Ibbitson: Trudeau’s decision over Quebec’s seats puts him at risk either way

2021/11/02 Leave a comment

Expect government will bend with no opposition from other parties, given precedents of Bills 21 and 96, even if questionable to do so:

When Justin Trudeau returns from his European travels, he will need to decide, and quickly, whether to prevent Quebec from losing a seat in the House of Commons.

Politically, all options are bad for the Prime Minister.

Back in 2011, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government moved to correct the problem of chronic underrepresentation in the House of Commons for the fast-growing provinces of Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario. In the final version of the formula enshrined in the Fair Representation Act, Quebec was also awarded extra seats, to ensure its representation in the House fairly reflected its share of the national population.

As required by law and the Constitution, Elections Canada applied the 2011 formula for its latest calculation of the distribution of seats in Parliament. The results, released two weeks ago, show the House of Commons growing by four seats, from 338 to 342. Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario will receive additional seats. But Quebec will have one seat taken away, reducing its representation from 78 to 77.

Not surprisingly, the Bloc Québécois and the Quebec government are demanding that the province’s representation not diminish, on the grounds that its MPs have a special mandate in the House to speak for and protect Quebec’s culture and language.

The Liberal government has two options. The first is to do nothing and allow Elections Canada to proceed with redistribution by establishing electoral commissions for each province that will redraw riding boundaries based on the latest census data. That process is scheduled to begin in February.

The second option is to introduce a new redistribution formula through legislation. That formula could ensure that Quebec’s seat count does not fall below its current 78 seats, though the province’s relative weight would decline as the House expands in size.

As an alternative, the formula could guarantee that Quebec’s representation never drops below, say, 25 per cent of all seats in the House. That was a provision in the Charlottetown accord of 1992, which was defeated in a referendum.

Any legislation would need to be introduced soon, so that Elections Canada knows whether, when and how to proceed with redistribution. But moving to protect Quebec’s interests will prove contentious.

“There’s risk if he does do it and there’s risk if he doesn’t do it,” Professor Lori Turnbull, director of the School of Public Administration at Dalhousie University, told me. Allowing the existing representation order to stand would anger Quebec voters, who would face a future of steadily weakening influence in Ottawa.

But moving to protect Quebec’s standing in the House would further anger Western voters who believe French Canada’s interests are protected while theirs are ignored.

This is especially true in the wake of the new cabinet announced last week, which weakened Prairie influence and emphasized the fight against climate change over oil-and-gas interests.

When asked how he would address the problem, Benjamin Forest, who researches the political representation of minorities at McGill University, said, “I would take the easy way out and add enough seats” so that Quebec once again has 78 seats in the House.

Many voters complain about sending more and more MPs to Ottawa. But Canada itself is growing, adding a million people every two or three years, mostly through immigration. The House should reflect that growth.

As well, previous federal governments at different times guaranteed smaller provinces a minimum number of seats, resulting in a House of Commons skewed in favour of rural interests. The riding of Cardigan, Prince Edward Island, has a population of just over 36,000; Cypress Hills—Grasslands in Saskatchewan has 68,000. But Vancouver East has 110,000 and the riding of Burlington, in Greater Toronto, has 121,000.

Adding more urban seats would make the House more democratic by diminishing the relative weight of the countryside, and increasing the importance of urban issues, such as transit, over rural, such as dairy supports.

Of course the best solution to Quebec’s declining demographic influence in the House would be for the province to increase its population through immigration. Instead, Premier François Legault has cut back on immigration. So long as that continues, the influence of Quebec must ultimately decline, however much politicians rejig the House of Commons to prevent it.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-trudeaus-decision-over-quebecs-seats-puts-him-at-risk-either-way/

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Globe editorial: This is a story about race in Canadian politics. And it’s hopeful

2021/11/01 Leave a comment

Agree. Recent federal election largely confirms:

This is not a story about race.

But to understand how it isn’t, we have to talk about how, in another, less successful country, it could be.

In 2016, the census found that 31 per cent the residents of the City of Calgary were immigrants. Thirty-six per cent of the population were members of a visible minority, including 9.5 per cent who were South Asian. The picture is almost exactly the same in Edmonton: 30 per cent of residents are immigrants and 37 per cent are visible minorities, including 9.5 per cent who identify as South Asian.

Two weeks ago, the people of Edmonton and Calgary went to the polls and elected new mayors. Both were born outside of Canada. Jyoti Gondek, Calgary’s top magistrate, was born in England to parents of Punjabi descent and came to this country as a child; Edmonton’s Amarjeet Sohi was born in India and immigrated in his teens. On the census, both would be counted among the roughly one in 10 city residents of South Asian descent.

We bring up race not because it was an issue in the elections of Ms. Gondek and Mr. Sohi, but because it was not. And let us give thanks for that.

In many other countries – less happy, less peaceful countries – the story would have been very different. There, race, religion or ethnicity are the basis for politics. Sectarian divides slice through the possibility of shared citizenship, with lives and politics organized along those lines.

That’s how much of the world is. (Ask an immigrant.) In the worst cases, it results in the failed state of Lebanon, or the violently extinguished state of Yugoslavia, or the Rwanda genocide.

But here’s what we believe can safely be said about the mayoral elections in Calgary and Edmonton: The race of the candidates, their religion (or lack thereof), and their status as first-generation Canadians appear to have been irrelevant to most voters. Maybe not all voters, whether pro or con, but surely most.

