Matt Gurney: Quotas have no place in our military

2014/05/22 Leave a comment

The predictable reaction to the story regarding revising Canadian Forces diversity targets downward (Canadian military hopes to cut hiring targets for women, minorities).

There is merit in the argument that the military recruiting base tends to be more rural and more white. But merit arguments sometimes also disguise unconscious biases and preferences. Having targets (I oppose quotas) ensures focus on what is a likely long-term challenge:

A more diverse military is a desirable goal, of course — albeit one that should be treated as completely secondary to the primary objective of fielding a competent force. And as Canada becomes increasingly diverse, the military naturally will draw recruits from a wider pool of applicants. But as it stands now, many recruits join to escape local economic difficulties in parts of the country that are less multicultural than our large cities, or to honour long family traditions of service. We owe all of them a fair chance and, of course, our thanks.

But we owe the country a properly trained and equipped fighting force, regardless of what it looks like. If someone is willing to put on the uniform and defend Canada and our values abroad, and meets reasonable definitions of fitness and suitability, that’s all that matters. Our soldiers defend the country, not just those who look like them.

Matt Gurney: Quotas have no place in our military | National Post.

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Tory MP given federal contracts months before, after failed 2008 election bid

2014/05/22 Leave a comment

Interesting story. In contrast to multiculturalism and  historical recognition grants and contributions (G&Cs), not delegated to officials, integration programming, largely language training, was delegated. When Minister Kenney became Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, officials had to explain why the sheer volume of G&Cs made Ministerial review impractical.

Minister Kenney had bad experience with the multiculturalism G&Cs as officials remained in denial mode, continuing to favour traditional organizations and approaches, leading the Minister to reject most proposals. Ministerial staffers would routinely Google organizations, to check for consistency between departmental descriptions of individual projects and the overall approach of the organization. It sometimes led to uncomfortable discussions, but his office was applying due diligence, more so than some of the officials (I eventually also would Google before approval).

Given the Minister’s concerns about delegation, a system was put in place to provide a heads-up on planned project approvals, an early detection system to avoid surprises and reduce the likelihood of project approval contrary to the Minister’s wishes. This was partially prompted by the Canadian Arab Federation case (Jason Kenney’s decision to cut funding to the Canadian Arab Federation):

When asked whether Diane Finley, who was the CIC minister at the time, was aware of the contract, spokesman Marcel Poulin said only that “officials award contracts, not ministers.”

That fall, Ms. Young ran in Vancouver South for the Conservatives, losing by just 20 votes to Liberal incumbent Ujjal Dosanjh.

The questions about the first contract didn’t deter Ms. Young’s consulting firm – her office declined to say how many employees the firm had beyond Ms. Young – from seeking a second one just over a year after the election. The November, 2009, pact totalled $452,900 for planning the same conference, this time in early 2010. It included $337,000 for “program delivery” and $115,900 for “administrative” functions. Again, the specific costs are redacted.

A spokeswoman for Jason Kenney, who had succeeded Ms. Finley as CIC minister when the second contract was awarded, said he had “no knowledge of or involvement” with the contracts.

A statement from the department echoed that. “Both contracts were assessed and approved by the appropriate delegated departmental official,” spokeswoman Sonia Lesage said.

Tory MP given federal contracts months before, after failed 2008 election bid – The Globe and Mail.

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Canadian military hopes to cut hiring targets for women, minorities

2014/05/21 1 Comment

Sigh….

Currently, the military is expected to aim for these targets: females should make up 25.1 per cent of full-time military personnel and reservists; 11.7 per cent should be visible minorities; and 3.3 per cent should be aboriginals.

Those target numbers are lower than for other federal departments, in recognition of the unique nature of military service.

The Canadian Forces place well compared to many of Canada’s allies, particularly on the percentage of women in uniform. The military has also seen recent progress in the number of visible minorities and aboriginals joining up.

Yet it has never actually met its targets. Women currently account for 15 per cent of personnel in uniform, a number that hasn’t changed in several years, while visible minorities represent 4.2 per cent, and aboriginals 1.9 per cent.

…

The proposed targets, contained in a briefing note to Canadian Army commander Lt.-Gen. Marquis Hainse from February, are 17.6 per cent for women, 8.2 per cent for visible minorities, and 2.6 per cent for Aboriginal Peoples.

…

Canadian military officials have previously highlighted the importance of increasing diversity within the Canadian Forces given the country’s changing demographic makeup, which includes more visible minorities and a growing aboriginal population.

“The changing makeup of Canada’s population makes it mission critical that the (Canadian Forces) take proactive measures to be inclusive for men and women of all cultures,” rear-admiral Adam Smith wrote in 2011 when he was chief of military personnel.

Chantal Fraser, a retired lieutenant colonel who spent the last part of her 28-year career looking at employment equity in the military, is worried about the impact reducing the targets would have on the Canadian Forces and their connection to average citizens.

“If we reduce the goals, then they don’t have to strive as hard to reach them,” she said. “And we may end up in a situation where the Canadian military no longer reflects Canadian society. And that’s bad news no matter what country you live in.”

