Iqra Khalid urges MPs to take unified approach in Islamophobia study

2017/09/19 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see the degree to which the Conservatives play a constructive or obstructive role in the Committee study – and whether the Liberals resist partisanship in their approach.

Their choice of witnesses will be as revealing as their interventions (don’t have the complete list to be able to assess the respective balance but the inclusion of Tarek Fatah on the Conservative list suggests that their approach may not have changed):

The inclusion of the phrase Islamophobia in a hotly debated motion passed by the House of Commons last year was meant as an example of forms of racism, the Liberal MP who sponsored the proposal said Monday.

Iqra Khalid told the House of Commons heritage committee that her motion calling for parliamentarians to condemn Islamophobia and for a study on systematic racism and religious discrimination was about the study itself that began Monday.

“It uses the example of Islamophobia to make a larger point about the problem of all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination — that we have to find ways to tackle that broad problem in Canada as a whole,” Khalid said.

Khalid said she was motivated to introduce M-103 after hearing several stories of racist acts against different faiths in the fall of 2016. When she looked into the issue, she found the statistics to provide context to the problem were lacking and something had to be done.

“The objective of the motion was to bring forward this study, it is upon this committee as a whole to take that unified approach to study the issue, to work with each other to find those recommendations to assist us as policy makers,” she said.

Khalid’s motion passed in a vote of 201-91 last spring. It called on MPs to recognize something had to be down to “quell the increasing public climate of hate and fear,” and to that end, the House ought to condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination and direct the heritage committee to study the issue, including how better to gather hate crime data.

The conflict around the motion centered largely around the word Islamophobia, setting off protests on Parliament Hill and arguments across the country over the meaning and implications of the phrase.

Khalid told the committee she defines it as “irrational fear or hatred of Muslims or Islam” that leads to discrimination.

But opponents say the word it is vague and essentially means criticism against Islam of any kind is forbidden, and some saw Khalid’s motion as the first step in criminalizing that criticism. Conservative news outlet Rebel Media seized on that issue with gusto, forcing it into the Conservative leadership race as contenders were grilled on their positions.

The Conservatives had sought to remove the phrase and instead broaden the motion to refer to multiple faiths.

They lost over objections from the Liberals that they would be watering down Khalid’s effort. Several Conservatives raised their own motion in quizzing Khalid on Monday about her intentions.

“Both of us would have liked to have found ourselves on the same side of the vote in the House on the issue,” Conservative David Anderson said.

“We are sir,” Khalid replied.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said she had never seen as much “fomented anger, concern and misconception” around a House of Commons motion as she heard around Khalid’s.

She and other MPs told Khalid they’d received calls that the motion would lead to Islamic religious law, known as Sharia, being introduced in Canada or that it would give Islam a protected status in Canada greater than that of other religions.

Khalid was asked to directly address some of the specific concerns, but didn’t tackle them all, saying while there were misconceptions, it was time to move forward.

“The conversation that Canadians had over the past number of months was a very important conversation,” Khalid said.

“It is a great way to lead up to this study.”

Source: Iqra Khalid urges MPs to take unified approach in Islamophobia study – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

When Picasso and Orwell Went After Tyrants and Risked It All

2017/09/19 Leave a comment

Good reminder:

This is a story about truth and how, against all the odds, it can be discerned and defended against liars through individual acts of courage and genius. It is a story for all time and particularly our time, when totalitarianism bludgeons the truth tellers with renewed support.

Pablo Picasso and George Orwell never met. But each of them, reaching the heights of their powers, looked at the same events in the same place at the same time, 80 years ago, and used their art to expose the true face of totalitarianism. At the time they were vilified for doing so.

Picasso produced his huge and wrenching masterpiece, Guernica, named for the northern Spanish city that was the first European city to be carpet-bombed. Orwell produced Homage to Catalonia, his gimlet-eyed record of fighting in the Spanish Civil War in which he nearly died.

Spain, Orwell discovered, “was a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between two political theories.” He fought with the republican government forces against the fascists but in the course of several battles realized that the republicans were being manipulated by Moscow and that “the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left but upon the extreme Right.”

The error—made by many thousands of European and American volunteers fighting with the republicans—was to believe that the forces opposing Generalissimo Franco’s fascists were naturally on the side of the angels simply because they were anti-fascist. As Orwell himself was swiftly disabused of this idea he came to the core revelation of his political life—that the true evil was totalitarianism, no matter what uniform it wore or what language it spoke.

