for reasons unrelated to ability.”

The legislation is also designed “to correct the conditions of disadvantage in employment experienced by women, Aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities and members of visible minorities.”

But the lawyers argue that because Black employees are grouped together with all non-white and non-Indigenous people as “visible minorities” under the act, they’ve suffered by not moving up in the public service — and the unique racism they have to deal with has been ignored.

Betchi agrees. “There’s not a lot of Black women or Black men at the executive level,” she said. “Our experience has been completely invisible and put aside.”

The Treasury Board has data that breaks down the “visible minority” category in the public service based on self-reporting by employees. It shows that in 2019, Black workers made up a smaller proportion of those in top-level executive positions than those doing administrative support.

Thompson said he’s optimistic the lawsuit will spark change.

“I’m very hopeful that this issue will be addressed in a forthright manner by the government of Canada,” he said. “The government has shown signs that it is prepared. It has done the first major part by acknowledging that this issue exists.”

Source: Black civil servants allege discrimination in proposed class-action lawsuit against Ottawa

Text of proposed class action suit: 486848991-NICHOLAS-MARCUS-THOMPSON-ET-AL-v-HER-MAJESTY-THE-QUEEN

A longer more in-depth account of the experiences of the 12 employees can be found here:

The Canadian government has failed to uphold the Charter rights of Black employees in the federal public service, shirking its responsibility to create discrimination- and harassment-free workplaces, and actively excluding Black bureaucrats, allege plaintiffs in a proposed class-action lawsuit.

“There has been a de facto practice of Black employee exclusion throughout the public service because of the permeation of systemic discrimination through Canada’s institutional structures,” said the statement of claim filed with the Federal Court in Toronto on Dec. 2.

The class action, which has not been certified, is being led by 12 former and current Black public servants, who have been employed in a variety of federal departments and agencies, including the RCMP, Canadian Revenue Agency, Canadian Human Rights Commission, Canadian Armed Forces, Statistics Canada, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, and Employment and Social Development Canada.

The representative plaintiffs, seeking $900-million in damages on behalf of public servants since 1970 and their families, claim Black employees have been systemically excluded from advancement within the public service and that the court should impose on the government a mandatory order to implement a “Diversity and Promotional Plan for Black Public Service Employees, related to the hiring and promotion” of Black bureaucrats.

“Canada owes Black employees a duty of care,” the 45-page statement of claim said. “This duty entails an obligation to promote Black employees based on merit, talent, and ability, as is the case for any other employee.”

The suit alleges that Canada’s application of the Employment Equity Act violates the Charter equality rights of Black employees. The act designates women, Indigenous people, persons with disabilities, and visible minorities as requiring special measures and accommodation in the public service.

“In particular, the act fails to break down the category of visible minorities and thus ignores the unique, invisible, and systemic racism faced by Black employees relative to other disadvantaged groups that are covered by the categories established by the act,” the statement of claim said, adding that decisions on hiring and promotions are governed by enabling legislation for the public service, and not subject to union grievance.

By not hiring and promoting Black employees in a manner proportional to their numbers in the public service or the overall population or to a degree consistent with the treatment of other visible minority or white public servants, “Canada has treated Black employees in an adverse differential manner and has drawn distinctions” between Black bureaucrats and those of other races.

Requests for comment from the federal Attorney General’s Office were referred to the Treasury Board Secretariat.

“As this matter is currently before the courts, the Treasury Board Secretariat cannot comment on this suit at this time,” said an email from a department spokesperson.

“The government has taken steps to address anti-Black racism, systemic discrimination, and injustice across the country. Most recently, the fall economic statement committed $12-million over three years towards a dedicated Centre on Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Public Service. This will accelerate the government’s commitment to achieving a representative and inclusive public service,” the email said, also highlighting the September Throne Speech where the government “announced an action plan to increase representation and leadership development within the public service.”

“Early in its mandate, the government also reflected its commitment in mandate letters, in the establishment of an Anti-Racism Strategy and Secretariat, in the appointment of a minister of diversity and inclusion and youth, and in the creation of the Office for Public Service Accessibility,” said the Treasury Board Secretariat statement.

