Tories want to cut red tape for skilled immigrants. What else is new? – Macleans.ca

2016/12/21 Leave a comment

An overview of where the Conservative leadership candidates stand on foreign credential recognition – no much new for a perennial issue.

The evaluation of IRCC’s efforts under the Conservatives, which were largely information, path-finding and referral services, does not indicate a strong correlation with improved outcomes for foreign-trained professions (Evaluation of the Foreign Credentials Referral Office (FCRO)):

A large part of Justin Trudeau’s campaign focused on reforming the Conservatives’ policies, but that’s not the case when it comes to skilled immigrants. Erin Tolley, a political science researcher at the University of Toronto who focuses on diversity in Canada, said the Liberals have been largely silent on the issue. Their platform didn’t include promises on immigrant skill utilization, and all they’ve done is tweak economic immigration policy. Tolley says it’s Conservative governments that are most active on skilled immigration reform because they see it as an economic issue.

That’s why when Conservative leadership hopefuls nearly unanimously said Canada needs more skilled immigrants, I had to know where they stood on reaccreditation. The campaigns of Kellie Leitch, Maxime Bernier, and Lisa Raitt did not make their candidates available for an interview, but nine other candidates agree that the federal government has a role to play in tackling the problem.

Nearly every candidate I spoke with said Canada needs to sharpen its focus on economic immigration. Former immigration minister Chris Alexander wants 70 per cent of Canada’s immigrants to be selected on the basis of skills, education, and language, rather than family reunification. Under the Harper government, that number hovered in the mid-60 percentiles, while the Liberals lowered 2016 targets to the mid-50s. Alexander’s message is clear: whether they come in as a response to our needs or in a steady stream, skilled immigrants help prop up the economy.

…But during the first debate, none of the candidates addressed how we will make sure those skills are part of the job market. Alexander and Steven Blaney said they would build on Jason Kenney’s work as immigration minister if they came to power. That means providing incentives to businesses, including tax breaks and the ability to let them tell the government what kind of skills they’re looking for, and having discussions with professional associations that often help immigrants gain their credentials. The associations could play a role in both educating new immigrants about how to get accredited and loosening standards for newcomers.

….Finances are one of the barriers for new immigrants, according to the U of T study. Others are a lack of job experience, language barriers, and even “lack of knowledge of Canadian professional ‘lingo.’”

To fill many of the gaps, Erin O’Toole said, Canada relies on migrant workers. Part of the reason is immigrants can’t use their degrees. For O’Toole, there are two steps to a solution. The first is to start a process of recognizing credentials sooner, concurrent with the application, and the second is working with provinces to streamline cross-provincial recognition.

The majority of candidates who spoke to Maclean’sechoed O’Toole’s ideas. Michael Chong added that Canada needs to be “giving immigrants a clear-eyed view of what the credentials are worth in Canada so they know what they will need to transition.” Andrew Scheer said, “If the work was done on the front-end and we were able to bring provinces together, in a lot of cases you wouldn’t need to qualify and re-certify.”

It’s possible they are right, but policy takes a long time to implement—and it takes even longer to figure out whether or not it works. Tolley also says there are barriers governments can’t tackle outside of raising awareness. For example, research shows foreign-sounding names are discriminated against by employers, and there is no policy that helps immigrants retroactively.

Source: Tories want to cut red tape for skilled immigrants. What else is new? – Macleans.ca

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Anti-Semitism Is on the Rise From Both Sides. Just Not How You Think. – Forward.com

2016/12/20 Leave a comment

J.J. Goldberg on left and right-wing antisemitism and the political divide:

In effect, the walls of mutual hostility and suspicion that cut through the American body politic — and, in slightly different form, through the Jewish community — have left much of the public believing that anti-Semitism is a unitary problem that exists over there, on the other side, while they are unable to see the parallel problem on its own side. The denial is not just shortsighted but also dangerous. Both strains of anti-Jewish ideology have been responsible for multiple deadly attacks specifically targeting Jews and Jewish institutions on U.S. soil over the past quarter-century, since the uptick began. In fact, according to my own research via FBI data and online newspaper archives around the country, the two strands, far-right and anti-Israel, are both implicated in roughly the same number of such attacks during that period.