Eventually that revelation shaped his two literary masterpieces, Animal Farm and 1984.However, the most immediate and personal result was that Orwell, in Homage To Catalonia,had delivered a message that nobody wanted to hear. In London his old socialist friends disowned him. Many of them were in thrall to Moscow’s utopian propaganda that the struggle in Spain was for universal liberty, rather than the slavery that Stalin had in mind.

Picasso was in a different kind of trap. When Guernica was exhibited in the U.S. the American Right labeled it “Bolshevist art controlled by the hand of Moscow.”  In fact, Picasso did not join the French Communist Party until 1944, when Paris was liberated from the Nazis. Political theory had nothing to do with the raging art that drove Guernica.

On the afternoon of April 27, 1937, successive waves of German and Italian bombers dropped a combination of bombs on Guernica carefully designed to kill, maim and terrorize the civilian population—they included fragmentation bombs that eviscerated people and incendiaries burning at 2,500 degrees centigrade that turned the city into a fireball. People who fled into the hills were strafed with machine guns. More than 1,600 people died and nearly 1,000 more were injured.

Seen in the perspective of what followed, Guernica was a calculated forewarning to the world that total war now included the mass slaughter of civilians. Picasso’s canvas was more than 25 feet wide and eight feet deep. Within this space every figure—including a bull, a horse, a mother with a dead child, was eviscerated. Limbs, fingers, skulls interlocked in a gruesome dance of death. What Picasso took from the atrocity was intensely personal: the people of his native country had become the cannon fodder of a new order in Spain. Franco, abetted by Hitler and Mussolini, would rule by terror.

Guernica was exhibited in London before being shipped to the US. Critics were divided. As a commentary on war some ranked it with Goya’s rending account of the savagery of the Napoleonic wars. But the hand of ideology also surfaced. The critic Anthony Blunt called the painting “hopelessly obscure, its meaning elusive.” Unknown to anyone then, Blunt was a Soviet sleeper agent, unmasked only in 1979 as the long-sought Fourth Man in an espionage ring—his rejection of Guernica was the Stalinist party line conveyed as aesthetic distaste.

Source: When Picasso and Orwell Went After Tyrants and Risked It All

Filed under Other Tagged with , ,

‘Fear is the greatest factor:’ Survey finds Canadians worry about rise of racism against Muslims

2017/09/19 Leave a comment

Not much new here but interesting nevertheless. Comments by Imam Soharwardy of note:

A survey suggests Canadians have a generally positive impression of Muslims but that view doesn’t apply to some of the religion’s leadership and beliefs.

The poll, commissioned by Think for Actions and Insights Matter, found 78 per cent of Canadians agreed Muslims should adopt Canadian customs and values but maintain their religious and cultural practices. Some 88 per cent of those surveyed said Muslims should be treated no differently than any other Canadian.

But 72 per cent of respondents also believed there has been an increasing climate of hatred and fear towards Muslims in Canada and that it will get worse.

Results of the poll — an online survey of 1,048 Canadians done from March 13 to Aug. 12 — were released Saturday at The Unity Conference in Calgary on Islamophobia, discrimination and systemic racism.

“The biggest takeaway is Canadians who are friends with a Muslim or know a Muslim individual have a positive view of Islam and Muslims and are more welcoming to them,” said Mukarram Zaidi, chair of the group that commissioned the survey.

“Fear is the greatest factor. The majority of Canadians believe the issue of racism has increased. They are concerned about the issue of general racism and hate crimes, religious discrimination, homophobia and anti-Semitism.”

Public perception isn’t all positive. The survey found 56 per cent believed that Islam suppresses women’s rights. There was a 54 per cent approval for imams and 35 per cent for Muslim leadership.

“There needs to be work done within the Muslim community and their leadership to understand that the common person does not hold a lot of respect for what they’re doing,” said Zaidi.

“Children born and raised in North America need to become an imam, because when they stand up and speak, they can speak English clearly and they can relate Islam to North American culture.”

Calgary Imam Syed Soharwardy, founder of Muslims Against Terrorism and the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, understands why Canadians would be suspicious of Muslim leadership. He said many imams discuss only religious teaching and morality when they should speak out against fanaticism, extremism and intolerance.