In February, Treasury Board President Jean-Yves Duclos (Québec, Que.) told The Hill Times that “the fact that Black employees tell us they are unable to be at their full potential is something of great concern to us. I will certainly address those concerns and make sure that every federal employee, including Black employees, has the ability to make the fullest impact on our society.”

NICHOLAS MARCUS THOMPSON ET AL. v. HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN by Charelle Evelyn on Scribd

Plaintiffs outline alleged mistreatment, exclusion

One of the representative plaintiffs, Nicholas Marcus Thompson, a union leader who was named activist of the year in January by the Public Service Alliance of Canada in Toronto, works for the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). Mr. Thompson has “repeatedly been denied promotions as a consequence of his race and due to his advocacy on behalf of other Black employees,” the statement of claim alleges.

One of the representative plaintiffs, Nicholas Marcus Thompson, says in the statement of claim that ‘merit was not a guiding principle for project assignment or advancement’ of Black public servants.

Mr. Thompson, who ran as an NDP candidate in Don Valley East, Ont., in 2019, said in the statement of claim that Black employees “were ghettoized in the lower ranks” of the public service and that “merit was not a guiding principle for project assignment or advancement.” Prejudice and indifference that “made the world polite, cool, and lonely to the point of permanent exclusion” are “Canadian-style systemic racism,” the claim said.Jennifer Philips has worked for the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) for more than 30 years, during which she has only been promoted once, according to the claim. “She watched as fellow non-Black colleagues, some of whom she had trained, climbed the ranks and enjoyed the benefits of a system designed to lift them up while holding her down.” The claim said she and other Black colleagues were also subject to “explicit and demeaning comments” made about their race, national or ethnic origin, as well as “attitudes and comments dismissing their ability to carry out their duties because of their race and ethnicity.”

Shalane Rooney was one of two Black employees in a roughly 300-person Statistics Canada office. Ms. Rooney began working for the agency in 2010, and in addition to being denied promotions and raises, said, according to the statement of claim, she was subject to comments “regarding [her] hair, [her] skin being too fair to have two Black parents, [colleagues] confirming with [her] if it is okay to say the ‘N’ word,” and more.

Other plaintiffs, such as Yonita Parkes, said that after complaining about race-related treatment by co-workers, the perpetrators were shuffled out laterally instead of being held accountable, while she was ostracized.

Daniel Malcolm highlighted in the statement of claim that Black employees like himself can be overlooked for permanent roles, despite acting in them for some time, because management can set their own criteria to make their preferred appointments from candidate pools, despite qualification or competition score.

Alain Babineau—a 28-year RCMP veteran who served on the protection detail for prime ministers Jean Chrétien, Stephen Harper, and Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) before leaving the force in September 2016—alleges in the statement that his first attempts to join the force in the early 1980s included being asked “What are you going to do if you get called a ‘nigger?’” during his recruiting interview, and later being racially profiled and falsely characterized as a drug dealer. Once he made it into the force, he was referred to as “Black man” instead of his name by the head of the drug section in which he worked. “This is the type of microaggression we endured as Black officers, but we shut our mouths and endure, on the belief that we can help to bring about change,” he said in the statement.

Bernadeth Betchi, who at one point was employed by the Prime Minister’s Office as a communications assistant to Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, alleges in the statement that her employment at both the CRA and the Canadian Human Rights Commission ultimately caused her stress, anxiety, and trauma. “As a consequence of the experiences of mistreatment and Black employee exclusion, [Ms.] Betchi lost faith in the commission’s ability to execute its mandate, seeing as it could not even promote equity within its own teams.”

Liberal MP Greg Fergus chairs the Parliamentary Black Caucus, which highlighted ‘systemic discrimination and unconscious bias’ in the federal public service in its June 16 statement and recommendations.

Repeated calls for change

The hiring, promotion, and overall treatment of people of colour within the public service, specifically Black people, has been a long-standing issue.

A 2000 report by the Treasury Board-created Task Force on the Participation of Visible Minorities in the Public Service noted that the federal public service, “which can be inhospitable to outsiders, can be particularly so to visible minorities,” and recommended, among other things, that the government set a benchmark for one-in-five “for visible minority participation government-wide” within the next five years.