The line separating sharp, activist opposition to Israeli policy from hatred of its existence isn’t always easy to see. Nor is it hard and fast. Fifty years of the Israeli military ruling over millions of Palestinians without citizenship or political rights are generating a time bomb of Western-liberal frustration. Palestinian activists exploit the frustration to pressure Israel and advance their cause. It all becomes devilishly complicated: There’s hatred of Israel because of what it is. There’s also hatred fanned by what Israel does.

At the same time, there’s an element of right-wing American anti-Semitism that is not prejudice but actual policy opposition to the social agenda of the Jewish advocacy community. American Jews have worked in an organized fashion for the past century to promote a set of broadly liberal principles, including pluralism, minority rights, church-state separation and international engagement. Significant strains of conservatism object to some or all of those principles. Some conclude that the Jewish community is their adversary. Others avoid mentioning Jews, fearing they’ll be accused of anti-Semitism.

Here, too, the line between hatred of Jews and opposition to Jewish policy is not impermeable. There are conservative critics of Israeli policy who bridle at the taboo on open criticism and let their disagreements morph into hostility. Like Israeli self-defense, Diaspora Jewish hypersensitivity is sometimes capable of fanning the very hostility it is meant to deter.

Source: Anti-Semitism Is on the Rise From Both Sides. Just Not How You Think. – Opinion – Forward.com

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Americans are convinced by economic report claiming minorities are taking jobs away from whites

2016/12/19 Leave a comment

Good example of how baselines and charting can mislead, as well as feeding popular prejudices:

To start, the report asserts that of the more than 5 million jobs added since November 2007, the pre-recession employment peak, more than half went to Hispanics — a stunning proportion that accounts for four times their share of the labor force that year.

Economic Cycle Research Institute

Disproportionately large gains also occurred among black and Asian workers, according to the report. African Americans accounted for 25 per cent of the job gains, more than double their share of the labour force. Asians accounted for nearly 30 per cent of the gains, about six times their share of the labour force.

But white workers fell behind, the report said. Whites had fewer jobs than they did nine years ago — even though they made up more than 80 per cent of the labour force in 2007.

These stunning statistics were enough to drive many, including the report’s author, to conclude that white economic despair led to Donald Trump’s election victory.

“The shock of the election spoke to a kind of disconnect,” said Lakshman Achuthan, co-founder of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, in an interview with the Post. “There is a huge cohort — you can call it whites, people in rural areas — who weren’t feeling the 5 percent unemployment rate. They weren’t feeling the stock market at new highs. They weren’t feeling a recovery that’s seven, eight years old.”

But other economists pounced on the report after the New York Times columnist, Eduardo Porter, highlighted it in his column. The statistics Porter cited paint too simplistic of a picture, they argued.

Economic Cycle Research Institute

“The implication is there are hundreds of thousands of white people who lost their jobs to blacks, Asians and Hispanics. Yet if you look at the unemployment rate differentials by race, you don’t see a huge increase in the white unemployment rate,” said Jonathan Rothwell, a Gallup economist.

The recession and its aftermath were not dramatically worse for white workers, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for whites — 4.6 per cent in 2015 — is lower than all racial and ethnic groups except Asians. In comparison, 9.6 per cent of African Americans, 6.6 per cent of Hispanics, and 3.8 per cent of Asians are unemployed.

And a far higher proportion of whites are employed than blacks; 59.9 per cent of the white labour force are employed compared to 55.7 per cent of the black labour force. The proportions of Hispanics and Asians who have jobs are just slightly higher than for whites — not nearly the alarming portrait painted by the Economic Cycle Research Institute.

All demographic groups experienced declining rates of employment between 2007 and 2015, but white workers’ plight is not as dramatic as ECRI implies.

“I don’t see any evidence that whites were disproportionately harmed over the last nine years,” Rothwell said. “The main concern I have with the [ECRI] chart is it’s potentially grossly misleading in terms of how it could be interpreted.”

Economic Cycle Research Institute

Rothwell and other economists pointed out that as the country becomes more diverse due to immigration and higher birth rates among minority groups, it only follows that those same groups would make gains in employment along with population.

“One would expect to see jobs shifting. Just as we see more kids going to public schools who are non-white, we would expect to see more adults in the labour force who are non-white, and it’s not any cause for concern,” Rothwell said.