Consider: Nine out of 10 voters in Calgary and Edmonton are not of South Asian heritage. Yet Ms. Gondek and Mr. Sohi each won 45 per cent of the vote. That means that most of those who voted for them were from “another” community.

And we put the word “another” in quotation marks because, this being Canada in 2021, most voters don’t see it that way. They weren’t marking their ballots through a prism of race. They didn’t see the winning candidates as coming from some other community, but rather as part of their shared community – Calgarian, Edmontonian, Albertan, Canadian – that transcends where you or your parents came from, where you pray or do not pray, and what colour your skin is.

Canadians are not saints, and Canada is not some magic land where racism never existed. It is not some place where no lines have ever been drawn labelling some people as “us” and others as “them.” Canada has a long history of evolving varieties of sectarian divisions.

But Canada also has a long and accelerating history of expanding the definition of “us,” and extending membership in the shared community to people who, in another place or another time, might have been excluded. For example, until 1954, the mayor of Toronto had always been a Protestant from the Orange Order. But that year, the citizens of Toronto ended all that, electing Nathan Phillips. Phillips was Jewish; nearly all of the city’s residents were not. Most were Protestants. It didn’t matter.

It was a similar story half a century later, in the three mayoral elections won by Naheed Nenshi in Calgary. The vast majority of the people of Calgary are not Ismaili Muslims; it didn’t matter. Overwhelming majorities chose Mr. Nenshi as their representative. And though three-quarters of the residents of Brampton, Ont., are visible minorities, in 2018 they elected Patrick Brown as mayor.

This ability to see beyond differences and biology and faith is something that Canada will need ever more of in its future. Canada is on the road to becoming a majority-minority nation, where no ethnic or racial group is the majority. That’s already the situation in Metro Vancouver and Greater Toronto, and the other big cities are not far behind.

The voting in Calgary and Edmonton is a reminder that this future is hopeful, not ominous. If a Canadian is defined by all that we hold in common, in spite of differences, then everybody’s part of the majority.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-this-is-a-story-about-race-in-canadian-politics-and-its-hopeful/

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‘It’s really unconscionable’: Here are the cabinet contenders Justin Trudeau snubbed

2021/10/29 Leave a comment

The reality of cabinet-making and the various factors – regional, gender, ethnic/racial etc – and how that invariably leads some to not make it.

Visible minority representation in Cabinet was 16.1 percent in 2015, rising to 21.6 percent in 2019 and falling slightly to 20.5 percent in 2021:

While the shuffling of key ministers and the ousting of others dominated cabinet chatter on Tuesday, there were also questions about MPs thought to be cabinet shoo-ins who were nowhere to be seen.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s front bench shakeup saw the creation of a slightly expanded cabinet, with seven ministers remaining in their old posts, nine newcomers, and three members shown the door.

As for those left without a seat at the table, Quebec MP Greg Fergus is one of the names topping that list.

Fergus is set to start his third term representing the riding of Hull-Aylmer, and most recently served as parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, the president of the Treasury Board and the minister of digital government, among other positions.

“You get a guy like Greg who’s done everything right within his party, serving the country — and he gets overlooked,” said NDP MP Matthew Green, a member of the Parliamentary Black Caucus alongside Fergus.

“I just don’t understand it. It’s really unconscionable.”

Fergus, who declined to comment on this story, has done much more than partaking in a never-ending list of parliamentary roles, committees and associations: he also stood by the prime minister’s side during the 2019 election campaign after old photos emerged of Trudeau in blackface.

And even as Trudeau’s past actions loomed over his commitment to combating anti-Black racism the following summer, Fergus took a knee alongside the prime minister during a Black Lives Matter protest on Parliament Hill.

Fergus is one of several MPs from across the National Capital Region who were left without cabinet gigs on Tuesday.

Gatineau MP Steven MacKinnon, also a former Liberal party national director, was another contender who missed out on a spot. In Ottawa, former Ontario ministers Marie-France Lalonde and Yasir Naqvi, who each fit in Trudeau’s vision of a diverse cabinet, also failed to level up.

The region might have done with one more minister, said one government source who spoke on the condition they not be named, given that Catherine McKenna’s departure left only Ottawa-Vanier’s Mona Fortier representing the area.

Fergus and others might have filled that void, the source said, but Trudeau’s commitment to gender parity made that difficult.

The NDP’s Green, meanwhile, says the Liberal government will need to move past “this notion that they can only have a handful of Black people in cabinet.”

Ahmed Hussen was returned to cabinet Tuesday, while Toronto Centre’s Marci Ien became the first Black woman on the front bench in nearly two decades.

But Bardish Chagger’s ejection from cabinet left a potential opening for other picks from southwestern Ontario, like London West’s Arielle Kayabaga, the source said.

And while Atlantic Canada was well-represented among the 38 faces sent to cabinet this week, there are still those who were bypassed, said Lori Turnbull, director of the school of public administration at Dalhousie University.

Halifax MP Andy Fillmore was one of those options, Turnbull said, although one of the top contenders was Halifax West’s Lena Metlege Diab, a former Nova Scotia minister long speculated to fill the void left by former fisheries minister Bernadette Jordan.

Jordan’s Nova Scotia spot on the front bench was instead plugged by Central Nova’s Sean Fraser, a longtime MP who was handed the immigration file Tuesday.

“Every prime minister will have their own math … around how they’re going to put the pieces together and who they want to bring in,” Turnbull said.