The most recent report on employment equity in the core public service, covering the 2018-19 fiscal year, said that of the 203,286 employees tallied in March 2019, 54.48 per cent were women (compared to an estimated workforce availability of 52.7 per cent), 5.1 per cent were Indigenous persons (against an estimated workforce availability of four per cent), 5.2 per cent were people with disabilities (compared to nine per cent workforce availability), and 16.7 per cent were visible minorities (compared to 15.3 per cent). According to the report, 19 per cent of those who identify as a visible minority in the public service are Black.

Since its establishment in late 2017, the Federal Black Employee Caucus has been pushing to get disaggregated employment equity data collected so that employees, employers, and policy-makers can all understand the landscape for Black federal bureaucrats, and to provide an element of support and unity for Black employees who are facing harassment and discrimination in the workplace.

Former senator Donald Oliver has long championed the idea of a new federal government Department of Diversity headed by a Black deputy minister, and former Liberal-turned-Independent MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes introduced a private member’s bill in the dying days of the last Parliament to change the Employment Equity Act. The bill called for a requirement of the Canada Human Rights Commission to provide an annual report to the minister “on the progress made by the Government of Canada in dismantling systemic barriers that prevent members of visible minorities from being promoted within the federal public service and in remedying the disadvantages caused by those barriers.”

There are so few people of colour at the deputy and associate deputy minister level that the government won’t release numbers, for privacy reasons. Caroline Xavier, became the first Black woman to work at that level of the public service when she was appointed associate deputy minister of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada in February.

In October, the government awarded a contract worth $164,415 to executive recruitment firm Odgers Berndtson to “establish and maintain on an ongoing basis an inventory of qualified and interested Black people and other racialized groups, Indigenous people, as well as persons with disabilities, from outside the federal public service for the Government of Canada to consider for the deputy minister and assistant deputy minister cadre.”

In its June 16 statement, the Parliamentary Black Caucus also highlighted “systemic discrimination and unconscious bias” in the federal public service. Signatories called for measures that included improving Black representation in the senior ranks of the public service, implementing anti-bias training and evaluation programs, and establishing an “independent champion for Black federal employees through the creation of a national public service institute.”

Source: ‘Canadian-style systemic racism’: Black public servants file suit against federal government

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with Black Canadians, employment equity, lawsuit

Google Researcher Says She Was Fired Over Paper Highlighting Bias in A.I.

2020/12/05 Leave a comment

Of note:

A well-respected Google researcher said she was fired by the company after criticizing its approach to minority hiring and the biases built into today’s artificial intelligence systems.
Timnit Gebru, who was a co-leader of Google’s Ethical A.I. team, said in a tweet on Wednesday evening that she was fired because of an email she had sent a day earlier to a group that included company employees.
In the email, reviewed by The New York Times, she expressed exasperation over Google’s response to efforts by her and other employees to increase minority hiring and draw attention to bias in artificial intelligence.
“Your life starts getting worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people. You start making the other leaders upset,” the email read. “There is no way more documents or more conversations will achieve anything.”
Her departure from Google highlights growing tension between Google’s outspoken work force and its buttoned-up senior management, while raising concerns over the company’s efforts to build fair and reliable technology. It may also have a chilling effect on both Black tech workers and researchers who have left academia in recent years for high-paying jobs in Silicon Valley.
“Her firing only indicates that scientists, activists and scholars who want to work in this field — and are Black women — are not welcome in Silicon Valley,” said Mutale Nkonde, a fellow with the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab. “It is very disappointing.”
A Google spokesman declined to comment. In an email sent to Google employees, Jeff Dean, who oversees Google’s A.I. work, including that of Dr. Gebru and her team, called her departure “a difficult moment, especially given the important research topics she was involved in, and how deeply we care about responsible A.I. research as an org and as a company.”
After years of an anything-goes environment where employees engaged in freewheeling discussions in companywide meetings and online message boards, Google has started to crack down on workplace discourse. Many Google employees have bristled at the new restrictions and have argued that the company has broken from a tradition of transparency and free debate.
On Wednesday, the National Labor Relations Board said Google had most likely violated labor law when it fired two employees who were involved in labor organizing. The federal agency said Google illegally surveilled the employees before firing them.
Google’s battles with its workers, who have spoken out in recent years about the company’s handling of sexual harassment and its work with the Defense Department and federal border agencies, have diminished its reputation as a utopia for tech workers with generous salaries, perks and workplace freedom.
Like other technology companies, Google has also faced criticism for not doing enough to resolve the lack of women and racial minorities among its ranks.
The problems of racial inequality, especially the mistreatment of Black employees at technology companies, has plagued Silicon Valley for years. Coinbase, the most valuable cryptocurrency start-up, has experienced an exodus of Black employees in the last two years over what the workers said was racist and discriminatory treatment.
Researchers worry that the people who are building artificial intelligence systems may be building their own biases into the technology. Over the past several years, several public experiments have shown that the systems often interact differently with people of color — perhaps because they are underrepresented among the developers who create those systems.
Dr. Gebru, 37, was born and raised in Ethiopia. In 2018, while a researcher at Stanford University, she helped write a paper that is widely seen as a turning point in efforts to pinpoint and remove bias in artificial intelligence. She joined Google later that year, and helped build the Ethical A.I. team.
After hiring researchers like Dr. Gebru, Google has painted itself as a company dedicated to “ethical” A.I. But it is often reluctant to publicly acknowledge flaws in its own systems.
In an interview with The Times, Dr. Gebru said her exasperation stemmed from the company’s treatment of a research paper she had written with six other researchers, four of them at Google. The paper, also reviewed by The Times, pinpointed flaws in a new breed of language technology, including a system built by Google that underpins the company’s search engine.
These systems learn the vagaries of language by analyzing enormous amounts of text, including thousands of books, Wikipedia entries and other online documents. Because this text includes biased and sometimes hateful language, the technology may end up generating biased and hateful language.
After she and the other researchers submitted the paper to an academic conference, Dr. Gebru said, a Google manager demanded that she either retract the paper from the conference or remove her name and the names of the other Google employees. She refused to do so without further discussion and, in the email sent Tuesday evening, said she would resign after an appropriate amount of time if the company could not explain why it wanted her to retract the paper and answer other concerns.
The company responded to her email, she said, by saying it could not meet her demands and that her resignation was accepted immediately. Her access to company email and other services was immediately revoked.
In his note to employees, Mr. Dean said Google respected “her decision to resign.” Mr. Dean also said that the paper did not acknowledge recent research showing ways of mitigating bias in such systems.
“It was dehumanizing,” Dr. Gebru said. “They may have reasons for shutting down our research. But what is most upsetting is that they refuse to have a discussion about why.”
Dr. Gebru’s departure from Google comes at a time when A.I. technology is playing a bigger role in nearly every facet of Google’s business. The company has hitched its future to artificial intelligence — whether with its voice-enabled digital assistant or its automated placement of advertising for marketers — as the breakthrough technology to make the next generation of services and devices smarter and more capable.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has compared the advent of artificial intelligence to that of electricity or fire, and has said that it is essential to the future of the company and computing. Earlier this year, Mr. Pichai called for greater regulation and responsible handling of artificial intelligence, arguing that society needs to balance potential harms with new opportunities.
Google has repeatedly committed to eliminating bias in its systems. The trouble, Dr. Gebru said, is that most of the people making the ultimate decisions are men. “They are not only failing to prioritize hiring more people from minority communities, they are quashing their voices,” she said.
Julien Cornebise, an honorary associate professor at University College London and a former researcher with DeepMind, a prominent A.I. lab owned by the same parent company as Google’s, was among many artificial intelligence researchers who said Dr. Gebru’s departure reflected a larger problem in the industry.
“This shows how some large tech companies only support ethics and fairness and other A.I.-for-social-good causes as long as their positive P.R. impact outweighs the extra scrutiny they bring,” he said. “Timnit is a brilliant researcher. We need more like her in our field.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/technology/google-researcher-timnit-gebru.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Business

Filed under Multiculturalism, Other Tagged with AI, bias, Google, Timnit Gebru

‘Nothing we’ve done has helped’: In Toronto’s poor, racialized neighbourhoods, second-wave lockdowns are again failing to slow COVID cases