Whites are also aging, and as Baby Boomers retire, the size of the white labor force remains relatively stagnant. The ECRI analysis compares a demographic group’s share of the labor force at a single point in time with the group’s share of job gains since 2007. In doing so, it overlooks the changes in the sizes of the underlying populations over time, said Alan Berube, deputy director at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program.

Source: Americans are convinced by economic report claiming minorities are taking jobs away from whites | National Post

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Preaching the Gospel of Diversity, but Not Following It – The New York Times

2016/12/19 Leave a comment

Some good critical self-examination but need to check in 5 years to assess degree of change:

Many journalists hoped a new era was beginning two and a half years ago, when Baquet became the first African-American to oversee the newsroom. But whatever progress has been made is only beginning to show up on a scorecard. Overall, newsroom diversity is at 22 percent, up slightly but below newsrooms in most big metropolitan areas. And of those who head departments here, only three are people of color.

I asked Baquet what he believes minorities in the newsroom would say about his senior team’s dedication to diversity.

“I think they’d say we have a problem,” he said. “We’re not diverse enough. But I think they’d say I have a commitment to it and that it’s gotten better in the past year.” He added, “My effort to diversify has been intense and persistent.”

By that, Baquet particularly means the handful of prominent black journalists he’s helped attract or promote, stars like Nikole Hannah-Jones, Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, all coveted by The Times’s competitors.

Their writing styles offer a refreshing break from The Times’s rather institutional voice, which — as one black editor put it to me — is older, white, male, Ivy League and authoritative. “That’s who The Times is at a dinner party,” she said.

Many of those I spoke with, including Latinos and Asians, said the arrival of a few stars can take the focus away from the real issue of bringing in and retaining diversity across the room. In other words, while big names are rightfully celebrated, they can give the appearance of more diversity than there really is.

What’s more, just because an African-American is at the helm, it doesn’t mean all is well in the newsroom he runs. “We can’t look to Dean as proof that everything is O.K., and we also can’t look solely to him for solutions,” said Nikita Stewart, a Metro staff reporter.

When you ask managers about the issue individually, everyone genuinely seems to care. Collectively, however, not much changes.

They begin by saying this is an industrywide problem, not just a New York Times problem. That is true, unquestionably. On the other hand, it’s also true that data from the American Society of News Editors shows that The Times is less diverse than large papers like The Washington Post (31 percent), The Los Angeles Times (34 percent) and The Miami Herald (41 percent). The Times is more diverse than The Boston Globe (17 percent) and The Philadelphia Inquirer (14 percent).

Given The Times’s ambitions across global cultures and languages, it would seem that instead of being a lagger, it would insist on being a leader — and make that an explicit goal. I see no sign that this is happening. Nor do I get the impression from many journalists of color I spoke with that they believe progress is on the horizon.

“There’s always a reason for such little diversity in newsrooms. Over the course of time, the reasons always change, but the underrepresentation never does,” said Hannah-Jones, who writes for the Times Magazine, one of the few notably diverse staffs in the building.

Ernesto Londoño, who sits on The Times’s editorial board — and on an Opinion staff lacking both gender and racial diversity — believes the problem lies in a failure of editors to step outside their white-knows-white circles. “It takes a concerted effort to break out of that habit and tap talent pools that are more diverse,” Londoño said.

Which means that unless the pattern breaks, the whiter the newsroom is, the whiter it will stay.

Mark Thompson, The Times chief executive officer, told a group of top leaders across the corporate and news sides last spring that managers could face dismissal if they failed to diversify their staffs. Baquet, who was at the meeting, didn’t sound that militant in our conversation, saying that his editors feel the most pressure through a stringent expectation to bring forth a diverse applicant pool for every job opening. No one has been punished, he says.

I can tell diversity isn’t a priority here by looking at what is. Think digital transition or global expansion or subscriber growth or visual innovation. Those are mandates that really power up the engines. Diversity is not at that level, at least yet.

This issue has challenged most every newsroom manager, myself included. The newsroom I came from, The Washington Post, is quite diverse, but its leadership is heavily white and male. At The Times, on the other hand, people of color seem shut out of all sorts of coveted jobs: the top digital strategists, the top managers, the precious ranks of cultural critics, the White House press corps, the opinion columnists, the national politics jobs — all are overwhelmingly white.