“Many Muslim leaders do not condemn ISIL, the Taliban, al-Qaida,” said Soharwardy. “A lot of imams are doing it, but not enough.”

Soharwardy, who was born in Pakistan, said imams should be fluent in English or French and have a good understanding of Canadian society.

“I think most of the imams, who come from overseas and outside of Canada, they still live in silos. They still do not help people to integrate in the mainstream Canadian society.”

Soharwardy has personal experience about the need for good language skills when talking to Canadian-born Muslims.

“At our mosque I speak in English and Urdu, like a bilingual sort of thing. My own son says, ‘Papa, when you speak English that is fine, but as soon as you start talking Urdu, you just turn me off’ — and he understands it.”

Source: ‘Fear is the greatest factor:’ Survey finds Canadians worry about rise of racism against Muslims | National Post

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

New passport processing system $75M over budget

2017/09/19 Leave a comment

Yet another failing project, once again pointing out political and public servant accountability and management issues:

Another government IT project is going off the rails, this one intended to issue Canadian passports faster and cheaper than the current system.

The so-called Passport Program Modernization Initiative, launched in 2014, is at least $75 million over budget and well behind schedule.

“From its outset, the complexity … was underestimated,” says an internal document, explaining a series of setbacks to the ambitious plan.

“The project management capacity and expertise was insufficient for the complexity and scale of the initiative.”

The January 2017 document, obtained by CBC News under the Access to Information Act, says that in initial tests the new system actually increased processing times, rather than decreased them as planned, and allowed breaches to Canadians’ confidential information.

The passport mess joins the botched Phoenix payroll system, the struggling email transformation initiative and the Canada.ca project as IT schemes inherited by the Liberal government that have bogged down in delays and cost over-runs.

That’s because passport fees are much higher than the actual cost of producing the document, and surpluses can be used for improvements in passport processing, including the modernization project and its budget overruns.

Online renewals

The passport project was first approved in December 2013 with a five-year, $101.2-million budget, and was intended among other things to let Canadians apply online for renewals. The project was to be complete by June next year.

But Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada — which has run the passport office since July 2013 — now says modernization will cost at least $176 million, a 75 per cent increase so far, and will not meet next year’s deadline because of delays.

“The project schedule is under review and planned activities are being resequenced to occur at a later date,” says a report on the project.

CBC News has previously reported on the first flubbed test of the new system, starting on May 9, 2015, in which at least 1,500 passports were produced that were vulnerable to fraud and tampering.

But unlike the other three, the fees Canadians pay directly for their passports are going to bail out the modernization project rather than general tax revenues.

‘The reporting did not track project spending … against budgeted activities.’– Internal report on passport modernizaton project

The test was carried out despite warnings of some officials that it posed significant security risks. In the summer of 2015 the department suspended its use of the new system, which was plagued with hundreds of glitches. Officials said none of the 1,500 problematic passports was issued to any citizen.

An internal audit of the initiative’s first stages found a raft of problems, including lack of cost control.

“The reporting did not track project spending against budgeted activities,” says the February 2016 audit report, adding the project “did not include a plan for security requirements.”

In 2013, the new fee for a five-year passport was set at $120 compared with $87 previously, and the department introduced a new 10-year passport for a $160 fee.

Revenues currently far exceed expenses; the passport program generated a surplus of $253 million for 2015-2016, the most recent year reported.

Revenue to drop

But because more Canadians are holding 10-year passports, the department expects revenues to drop significantly starting next year as fewer people need renewals.

The program will start drawing on its accumulated surpluses after next year to avoid deficits — but the modernization program’s cost overruns will add to the fiscal pressures.

That’s the opposite of the original plan, which was for the passport modernization project to dramatically cut the cost of issuing passports, and help IRCC get through the lean years from 2018 to 2023 as revenues decline because of the effect of 10-year passports issued in 2013 and after.

Source: New passport processing system $75M over budget – Politics – CBC News

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Canada needs a fuller house to thrive – but population growth isn’t enough: Saunders

2017/09/18 Leave a comment

While I am a great fan of Doug Saunders, I think he makes many of the same fallacies as other boosters of large increases in immigration and population in his latest book, Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough.  (See my earlier How to debate immigration issues in Canada where I discuss the respective fallacies of immigration boosters and critics).

However, unlike many others, he recognizes the large public and private investments needed to integrate successfully large number of immigrants along with the associated infrastructure and other needs of a much larger population.