Fraser said the problem isn’t unrealistic targets; it’s that the Canadian Forces aren’t doing enough to recruit women, visible minorities and aboriginal people.

That includes measures to improve the work-life balance for women; focus recruitment efforts on the country’s three biggest cities for visible minorities and on the North for aboriginals; and showcase people from those communities who are already in the military.

Canadian military hopes to cut hiring targets for women, minorities.

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A Debate Over A Troublesome Book – Nicholas Wade

2014/05/21 Leave a comment

More on Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History by Agustín Fuentes, a professor of anthropology at Notre Dame. The following on human genetics is helpful:

1) Genes matter, but they are only a small part of the whole evolutionary picture and focusing on DNA segments won’t get you very far in understanding human evolution. The roundworm C. elegans has about 20,000 genes and humans have about 23,000 genes—it is pretty obvious that humans are more than 15% more complex than roundworms.

2) When making scientific argument about genetic variation you need to focus on populations–and be clear about your definitions (a common one for “population” is a geographical cluster of people who mate more within the cluster than outside of it). Many people talking about this subject use the words cluster, population, group, race, subrace and ethnicity in a range of ways, with few concrete definitions and occasionally interchangeably.  If you do not define something then you cannot measure it, test for it, or try to construct and refute or support hypotheses for it—in short you can’t do science.

3) Humans all share 100% same genes and 99.9% of the variation in the DNA. So the variation we are interested in is .1% of the entire genome. And yes, understanding that variation is important

4) Most genetic variation is due to gene flow and genetic drift so the further apart two populations are the more likely they are to have more differences

5) Nearly all the genetic variation in our entire species is found in populations just in Africa, with most of the variation found in all populations outside of Africa making up a small subset of that variation.

Margaret Wente to note (What if race is more than a social construct?)!

A Debate Over A Troublesome Book « The Dish.

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Creepy Ad Watch – Coke

2014/05/21 Leave a comment

Lack of judgement and values – Coke normally does better than this:

In March, Coke installed five special phone booths in Dubai labor camps that accepted Coca-Cola bottle caps instead of coins. In exchange for the cap from a bottle of Coke—which costs about fifty-four cents—migrant workers could make a three-minute international call. The ad shows laborers in hard hats and reflective vests lining up to use the machine—and grinning, for the first time in the video, as they wait. “I’ve saved one more cap, so I can talk to my wife again tomorrow,” one man tells the camera. More than forty thousand people made calls using the machines. Then, in April, after the booths had been up for about a month, the company dismantled them

I sent links to the ads to Nicholas McGeehan, a Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied labor conditions in Dubai. I was interested in his take on the questions of appropriateness and ethics that some viewers had raised. The videos, he said, were “odious.” For one thing, he said, Coke is not only using these low-income workers to advertise its product, it is also requiring them to buy soft drinks themselves—at nearly a tenth of their typical daily wages, he pointed out—to use the special phone booth. On top of that, he feels that the ads normalize and even glorify the hardship faced by migrant workers—at least some of whom may be working against their will. “If this was two hundred years ago, would it be appropriate for Coke to do adverts in the plantations of the Deep South, showing slaves holding cans of Coke?” he asked. “It is a normalization of a system of structural violence, of a state-sanctioned trafficking system.”

Creepy Ad Watch « The Dish.

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Language and morality: Gained in translation

2014/05/21 Leave a comment

Interesting finding but not surprising that slowing down thinking, through the language barrier, can lead to more rational outcomes:

Several psychologists, including Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 for his work on how people make decisions, think that the mind uses two separate cognitive systems—one for quick, intuitive decisions and another that makes slower, more reasoned choices. These can conflict, which is what the trolley dilemma is designed to provoke: normal people have a moral aversion to killing (the intuitive system), but can nonetheless recognise that one death is, mathematically speaking, better than five (the reasoning system).

This latest study fits with other research which suggests that speaking a foreign language boosts the second system—provided, that is, you don’t speak it as well as a native. Earlier work, by some of the same scholars who performed this new study, found that people tend to fare better on tests of pure logic in a foreign language—and particularly on questions with an obvious-but-wrong answer and a correct answer that takes time to work out.

Dr Costa and his colleagues hypothesise that, while fluent speakers can form sentences effortlessly, the merely competent must spend more brainpower, and reason much more carefully, when operating in their less-familiar tongue. And that kind of thinking helps to provide psychological and emotional distance, in much the same way that replacing the fat man with a switch does. As further support for that idea, the researchers note that the effect of speaking the foreign language became smaller as the speaker’s familiarity with it increased.

Language and morality: Gained in translation | The Economist.

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Premier Clark apologizes for B.C.’s historical wrongs against Chinese immigrants

2014/05/17 Leave a comment

A reminder of the power of an apology (without admitting legal liability) for the Chinese Canadian community in healing old wounds:

Shui Lee endured decades of intolerance and racism in Canada just because he is Chinese, but on Thursday the 58-year-old restaurant owner said he is finally proud to be both Canadian and Chinese.

With tears in his eyes and holding the 1914 head-tax document belonging to his great, great grandfather, Lee described what British Columbia’s formal apology for racist and discriminatory government policies against Chinese immigrants means to him.

“When I walk out this door today, I feel so proud that I can put my head up and I tell everybody I’m proud to be Canadian,” he said. “I can be proud to be Chinese.”

Lee, a Kelowna, B.C., restaurant owner, said he often argued with friends, relatives and others about what he considered Canada’s racist and intolerant laws and policies towards Chinese immigrants, but was told not to rock the boat.

“They don’t want to apologize to you,” he said he was told. “But I prove it today, they are wrong. The government did apologize to us. And they admit they were wrong.”

Much like the federal government’s Chinese Head Tax ex gratis payments and historical recognition program, or PM Harper’s apology to First Nations for residential schools, recognition of the past helps reconciliation in the present and future. While challenging to governments, particularly which communities are recognized and which not, the old hard-line approach of earlier Liberal governments that we do not apologize for what happened in the past does not address this need.

Of course, the more organized the community, the better the chance for some form of historical recognition. Democracy in action.

Clark apologizes for B.C.’s historical wrongs against Chinese immigrants – The Globe and Mail.

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A 10-year record of immigrant success: TRIEC

2014/05/17 Leave a comment

Good profile on Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) celebrating its 10 year anniversary:

Over the past decade TRIEC has become so admired that it is now copied in 12 cities across Canada and in countries around the world, including the U.S., Finland, Germany and New Zealand.

Indeed, it is a true Canadian success story.

“Ten years ago the landscape facing skilled immigrants was pretty dim,” Omidvar said at a recent event in Toronto celebrating the 10th anniversary of TRIEC. The event was attended by hundreds of newcomers and employers who have been helped by TRIEC.

“Today, we’ve made much progress, but we’ve a long way to go and in many cases have actually fallen back in terms of immigrant jobless rates and poverty levels,” she said.

In general, poverty rates have been rising among immigrant groups and falling among Canadian-born residents. More than 36 per cent of immigrants who have been in Canada less than five years live in poverty, according to a 2012 Canadian Labour Market Report. In the 1980s the rate was 25 per cent.

At the same time, researchers have found that while 70 per cent of immigrants find a job within six months of arriving here, only 40 per cent of those get work in their chosen occupation.

A 10-year record of immigrant success: Hepburn | Toronto Star.

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Higher immigrant population means lower municipal voter turnout: Study

2014/05/16 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis of municipal voting and immigrants and minorities in Toronto:

Siemiatycki said the top 10 wards in 2010 had average voter turnout at 56.8 per cent, with 36.3 per cent of their population being immigrants and 27.3 per cent being minorities.

In contrast, the bottom 10 had a turnout of just 44.6 per cent, with an average of 63 per cent and 62.7 per cent of their population being immigrants and minorities.

Siemiatycki attributed the low turnouts in wards with high immigrant and minority concentration to the nature of municipal elections, which are not guided by a party system like the provincial and federal elections.

“Municipal elections are confusing and it’s hard to wrap your head around because candidates have no open party affiliations. It’s more difficult for voters to identify with the candidates and what they stand for,” he explained.

“There is also the incumbent advantage in local elections. There are fewer immigrants and visible minorities elected municipally. People are less likely to vote if they are less likely to see themselves in the candidates.”

Higher immigrant population means lower municipal voter turnout: Study | Toronto Star.

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5 Things Bill Maher Got Wrong In Latest Islam Rant | Omar Baddar

2014/05/16 Leave a comment

More on the Bill Maher controversy. I think Omar Baddar has it about right:

Ultimately, this isn’t about scoring points against Maher or his panel; this is about making this world a better place. The Muslim world is incredibly diverse, and can by no means be reduced to a single cohesive unit. From Eastern Europe to the horn of Africa, and from Lebanon to Indonesia, we are talking about fundamentally different societies and cultures. Some of these societies are more socially progressive than others; but in all of these societies, there are Muslims who are fighting for women’s rights and against extremism and violence, and they deserve our support against their reactionary opponents. To lump them all together under an ugly stereotype that’s defined by the Muslim world’s worst elements only alienates our progressive allies in Muslim societies and makes their causes all the more difficult to advance.

Bill Maher attempted to cite an Egypt poll, saying it showed that 80-90% of people in the country approved of death as a punishment for leaving Islam. The actual number is 64%, which is still horrifyingly high, and I am alarmed by it. An Israeli or a Palestinian may also be alarmed by the poll that found the majority of Israelis favor discrimination against their non-Jewish neighbors. But how we express these concerns also matters. If some random city in America had a high crime rate in the African American community, and one public official said “I’m concerned about this problem” and another public official said “the blacks are a problem,” which of these two would we all (probably including Bill Maher) condemn as a racist? When concern for certain problems within societies turns into hostility towards inexcusably large groups of people who have little in common beyond some random demographic factor (in this case, religion), then that is a paradigmatic example of bigotry. And this type of bigotry puts entire communities under attack from the outside, thus distracting from their fight to advance and tackle problems within. If Bill Maher wants to take his progressivism seriously, he should really let go of reckless rhetoric and join the real fight to advance progressive causes within and without Muslim societies.

5 Things Bill Maher Got Wrong In Latest Islam Rant | Omar Baddar.

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