It is possible to change this. But The Times will need more humility, introspection and openness than has been its habit in the past.

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Identity politics returns to Quebec: Patriquin

2016/12/17 Leave a comment

Martin Patriquin’s balanced take on Quebec’s Bill C-62 (banning face covering when providing or receiving public services):

Quebec is home to a majority population of about 6.6 million French speakers, where about three-quarters of the 50,000 immigrants who arrive here every year settle in the region of Montreal. The city is multicultural and multilingual. The rest of the province is largely white and French.

The populism resulting from this unique demographic circumstance, which surfaced in the 2007 election campaign, had a distinctly Trumpian narrative to it. To wit: the political elites in Quebec City were corrupt and out of touch. Immigration had turned Montreal into a Babylonian hellhole, and threatened to do the same to the hinterland. By throwing out the first and radically curtailing the second, Quebec would be . . . well, it would be great again.

Two political parties, first the right-of-centre Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ) and then the Parti Québécois, attempted to harness this resentment. Both failed miserably. The ADQ ceased existing in 2012, while the PQ suffered one of the worst defeats in its history in 2014.

Still, issues of immigration and religion remain a stubborn constant in Quebec politics. Both the PQ and the Coalition Avenir Québec, the successor to the ADQ, have introduced plans to cut immigration levels. Both have equated the rise in immigration under successive Liberal governments to the decline of French in the province—a contention disproved by several recent Quebec government studies.

PQ Leader Jean-François Lisée said burqas should be banned before “a jihadist uses one to hide his movements.” The CAQ recently ran an advertisement suggesting the chador would become commonplace in Quebec classrooms should either the Liberals or the PQ form the next government. (In truth, body-covering Muslim garb is about as rare in Quebec as Maple Leafs fans.)

Yet despite all this rhetoric over the last 10 years, Quebec remains a comparatively welcoming province. At 3.2 per 100,000, police-reported hate crimes in the province are below the national average of 3.7—and well below Ontario’s average of 4.8, according to the most recent Statistics Canada data.

It is in the crucible of the debate that the province has developed guidelines for so-called “reasonable accommodations” of religious and cultural practices. In 2017, Quebec’s National Assembly will vote on Bill 62, which would compel anyone giving or receiving a public service to do so with their face uncovered—unless the temperature, not religion, dictates otherwise. It is the second time in six years that the province has attempted to pass such a thing.

The bill has its critics, and will almost certainly be the subject to a court challenge should it become law. Yet in limiting its reach to the public service, the legislation strikes a balance between religious freedom and state religious neutrality. (Such is decidedly not the case in France, where the very act of wearing a religious face covering in public is illegal.) The final vote on Bill 62 will take place outside the context of an election campaign, when instances of chest-thumping vitriol tend to be lower. The optimist hopes cooler heads will prevail.

While America is hardly new to the caustic politics of race and identity, it raced to new lows during the last presidential campaign. Trump’s victory has invigorated populist movements around the globe; suddenly, the world is awash in worry over immigration and religion.

In Quebec, this sort of thing is old hat. Long the outlier on the identity front in Canada, Quebec’s take on matters of religion and immigration suddenly seem sensible, even desirable, in a world of border walls and Muslim bans.

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Opinion: Scorn for multiculturalism in Quebec yields troubling results

2016/12/17 Leave a comment

Quebec human rights lawyer Pearl Eliadis:

Interculturalism starts from the premise of the de facto precedence of Quebec’s majority culture over others. That practical reality was not supposed to have morphed into legal precedence, nor to have operated in a way that perpetuates the privileges of that majority. However there are troubling indications that it has done just that.

Other rights have been subordinated, including racial and religious equality. This is in part the result of Quebec’s brand of laïcité-lite that has imposed religious neutrality on non-majoritarian faiths and individuals as well as on the state. Equality and reasonable accommodation for minorities have become battlegrounds in the fight for “Quebec values.” The Supreme Court keeps having to intervene, as it did in the Multani decision in 2006 (to permit an observant Sikh boy to wear a sewn-in, concealed kirpan to school) and in several other cases after that.

In 2011, the National Assembly barred Sikhs from its precincts after having invited them to participate in a debate on reasonable accommodation. In 2013, there was the PQ’s nativist Charter of Values, Bill 60, built squarely on the foundations of Quebec values and interculturalism.