“And one thing is that (Diab) represents Halifax West, which is a very safe Liberal riding. So it’s possible that if (Trudeau) is … sort of trying to solidify a seat, he doesn’t need to solidify that one with a cabinet post.”

Source: ‘It’s really unconscionable’: Here are the cabinet contenders Justin Trudeau snubbed

And this piece by Erica Ifill complaining about Greg Fergus’ absence from cabinet is silent about how Black representation in Cabinet has increased from 0 in 2015 to 2 out of 39 in 2021 (Ministers Hussen and Ien):

Fergus’ snub shows that for Black faces, the work is never enough

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Bloc leader’s threat to unleash ‘fires of hell’ over Quebec seat proposal might just backfire

2021/10/25 Leave a comment

Hard to have much sympathy for the “outrage” given the demographic decline reflects in part Quebec’s decision to admit fewer immigrants than elsewhere in Canada (despite or because they manage economic immigration) and the xenophobic Bill 21 and the weakening of bilingualism in Bill 96. Commentaries, starting with Konrad Yakabuski highlighting the consequences of lower immigration levels, and Randy Boswell’s more sympathetic take:
Le premier ministre de l’Ontario, Doug Ford, a suscité un tollé cette semaine lorsqu’il a livré un avertissement à tous ceux qui espèrent immigrer dans sa province, laquelle fait face à un manque criant de travailleurs puisque plus de 290 000 postes demeurent vacants. « Si vous pensez que vous pouvez venir ici pour toucher le B.S. et rester assis à la maison, ça n’arrivera pas », a martelé M. Ford lors d’un point de presse, se faisant immédiatement accuser d’exprimer tout haut ce que de nombreux Ontariens pensent tout bas. Si M. Ford a refusé de s’excuser pour ses propos, il s’est néanmoins empressé de se déclarer « pro-immigration » et de se vanter d’accueillir des immigrants de partout dans le monde au « Ford Fest », le barbecue estival que sa famille organise chaque année dans un quartier très multiculturel à Toronto. En effet, le gouvernement conservateur de M. Ford appuie sans réserve la hausse des seuils d’immigration annoncée l’an dernier par Ottawa, qui vise à accueillir 401 000 résidents permanents au pays en 2021, soit une augmentation de 18 % par rapport à 2019. Si le nombre d’immigrants a chuté en 2020 en raison de la pandémie, tombant à 184 000, le gouvernement fédéral presse le pas pour atteindre ses objectifs en matière d’immigration pour les années 2021, 2022 et 2023. En tout, ce sont plus de 1,2 million de nouveaux résidents permanents que le Canada compte accueillir pendant cette période, dépassant ainsi un ancien record qui date du début du XXe siècle. À lui seul, l’Ontario devrait accueillir plus de 540 000 nouveaux arrivants, ce qui pousserait sa population au-delà du seuil des 15 millions d’habitants. La politique d’immigration du Québec Quoi qu’on pense de la politique d’immigration du Québec, son résultat à long terme mènera vers une baisse du poids démographique de la province dans la fédération canadienne. La province compte accueillir entre 51 500 et 54 500 nouveaux immigrants cette année, si on inclut le « rattrapage » de 7000 nouveaux arrivants que le gouvernement caquiste prévoit d’effectuer après la baisse de 2020 liée à la fermeture des frontières. En 2019, durant la première année du gouvernement de François Legault, le Québec a reçu 40 565 nouveaux résidents permanents, ou seulement 11,89 % du total canadien. L’Alberta, qui compte la moitié moins d’habitants que le Québec, en a reçu 43 691, ou 12,81 % du total. L’Ontario a accueilli 153 395 nouveaux arrivants, ou 45 % des 341 000 nouveaux résidents permanents acceptés en 2019. Le Québec ne recevait déjà pas sa part d’immigrants en fonction de sa population au sein de la fédération canadienne avant l’arrivée de M. Legault au pouvoir. En 2016, quand le Québec comptait pour environ 23 % de la population canadienne, il avait reçu 18 % des immigrants arrivés au pays au cours de cette année-là. Il n’est pas impossible que ce taux atteigne les 10 % dans les prochaines années. En effet, les voix s’élèvent dans le reste du pays pour qu’Ottawa augmente ses seuils annuels d’immigration à 450 000 ou à 500 000 nouveaux arrivants. Un groupe d’influents Canadiens, réunis sous la bannière de l’Initiative du siècle, préconise une politique d’immigration visant à hausser la population canadienne à 100 millions de personnes en l’an 2100 afin de s’assurer de la prospérité nécessaire au maintien des programmes sociaux et d’augmenter l’influence du Canada sur la scène internationale. Le groupe, présidé par l’ancien chef de la direction du fonds d’investissement du Régime de pensions du Canada, Mark Wiseman, compte parmi ses membres le p.-d.g. du Conseil canadien des affaires, Goldy Hyder, et Dominique Barton, l’actuel ambassadeur du Canada en Chine. Il jouit aussi de l’appui de l’ancien premier ministre Brian Mulroney. Or, dans son discours inaugural prononcé cette semaine à l’Assemblée nationale, M. Legault a réaffirmé son refus aux « voix qui réclament un nombre toujours plus élevé d’immigrants ». Le Québec reçoit déjà plus d’immigrants que la plupart des pays développés, a-t-il dit, et il n’est pas question qu’il emboîte le pas au reste du pays. « Le Québec ne peut pas avoir le même modèle d’immigration que celui du Canada anglais. La survie du français exige une approche différente. » Ce choix n’est pas sans conséquences. Le directeur des élections du Canada, Stéphane Perreault, a annoncé la semaine dernière que le Québec doit perdre un siège à la Chambre des communes dès 2024, ce qui porterait le nombre de ses sièges à 77, selon une nouvelle répartition des sièges basée sur la formule de représentation prévue dans la Constitution. Les réactions à cette annonce n’ont pas tardé, le chef du Bloc québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, et la ministre caquiste des Relations canadiennes, Sonia LeBel, s’étant tous deux insurgés contre toute tentative de diminuer le poids du Québec au Parlement fédéral. Vendredi, M. Legault a lui-même sommé M. Trudeau de « préserver le poids de la nation québécoise à la Chambre des communes ». Toutefois, sans modification constitutionnelle, il semble inévitable que le Québec voie sa proportion de sièges à la Chambre des communes diminuer de façon importante au cours des prochaines décennies. Cette proportion est déjà tombée de 36 % des sièges en 1867 à 23 % en 2011. Selon la proposition de M. Perrault, elle glisserait encore à 22,5 %. Qu’en sera-t-il dans dix ans, alors que le reste du Canada s’apprête à accueillir de plus en plus d’immigrants pendant que le Québec referme davantage ses portes ?
