ICYMI: Quebec City guide to help integrate newcomers derided as insulting, infantilizing

2017/01/20 Leave a comment

Does seem that this guide would have benefited from greater care in its design and emphasis. That being said, it is an effort to capture some unwritten aspects of integration but not whether the content reflects evidence or is based upon the assumptions of the authors:

Immigrants who settle in Quebec City are being offered a new guide to explain local customs, and the authors spare no detail in telling the newcomers how to fit in – for example, refrain from committing incest, wash with soap and use underarm deodorant to “control perspiration and bad odours.”

The guide from city hall was made public last week and has already been condemned as insulting and paternalistic.

“It’s a good idea to prepare something intelligent to help immigrants, but the way it was done is infantilizing,” Anne Guérette, municipal opposition leader in Quebec City, said on Sunday.

Quebec City is one of 13 municipalities across Quebec designated by the province to settle refugees from Syria. While Montreal remains the overwhelming destination of choice for newcomers, more than 550 state-sponsored refugees landed in Quebec City, 400 of them from Syria.

To help them integrate, city hall unveiled a guide last week, “Québec, Une ville pour moi” (Quebec City, A city for me) that spells out “common values” and ways of life in the province’s second-largest city. Some of the values, such as the equality of men and women, are commonly recognized in Canada. Other rules in the booklet, whose contents were first reported in Le Journal de Québec, seem to treat newcomers as if they are joining the civilized world for the first time, or have never bathed.

The section on “Hygiene and body care,” which is accompanied by a diagram of a dark-haired man with a beard, advises brushing one’s teeth at least twice a day “with a toothbrush and toothpaste.” Hand-washing is a must, “especially after going to the bathroom,” among other occasions. Socks and underwear should be washed after each use. And when washing one’s body, “pay particular attention to underarms, feet and intimate parts.”

For household rules, the guide counsels limiting kitchen odours through the use of an oven vent, and removing shoes inside the house to avoid disturbing one’s neighbours. In yet another rule aimed at removing “bad odours,” the guide helpfully suggests opening a window.

Mayor Régis Labeaume defended the guide in Quebec City last week, calling it “completely normal.”

“We could have just talked about sorting household garbage, but that is not enough,” Mr. Labeaume said. “There are practices, ways, traditions that are different,” he said. “There are laws and rules that exist here that might be different from the countries of origin of immigrants. So it’s better to go this far.”

The tips out of Quebec City come as the country debates the notion of defining “Canadian values,” as the country integrates large numbers of newcomers, and as Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch has proposed screening would-be immigrants for “anti-Canadian values.”

Quebec City’s guide, which received funding from the provincial immigration ministry, also has a section on family violence. It says using violence against your spouse violates the Criminal Code, as is using “unreasonable” force or using a belt or ruler to punish your child. Sexual consent is necessary even among married couples. Incest is a crime.

“For example: Brother + sister = illegal. Parent + child = illegal,” the guide spells out.

The guide is being distributed to organizations working with immigrants and refugees. Chantal Gilbert, a city councillor whose responsibilities include minority ethnic communities, says the individual sections can be made available to groups depending on their particular needs.

“There are communities to whom things won’t necessarily apply,” she said. “There are communities that might come from a place that is exactly the same culture as us, though they might need to know how things work for schooling. Even a French person from France comes here and can’t figure out the schooling for their children.”

Source: Quebec City guide to help integrate newcomers derided as insulting, infantilizing – The Globe and Mail

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ICYMI: Will Britain’s new definition of antisemitism help Jewish people? I’m sceptical | David Feldman

2017/01/20 Leave a comment

David Feldman on the risks of the expanded IHRA definition (the examples section) and its lack of recognition of the linkages to other forms of prejudice, discrimination and hate:

The text also carries dangers. It trails a list of 11 examples. Seven deal with criticism of Israel. Some of the points are sensible, some are not. Crucially, there is a danger that the overall effect will place the onus on Israel’s critics to demonstrate they are not antisemitic. The home affairs committee advised that the definition required qualification “to ensure that freedom of speech is maintained in the context of discourse on Israel and Palestine”. It was ignored.