In 2015, the Quebec Liberals introduced Bill 62. It is nowhere as troubling as the Charter of Values, but it does weaken the flexibility of the public sector in accommodating religious minorities. Both Quebec’s human rights commission and the Quebec Bar Association have objected to several aspects of the bill.

As for the practical effect of protecting the “de facto precedence” of the majority, minorities are dealt with as satellite communities revolving around the “host society” until they are absorbed, effectively assimilated, and no longer seen as threats. Nowhere is the impact of this approach clearer than in the relatively poor employment prospects of immigrants in Quebec and, of course, in the low representation of minorities among the senior ranks of the Quebec public service. The issue is systemic and transcends party loyalties, and yet we continue to be forced to ask questions for which the answers are, depressingly, well known. How many senior appointments among Quebec’s public institutions, agencies and commissions are from racialized or ethnic minority backgrounds? How many are anglophones or allophones?

When the news about Thermitus [candidacy for the presidency of Quebec’s human rights commission] became public, the PQ quickly pivoted, perhaps mindful of the appalling optics, and said it would support the appointment. That is good news, even if it’s not yet clear whether Thermitus will get the job. But the broader issue of the rejection of multiculturalism in Quebec reminded me of something that Zadie Smith, the British-born novelist, said in November while accepting a literary prize: “The people who ask me about the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ mean to suggest that not only has a political ideology failed but that human beings themselves have changed and are now fundamentally incapable of living peacefully together despite their many differences.” That is not an outcome any of us should be prepared to accept.

Source: Opinion: Scorn for multiculturalism in Quebec yields troubling results | Montreal Gazette

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Rare views of Japanese-Canadian internment: 19 images remembering one of Canada’s darkest hours 

2016/12/16 Leave a comment

1941_boats-u1369Good and harrowing series of photos (have chosen just two):

Last week was the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Amid commemorations of the Americans killed in the attack, as well as the brutal war that followed, also came a solemn remembrance of how the United States interned coastal Japanese-American populations that it wrongly believed were a dangerous fifth column.

A similar tragedy, of course, played out in wartime Canada. In a country with an established tradition of respecting civil liberties, wartime hysteria led to 21,000 people of Japanese descent being forcibly removed from a 100-mile “defence zone” along the British Columbia coast.

But that’s only part of the story. The National Post has combed through archives across the country to unearth these rare photos of one of the darkest hours in modern Canadian history.

propaganda

Beginning in March 1941 — eight months before the attack on Pearl Harbor — Japanese-Canadians were required to obtain these identity cards, which have been recently featured as part of the museum exhibition Registered. Something to note on these cards is that issuers felt the need to stamp them with the words “Canadian born.” It would have been understandable for the owners of these cards, both of them Canadian citizens, to see that stamp as a kind of insurance policy in case of war with Japan. But ultimately, 75 per cent of those interned were Canadian citizens, including many who could not speak Japanese or had fought for Canada in the First World War. With no similar mass internments taken against Italian- or German-Canadians, it was clear to them that this was motivated by a belief that Japanese were racially incapable of loyalty. As U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson summed it up, “their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese.”

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Is 2016 the Year That Fashion Finally Embraced Diversity? – The Daily Beast

2016/12/16 Leave a comment

I don’t follow the fashion press but this analysis is both interesting and revealing, particularly the contrast between different publications:

2016 is shaping up to be the most diverse year yet for the fashion industry, according to a new report tracking racial representation on glossy magazine covers.

Released Wednesday by the Fashion Spot, a 70,000 invitation-only community of industry insiders, the annual report found that more women of color were featured on glossy covers this year than the past three years (the Fashion Spot began conducting its annual report in 2013).

The report tracked 679 cover appearances from 48 top international fashion publications and found that 29 percent (197 covers) featured nonwhite women. Fashion runways have become increasingly diverse as well, suggesting a shift in the industry at large.

In October, the Fashion Spot’s biannual report gauging diversity on the catwalk found that 25.4 percent of nonwhite models walked the runway during Spring 2017 fashion week in New York, Milan, Paris, and London, making this season the most diverse in history.

New York had the most models of color (30.3 percent) this year, while Milan scored the lowest points for diversity on the runway (20.9 percent).