Yet surprisingly, he is silent on the likely impact of technology on labour market needs.

However, will read his book to get a fuller appreciation of his arguments (have just excerpted his conclusion but recommend reading the full long read):

The challenges of family policy, like most of the obstacles examined here, are already being experienced by Canadians, and will be growing problems, regardless of what happens to the population. The changes in the structure of the work force, in the cost and accessibility of housing, in the geographic isolation of major cities; the obstacles to getting credentials recognized, and of lost educational opportunities – all these barriers to equality and social mobility need to be confronted by Canadians and their governments, whether we triple our population or not.

It is therefore worth asking: If the time has come for Canada to train its sights on institutional reform, infrastructure expansion and policy reassessment, why shouldn’t we also make plans to build a population commensurate with those ambitions and resources? The changes we need to undertake in order to maintain and empower a Canada of 35 million will be far easier to bring about, and yield far greater benefits, if they are applied to a population that is gradually growing to a larger and more self-sufficient scale by the end of the century.

With that population – and by instituting the reforms needed to create it – Canada promises to become a place with the tools and resources to do many things better, more fairly, more cleanly and more co-operatively: a more comfortable, and more intensely Canadian version of the Canada we know.

Source: Canada needs a fuller house to thrive – but population growth isn’t enough – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Immigration Tagged with

Research Shows Spanish Speakers Take Longer To Learn English. Why? : NPR

2017/09/18 Leave a comment

Likely a mix of all three explanations:

A recent study out of Philadelphia tracked kindergartners who were learning English and found that four years later there were major discrepancies between which groups of students had mastered the language.

Students whose home language was Spanish were considerably less likely to reach proficiency than any other subgroup. And, on the extreme end, Spanish speakers were almost half as likely as Chinese speakers to cross the proficiency threshold.

The study, conducted by the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium, just looked at English learners who entered the district as kindergartners in 2008 and their progress through the end of third grade.

But this phenomenon isn’t specific to Philadelphia. “I have never seen any study that has looked at this question and not found this trend,” says Ilana Umansky, who studies English acquisition at the University of Oregon.

Earlier this year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a 415-page report on English learners. The report cited 12 studies — dating back to 2004 — that found this gap between Spanish-speaking English learners and other groups.

But to date, no research has been able to determine why.

So, we emailed or spoke with about two dozen researchers, teachers, and students to hear how they would explain this trend. Predictably, there’s no consensus, but here are three basic theories.

Spanish saturation

There are nearly 150,000 Spanish speakers in Philadelphia, according to the American Community Survey. The numbers are even greater in New York City, where Jose Garcia arrived in 2012, at 11 years old, after emigrating from the Dominican Republic.

Garcia moved to the heavily Hispanic Washington Heights neighborhood in upper Manhattan. At home, he spoke Spanish. In school, classmates spoke Spanish. When he watched television, he often tuned into Spanish-language news.

“So it wasn’t like a big challenge for me,” Garcia says.

Eventually, Garcia moved to Philadelphia and weaned himself off Spanish media by watching American movies like The Fast and the Furious. But he considers his early months in New York wasted time, compounded by the fact that many of his friends didn’t seem all that interested in learning English.

“They didn’t wanna learn it as fast because they didn’t need to use it,” he says. “They were speaking Spanish already. So they had a way to communicate with each other.”

But Nelson Flores, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, grew up in an area of Philadelphia with a lot of Spanish speakers, too, and he says that’s not always the case. In fact, he doesn’t think the Spanish-language achievement gap has much to do with language at all.

Family income and segregation

Flores contests the notion that Spanish speakers aren’t learning English — at least in the way we typically understand language acquisition.

“We’re not talking about the ability to communicate in English,” Flores says. “We’re talking about the ability to do grade-level content in English.”

Flores believes a lot of the students who score below proficient in English can speak and comprehend the language with ease. Many of them, he says, can speak English better than Spanish.

So why aren’t they testing well? Flores believes it’s because Latino students are disproportionately living in isolated, high-poverty neighborhoods and learning in isolated, high-poverty schools.

High-poverty schools, Flores points out, tend to receive fewer resources and less-experienced teachers. Plus, these schools have to deal with the compound effect of having so many students who experience trauma, transience and other disadvantages.

It could be true that Spanish-speaking English learners in Philadelphia are generally poorer than, say, Vietnamese-speaking students, but it’s unlikely family income totally accounts for the achievement gap.

