Travelling
2017/10/24 Leave a comment
Travelling over the next few weeks and so will be posting less than usual.
A third of Switzerland’s population mistrusts Islam, according to survey
2017/10/24 Leave a comment
Some interesting data:
The survey, which questioned 3,000 people across Switzerland, was designed to take the pulse of multicultural coexistence in Switzerland, a nation which is home to people of more than 190 nationalities and more than 10 religious groups. The survey covered permanent residents in Switzerland and wasn’t confined to Swiss nationals.
Overall, 36% said they could be bothered by the presence of people of a different nationality, religion, skin colour, language, or lifestyle.
At the same time, 66% recognized racism as an important social problem.
On a daily basis, foreign languages bothered those surveyed more than race, nationality or religion. Differences in nationality or skin colour bothered 6% of those surveyed, compared to 10% for religion and 12% for language. These annoyances were felt most in professional life.
Beyond annoyance, 14% claimed to be fearful of foreigners. Fear wasn’t reserved exclusively for foreigners. 4% were afraid of Swiss.
When questioned regarding religion, Muslims were viewed most negatively. 14% voiced hostility towards Muslims, compared to 8% towards Jews.
The survey made an important distinction between Islam and its followers. The percentage mistrusting Islam, as opposed to followers of the religion, was 33%, a figure far higher than the 14% voicing hostility towards Muslims.
The survey also questioned those on the receiving end of discrimination. In 2016, 27% of the population said they had experienced discrimination over the last five years. Among this group, 54% said the discrimination was based on nationality, particularly when job hunting.
Source: A third of Switzerland’s population mistrusts Islam, according to survey
‘Sunshine’ approach to diversity in federal public service working, [Policy Options] study says
2017/10/23 Leave a comment
Toronto Star article (excerpt) based on my Policy Options article, Diversity in the public service’s executive ranks:
An employment equity regimen that relies on public disclosure rather than a mandatory quota system seems to have improved representation from women, visible minorities and Indigenous people in the public service, according to a new study.
Women now make up 54.4 per cent of federal government employees while visible minorities and Indigenous people account for 14.5 per cent and 5.2 per cent of the workforce, respectively, according to the report by the Institute for Research on Public Policy.
The latest government statistics say 50.4 per cent of Canada’s population are women, 20 per cent are visible minorities, and 4 per cent are Indigenous. The Canadian government defines visible minorities as non-white people other than Indigenous people.
Under the Employment Equity Act, the federal government is obligated to report annually on diversity within the government and in the federally regulated private sector.
The growth has been steady for both women and Indigenous people, who started at 46.1 per cent and 2 per cent respectively in 1993 when data became available, said report author Andrew Griffith.
And the almost quadrupling of representation for visible minorities from a mere 3.8 per cent in 1993 was remarkable, he noted.
“The transparency, sunshine-law approach and the politics of shame has shifted the representation of public services by a remarkable extent,” said Griffith, a retired director-general with the Immigration Department and now an independent policy analyst specializing multiculturalism and diversity.
“The organic and uncontroversial approach may have worked better than a quota system that would have created more resistance and tension.”
Source: ‘Sunshine’ approach to diversity in federal public service working, study says | Toronto Star
Black people awaiting trial in Ontario jails spend longer in custody than white people
2017/10/23 Leave a comment
Good data-based analysis and discussion on the factors behind the data:
Black people in Canada’s most populous province spent longer behind bars awaiting trial than white people charged with many of the same categories of crimes in each of the past five years, according to data obtained by Reuters.
Between April 2015 and April 2016 — the most recent period in which data is available — black people awaiting trial in Ontario jails were there longer, on average, than white people charged with the same crime in 11 of 16 offence categories Reuters examined. There were approximately 6,000 black people and nearly 26,000 white people remanded to pre-trial detention during the period.
The data showed similar patterns in the four prior years.
Among the categories examined, black people spent almost twice as long in remand in 2015-2016 for weapons offences, equivalent to an additional 38 days. They also spent 46 per cent longer for serious violent offences and 36 per cent longer on charges of obstructing justice.
In three categories, white people awaiting trial were held longer in remand during the same period. Those included drug possession, theft and traffic offences. In two categories, the difference was 1 per cent or less.
The data also showed black people arrested and held in custody between 2011 and 2016 were more likely than white people to spend more than a year in pre-trial detention.
Reuters obtained the previously unreported data through access-to-information requests from Ontario, which asks inmates to indicate their race when they enter jail. Other provinces either do not collect this data or categorize it differently.
A spokesperson for Ontario Attorney General Yasir Naqvi said the province “takes systemic racism seriously and is working to address racial inequities,” but declined to comment on the data. The Ontario Crown Attorneys’ Association, which represents the province’s prosecutors, and the Association of Justices of the Peace, which represents the people who decide most of Ontario’s bail cases, declined to comment.
More than a dozen defence lawyers as well as prosecutors, criminologists, and a judge interviewed by Reuters said shortcomings in Canada’s bail system appeared to play a role in the racial disparities shown in the data.
Unlike the United States, Canada virtually eliminated cash bail almost half a century ago. Instead, courts often require prisoners awaiting trial to secure a surety, meaning a relative or close friend who can appear in court and subsequently monitor them.
A surety needs assets to pledge, a crime-free record and, often, a home where the accused person can live until the case is complete. A surety cannot represent more than one defendant at a time.
Current and former prosecutors interviewed for this story said securing a surety can be onerous and the requirement is perhaps relied upon too often; but some said sureties remain the best way to protect the public and ensure defendants show up for trial.
Harder on the poor
Critics of the system say the poor are less likely than middle-class or wealthy people to have connections to provide the assets to pledge or housing to act as a surety. They add that this has an outsized impact on minorities, who are over-represented among Canada’s poor.
“Surety is a huge issue in Ontario,” said Nicole Myers, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “If you are from a marginalized community or a criminalized community, it can be very difficult to find a surety the court deems appropriate.”
The data did not take into account specifics of each case, the person’s criminal record, the frequency of plea deals, whether the person had a bail hearing and why bail may have been denied.
Reuters focused on offences with the largest pre-trial populations when comparing the average periods in remand, to minimize the impact of outliers. Inmates charged in multiple offence categories were counted in only the more serious one; multiple charges could affect someone’s chances of getting bail.
Studies, including one published last year by the Ottawa police, have found Ontario’s black communities are more heavily policed than white ones.
Quen Chow Lee, lead plaintiff in lawsuit over Chinese head tax, dies at 105
2017/10/23 Leave a comment
Good story about her life and activism, not to mention the role activism plays in shifting positions:
Quen Chow Lee, one of three immigrant litigants who led a class-action lawsuit against Ottawa over its discriminatory Chinese head tax, has died. She was 105.
Born in China in October 18, 1911, Lee was nicknamed “Nooey Quen” — meaning women’s rights in English.
Her toughness helped her overcome war, poverty, a 14-year separation from her husband, and the drawn-out legal battle for government redress, said her son Yew Lee.
“She was a tough lady, determined, committed and stubborn, someone who had a strong sense of justice,” said Lee. “Yet, she was a very loving mother and grandmother.”
A native of Taishan, Chow Lee married to Guang Foo Lee in 1930, when he returned to China from Canada to find a wife. He was born in 1892, also in Taishan, and paid a $500 head tax in 1913 to come to Canada.
After the marriage, Lee only stayed two years in China because Canadian laws then made Chinese people pay another $500 head tax if they were out of the country for too long. He left behind his wife, pregnant with a third child, and two kids.
Between 1885 and 1923, the Canadian government collected a total of $23 million from some 81,000 people under the various forms of the Chinese Immigration Act.
Because of the Second World War and the civil war in China, Chow Lee and her children lost touch with her husband for almost 14 years.
Chow Lee raised the children on her own until after the repeal in 1947 of the Chinese Immigration Act, which had effectively banned Chinese immigration to Canada for more than two decades. Although Chinese wives could now join their husbands in Canada, most had to wait patiently before the family saved enough money for the fares.
“I’ve endured so many years of hardship. We had no money and nothing to eat,” Chow Lee said in the 2004 documentary, In the Shadow of Gold Mountain, by Karen Cho. “Some women remarried farmers from faraway just to survive . . . but I didn’t want to because of my children.”
Chow Lee arrived in Canada with her three children after Christmas in 1950 and settled in Sudbury, Ont. where the family ran a number of restaurants: the Capitol Café, the Star Restaurant, the China House Restaurant, the Empress Tavern and Lee’s Palace.
After her husband passed away in 1967, Chow Lee once again was left to raise her children on her own — now five of them, with the two youngest ones born in Canada.
Growing up, Yew Lee said his mother would pull out a piece of paper from a leather-and-brass box and just looked at it. It was his father’s head tax certificate.
“She kept it in a steamer trunk above the restaurant. She would pull it out many many times. We knew something was wrong and the paper was significant,” Yew Lee recalled. “She always felt the injustice had to be righted.”
Chow Lee was already retired in her late 80s when the family got in touch with the Chinese Canadian National Council, which had spearheaded the redress campaign. She immediately volunteered to be one of the lead claimants of the class-action lawsuit representing the head-tax-payers’ widows.
Chow Lee would travel in her wheelchair to fundraising events and rallies between Toronto and Ottawa to raise public awareness about Canada’s racist past against the Chinese.
“We approached many head-tax-payers and families to sue the government, but many turned down because they were ashamed of it and didn’t want to talk about it. But Mrs. Lee needed no convincing,” said Avvy Go, one of the lawyers involved in the lawsuit. “She was a true inspiration for all of us.”
Although the lawsuit was ultimately dismissed and subsequent appeals were denied, it set into motion talks with the government that ended in an official apology at the House of Commons on June 22, 2006.
Chow Lee was in the audience when then prime minister Stephen Harper apologized in Cantonese to the Chinese-Canadian community.
“Even though we didn’t win the lawsuit, Mrs. Lee never gave up hope. She never had any regret,” said Go. “She used her suffering to propel her to fight injustice and challenge the government head on for its treatment of the Chinese. She was a model not only for the Chinese, but all Canadians.”
Source: Quen Chow Lee, lead plaintiff in lawsuit over Chinese head tax, dies at 105 | Toronto Star
Why Canada’s Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence is in the wrong department
2017/10/23 Leave a comment
Phil is a friend of mine and I have great respect for the work he did while in government and the analysis and commentary he is doing outside.
His logic is sound in having community engagement and deradicalization outside of Public Safety, to distinguish the security function and community support/resilience-building. As Phil and I have discussed, in theory, Canadian Heritage would be a good home for all the reasons he lists.
But with respect for the people who work in Canadian Heritage, the department, as constituted, is not equipped to provide strong leadership in this area given its focus on its core mandate.
The area that could have possibly taken this on – multiculturalism – has been largely decimated following the 2008 transfer to then CIC (IRCC) and return back to Canadian Heritage in 2015:
First of all, kudos to the Trudeau government for its commitment to the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence (CCCEPE—that name is way too long, however). The $35-million over five years is an excellent start and, although details are wanting, the government sees the new office as a leadership post for Canada’s efforts.
This move represents a significant shift in Canada’s prevention of violent extremism approach from the purely hardline emphasis of the Harper government to a more inclusive and more comprehensive one under the new regime. As I have said before, we will always need the hardline tool, but we need to do more in early intervention and counter-radicalization.
One question remains: where should this new office reside? When I was still with the federal government it was housed where it is now, within Public Safety Canada. In some ways, it should stay there if for no other reason than that department has experienced and capable staff who were part of the amazing success of the shortened efforts under Harper.
But in other and more important ways it should be moved to another department. Let me try to explain why.
What if the government were to put the new office under the Heritage portfolio? PVE is all about providing communities with the tools to foster Canadian citizenship and reject the empty and violent promises of groups like Islamic State. It is about being or becoming Canadian. Another aspect is the debate over narratives. I have long argued that we need to move away from “counter narratives” to “alternative narratives.” Alternative narratives are an important part of PVE—what better place to locate them than within Heritage, the department that helps foster the Canadian narrative? Our narrative is so superior to that of the Islamic State that if this were a boxing match the referee would have called the fight years ago.
Of course, those with lots of experience in PVE, especially the RCMP which has a longstanding and robust outreach program, would be asked to lend its assistance and best practices. Other partners could also contribute. Canada is—or rather was—a world leader in PVE and many countries look to us for models on what to do. We don’t need to reinvent it, we just need to tweak it to make it better.
At the end of the day it may not matter where the government decides to put PVE. Only time will tell. I am glad to see that those in the centre already recognize some important aspects on how to implement their strategy (tailor the approach to match local conditions, acknowledge that the government does not have the credibility to do PVE, etc.). Evaluation and measurement of what works and what doesn’t will be critical. Lots of people put their hands out when government funding is provided and the centre has to ensure that the right people are getting that money. The important thing is that it cultivate good relations with the communities it hopes to work with for the best answers to violent radicalization and extremism are to be found there, not in a government policy brief.
She didn’t find much multiculturalism in Canada’s official archives — so she made her own
2017/10/21 Leave a comment
A good and valuable initiative:
If Canada is truly multicultural, why are images of the immigrant experience missing from our official archives? When Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn searched through the records at the National Film Board, the CBC, and Libraries and Archives Canada, she saw a striking lack of diversity in the images she found.
“To my great disappointment, it was really difficult to find forms of representation, but more importantly to see how multiculturalism could have changed over time,” she says.
The experience was part of the impetus behind Hoàng Nguyễn’s ongoing cross-Canada project The Making of an Archive. The project takes a step forward this month in Vancouver and Richmond, where immigrants and their families are invited to bring their family albums to be digitized and added to Hoàng Nguyễn’s community archive.
An image from The Making of an Archive. (Casey Wei)
The idea for the project was also sparked by Hoàng Nguyễn’s discovery of an old photo album belonging to her father, who immigrated to Canada from Vietnam in the 1970s. She was moved by the images she saw of her father as a young man — organizing potluck dinners, going camping with friends and engaging in political activities.
“I saw images of him from the mid-70s, active with his student association, organizing and protesting in front of the parliament and saw him not only as the model minority but really as a citizen with political agency occupying the public sphere,” she says.
As the first country in the world to officially declare itself multicultural, says Hoàng Nguyễn, Canada should be doing a better job of recording the immigrant experience and the various waves of migration that shape our nation’s identity. Family photos, she says, offer an intimate window into the lives of newcomers.
An image from The Making of An Archive. (Maiko Tanaka)
“Typically people of colour that are coming to Canada have these photographs at home in the attic, in their cupboards, in the garage or wardrobe collecting dust,” she says. “I see those as historical documents that capture a particular moment of coming to a new country and how they deal with their daily life.”
Hoàng Nguyễn, who grew up in Montreal and currently lives in Stockholm, Sweden, began the project in 2014 with several digitization sessions in Toronto in collaboration with Gendai Gallery. Donors bring their family albums to have them scanned and are interviewed about the images to capture their context. They keep the original versions and also get copies of the scans.
Histories of migration also come with a lot of histories of trauma as well. People coming from places of war or places of political instability, their stories are more difficult — and there’s a sense that I need to be careful in how I’m receiving and accepting these images.– Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, artist
Hoàng Nguyễn hopes the act of digitizing will bring new life to people’s old family snapshots.
“They’ll have JPEGs now, so they’re able to share with their relatives and friends again and be able to revisit their histories and reactivate the materials that they have,” she says.
The project also aims to create a more complex image of multiculturalism in Canada. With other scholars and archivists — such as the Royal Ontario Museum — developing an interest in family photography, Hoàng Nguyễn says, a richer and more complex picture of the country is coming to light.
An image from The Making of an Archive. (Leila Meshgini)
Sometimes that picture has dark undertones. Family dinners, schoolchildren and community events are the subjects of many of the photos Hoàng Nguyễn has collected so far, but some belong to people who had fled conflict or extreme poverty.
“Histories of migration also come with a lot of histories of trauma as well,” she says. “People coming from places of war or places of political instability, their stories are more difficult — and there’s a sense that I need to be careful in how I’m receiving and accepting these images.”
The Making of An Archive is a multi-layered, ongoing project that includes a planned book of photos and essays to be published in the spring through grunt gallery and released in conjunction with an exhibition about social movements at the Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver.
Source: She didn’t find much multiculturalism in Canada’s official archives — so she made her own | CBC Arts
Quebec ban on face coverings a blatant violation of religious freedom: David Butt
2017/10/21 Leave a comment
At some point in time, the ban will be successfully challenged:
With Halloween imminent, people turn their thoughts to the good-natured duplicity of costumes. But there is a much darker duplicity afoot as well. Under the mask of pursuing “social cohesion” the Quebec legislature has passed a bill denying women the right to receive public services while wearing a veil for religious reasons. The law is a blatant violation of religious freedom guaranteed by the Charter of Rights, an exercise in oppression of a socially vulnerable minority and gender discrimination to boot. Quite a litany of legal lapses in one bill.
Our Charter protects religious freedom regardless of whether our beliefs are shared by a majority, a minority or nobody. It matters not if others think our sincere religious beliefs benign, wacky or offensive. The freedom to believe as we choose is protected nonetheless. To understand what is so wrong with this new law one must first accept, difficult as it may be, that people who hold religious beliefs we dislike intensely are just as free to hold them as we are to hold our own. Embracing diversity can be hard and challenging work.
Some religious practices can be limited by government. But the government must tread lightly. The limits must be reasonable and carefully tailored to pursue legitimate social objectives. For example, a religious belief that prohibits being photographed cannot exempt the believer from a driver’s licence photo: Driving is necessarily heavily regulated, so anyone wishing to drive must have a proper licence.
The Quebec government ban on veil-wearers receiving government services pursues no legitimate social objective and is not carefully tailored to anything. How does a Muslim woman quietly riding a public bus create any harm, or risk of harm, to the broader public good? She doesn’t. Nor is there any harm flowing from a Muslim woman using a library, visiting a hospital ER or getting a building permit from City Hall. So there is no valid objective pursued by denying these services to Muslim women who wear a veil.
Wherever photo ID is required, briefly lifting a veil to confirm identity is indeed a legitimate ask by those providing government services. But this new law goes far beyond such reasonable limits on religious freedom. The veiled woman might properly be required to lift her veil to use a photo-ID bus pass. But she should not have to keep the veil off for the entire bus ride. So the law is not carefully tailored either. It is a vastly over-reaching intrusion on freedom of religion.
If the Charter of Rights so obviously dooms this law to oblivion, why would the Quebec Legislature pass it in the first place? In fact, democracies function rather well on a certain degree of tension between legislatures and courts, which protect fundamental freedoms. Legislatures fulfill basic democratic norms by enacting laws conforming to majority views. The Quebec Legislature has done so here, where public support for the law hovers around 87 per cent. And it is for courts to do the politically unpalatable, but necessary, work of striking down bad laws that violate the minority rights of those lacking sufficient numbers for political clout. Such tension can be healthy in a vibrant democracy committed to both democratic rule and minority rights.
But the Quebec government doesn’t get off so lightly here. If we look at why people are so strongly and viscerally opposed to women wearing veils, we will see that the Quebec government is catering slavishly to the meanest urges of the voting mob, stooping to the lowest depths of democracy.
Behind much visceral opposition to veils is unwarranted fear of the unfamiliar. Veils make women perpetually unfamiliar in a shallow visual sense, and this allows the unreflective among us to wrongly build the irrational bridge from unfamiliarity to loathing. Sadly, that is what the Quebec government has encouraged. Anyone making the effort to know veil wearers will of course discover a rich humanity that whether agreeable or disagreeable, reduces wardrobe choices to near irrelevance and invisibility.
Also behind much opposition to veils is the infuriatingly persistent social tendency to tell women what their choices mean, and then impose that meaning on them. The Quebec government is paternalistically telling women that even their most thoughtful, sincere and highly individual religious choice to wear veils categorically denotes nothing more than mean-spirited rejection of the community that sustains them. And the government is then punishing these women for sending the message the government has told them they are sending. This is oppression, pure and simple.
At Halloween, the Quebec legislature has rejected treats in favour of a mean-spirited, insidious trick. Let us hope the courts will not be fooled by the legislature’s poorly crafted disguise.
Source: Quebec ban on face coverings a blatant violation of religious freedom – The Globe and Mail
‘Problematic’ and a ‘dog’s breakfast’: Quebec face-covering ban panned by authors of landmark report [Bouchard and Taylor]
2017/10/21 Leave a comment
Always worth listening to Bouchard and Taylor:
A new Quebec law purported to deal with secularism and the accommodation of minorities is being called a “dog’s breakfast” of contradictions by one of the authors of a landmark study of the issue.
The other author of the study says it would be “problematic” in its application by health-care and transit workers.
In their 2008 report, sociologist Gérard Bouchard and philosopher Charles Taylor offered solutions aimed at assuaging concerns about the erosion of Quebec identity while respecting the rights of minorities.
The Liberal government’s Bill 62 on religious neutrality, passed in Quebec’s National Assembly on Wednesday, aims to address some of the recommendations laid out in their report.
However, speaking separately, both men say it misses the mark.
“It’s a bit surprising that a law that purports to be about secularism reduces it to one dimension — religious neutrality — and doesn’t explore separation of church and state, equality of religions and belief, freedom of religion,” Bouchard told Radio-Canada’s morning radio program Gravel le matin.
Bouchard pointed out that the law does not address the crucifix still hanging at the National Assembly.
Taylor had an even more scathing assessment. In an email, he called it “excessive and badly conceived, in fact, contradictory.”
The bill represents Quebec’s latest attempt to address the question of religious neutrality.
The separation of church and state is viewed as a central pillar of Quebec society, but successive governments have struggled to implement guidelines on what this should look like on a daily basis — with neutrality and secularism running up against religious freedom.
How will law be applied?
Bill 62 extends to municipal services, meaning Muslim women who wear a niqab or burka wouldn’t be able to take out a book from the library, visit the doctor or take the bus or Metro.
The guidelines on how the law should be enforced won’t be ready until next summer. The law also provides for exceptions to be made on religious grounds, though exactly how that would work is unclear.
All this makes the law’s application “problematic,” Bouchard said.
“A woman with a covered face who presents herself at the hospital emergency room, we’re not going to send her home if it’s life-threatening,” he said.
“Another scenario, the bus stops in winter and it’s –30 C, and the woman with a niqab is there with her two small children. Will the driver leave her on the curb?”
The union representing workers at Montreal’s public transit authority, the STM, has already said its members don’t want that responsibility, while civil rights advocates say the law infringes on freedoms enshrined under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In an email, Taylor pointed out that the province justified the law for safety, communication and identification reasons.
But, he said, none of those are at stake when someone takes a bus or is treated by a doctor in hospital.
“It’s a dog’s breakfast,” Taylor said.
Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote
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Multicultural Meanderings 