That glossy magazine covers are featuring more women of color coincides with a larger cultural demand for more diversity in the entertainment industry, particularly in Hollywood and on network television.

Last year, some of Hollywood’s most famous black actors called for a boycott of the Academy Awards when it was revealed that—for the first time in two decades—every single acting nominee was white.

The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag began trending with the controversy, prompting the Academy to announce an initiative promising greater diversity in its future voting body.

Actresses and entertainers make up a large percentage of fashion magazine cover models, and stars like Beyoncé, Zendaya, and Rihanna are regulars on top glossy covers. While the Fashion Spot has no data on how covers showing women of color affect sales of magazines, it’s clear that famous women of color—Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Michelle Obama, to name a few popular cover stars—sell.

Still, the only nonwhite woman in the report’s list of top 10 cover models this year was actress Lupita Nyong’o, who graced five covers. By contrast, top model Gigi Hadid snagged 14 covers, while her Instagram-famous peer Kendall Jenner and sister Bella Hadid landed 10 and 8 covers respectively.

“I think nonwhite actresses are seen as a ‘safer’ bet over traditional models of color in terms of sales,” Jennifer Davidson, the Fashion Spot’s editor in chief, told The Daily Beast, noting that Zendaya, Zoe Kravitz, Selena Gomez, Jessica Alba, Rihanna, and Beyoncé were “more likely to earn multiple cover appearances” than models of color.

Among the worst diversity offenders were Harper’s Bazaar, Love, Marie Claire U.K., Porter, Vogue Germany, Vogue Netherlands, Vogue Paris, and Vogue Russia (all failed to feature a single woman of color on their covers this year).

I-D, InStyle, Paper, Teen Vogue, Vogue India, Vogue Korea, and Vogue Taiwan had the most racially diverse cover stars, though the fact that Vogue Indian, Korea, and Taiwan featured nonwhite models is likely owed to their buying demographic’s predominantly nonwhite ethnicities rather than a conscious effort to be more diverse.

Source: Is 2016 the Year That Fashion Finally Embraced Diversity? – The Daily Beast

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Why Islam Gets Second-Class Status in Germany – The New York Times

2016/12/16 1 Comment

Interesting commentary by Alexander Gorlach:

Religion in Germany is not a private affair. Government at all levels recognizes religious communities as public institutions, and encourages participation in them — Germans who register with the state as Roman Catholics, Protestants or Jews pay a “religion tax,” which the government then sends to their respective institution. Religious groups are also allowed to give faith-based instruction in public schools: It’s not uncommon for a small-town pastor, priest or lay person to have a spot on the local high school faculty.

To enjoy this privileged status, religious communities must have a defined set of beliefs, their members must be recorded, and they must have historical and social significance. The Catholic, Protestant and Jewish religious communities are organized as public institutions; in the state of Berlin, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormon Church are as well.

It might seem as if Islam, with 4.3 million adherents in Germany, would have qualified easily. But so far, the German government has resisted including it.

The reason is both simple and complex: Muslim communities are separated along ethnic lines as well as along denominational lines among Sunnis, Shiites and Alawites. Often there is little unity among these groups, hence they fail the most important state criterion: a unified religious body with shared goals and doctrines.

These requirements for a religion to get a privileged status in Germany highlight the anachronistic state of the secular federal republic in its approach to faith. The idea that the state can cooperate with religious groups in the same way it cooperates with, say, labor unions presumes a certain unity and hierarchy on the part of those groups. But Islam doesn’t work that way. It simply doesn’t fit within criteria written for the structured Christian churches that have shaped Europe, with bishops and baptismal registers.

For quite some time, there have been demands that the law be renamed to the Religionsrecht (State and Religion Law), and for it to include a wider diversity of religions. Though nothing much has changed on the national level, there has been progress in the states, where most of the country’s religious laws are promulgated. Bavaria, a conservative Catholic state that polls very high in measurements of xenophobia and anti-refugee sentiment, nevertheless has been running an Islamic-education pilot program in schools; it is also home to Germany’s oldest mosques. Perhaps the Bavarians, precisely because they protect their own religious and cultural traditions so ferociously, are also the most willing to recognize and support the traditions of others.

But it’s not only in Bavaria that reform is moving forward. In the Protestant-dominated north, Christian Wulff, a premier of Lower Saxony, set up training courses for future imams and Islamic religious teachers at the universities of Münster and Osnabrück. Later, when he was president of Germany, Mr. Wulff said, “Islam belongs to Germany.”

Though Mr. Wulff served just two years as president before resigning in 2012 over allegations of corruption (since dropped), his actions on behalf of Islam — and that quotation in particular — set off a debate that continues across the country. Critics of Islamic religious education in the schools, including many Muslims themselves, say that there is no group in the country that can speak for all Muslims. And indeed, it is estimated that the Central Council of Muslims and the Islamic Council for the Federal Republic of Germany, the two groups that have the best claims to speak for Islam in Germany, represent no more than 20 percent of German Muslims.

Germany is a secular country, but the German legal framework approves of institutionalized religions in a biased way. The religions must organize themselves according to state standards, and those standards are tailored toward the structures of the Christian religion.

The result is a delegitimization of the state’s relationship to religious groups in the eyes of many non-Christians, particularly Muslims — a dangerous prospect at a time when rapid integration is essential to maintain social peace. In the context of a growing Muslim community and a rising number of citizens affiliated with no religion at all, Germany may not be able to maintain an order that arose many generations ago.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

For racialized communities, electoral reform is about more than voting | Toronto Star

2016/12/16 Leave a comment

While Avvy gets the numbers wrong – there are 47 visible minority MPs, not 46  (14 percent), close to the 15 percent of visible minorities who are also Canadian citizens and who can vote, her broader point on the need for better representation would benefit for more attention to the declining naturalization rate, and how that disproportionately affects visible minorities, and hence participation in elections (see Citizenship Applications: Third Quarter Continues to Show Decline).

Moreover, while it is legitimate to criticize the specific choices of which  visible minorities made it into Cabinet (four Canadian Sikhs, one Afghan Canadian), a broader look at senior political positions (parliamentary secretaries etc) and Senate appointments presents a more nuanced picture (see my Government appointments and diversity).

My focus is more on the declining naturalization rate given the longer term impact on social inclusion/cohesion and representation:

When the 46 so-called “visible-minority” MPs were elected to the Canadian Parliament in the 2015 election, some media called it a “watershed” moment in our history and a victory for Canada’s multiculturalism. In reality, out of a total of 338 seats, the politicians from different communities of colour represent just over 13 per cent of Parliament, while about 19 per cent of Canada’s population is made up of people of colour, with the largest three groups being South Asian, Chinese and black, who together made up 61 per cent of all communities of colour. When Trudeau named his cabinet, one that he described as looking like Canada, not one Chinese or black made it to his short list.

Today, tens of thousands permanent residents of Canada are denied the right to vote because of the strict naturalization law, not to mention the 200,000 or immigrants with precarious status who have lived and worked in Canada for years, in some cases decades, without ever given a chance to regularize their status.

As Canadians ponder which electoral system will be best for our democracy, considerations should be given for the following two questions:

  • Which electoral system will be best able to engage the marginalized communities, including racialized communities and new Canadians, in order to ensure their full participation in the democratic process.
  • Regardless of which system is chosen, what can we do to make our political bodies more fully reflect the makeup of Canada?

On both questions, the special committee report fell short. While the Report did make some passing references to the need to increase representation of “visible minorities,” no specific recommendation — or an attempt to come up with one — was made to address this issue.

This is in contrast with the committee’s treatment of some of the other under-represented groups, or groups that are not as engaged in the political process as they should, such as indigenous peoples, students, youth, people with disabilities, and women, where there were specific sections in the report devoted to analyzing how to increase their democratic purification, and in the case of indigenous people and women, their political representation. But even then, the committee did not offer any concrete solutions for these critical challenges.

The government has since been hosting its own online consultation to gather public opinion. Apart from offering no public education or information about the electoral reform process or the various possible options, the questions posted on Mydemocracy.ca are replete with false dichotomy.

Canadians are asked a number of “either-or” questions, as if the choices presented are mutually exclusive. One question assumes, for instance, a system that requires greater collaboration among parties would be less accountable. Another asks Canadians to choose between improving representation of under-represented groups and greater political accountability.

While there is no perfect system, there is no reason why we cannot aspire to design a system that is inclusive, accountable, and above all, responsive to all Canadians.

Source: For racialized communities, electoral reform is about more than voting | Toronto Star

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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