It’s no surprise that researchers studying this trend in the past have used income-based controls — such as whether a child qualifies for free or reduced lunch. Those researchers have still found Spanish speakers lagging.

Family background

If you look only at family income, you might assume many immigrant groups come from relatively similar socioeconomic backgrounds.

“Immigrants often look low-income because they’re in transition,” says Patricia Gandara, a UCLA professor who has studied this trend in California. “They may have been physicians in their home country, but now they’re having to work as a cook.”

Many of the proxies we use to measure poverty or disadvantage trace back to how much money a family makes. But in the case of immigrant groups, that may mask some crucial differences.

A 2009 analysis led by Hunter College professor Donald Hernandez found, for instance, large discrepancies in the relative education levels of many immigrant groups. Adult immigrants from East Asia and the Middle East were among the most likely to have a high school or college degree. Adult immigrants from Mexico and Central America were among the least likely to have made it to high school.

Researchers Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou came to similar conclusions when they compared Mexican and Chinese immigrants. They found that, relative to their parents, the children of Mexican immigrants progressed further educationally from one generation to the next. But the children of Chinese immigrants progressed further overall, in large part because their parents started many steps ahead.

The logic here is pretty simple: Parents who attended college are better able to help their children with homework or connect them to resources.

Tip of the iceberg

These were just three theories we heard when we asked about the language acquisition gap, not all of them.

For instance, many people pointed to societal biases against Hispanic students, arguing that teachers and administrators have lower expectations of them than Asian students because of deeply ingrained stereotypes.

Right now, it’s hard to isolate the cause of this gulf between Philadelphia’s Spanish-language English learners and everyone else. It’s possible — maybe likely — that all of these theories have some shade of truth to them.

Source: Research Shows Spanish Speakers Take Longer To Learn English. Why? : NPR Ed : NPR

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

USA: Fast Track to Citizenship Is Cut Off for Some Military Recruits – The New York Times

2017/09/18 Leave a comment

This US program inspired a comparable preference in Canada for citizenship applicants who had enrolled in the military in C-24:

Mohammed Anwar enlisted in April 2016 in the United States military through a program that promised him a fast track to citizenship. His ship date for basic training, expected within six months, was postponed twice. “It was common knowledge that there were delays because of new security checks,” said the 27-year-old Pakistani national, who lives in Jersey City.

Each month he donned a uniform and, as required, attended drill training with his Army Reserve unit in Connecticut.

Last week, Mr. Anwar got a call from his recruiter informing him that his enlistment had been terminated. “I was shocked, confused and angry that the United States government didn’t keep up with its commitment to me,” said Mr. Anwar, who was to work as a nurse.

The reason behind the decision to cut Mr. Anwar from the military remains unclear to him.

In the last week, recruiters have rescinded contracts for an unknown number of foreign nationals who had signed up for Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, or Mavni, a program introduced in 2009 to attract immigrants with certain language and other skills that are in short supply into the armed forces.

More than 4,000 Mavni recruits have been in limbo since late last year, when the Department of Defense began introducing additional vetting. The protracted process has indefinitely delayed basic training for many enlistees, making it more difficult for recruiters to meet their targets. Recruiting stations are flooded with calls from many concerned that their lawful presence in the country could lapse while they await clearance.

“Emotionally, I can’t move forward with my life,” said Mr. Zhu, 27, who has master’s degrees in engineering from Columbia University and the University of Wyoming. “I am sure my contract is on the verge of being rescinded,” he added, because enlistees must report to training within two years of signing a contract.

Paul Haverstick, a Pentagon spokesman, confirmed that the Army must discharge recruits who have not shipped to initial military training within two years.

“Unfortunately, some Mavni recruits have been unable to complete the increased security screening required by the Department of Defense to ship to training within two years of enlistment,” he said, adding that the Army is still seeking ways to help those who have been affected.

“The Mavnis have become a huge problem for the recruiting command because they can’t ship out to their training until they complete mandated background checks,” said Margaret Stock, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who helped create the program. “If they can’t ship out, they aren’t doing the Army any good.”

Ankit Gajurel, a Nepalese mechanical engineer who enlisted in the Army Reserve in May 2016, recently had his training date postponed for the second time. But several of his references had been contacted by security officials, and he had been told by his recruiter that his “counterintelligence interview,” one of the last steps in the vetting process, would be scheduled for November.