2020/12/05 Leave a comment

Good detailed analysis:

The data is clear, and has been for months: Ontarians who are poor, under-housed and racialized are disproportionately attacked by COVID-19.
And yet, deep into the second wave, this central feature of the pandemichas not been central to our pandemic response, health experts say. The current “one size fits all” restrictions have so far failed to protect the vast majority of people getting infected by COVID-19. As a result, lockdowns in hot spots like Toronto and Peel are on track to be longer, harder and more devastating for everyone.
“If we don’t tackle this problem, we will continue to struggle through the winter. I can guarantee you that right now,” says Dr. Peter Juni, scientific director of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, which provides evidence to inform the province’s pandemic response.
In the first wave, lockdowns worked instantly in richer, whiter Toronto neighbourhoods but failed to flatten the curve in the poorest, most racialized ones, Star analyses showed.
Experts fear the same thing is happening again. Over a recent four-week period, the 20 Toronto neighbourhoods with the highest proportions of visible minorities recorded more than 3,300 cases. The 20 whitest neighbourhoods reported just 360. This racialized tilt is not a function of race itself, research shows, rather of who performs essential but low-paying work and is more likely to live in sub-standard housing.
“This is really about the people who do all the work for us and who allow you and me to stay home,” says Juni.
“The restrictions work very nicely in my neighbourhood, Moore Park,” an affluent area in North Toronto, Juni adds. “In some other neighbourhoods, they don’t. Why? Because we do not support people to actually be able to decrease the amount of contact they have.”
Summer offered a reprieve from the virus — a chance to reflect on the first wave of the pandemic and prepare for the second. And perhaps the harshest lesson from the spring was that COVID-19 predominantly impacted poor and racialized Torontonians, especially from Black and South Asian communities.
According to Toronto Public Health data released in July, racialized residents accounted for 83 per cent of cases despite making up 52 per cent of the population. People in the poorest households accounted for the largest share of cases of any income group.
Many of the worst-hit neighbourhoods were in the city’s northwest and northeast. And while the rest of Toronto — particularly whiter, more affluent downtown neighbourhoods — enjoyed a relatively pandemic-free summer, residents in these areas continued to see transmission simmer along at low levels.
As the second wave took off, the same first-wave patterns quickly took hold: the downtown Waterfront neighbourhood initially emerged as a hot spot, then infections began to spike in neighbourhoods more densely populated by poor and racialized residents.
The province and the city began a series of interventions over the fall that escalated in severity — all of which have been too lax, many epidemiologists have argued. In late September, capacity limits were imposed for indoor dining and bars. In early October, indoor dining was nixed entirely along with fitness classes, and gathering sizes reduced.
These measures did have an impact — but most dramatically in downtown neighbourhoods like Little Portugal and the Waterfront. In the northwest and northeast corners especially, cases continued to climb.
“Rates in some of those downtown communities have dramatically decreased. You can see the direct effects of the intervention on those neighbourhoods, and you can hypothesize that (restaurants and indoor dining) were a very big driver for the cases in those neighbourhoods,” says Dr. Vinita Dubey, an associate medical officer of health with Toronto Public Health.
Dubey acknowledges that the inequalities of the first wave are repeating. “We are still seeing some of the same patterns that have actually persisted,” she says. “We’re doing more, we’ve learned more, we’re working with the communities more. But some of those systemic inequalities or disparities haven’t (been) fixed between the first and second wave.”
In an emailed statement, a health ministry spokesperson said the provincial government has had “an explicit focus on equity issues” with respect to the pandemic’s impact and cited several steps it’s taken to address these, including: public-health marketing efforts in more than 18 languages; a relief fund of $510 million for food banks, shelters and other organizations; and working with community groups to improve testing access in hard-hit areas.
If the lockdown that began Nov. 23 has had any effect on the hardest-hit neighbourhoods, it is not yet apparent. But while the inequities underlying differences in COVID risk may be deep-rooted, they can still be tackled, health experts say.
“We’ve set up a response, I think, at the extreme … it’s been only for the rich, or at least with the rich in mind first,” says Dr. Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, who provides clinical care in homeless shelters in Toronto.
“There were very specific and tangible things that I think could have been done to prepare for what was going to be a very difficult winter.”
In early October, the Star obtained provincial data showing that some Toronto neighbourhoods had alarmingly high positivity rates, suggesting that pockets of the city were in worse shape than previously known.
Provincial health officials admitted they first saw this data in the newspaper, and Premier Doug Ford cited mobile testing as part of what the province was doing to support marginalized communities.
But just days earlier, community health organizations in some of Toronto’s hardest-hit neighbourhoods were pressured by the province to stop offering pop-up testing, those involved say.
The province was transitioning to an appointment-only testing system as the backlog of unprocessed specimens ballooned. But community groups knew that easier-to-access pop-up testing sites were critical for reaching residents at highest risk of COVID-19.
The community groups pushed back, and “highlighted that without their pop-ups, there would be nothing available for (their) communities,” says Sané Dube, with the University of Health Network’s social medicine program, who was working in the community at the time.
It was “disturbing and concerning,” she adds. Though the province “backtracked” and the pop-up sites happened as planned, she says, “it raised serious questions about how decisions were being made.”
The health ministry says “there was absolutely no plan or proposal to ever cancel testing” in the neighbourhoods in question.
“Ontario Health Regions are working with high priority communities to offer additional testing sites.”
Many advocates describe a chronic inability to reach people in marginalized communities, where the need for COVID-19 testing is most dire.
In September — when testing volumes peaked in Toronto and the second wave started taking off — there was no pop-up testing in Scarborough and just three sites in the city’s northwest corner, two regions with high densities of poor, racialized communities that have been hardest hit by the pandemic.
But people in the richest and whitest neighbourhoods were likely being overtested. In late September, testing rates in Toronto’s whitest neighbourhoods were double that of the most racialized communities, according to a Star analysis of public health data.
After the province overhauled its strategy in late September, including restricting access for those with no symptoms, testing rates fell dramatically in the richest, whitest neighbourhoods. Today, they are more or less in line with rates in the city’s poorest, most racialized neighbourhoods — even though testing rates in the latter neighbourhoods “should be through the roof” given the soaring infection rates in those areas, says Dr. Sharmistha Mishra, a scientist with the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute and a member of the province’s modelling consensus table.
In response to the Star’s questions about testing access in northwest Toronto, the health ministry spokesperson cited the dozens of testing sites across the larger region that encompasses these neighbourhoods — but also acknowledged that uptake was still too low, and that the “expansion planning is underway.”
“Next efforts focus on mobilizing increased uptake of testing within targeted communities and providing culturally relevant and community tailored messaging addressing the social determinants of health, such as income, food security, and housing, that make it difficult for some people to seek or access care.”
Coun. Joe Cressy said that though COVID-19 testing is the province’s purview, the city recently ramped up supports for testing in targeted neighbourhoods. All city facilities — from fire stations to libraries — are now available for pop-up testing, he said. The city also recently kicked off a $5 million program in partnership with 11 communities agencies that have played a crucial role in supporting marginalized neighbourhoods.
Cressy said community involvement is key to increasing testing rates in the hardest-hit areas. Dube agrees, noting that many people are understandably mistrustful of a health system that has long excluded their needs.
“The failures we have with testing are actually linked to the failures of our pandemic strategy in general,” she says.
The province’s science table has begun referring to something called the “prevention gap” — the observation that “light touch” restrictions will flatten the curve in mildly affected areas, but allow large amounts of transmission to carry on in the hardest-hit regions.
Different tools are needed to meaningfully protect people at highest risk of COVID-19, experts say — for example, paid sick leave or a moratorium on evictions. Both measures would allow people to self-isolate without worrying about losing their job or home, and are now being formally requested by the City of Toronto in forthcoming letters to the provincial and federal governments.
Low-wage earners, who are the most likely to contract COVID-19, are also the least likely to have paid sick leave, according to data from the Labour Force Survey. Among Torontonians who make $17 an hour or less, only 17 per cent of workers who took a week-long sick leave between March and September were paid to take that time off.
This statistic almost certainly underestimates the problem, since it only captures workers who took an entire week off; low-wage workers are much more likely to only take a few days off at most, according to Dr. Kate Hayman with the Decent Work and Health Network.
Hayman, an emergency room physician in downtown Toronto, says paid sick leave is “a concrete tool for behavioural change that the government is underutilizing.” She frequently sees patients with COVID-19 who would benefit from paid sick leave; the food services worker whose employer wouldn’t allow her to self-isolate without a doctor’s note, for example, or the construction worker who continued working to pay the bills, even though he lives with his mother who had the virus.
“This is actually an intervention that has the (biggest) potential to benefit people who need it the most,” Hayman said. “Which is completely different from a lockdown, which might benefit people who can work from home the most.”
The ministry spokesperson said the Ontario was the first province to sign onto the federal Liberals’ Safe Restart Agreement, which provided $1.1 billion for paid sick leave. The province had earlier changed labour laws to provide unpaid, job-protected emergency leave, a requirement to receive the federal funding.
“No one should have to choose between their job and their health, which is why our legislation ensures those who stay home to self-isolate or care for loved ones will not be fired.”
Hayman says the federal program — $500 a week, for two weeks maximum — is both onerous and insufficient, with too many barriers, exclusions and delays to meet many workers’ needs.
Hayman notes there is good evidence paid sick leave can be a powerful tool for outbreak control. American researchers recently found that states with paid sick leave had a statistically significant reduction in COVID-19, according to a paper that will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Health Affairs.
A COVID-19 research survey from Israel also suggests that when pay was available, workers’ compliance with public health measures was 94 per cent. When pay was removed, compliance dropped to less than 57 per cent.
And following the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009, a U.S. study estimated that up to eight million workers did not take time off despite being infected — leading to an estimated seven million additional infections.
Without paid sick leave, precarious workers are both less likely to get tested — because being forced to self-isolate can have devastating financial consequences — or make use of the city’s voluntary isolation centre, experts say. Toronto Public Health did not respond to questions about how many admissions there have been at the city’s 140-person isolation centre, which opened in September.
Failing to take targeted, meaningful steps to stop the spread in hardest-hit communities — those primarily populated by Black and other racialized people — is just another example of “how systemic racism actually moves,” says Dube.
“Because the truth is we value some lives over others.”

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/12/04/nothing-weve-done-has-helped-in-torontos-poor-racialized-neighbourhoods-second-wave-lockdowns-are-again-failing-to-slow-covid-cases.html

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with COVID-19, Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, paid sick leave, racial disparities, second wave, Toronto

← Older posts

Newer posts →

Multicultural Meanderings

Surrey imam who misrepresented himself to immigration officials jailed for sexual assault

‘Nobody support me’

Multiple names and attempts to immigrate

Misled officials

‘Personal matter’

Multiple marriages

Victim shaming

‘Open your eyes’

Our attitudes to race are complex. Our response to racism should be complex too

Survey Finds Asian Americans Are Racial Or Ethnic Group Most Willing To Get Vaccine

21 racialized Canadians who could help the Order of Canada look more like Canada

Somin: Rights and Wrongs of the Trump Administration’s Revised Citizenship Test

‘There is no playbook in dealing with the pandemic’: how StatsCan has mobilized around urgent COVID-19 data collection

Crowdsourcing, web panels used for COVID-19 data collection

‘We had to mobilize very quickly’

Long-form census scheduled for 2021

Pandemic has highlighted ‘pre-existing inequalities in our society,’ says expert

How modern mathematics emerged from a lost Islamic library

Scholars and translators at the library also took great pains to ensure that their work was accessible to the reading public

A global shift away from Roman numerals underscores a creeping innumeracy in other aspects of life

Black civil servants allege discrimination in proposed class-action lawsuit against Ottawa

Lack of representation

Complaints in multiple departments and agencies

Proposing solutions

Plaintiffs outline alleged mistreatment, exclusion

Repeated calls for change

Google Researcher Says She Was Fired Over Paper Highlighting Bias in A.I.

‘Nothing we’ve done has helped’: In Toronto’s poor, racialized neighbourhoods, second-wave lockdowns are again failing to slow COVID cases

Follow Blog via Email

Follow Me

Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote

Translate

Facebook Page

Archives

Categories

Subscribe

Tag Cloud