Source: https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/642273/chronique-la-marginalisation?utm_source=infolettre-2021-10-23&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=infolettre-quotidienne
A proposed rejigging of Canada’s electoral map could see Quebec lose one of its seats in the House of Commons by 2024 while Alberta gains three and Ontario and B.C. each gain one.
The changes would increase the total number of federal ridings to 342 from 338. There are reasonable arguments for and against implementing the exact changes recommended by Elections Canada. But Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet’s opening salvo in the debate — that the BQ would “unleash the fires of hell” if his province’s seat count is dropped to 77 from 78 — is the wrong way to begin what needs to be a calm, cool conversation about updating the country’s political geography. How are we supposed to respond to Blanchet’s Trumpian explosion of outrage? Can thoughtful discussion follow a toddler’s tantrum?
Injecting apocalyptic rhetoric into a decision-making process that must be driven by the fundamental democratic principle of representation by population — and basic math — is precisely how to inflame prejudices, fuel interprovincial pettiness and polarize the nation. Blanchet, of course, knows this. Driving wedges wherever possible between Quebec and the rest of Canada is crucial, by definition, to the political project of any diehard separatist.
So we shouldn’t be too surprised that Blanchet has zeroed in histrionically on the planned removal of a single Quebec seat from the Commons as if it were a sign of the End Times. Although Elections Canada proposed the change for the benign reason that Quebec’s population is not growing at the same pace as the populations in Alberta, Ontario or B.C. — and because Quebec is (relative to those other big provinces) already more fairly represented in the current parliamentary seat count — Blanchet is invoking biblical imagery of the final battle between Good and Evil.
Sonia LeBel, Quebec’s minister responsible for relations with the rest of Canada, has employed more moderate language — and advanced a more compelling rationale — in urging special considerations for the province in the latest redistribution of federal ridings. “We are part of the founding peoples of Canada,” she said this week. “We have three seats guaranteed at the Supreme Court for judges. We have seats guaranteed in the Senate, a weight that is important and represents much more than just a simple calculation of population.” All of this is why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other political leaders interested in preserving the peace in our mostly peaceable kingdom need to rise above Blanchet’s blatant bullying while finding a sensible solution to the seat-count conundrum — one that delicately balances numerical fairness with other considerations endemic in a land of complexity and compromise. Remember: there’s no purely mathematical justification for granting a federal seat to each of Canada’s three territories — none of which has a population above 50,000 — when the average number of Canadians represented by each MP is more than 110,000. There’s no logical reason, either, for Prince Edward Island — with a mere 0.43 per cent of the national population of about 38 million — to have four seats representing 1.19 per cent of the elected positions in Parliament.
So there may well be legitimate reasons to avoid reducing Quebec’s seat count at this time. In 2011, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper implemented legislation that increased the number of seats to 338 from 308 to reflect population changes. At the time, the Harper government — with much prodding from Quebec, the BQ and other opposition parties — chose to inflate the overall size of the House of the Commons so that the number of Quebec seats would increase (by three, to 78) instead of remaining static at 75 — as an earlier, hotly rejected, purely mathematical proposal had called for. The government’s thinking at the time was that tweaking the formula for allocating seats in a way that would better recognize Quebec’s special status as a nation within the nation was politically prudent.
It also happened to keep the province’s seat total roughly proportional to its percentage of Canada’s population, even as those two numbers remained unfairly out of whack for faster-growing provinces.
The Quebec-friendly adjustment wasn’t immediately embraced by Harper’s own caucus. The additional Quebec seats, according to a Globe and Mail report at the time, “caused consternation among Conservative backbenchers, who were concerned that Canada’s French-speaking province was benefiting from a bill meant to address under-representation in the three large and fast-growing anglophone provinces” — Alberta, Ontario and B.C. Sound familiar? The Conservative caucus was ultimately convinced by Harper to accept the plan for the sake of national unity. But despite the Quebec-friendly compromise, the pre-Blanchet Bloc Québécois still slammed the 2011 reconfiguration of the House as falling short of true recognition of the province’s “unique status with regard to its political weight.” You can’t please everyone. As then-B.C. premier Christy Clark, who supported the 2011 changes, said at the time: “Perfection in these things is impossible because it’s a big and complicated country.” A decade later, the scenario confronting Elections Canada, the federal government and the provinces is much the same. And maybe a little massaging of the numbers to mollify Quebec is warranted yet again. Would it be so bad if Quebec kept its 78 seats and we had 343 federal ridings instead of 342? That would represent about 22.7 per cent of the seats in the House for a province with about 22.6 per cent of Canada’s population. (Meanwhile, Ontario’s proposed 122 seats would then account for 35.6 per cent of 343 seats for a province with almost 39 per cent of the country’s population.)
But Blanchet’s bluster about unleashing the “fires of hell” risks torching the good will required for the rest of Canada to grant Quebec some latitude in its allotment of seats in the national legislature. It’s the kind of talk that’s more likely to unleash cynicism and stinginess. And eventually, if population trends continue in the current direction, maintaining Quebec’s present share of federal seats as its population drifts towards one-fifth of Canada’s total will become untenable from a democratic point of view — Blanchet’s fires of hell notwithstanding. Randy Boswell is a Carleton University journalism professor and former Postmedia News national writer.
Source: Bloc leader’s threat to unleash ‘fires of hell’ over Quebec seat proposal might just backfire

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We’re about to find out how many new seats there will be in Parliament. Then the fighting starts

2021/10/16 Leave a comment

Yes, indeed. Looking forward to the overview and eventually the new riding list:

The federal election may be over but a new fight over ridings is about to start.

On Friday, the Star has learned, Elections Canada will announce the number of new seats each province will be allocated in the House of Commons. It’s not quite the gerrymandering that occurs in the United States — where politicians draw zigzags to create safe districts — but every 10 years in Canada new constituencies are added and riding boundaries are reviewed. And here too, MPs have lots to say about where they want those lines to be.

“Every party is going to look at this and say, ‘OK, what polls did we win? Where did we lose? How can we create a combination that will give us the best outcome at election time?,’” one MP told the Star. “Everybody does it.”

It may be less overt — and less successful — in Canada but political parties will try to sway the decisions of the independent three-person commissions that decide where the boundaries go.

Those panels, one for each province, will be struck in the next two weeks. The chair is named by the province’s chief justice and the two other members by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Liberal MP Anthony Rota. Over the next year, they’ll draw up a proposal for where they think the lines should be, based on population data from this year’s census. The public will then have a say before a final report is issued. That’s where things can get interesting.

In 2012, for example, when the Saskatchewan commission suggested getting rid of eight pizza-shaped ridings that split Regina and Saskatoon up into four pieces with a tiny bit of urban area and a large rural part, there was massive opposition.

The commission suggested creating two urban districts in Regina and three in Saskatoon to reflect the cities’ rapid growth. They expected 40 people to show up at the hearings: 230 registered. Four extra days were added to the schedule.

MPs came, as did defeated candidates, small town representatives and the public. The vast majority opposed the changes. But once commissioners started receiving identical postcards and petitions and 3,000 written submissions, they understood politicians had mobilized their supporters.

The commission’s task was to consider the community of interest and weigh that against a manageable geographic size for districts. What the commissioners heard at the hearings were concerns that carving out urban seats would give the NDP an advantage. (For the record, since 2019, the Conservatives have held all the province’s 14 seats.)

Still, unlike the 2002 commission that bent to public pressure after proposing six urban districts, the 2012 commission resisted. Well, two commissioners — Justice Ronald Mills and Prof. John Courtney — did. A third, David Marit, now the MLA for Wood River and Saskatchewan’s agriculture minister, wrote a dissenting report calling on parliamentarians to reverse the commission’s decisions. He worried the new ridings would lead to voter apathy, didn’t reflect natural trade patterns, and felt the province’s growing population would mean it would revert to urban-rural ridings in 10 years.

Some Conservatives certainly hope that happens. They argue the rural ridings are too large. In Kelly Block’s Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek riding, for example, driving to all three corners takes about six hours. “Is that safe, especially in the wintertime?” asked one MP. “We’re going to watch [this process] very closely. No question about that.”

NDP national director Anne McGrath told me this week it’s too early to say what her party’s priorities will be but “clearly, we wouldn’t want to return to the days of the really wonky boundaries that existed, particularly in Saskatchewan.” Ridings, McGrath suggested, should match “the test of common sense.”

One riding the NDP opposed back in 2012 was the bizarrely shaped Burnaby North—Seymour, which includes part of North Vancouver on one side of the Burrard Inlet and North Burnaby on the other. NDP MP Peter Julian argued at the time that commissioners were forcibly joining two communities that had little in common. Unsurprisingly, the Liberal MP who’s won three elections since the riding was created in 2015, doesn’t want to see it changed. “I would like to keep representing the community that I currently represent,” Terry Beech said. Aside from the traffic on the bridge, he said, representing the riding has been “a wonderful experience.”

What concerns most MPs is the battle in the suburbs and increasingly the ex-urban areas around the GTA and in places like Kitchener, Hamilton, London and Vancouver.

“People can’t afford to live there anymore so they’re moving out a little bit further, and that takes the more ‘lefty vote’ and spreads it,” one Conservative MP said.

Tory incumbents in places such as Brantford—Brant, Flamborough—Glanbrook and Dufferin—Caledon should be worried, that MP added. “That will flip those close seats in those areas.”

Whatever the result of the commissions’ work, it’s unlikely to take effect until after April 2024 — that could be after the next election.

Source: We’re about to find out how many new seats there will be in Parliament. Then the fighting starts

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A Sea of White Faces in Australia’s ‘Party of Multiculturalism’

2021/10/07 Leave a comment

More on Australia:

She seemed an ideal political candidate in a country that likes to call itself the world’s “most successful multicultural nation.”

Tu Le, a young Australian lawyer who is the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, was set to become the opposition Labor Party’s candidate for Parliament in one of Sydney’s most diverse districts. She grew up nearby, works as an advocate for exploited migrant workers and had the backing of the incumbent.

Then Ms. Le was passed over. The leaders of the center-left party, which casts itself as a bastion of diversity, instead chose a white American-born senator, Kristina Keneally, from Sydney’s wealthy eastern suburbs to run for the safe Labor seat in the city’s impoverished southwest.

But Ms. Le, unlike many before her, did not go quietly. She and other young members of the political left have pushed into the open a debate over the near absence of cultural diversity in Australia’s halls of power, which has persisted even as the country has been transformed by non-European migration.

While about a quarter of the population is nonwhite, members of minority groups make up only about 6 percent of the federal Parliament, according to a 2018 study. That figure has barely budged since, leaving Australia far behind comparable democracies like Britain, Canada and the United States.

In Australia, migrant communities are often seen but not heard: courted for photo opportunities and as fund-raising bases or voting blocs, but largely shut out of electoral power, elected officials and party members said. Now, more are demanding change after global reckonings on race like the Black Lives Matter movement and a pandemic that has crystallized Australia’s class and racial inequalities.

“The Australia that I live in and the one that I work in, Parliament, are two completely different worlds,” said Mehreen Faruqi, a Greens party senator who in 2013 became Australia’s first female Muslim member of Parliament. “And we now know why they are two completely different worlds. It’s because people are not willing to step aside and actually make room for this representation.”

The backlash has reached the highest levels of the Labor Party, which is hoping to unseat Prime Minister Scott Morrison in a federal election that must be held by May.

The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, faced criticism when he held up the white senator, Ms. Keneally, 52, as a migrant “success story” because she had been born in the United States. Some party members called the comment tone deaf, a charge they also leveled at former Prime Minister Paul Keating after he said local candidates “would take years to scramble” to Ms. Keneally’s “level of executive ability, if they can ever get there at all.”

Ms. Keneally, one of the Labor Party’s most senior members, told a radio interviewer that she had “made a deliberate decision” to seek the southwestern Sydney seat. She did so, she said, because it represents an overlooked community that had “never had a local member who sits at the highest level of government, at a senior level at the cabinet table, and I think they deserve that.”

She plans to move to the district, she said. In the Australian political system, candidates for parliamentary seats are decided either by party leaders or through an internal vote of party members from that district. Candidates do not have to live in the district they seek to represent.

When contacted for comment, Ms. Keneally’s office referred The New York Times to previous media interviews.

Chris Hayes, the veteran lawmaker who is vacating the southwestern Sydney seat, said he had endorsed Ms. Le because of her deep connections with the community.

“It would be sensational to be able to not only say that we in Labor are the party of multiculturalism, but to actually show it in our faces,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in March.

Ms. Le, 30, said she believed the party leadership sidelined her because it saw her as a “tick-the-box exercise” instead of a viable contender.

As an outsider, “the system was stacked against me,” she said. “I haven’t ‘paid my dues,’ I haven’t ‘served my time’ or been in with the faceless men or factional bosses for years.”

What she finds especially disappointing about Labor’s decision, she said, is the message it sends: that the party takes for granted the working-class and migrant communities it relies on for votes.

Australia has not experienced the same sorts of fights over political representation that have resulted in growing electoral clout for minority groups in other countries, said Tim Soutphommasane, a former national racial discrimination commissioner, in part because it introduced a “top down” policy of multiculturalism in the 1970s.

That has generated recognition of minority groups, though often in the form of “celebratory” multiculturalism, he said, that uses food and cultural festivals as stand-ins for genuine engagement.

When ethnic minorities get involved in Australian politics, they are often pushed to become their communities’ de facto representatives — expected to speak on multiculturalism issues, or relegated to recruiting party members from the same cultural background — and then are punished for supposedly not having broader appeal.

“The expectation from inside the parties as well as the community is that you’re there to represent the minority, the small portion of your community that’s from the same ethnic background as you,” said Elizabeth Lee, a Korean Australian who is the leader of the Australian Capital Territory’s Liberal Party. “It’s very hard to break through that mold.”

Many ethnically diverse candidates never make it to Parliament because their parties do not put them in winnable races, said Peter Khalil, a Labor member of Parliament.

During his own election half a decade ago, he was told to shave his goatee because it made him “look like a Muslim,” he said. (Mr. Khalil is a Coptic Christian.)

“They want to bleach you, whiten you,” he added, “because there’s a fear that you’ll scare people off.”

In the Australian political system, the displacement of a local candidate by a higher-ranking party insider is not unusual. Mr. Morrison was chosen to run for a seat in 2007 after a more popular Lebanese Australian candidate, Michael Towke, said he was forced to withdraw by leaders of the center-right Liberal Party.

Ms. Keneally moved to the safe Labor seat, with the backing of party leaders, because she was in danger of losing her current seat. Her backers also note that she has been endorsed by a handful of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Middle Eastern community leaders.

Joseph Haweil, 32, the mayor of a municipality in Melbourne and a Labor Party member, said that as a political aspirant from a refugee background, he saw in the controversy over Ms. Le a glimpse of his possible future. Mr. Haweil is Assyrian, a minority group from the Middle East.

“You can spend years and years doing the groundwork, the most important thing in politics — assisting local communities, understanding your local community with a view to help them as a public policy maker — and that’s not still enough to get you over the line,” he said.

Osmond Chiu, 34, a party member who is Chinese Australian, said “the message it sent was that culturally diverse representation is an afterthought in Labor, and it will always be sacrificed whenever it is politically inconvenient.”

Ms. Le spoke out in a way that others in the past have avoided, perhaps to preserve future political opportunities. She said that she was uncertain what she would do next, but that she hoped political parties would now think twice before making a decision like the one that shut her out.

“It’s definitely tapped into something quite uncomfortable to discuss, but I think it needs to be out in the open,” she said. “I don’t think people will stand for it anymore.”

Source: A Sea of White Faces in Australia’s ‘Party of Multiculturalism’

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We speak a lot of languages in Canada — elections should reflect our diversity

2021/10/07 Leave a comment

How significant a barrier are official languages on ballots? Any evidence-based studies?

According to the 2011 census, almost 213,500 people reported an Indigenous mother tongue, including 144,000 who speak an Algonquian language and 35,500 who speak an Inuit language. All Indigenous languages are the languages of this land.

In the same 2011 census, more than 20 per cent of Canadians (6.8 million people) reported a mother tongue other than English or French. At home, more than a million Canadians reported speaking a variant of Chinese, and six other languages (Punjabi, Spanish, Italian, German, Tagalog and Arabic) were each spoken by some 400,000 to 500,000 Canadians. 

The census revealed more than 200 languages spoken by Canadians as a home language or a mother tongue, with 20 languages each numbering over 100,000 speakers.

These “immigrant” languages are also the languages of Canadians, along with the two official languages — English and French (which are also immigrant languages). With some 350,000 new immigrants arriving to Canada each year and numbers rising, the variety and number of non-official minority language speakers are constantly increasing.

Canada has taken the first steps towards the linguistic accommodation of its minority citizens. During the 2019 federal election, Elections Canada developed and offered to voters two publications — the Guide to the Federal Election and the Voter ID info sheet — in more than 30 minority languages and 16 Indigenous languages. 

The Canada Elections Act also specifies that electors may contact electoral returning officers if they require a language or sign-language interpreter. The aim is to facilitate greater participation of all citizens in the fundamental democratic process.

Discretionary accommodation measures

Canada’s 2019 Indigenous Languages Act states that a federal institution (like Elections Canada) may provide access to services in an Indigenous language. It may also translate a document into an Indigenous language, or provide for interpretation services to facilitate the use of an Indigenous language in the course of the federal institution’s activities. 

However, these otherwise progressive provisions do not mandate linguistic accommodation, meaning these measures are discretionary and not guaranteed.

Electoral rights are universally recognized as among the most fundamental of civil and political rights. They are the hallmark of democracy. Barriers to their exercise and enjoyment — including linguistic barriers — are a human rights and equality issue.

The law and its practice in the United States are instructive. The language minority provisions of the U.S. Voting Rights Act state:

“Whenever any state or political subdivision provides registration or voting notices, forms, instructions, assistance, or other materials or information relating to the electoral process, including ballots, it shall provide them in the language of the applicable minority group as well as in the English language.” 

These provisions apply to situations where more than 10,000 people, or five per cent of the total voting-age citizens in a single political jurisdiction, are members of a single language minority group, have depressed literacy rates or don’t speak English sufficiently well in order to exercise their electoral participation rights.

During the November 2020 elections, voters in California were able to request ballots in widely spoken languages like Arabic, Armenian, Hmong, Korean, Persian, Spanish and Tagalog. 

In Harris County in Texas (home to America’s fourth largest city, Houston) the ballot was printed in four languages: English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Chinese.

In Cook County (home to Chicago, America’s third-largest city), where over one-third of residents speak a language other than English at home, elections-related information and fully translated ballots were provided to the voters during the November 2020 elections in 12 languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Tagalog, Arabic, Gujarati, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and Urdu.

The UN urges accommodation

International human rights standards under the United Nations system and within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), of which Canada is part, urge the accommodation of linguistic minorities.

Most notable provisions can be found in the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 2001 OSCE Guidelines to Assist National Minority Participation in the Electoral Process and the 2017 handbook Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities by the UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues. 

Similar provisions on political participation of Indigenous peoples can be derived from the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), brought into Canadian law this year through Bill C-15.

To be more inclusive and rights-based, Canada needs to fully embrace linguistic diversity for its elections. Greater use of Indigenous and minority languages will enhance the quality of Canada’s elections in line with international norms and standards.

This will certainly resonate well with current pledges of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and with Canada’s Inuktitut-speaking new governor general, Mary Simon. 

As a multicultural, plurilingual and well-heeled country, Canada can do better to accommodate and facilitate the fuller participation of citizens in our elections. In so doing, we can offer a leading example to the world.

Source: https://theconversationcanada.cmail19.com/t/r-l-tryhljdk-kyldjlthkt-f/

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As Tories review election loss, weak support in immigrant communities a crucial issue

2021/10/06 Leave a comment

Article over-dramatises even if there is a need for a review.
Margins in many of these ridings were relatively small. Moreover, in Ontario, the provincial conservatives swept most of the same seats and, as the article notes, active outreach by Conservatives allowed them to make inroads.
But beyond the 41 ridings, there are an additional 93 ridings with between 20 and 50 percent visible minorities which should also be looked at:
The Conservative Party is only beginning to sift through the data from the 2021 election, but there is at least one warning light flashing red on the dashboard: the party has been nearly wiped out in Canadian ridings where visible minorities form the majority.

Of the 41 ridings in Canada where more than half the population is racialized, the Conservatives won just one in the 2021 election — Calgary Forest Lawn — despite winning 119 seats overall.

Source: As Tories review election loss, weak support in immigrant communities a crucial issue

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Latif | Equity and diversity were shamefully ignored during the election

2021/10/05 Leave a comment

In the debates, yes, but the Liberal, NDP and Green parties all had substantial commitments whereas the Conservatives, inexplicably, had none:

While pandemic recovery, gun control, and even puppies took centre stage during the federal election, we failed to seize the opportunity to hold our leaders accountable on equity issues.

In the lead up to the election, we had unprecedented conversations about the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on racialized people; anti-Black racism in policing; Islamophobic violence; the unearthing of thousands of Indigenous children who died at Canadian residential schools; and a spike in hate crimes against members of the Asian community. Yet none of the political parties prioritized equity, diversity and inclusion issues in their platforms, tours or advertising.

As voters, we had the power to hold our leaders accountable by asking the hard questions, but we didn’t. Even when there was a moment on the national stage provided by debate moderator Shachi Kurl, we didn’t seize it. Instead, we allowed the conversation around bills 21 and 96 to turn into a conversation about the impact on the horse race and the polls in Quebec, rather than a conversation about values.

I spoke with Erin Tolley, Canada research chair in gender, race and inclusive politics at Carleton University, who suggests party leaders, the media and the public all play a role in sparking — and continuing — these conversations.

Tolley notes that “there is a long history in Canada of parties not seeing a focus on multiculturalism, immigration or diversity as a winning strategy. They see those issues as divisive. All parties know they need to discuss the economy because voters demand it, but these other issues are viewed as niche. If voters don’t put pressure on parties, then parties are going to ignore the issue. So when we’re thinking about who to blame, I don’t only blame parties.”

There have been many campaigns where a catalyzing moment captured media attention and turned equity issues into election issues. I recall the 2011 provincial election, when a $10,000 tax credit to hire an immigrant for their first job in Ontario got leaked before the Liberal platform launch, and became a lightning rod that almost derailed the campaign. Although it was sound policy, the Conservatives tried to make it a wedge issue. I worked with a Liberal team, behind the scenes, to ensure this did not sabotage our efforts.

Another example of an election flashpoint was the tragic death in 2015 of a three-year-old Syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi, which sparked immigration, refugee and asylum debates. The Conservative’s “barbaric cultural practice hotline” was anti-Muslim and ugly but meant to grab votes. Then, the 2019 election focused on gender inequality and systemic racism as pictures of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in blackface surfaced during the election.

But in this year’s campaign, we watched as the debate moment barely scratched the surface; as the racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism faced by Annamie Paul, former leader of the Green Party of Canada, didn’t raise eyebrows; and as NDP MP Don Davies was given a pass on his unacceptable comments against his opponent Virginia Bremner, a Filipino-Canadian woman.

Despite the sheer devastation of these moments, all we saw were performative acknowledgments by leaders and media without substantive discussions about the systematic issues — and how we can address them.

We failed ourselves by letting these moments pass, relegating them to the back burner. It’s convenient for these political parties, with their preestablished agendas that prioritize economic issues with a one-size-fits-all approach, negating the fact that economic disparities are compounded by things like race, religion and social demographics.

I am disappointed that we let these issues slide, especially with the millions of voices and support we saw on social media. Now, more than ever, we need to ask all of our leaders (not just the Liberals) to implement policies that are focused on systemic racism and discrimination into their day-to-day working. Despite having a minority government, we can only realize equity issues when we unpack policy — and understand how that policy isn’t developed to support the marginalized.

Source: Opinion | Equity and diversity were shamefully ignored during the election

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Kheiriddin: Rebuilding the Tories’ ‘big tent’ starts with new Canadians

2021/10/04 Leave a comment

Somewhat bloated commentary, where Kheiriddin picks up on earlier arguments made by Tom Flanagan regarding the “fourth sister” of Canadian politics but broadens her arguments to include other issues:
In the aftermath of Canada’s 44th federal election, the Conservative party is at a crossroads. Under two successive leaders, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole, it has attempted to rebuild its fabled “big tent,” and failed.
That tent has taken different forms over the years. From 1984 to 1993, with party leader Brian Mulroney in the Prime Minister’s Office, it was composed of an amalgam of Quebec nationalists, Ontario Red Tories and Western fiscal hawks. From 2006 to 2015, with Stephen Harper at the helm and in power, it comprised a microtargeted mix of suburban and exurban Ontario families, “bleu Québécois,” and the Western remains of the Reform Party.

Source: Rebuilding the Tories’ ‘big tent’ starts with new Canadians

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