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

President Donald Trump debuts his videotaped message to new U.S. citizens at the National Archives Friday morning – The Washington Post

2017/09/18 Leave a comment

Same shift in tone from integration to assimilation as noted earlier (Trump Administration Changes Focus of USCIS Immigrant #Citizenship Training to Assimilation – Breitbart):

President Trump, in his first official video message to newly minted U.S. citizens, welcomes them into the “American family” and exhorts them to “help newcomers assimilate to our way of life,” according to a copy of the video requested by The Washington Post.

The video will debut Friday after a citizenship ceremony at the National Archives in Washington. Thirty immigrants, from Mexico, Eritrea and other countries, will take the oath of citizenship.

A recorded presidential message has been played for new citizens at naturalization ceremonies since the administration of George W. Bush. Presidents also typically issue congratulatory letters.

What Trump would say in his video has been a point of curiosity for immigration advocates and others since he took office in January and began acting on campaign promises to dramatically reduce legal and illegal immigration. Citizenship applications soared last year, which some liberal groups said was a response to Trump’s candidacy and his tough talk on immigration.

In his 1 minute, 37 second video — one second longer than President Barack Obama’s — Trump lauds the “devotion to America” that he believes the new citizens will feel.

“No matter where you come from or what faith you practice, this country is now your country,” Trump says in the video. “You enjoy the full rights, and the sacred duties, that come with American citizenship — very, very special.”

“You now share the obligation to teach our values to others, to help newcomers assimilate to our way of life,” he adds.

That phrase could serve as a reminder of controversial claims Trump made last year on the campaign trail: that Muslims and other immigrants were failing to adapt to an American way of life.

Trump also signals that the United States should be the only home for American citizens. While new citizens take an oath renouncing allegiances to foreign states, many maintain dual citizenship if their countries of origin allow it.

“America is our home. We have no other,” Trump says in the video. “You have pledged allegiance to America. And when you give your love and loyalty to America, she returns her love and loyalty to you.”

Trump tells new citizens that Americans are “your brothers and sisters,” with “one American heart and one American destiny.”

In addition to unveiling the video Friday, acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke will deliver a keynote address to immigrants from Benin, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Canada, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, El Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, France, Guyana, India, Italy, Liberia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Romania, Senegal, Slovakia, Togo and Vietnam.

The event marks U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ annual celebration of Constitution Day and Citizenship Day and kicks off a week of citizenship ceremonies nationwide. More than 30,000 green-card holders will officially become citizens at more than 200 ceremonies through Sept. 22.

Source: President Donal Trump debuts his videotaped message to new U.S. citizens at the National Archives Friday morning – The Washington Post

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Todd: Tax avoidance behind Metro’s disconnect between housing, income

2017/09/18 1 Comment

Another good piece on Vancouver’s housing prices and the underpaying of tax:

After census figures this week revealed alarming gaps between housing costs and average incomes in Metro Vancouver, veteran real-estate analyst Richard Wozny is preparing a speech for B.C. politicians that blames the disparity is in part on tax avoidance.

A reason why residents of Metro Vancouver municipalities with expensive housing tend to report lower incomes than people in less-costly municipalities is that many of the former avoid declaring their total wealth, said Wozny, whose company has produced 1,200 studies on real-estate trends in Canada and the U.S.

“Canada has become a freeloader society” in which some mansion owners have found ways to avoid reporting their total incomes to the Canada Revenue Agency, said Wozny, who will speak on Sept. 25 at the convention of the Union of B.C. Municipalities in Vancouver.

Census figures released this week show Metro Vancouver, which has one of the world’s most expensive housing markets, lags behind 14 other Canadian cities on average wages.

The census also exposed an apparent contradiction: Residents of Richmond, Burnaby, the city of Vancouver and West Vancouver — which have the most expensive housing costs in Metro — also have on average the highest rates of poverty.

The census data highlights “inappropriate reporting of family incomes” by many property owners in Metro Vancouver’s well-off neighbourhoods, says Wozny, head of Site Economics Ltd., who said governments need to crack down on residential property speculators.

Inadequate Canadian tax laws have allowed owners of houses that sell for more than $2 million or $3 million “to report unusually low taxable median family incomes,” Wozny said in a detailed report titled Low Incomes and High House Prices in Metro Vancouver.