The IHRA definition has been circulating for over a decade and has already been buried once. It is almost identical to the European Union monitoring commission’s working definition, formulated in 2005 as part of the global response to the second intifada in the early 2000s. The definition was never accorded any official status by the EUMC and was finally dropped by its successor body, the Fundamental Rights Agency.

The definition has been resurrected just as we are moving to new times. David Friedman, who will soon become President Trump’s ambassador to Israel, has denounced the “two-state” solution. The prospect of continued Israeli dominion over disenfranchised Palestinians, supported by a US president whose noisome electoral campaign was sustained by nods and winks to anti-Jewish prejudice, is changing the dynamic of Jewish politics in Israel and across the world.

In this new context, the greatest flaw of the IHRA definition is its failure to make any ethical and political connections between the struggle against antisemitism and other sorts of prejudice. On behalf of Jews it dares to spurn solidarity with other groups who are the targets of bigotry and hatred. In the face of resurgent intolerance in the UK, in Europe, the United States and in Israel, this is a luxury none of us can afford.

Source: Will Britain’s new definition of antisemitism help Jewish people? I’m sceptical | David Feldman | Opinion | The Guardian

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ICYMI: In Cancer Trials, a Lopsided Shot at Hope for Minorities – The New York Times

2017/01/20 Leave a comment

Another area where ensuring diversity is important:

Like a man on a flying trapeze, K.T. Jones has leapt from one medical study to another during his 15-year struggle with cancer, and he has no doubt that the experimental treatments he has received have saved his life.

Mr. Jones, 45, has an aggressive type of Hodgkin’s lymphoma that resists the usual therapies. At the start of his most recent clinical trial, his life expectancy was measured in months. That was more than three years ago. He received a drug that helped his immune system fight cancer — a type of immunotherapy, the hottest area in cancer research and treatment.

“I’ve been over 12 months now with no treatment at all,” he said. “I walk half-marathons.”

Mr. Jones is one of many patients who have benefited from lifesaving advances in immunotherapy. But he’s an outlier: He is African-American. As money pours into immunotherapy research and promising results multiply, patients getting the new treatments in studies have been overwhelmingly white. Minority participation in most clinical trials is low, often out of proportion with the groups’ numbers in the general population and their cancer rates. Many researchers acknowledge the imbalance, and say they are trying to correct it.

Two major studies of immunotherapy last year starkly illustrate the problem. The drug being tested was nivolumab, a type of checkpoint inhibitor, one of the most promising drug classes for cancer. In both studies, patients taking it lived significantly longer than those given chemotherapy.

In the first study, of 582 patients with lung cancer, 92 percent were white. Three percent were black, 3 percent were Asian and 3 percent were listed as “other.” In the second study, of 821 people with kidney cancer, 88 percent were white, 9 percent Asian and just 1 percent black.

According to 2015 census figures, whites make up 77 percent of the United States population, blacks 13.3 percent and Asians 5.6 percent.

A 1993 law requires that all medical research conducted or paid for by the National Institutes of Health include enough minorities and women to determine whether they respond to treatment differently than other groups. Minority enrollment in its studies was about 28 percent in clinical research and 40 percent in Phase III clinical trials in 2015, the N.I.H. said.

But the N.I.H. paid for only about 6 percent of all clinical trials in the United States in 2014, and those it does not support do not have to adhere to its rules. The lung and kidney studies of nivolumab, for instance, were paid for by the drug’s maker, Bristol-Myers Squibb. Researchers say such studies, geared toward getting a drug approved for new uses, are often done quickly, and minority patients may be left out because it can take longer to find and enroll them.

One obstacle, researchers say, is that people in minority groups tend to have lower incomes and less education, and therefore less awareness of medical studies and how to find them. Many live in areas that do not have easy access to a major cancer center. Moreover, minority patients with cancer are more likely to have other, poorly controlled chronic diseases like diabetes that may make them ineligible for studies, according to Dr. Julie R. Brahmer, from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.

 

Source: In Cancer Trials, a Lopsided Shot at Hope for Minorities

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Most engineers are white — and so are the faces they use to train software – Recode

2017/01/19 Leave a comment

Not terribly surprising but alarming given how much facial recognition is used these days.

While the focus of this article is with respect to Black faces (as it is with the Implicit Association Test), the same issue likely applies to other minority groups.

Welcome any comments from those with experience on how the various face recognition programs in commercial software such as Flicker, Google, Photos etc:

Facial recognition technology is known to struggle to recognize black faces. The underlying reason for this shortcoming runs deeper than you might expect, according to researchers at MIT.

Speaking during a panel discussion on artificial intelligence at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting this week, MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito said it likely stems from the fact that most engineers are white.

“The way you get into computers is because your friends are into computers, which is generally white men. So, when you look at the demographic across Silicon Valley you see a lot of white men,” Ito said.

Ito relayed an anecdote about how a graduate researcher in his lab had found that commonly used libraries for facial recognition have trouble reading dark faces.

“These libraries are used in many of the products that you have, and if you’re an African-American person you get in front of it, it won’t recognize your face,” he said.

Libraries are collections of pre-written code developers can share and reuse to save time instead of writing everything from scratch.

Joy Buolamwini, the graduate researcher on the project, told Recode in an email that software she used did not consistently detect her face, and that more analysis is needed to make broader claims about facial recognition technology.

“Given the wide range of skin-tone and facial features that can be considered African-American, more precise terminology and analysis is needed to determine the performance of existing facial detection systems,” she said.

“One of the risks that we have of the lack of diversity in engineers is that it’s not intuitive which questions you should be asking,” Ito said. “And even if you have a design guidelines, some of this stuff is kind of feel decision.”

“Calls for tech inclusion often miss the bias that is embedded in written code,” Buolamwini wrote in a May post on Medium.

Reused code, while convenient, is limited by the training data it uses to learn, she said. In the case of code for facial recognition, the code is limited by the faces included in the training data.

“A lack of diversity in the training set leads to an inability to easily characterize faces that do not fit the normal face derived from the training set,” wrote Buolamwini.

She wrote that to cope with limitations in one project involving facial recognition technology, she had to wear a white mask so that her face could “be detected in a variety of lighting conditions,” she said.

“While this is a temporary solution, we can do better than asking people to change themselves to fit our code. Our task is to create code that can work for people of all types.”

Source: Most engineers are white — and so are the faces they use to train software – Recode

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Will Hollywood Finally Learn From the Success of ‘Hidden Figures’? – The Atlantic

2017/01/19 Leave a comment

One of the films on my list to see (our daughter saw it and highly recommended it):

… it wouldn’t be hard for major studios to increase the number of films written by women: The ratio in 2015 was 69 percent male to 31 percent female, but by commissioning just five new scripts by women per year, things would be equal by 2018. But the supposed “surprise” of Hidden Figures’s success feels especially galling because it repeats a similar conversation from a year ago. Films like Creed and Straight Outta Compton were smash hits, clearly refuting the discriminatory maxim that films about people of color are more of a box-office risk for studios. A year later, Hidden Figures is “disproving” that trend yet again—even though that kind of backwards thinking about diversity should feel entirely irrelevant by now.

In its first weekend of wide release, Hidden Figures defied tracking numbers that saw it grossing less than the fourth weekend of Rogue One; it made $22 million, also beating out that week’s new blockbuster, Underworld: Brood Wars. For the subsequent four-day Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend, Hidden Figuresactually increased its gross, making $26 million and staying at number one, holding off the expansion of La La Land, the horror film The Bye Bye Man, and Paramount’s broad-skewing children’s adventure Monster Trucks.

That last film provides a particularly interesting lesson in Hollywood economics. The industry, in general, has focused in recent years on films that have the potential to be launching pads for major franchises. As the movie business becomes more globally focused and tries to compete with TVs that can offer a near-theater-quality viewing experience at home, splashy big-budget extravaganzas have become a routine matter of course. This is frequently put forward as an explanation for why Hollywood seems loath to cast actors of color in leading roles, because they supposedly have less market pull worldwide (an argument soundly disproven by hits like the Fast & Furious franchise or Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as well as many smaller-scale films).

And yet Monster Trucks is a patently silly piece of kids entertainment about a young man who finds a squid-like monster living in his truck. It stars Lucas Till, hardly an A-lister (though he had a small role in the recent X-Men movies), and cost $125 million to make—$100 million more than Hidden Figures. Devoting such a large budget to a film with little brand recognition that was basically guaranteed to get terrible reviews was quickly regarded as a disastrous decision. Viacom, the company that owns the Monster Trucks studio Paramount Pictures, took a $115 million write-down in earnings last September in anticipation of its failure (it opened to a lackluster $15 million last weekend).

This is what Hollywood’s emphasis on big-budget films with “broad appeal” inevitably leads to: hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on toy-focused action films with no real audience. For the cost of Monster Trucks, Paramount could have made five Hidden Figures—smaller films, focused on telling grounded stories to fill a market gap that studios continue to ignore. That Hidden Figures’s success has to serve as a lesson to Hollywood in 2017 is ridiculous, but the lesson is nonetheless there to be learned. Audiences are hungry for films that look beyond the movie industry’s narrow worldview. It’s time to start delivering them.

Source: Will Hollywood Finally Learn From the Success of ‘Hidden Figures’? – The Atlantic

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Let’s Work Together To Bring Down Canada’s Hierarchy Of Prejudice | Jack Jedwab

2017/01/19 Leave a comment

From both a policy and operational perspective, there is a challenge of finding a balance between community specific and general anti-discrimination approaches (see my earlier critique of partial approaches – The Canadian government must do more to combat hate crimes in Canada: Fogal, Godoy and Ansong, an example of not building a broad coalition):

Two year-end surveys of Canadians, respectively conducted by Forum Research Group and by Abacus, provide some potentially useful insights into the relationship between discrimination and prejudice. The surveys remind us that prejudice is uneven, and that some groups are viewed less favourably than others. In effect, the surveys reveal that Asians, Blacks and Jews are less likely to be regarded unfavourably by Canadians than are Muslims and Aboriginal Peoples, and that the latter two groups are also more likely than are others to be seen as objects of discrimination.

Although we’ve rarely described it as such, there has always been a hierarchy in the way racial, ethnic and language communities are viewed. Over time, what’s changed is how unfavourably some groups are viewed when compared with others. There is little doubt that prejudice towards Muslims has surged since September 2001 and by consequence they’ve moved to the top of the list of those regarded most unfavourably.

It’s not just where Muslims rank that has evolved. The gap has also widened in the extent to which they’re viewed more unfavourably. As a result, when looking across the list of groups in the two surveys, it’s possible to ascertain that prejudice towards Blacks and Jews is less important than it was in the past, simply by virtue of the fact that the percentage of persons expressing animosity towards them is currently much lower than it is for Muslims.

Eradicating negative stereotypes is essential in the fight against prejudice and discrimination.

This may also give rise to the broader conclusion that societal prejudice and discrimination are in decline. Yet the more cogent observation would be that, with time, there has been a displacement in the degree and the intensity of negative feeling towards those groups that become the object of greater public attention.

Amongst the issues raised by the hierarchy of prejudice and the accompanying perception of discrimination is identifying who’s best situated to combat this destructive phenomenon. It’s a key question for policy makers, educators and anti-racist activists. Often the leaders of those communities whose members are more likely to have experienced prejudice assume that they best understand discrimination and are therefore most qualified to combat it. Conversely, they may also feel that persons who have not been victims of prejudice are ill equipped to deal with it.

Explaining why some groups were liked or overlooked and others were disliked was difficult according to the renowned psychologist Gordon Allport. Yet there is consensus that eradicating negative stereotypes is essential in the fight against prejudice and discrimination. Stereotypes are generalizations that arise when people are either unable or unwilling to acquire the necessary information to make proper assessments about groups. Prejudices are not simple to debunk as they provide reassurance for people’s impressions.

Victims of prejudice may indeed be best placed to undo negative stereotypes about the communities with which they are identified. It’s also true that common stereotypes that serve to denigrate certain groups vary and hence some may assume different approaches are needed to tackle them. In other words, the common stereotypes about Muslims differ from the ones about Jews which in turn differ from those about Blacks, etc. However the removal of one stereotype may have no impact whatsoever on diminishing another. Indeed this appears to be confirmed by the persistence of a hierarchy of prejudice as revealed in the surveys referred to above.

Ideally victims of prejudice should band together across communities to insist that the generalizations that underlie stereotypes are wrong. Ideally they need to work with persons who have not been victims of prejudice and that perhaps previously harbored negative stereotypes and thankfully have since evolved. In the absence of such efforts we can expect some Canadians to continue to provide a rational and/or justification for why some groups deserve to seen more unfavourably than others.

Source: Let’s Work Together To Bring Down Canada’s Hierarchy Of Prejudice | Jack Jedwab

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Austria’s far-right party wants to ‘ban’ Islam – The Washington Post

2017/01/18 Leave a comment

More warning signs in Europe:

The head of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party called on Saturday for a total ban on “fascistic Islam.”

Heinz Christian Strache told an audience in Salzburg that he wanted to see a ban of Muslim symbols, something like the Austrian law that bans Nazi symbols. And he warned that Islam posed an existential threat to Europe. “Let us put an end to this policy of Islamization,” he said. “Otherwise we Austrians, we Europeans will come to an abrupt end.”

The Freedom Party is staunchly anti-immigrant. Stache said Saturday that “we need zero and minus immigration.” The country has received 130,000 claims for asylum since the summer of 2015. Most are former residents of Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.

This attitude has made it hard for young Muslims to feel accepted. One recent study of Muslim youth in Vienna found that many do not feel recognized as Austrians, which has increased the risk of radicalization. According to the survey, “85 percent of young people who are in contact with a youth worker have an immigration background,” and “27 percent of those teenagers who are Muslim show strong sympathy for jihadism, and violent and anti-Western thinking.”

The Freedom Party’s anti-Muslim message has been well-received by a nearly a majority of Austria’s electorate. Its presidential candidate Norbert Hofer was defeated in a runoff vote last month, but gained 47 percent support.

In the Netherlands, the Freedom Party is running on a platform of closing mosques and Islamic schools, banning the Koran and Muslim migrants. It also wants to prohibit women from wearing headscarves. The next election is March 2017, and the party is expected to pick up seats to become the most represented party in the Dutch parliament.

Source: Austria’s far-right party wants to ‘ban’ Islam – The Washington Post

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Note to Conservatives: There is no future in Donald Trump Lite – The Globe and Mail

2017/01/17 Leave a comment

From the ‘big shift’ to understanding Canadian political realities, John Ibbitson reflects on the Conservative leadership race.

While I share his general assessment, I always worry about complacency and assuming that Canada is resilient to the overall political trends in the US and Europe. Better to be less categorical; after all, whenever European leaders pronounce multiculturalism dead, there is an echoing chorus in Canada:

To varying degrees, several candidates for the Conservative leadership seek to unravel the conservative coalition forged by Stephen Harper, hoping to replace it with a populist, nativist movement similar to the one that elected Donald Trump.

Either they will fail and a Harper Conservative will win the leadership, or one will succeed, condemning the Conservative Party to many years in the wilderness. Because the Trump coalition simply doesn’t exist in this country.

Canada routinely ranks among the happiest nations on earth. The 2016 United Nations World Happiness Report had us at sixth, behind the Nordic countries and Switzerland.

Happy countries share in common governments that are committed to sound finances. They also enjoy high-quality public health care, education and other social services, something Harper Conservatives support. Harper Conservatives also join other Canadians (six-in-10, according to most polls) in endorsing high levels of immigration. Immigrants are welcome in Canada because our immigration policy is based on economic self-interest rather than compassion, and because the points-based system ensures that no one ethnic group dominates others.

And although the Ontario manufacturing sector has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs since 2000, the province as a whole is prospering, powered by the service-sector economy of Greater Toronto, the high-tech sector centred in Kitchener-Waterloo, and new, smaller, manufacturers springing up in Southwestern Ontario….

In this context, another word for happiness is trust. If citizens trust their government to spend tax dollars on needed services, their police to treat them fairly, their central bank to protect a sound currency and so on, then populist uprisings will be few and weak. All in all, Canadian citizens trust the Canadian state.

But in the United States, trust is eroding, thanks to foolish wars, government waste and free-riding fat cats, leading to ideological warfare and populist rebellions.

In the rust-belt states that swung to Mr. Trump, white working- and middle-class voters blame foreigners for taking away their factory jobs, environmentalists for shutting down the coal mines, Latino migrants for changing the ethnic mix of their communities, and Muslims for making them feel less safe. They trust neither the state nor each other.

There are doubtless some Canadians who are this angry. But you won’t find many of them in the suburban ridings of Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver, dominated by new Canadians. You won’t find many of them in Calgary and Edmonton. People are hurting there, but they know the downturn in oil and gas prices is to blame for the slump, not immigrants or low-wage factory workers overseas.

That doesn’t mean Kellie Leitch, who is channelling a toned-down version of Trump memes, has no chance of winning the leadership. Only about 100,000 Conservative party members will vote for a leader, and that membership is older and whiter than the nation itself.

But whoever wins will have to appeal to voters in Mississauga-Erin Mills, to choose just one Greater Toronto example. That riding is 60 per cent non-white. In 2011, the Conservatives won the riding with 21,646 votes. In 2015, that vote went up slightly, to 21,716. Contrary to popular belief, the Conservatives held their suburban immigrant base in the last election.

But the Liberals took the riding by nearly 6,000 votes. Two thousand NDP voters switched to the Liberals, and the overall turnout increased by about 9,000 votes. (At 68 per cent nationally, turnout in the 2015 election was the highest since 1993).

Will turnout in 2019 drop back down to the post-2000 norm of around 60 per cent? How many disillusioned Liberal voters can be won over to the Conservative side? Can Conservatives broaden their support among suburban immigrant voters? These are the questions Conservative strategists should be asking – not whether the party can foment and surf a populist backlash.

Riding a wave of anger won’t get you very far in the sixth-happiest place on earth.

Source: Note to Conservatives: There is no future in Donald Trump Lite – The Globe and Mail

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We can’t let Canada’s politicians divide us with populist labels: Goldy Hyder

2017/01/17 Leave a comment

While I agree with Hyder on the risk of playing to divisions, ignoring class and other differences also entails risk of denial and addressing issues.

Generally those who decry ‘class warfare’ do so from a position of privilege. What is needed, hard to do so in politics, is more nuanced debate about difference, barriers, and ways to overcome them:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to cancel his plans to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos so he can undertake a cross-country tour and engage directly with Canadians is a symptom of a much larger and more troubling trend where it has become increasingly fashionable for political leaders to frame public-policy decisions in terms of their potential impact on “ordinary,” “real” or “average” Canadians.

These terms, which are now at the heart of debates about everything from health-care funding to the benefits of globalization, have come to be used almost interchangeably with the equally popular “middle class.” To the extent that many Canadians consider themselves, rightly or wrongly, to be part of the middle class, these labels are intended to convey a sense of inclusiveness.

Yet the opposite is true. As we have seen in the United States and Britain, when these types of generic terms are used to describe large groups, they are generally defined on the basis of who they exclude: the so-called elites.

These terms are, in fact, inherently divisive. Just as few of us would self-identify as being “abnormal,” our characteristic Canadian modesty prevents us from thinking we are particularly exceptional. If we are not among those frequently maligned “elites,” we must therefore, be part of some “middle-class” majority. (Even the math holds up, as we’re told “elites” are only the top 1 per cent.)

The problem with vague terms like these is that they invite people to fill in the blanks with their own biases about who fits into each group – and we’ve seen the consequences that has had in other countries. Canadians should not be urged to divide themselves on the basis of income, education, ethnicity, religion or region. To do so would be to unravel our rich multicultural tapestry by pulling on loose threads.

We don’t want Canadians to be inherently distrustful of experts, to presume that a person is less ethical because they have a higher or lower net worth, or to believe that those with global outlooks aren’t patriotic. Any proliferation of populist labels risks creating an “us versus them” conflict within the country, something that can be exploited by those looking for an easy way to galvanize and mobilize a political base.

Some may suggest I am being alarmist, but I have spent the better part of my career in the field of communications, and in my professional experience our choice of language matters a great deal. It has also been my personal experience. As an immigrant and a Muslim, I have witnessed firsthand how quickly the word “different” becomes “foreign,” and how easily “foreign” can become “un-Canadian.”

At a certain point, assigning some meaning to arbitrary or artificial terms inevitably becomes a question of defining values. That is where things get complicated and where the real fissures can emerge. Canada’s 150-year story has many chapters in which divisions between people defined the politics of an era. Some of our worst mistakes have been made by governments in attempts to satisfy one group over another.

Without question, governments must consider the very different realities in which Canadians live when they develop policy res-ponses to pressing issues – but that is about technical implementation. What governments must avoid doing is using the levers of policy to divide Canadians on the basis of their different circumstances, as opposed to building a broad consensus based on shared values and interests.

Moreover, governments must avoid making decisions – such as whether to attend a global conference with the world’s most powerful economic stakeholders – based solely on the perceived optics of those decisions.

In these uncertain times, we cannot afford to make mistakes or miss opportunities. We need to seize every advantage we have, and that means ignoring those who call for us to marginalize or vilify others. Instead of targeting a particular class of Canadian – whether upper, lower or middle – let’s avoid entirely the temptation to engage in any type of class distinctions or, worse still, to inflame class warfare.

When the Fathers of Confederation created our country 150 years ago, they sought to unite us in common cause. Let us invoke that same spirit in this anniversary year by uniting Canadians, not dividing them.

Source: We can’t let Canada’s politicians divide us with populist labels – The Globe and Mail

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Multiculturalism is unpopular with the majority – even though it makes for happier societies : Democratic Audit UK

2017/01/17 Leave a comment

Interesting study looking at multiculturalism policies and their impact on majority populations in Europe:

With data from the European Social Survey for 14 western European states, we used multiple and logistic regression to investigate whether the eight “rights” areas within Banting and Kymlicka’s (2013) composite Multicultural Policy Index (MCP) differentially satisfied or unsettled members of the three self-identified groups.  The “rights” areas include: constitutional/legislative/parliamentary affirmation of multiculturalism; school curriculum; media sensitivity and representation; dress-code exemptions; dual citizenship; funding of ethnic group organisations’ cultural activities; bilingual education; and affirmative action.

To assess individuals’ unease and satisfaction, we looked at their sense of being in a group that is discriminated against, whether they felt safe walking alone locally after dark, their satisfaction with life and with the government.

We found that all but two of the nine measures of state multicultural orientation increase the majority’s sense that people like them are being discriminated against – even when background characteristics are controlled.  The impact is more consistent for the majority than for either of the self-identified minority respondent groups.  Multicultural policies affecting the school curriculum, media, dress-code exemptions, in the form of dual citizenship, in funding for ethnic group cultural preservation and in the form of affirmative action all increase the sense of discrimination indicated by majority group members.  They were also more likely to report lower feelings of safety when walking alone near home in states with greater multicultural orientation, even when background factors were controlled.  In particular, multicultural policies relating to the media, dress code exemptions and affirmative action had a negative impact on how safe majority groups felt.

Muslims were less likely to feel discriminated against in states with more pro-multicultural policies (after controls for background characteristics) and, in particular, where dress code exemptions were available and affirmative action policies in place.  At the same time, Muslims were more afraid of victimisation in countries with dress code exemptions, underscoring the precariousness of the religious minority’s position.  When their cultural lifestyle claims (to wear headscarves, for example) are legitimised, this increases their visibility and sense of vulnerability.

Our findings about satisfaction with life and with the national government show the complicated political terrain politicians face.  Majority group members are more satisfied with both in states that have embraced multiculturalism. These findings represent a quandary for political leaders, who face short-term pressure from nativists – but a population that, in the long term, will be unhappier if they take an isolationist approach. By making them available to everybody, politicians may try to avoid the negative reactions to multicultural policies that fan the flames of support for far-right parties.

But the growth in extreme-right support across Europe suggests that by backing away from a rigorous defence of multiculturalism, public officials left space for far-right groups, permitting majorities to feel justified in articulating their unease at the presence of minorities and dissatisfaction with the benefits intended to support them.  Xenophobia has moved to the fore. The claims made by Muslims and ethnic minorities who seek rights commensurate with their status as citizens in Europe, and asylum applications by migrants at risk of harm, are no longer seen as legitimate.

Europe’s pressing need for immigrant labour and population growth mean the political establishment and the press will have to change direction if they want to maintain current prosperity.  They will have to explain why global economic systems need diversity, and provide for the security of voters who feel that they have lost out to globalisation.  Programs to counter violent extremism (CVE) among young people who show signs of alienation from Europe should focus not only on Muslim youth attracted to Islamic State and al-Qaeda, but also on majority group members who show signs of violence against those of migrant background.  Broadening the focus of CVE programmes to all extremists is a logical and necessary step where mainstreaming has replaced multiculturalism in public policy.

Source: Multiculturalism is unpopular with the majority – even though it makes for happier societies : Democratic Audit UK

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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