“It is not logical that so many low-income residents buy expensive houses. The analogous situation would be people reporting minimum wage routinely buying Rolex watches and luxury limousines,” Wozny said.

It’s also not fair, Wozny said, that the burden of paying for Metro Vancouver’s transit systems and schools is largely borne by residents of the suburbs, such as Port Moody, where house prices are only average, yet residents have the highest taxable incomes in Metro Vancouver.

“Irrationally high-priced real estate is not harmless,” Wozny said. “There are plenty of victims, from the environment to the middle class. Simply stated, Metro Vancouver is worth more than it charges in property taxes and fees.”

When Wozny speaks to politicians at the UBCM, he will urge better regulations to target real-estate speculators, both domestic and offshore, many of whom shield their wealth from Canada’s tax officials.

“The Americans would never tolerate such free riders. Canada has become a money-launderer’s paradise,” Wozny said in an interview.

“Seattle’s incomes are far higher than those in Metro Vancouver, and its economy is many times larger, yet its housing prices are far lower than they are in Metro Vancouver. The difference is that Seattle is governed by laws that tax worldwide incomes, and which don’t allow un-monitored capital flows.”

Wozny disagrees with real-estate lobbyists who attempt to explain the radical gap between housing prices and wages by saying many mansion owners in Richmond, Vancouver, Burnaby and West Vancouver are seniors getting by on low incomes.

That rationalization doesn’t make sense, Wozny said, because most neighbourhoods in North America have similar levels of what he called “old Mrs. MacKenzie who has lived in her house since the Second World War. There are old Mrs. MacKenzies in every city.”

Wozny’s analysis also doesn’t support remarks made Wednesday by economist Iglika Ivanova of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, who speculated the reason municipalities with soaring housing prices also have unusually high percentages of people living below the poverty line ­is the latter want to live near transit lines.

Instead, Wozny’s report supports former Richmond mayor Greg Halsey-Brandt, who was the first to publicly flag how some of his city’s pricier neighbourhoods had almost as many people reporting poverty-level incomes as in Vancouver’s destitute Downtown Eastside.

University of B.C. geographer Dan Hiebert has also discovered a correlation between neighbourhoods with largw foreign-born populations and neighbourhoods that appear to have unusually low taxable incomes, despite their inflated housing prices, such as Richmond and Vancouver’s west side.

Wozny, a real-estate business insider, appreciates the analyses of immigration lawyers Sam Hyman and Richard Kurland, and SFU professor Josh Gordon, who have pointed to loopholes in tax and real-estate laws.

They say unenforced laws allow wealthy speculators to avoid taxes by using trusts or companies to purchase real estate, by falsely claiming they are not “residents of Canada” for tax purposes and by buying residential property in the name of “proxies,” such as low-income spouses or children.

Even though Wozny considers himself a fiscal conservative, he said B.C. and Canada desperately need tax-code updates so that investors who buy multiple residential proprieties contribute more to their communities.

“The public has been cynically abandoned by governments. Real-estate is an essential building block of the middle classes,” Wozny said. But hard-working people are being squeezed out of ownership, he said, by speculators who put too much demand on Metro’s real-estate market and who aren’t carrying their social weight.

“Everybody should be paying taxes,” Wozny said. “Taxes should be a privilege. We should enjoy paying them.”

Source: Todd: Tax avoidance behind Metro’s disconnect between housing, income | Vancouver Sun

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Canadians divided on granting entry to asylum seekers from U.S., [Nanos] poll finds

2017/09/16 Leave a comment

Somewhat surprised that public opinion is so divided, given that concern over “queue jumping” and irregular arrivals tends to mean less confidence in Canada’s ability to manage immigration:

More than 12,000 asylum seekers have crossed into Canada at a single unofficial crossing point along the Quebec-United States border this year, surpassing the province’s expectations for all of 2017.

The numbers come as a new survey shows that Canadians are equally divided over whether the country should welcome asylum seekers from the United States or close its borders to them. A Nanos poll found that more than one-third of Canadians – 37 per cent – say Canada should welcome asylum seekers from the United States, while the same percentage of respondents think Canada should close its borders; 26 per cent were unsure.

“There’s very few times that Canadians are so evenly divided on an issue,” pollster Nik Nanos said.

“This is a recipe for a continued and prolonged debate about what to do when people show up at the Canadian border and ask for asylum.”

Source: Canadians divided on granting entry to asylum seekers from U.S., poll finds – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →