TIFF 2017: At film festival, the truth is out there – if you know where to look – The Globe and Mail

2017/09/12 Leave a comment

Interesting:

This year’s Toronto International Film Festival is filthy with films boasting socially progressive bona fides. Battle of the Sexes, starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell, tackles chauvinism in the sports arena. Kings, with Halle Berry and Daniel Craig, looks at racism through the prism of the Rodney King riots. The same-sex romance Call Me by Your Name aims to be this year’s Brokeback Mountain. Hollywood, don’t you know, is all about speaking truth to power.

TIFF itself is even positioning itself as more socially “woke” than usual, with its Share Her Journey campaign aimed at remedying the unbelievable gender imbalance in the industry (last year, only 7 per cent of the top 250 films were directed by women).

Yet year after year, it’s the less-glitzy documentary program that exhibits true social awareness. It makes sense; with smaller budgets, lowered aesthetic expectations, and a cinematic form built on real-time urgency, documentaries are better positioned to act as a mirror to the current culture.

It was a notion I kept returning to this past weekend, as TIFF lurched from one glitzy, questionable star vehicle to the next – where were the incendiary films that could unite audiences to stand up and cheer? Where were the movies that might actually make a difference in this heightened political climate? As ever, the doc lineup provided the answer, with one of the most culturally conscious selection of films in recent TIFF memory.

Even putting aside its achievement in near-gender parity – 41 per cent of 2017’s doc programming is directed by women, versus the festival’s total programming of 33 per cent – this year’s offerings are impressive, even intimidating, in their progressiveness.

There are films on iconic figures in the black community (Boom for Real, about Jean-Michel Basquiat; Grace Jones: Bloodlight & Bami; The Gospel According to Andre, focusing on fashion icon Andre Leon Talley; Sammy Davis Jr.: I Gotta Be Me; and Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart, which chronicles the life of playwright Lorraine Hansberry); movies examining LGBT issues (Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood); and the expected, though no less appreciated, docs pivoting on here-and-now politics, including The China Hustle, Cocaine Prison, Silas and The Final Year.

On paper, that list might read like a compacted semester on the most liberal campus imaginable. Yet the films are more dynamic than didactic. It is a testament to the programming prowess of TIFF’s longtime documentary expert, Thom Powers – especially when the rest of the festival is crowded with temptations of glossier, more escapist fare.

“Sometimes these things come together as a coincidence,” says Powers, who has been programming docs for TIFF for the past twelve years, and has also worked with the IFC Center in New York, the DOC NYC festival and the Miami International Film Festival. “The Grace Jones film, I’ve been following that for ten years. And then there happened to be a cluster of films, like the Jean-Michel film and the Andre film.”

Although he prefers not to trumpet certain connective themes in his doc selection, Powers admits that this year offers a notable cluster of films that cannot escape the current political climate. “The films come in waves, and outsiders may not see the connections like I do, but there is a notable cluster of films in the program about figures of resistance,” he says. “They come from very different countries and very different filmmakers, but each of the central characters in something like Silas, they impressed me for their courage and eloquence in standing up to larger forces.”

“Right now, in North America, we see people hold up signs of ‘resist’ and rally around this idea of resistance,” he continues. “I think these figures, and these films, have a lot to teach us.”

On the issue of gender parity, Powers admits the doc medium simply makes it easier for female filmmakers to make headway in a notoriously hostile and sexist industry.

“There’s no question there, with budget being a very big factor,” he says. “It takes a lot less money and fewer gatekeepers for women to get started on a documentary project. Or any director, because you don’t have to wait for someone to give yourself permission. You can just get it going with less resources to begin with.”

Source: TIFF 2017: At film festival, the truth is out there – if you know where to look – The Globe and Mail

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Ontario school board promotes literature diversity to reflect student body

2017/09/12 Leave a comment

Makes sense and does not appear to being implemented in an either/or manner.

However, while the motivation is with respect to those from diverse backgrounds, the benefits will be the exposure of different voices for all students:

Students at a high school in Brampton, Ont., will not be reading about star-crossed lovers in Verona this year, or a feisty six-year-old girl in Maycomb, Ala., or a group of young boys marooned on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean.

Instead, they will read about protagonists who look more like them.

The move at Jean Augustine Secondary School, north of Toronto, comes as their district, the Peel District School Board, recently sent a memo to high-school principals, vice-principals and English departments, encouraging them to reconsider the novels being read in class so that the literature is more reflective of a culturally diverse student population.

It’s a bold step, educators say, especially for those who believe in the educational value of mainstays, such as Romeo and Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird and Lord of the Flies.

But an increasing number of school officials both in Peel and in other districts are pushing hard to introduce new voices in literature, in addition to the old ones, to reflect a changing student body.

“There’s probably a small minority who still believe that there is a literary canon that we need to hold onto. I think it’s because it is the way we’ve always been taught,” said Poleen Grewal, associate director of instructional and equity support services at the Peel board. “[But] if we are focusing on equity and inclusion as a school board, the work around inclusion must be visible at the student desk.”

Ms. Grewal sent a memo to English department heads in June, asking them to explore culturally relevant texts after the school board heard from its students that their experiences were not being reflected in classroom literature. She attached a list of books, which includes A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse. Students in Ontario are required to take an English course every year of high school.

She acknowledged that books are costly, but Ms. Grewal said that funds are set aside every year for new purchases.

“We do not expect a clean sweep of texts in every school; however, we would like to see movement towards more culturally responsive texts that connect to the lived experiences and narratives of the students and communities we serve,” Ms. Grewal said.

In the Peel region, minorities have reached a critical mass and now make up 57 per cent of the total population. Close to half of Peel’s residents are South Asians.

Increasingly, school districts are looking at their curriculum to see if it reflects their culturally diverse student population – a shift that is becoming more pronounced by news events beyond the classroom walls.

A spokesman for the Halifax Regional School Board said teachers are looking to develop culturally relevant lesson plans.

Marilyn Manning, acting supervisor for curriculum and resource support at Edmonton Public Schools, said part of a project this summer involved developing guidelines for educators to consider when making book selections. “We’re not about banning books or telling teachers they can’t use these things. It’s really about broadening perspectives and developing the sensitivity to the social considerations,” Ms. Manning said.

This has also become a topic of discussion around North America and there’s sometimes backlash.

In 2015, The Washington Post detailed how a teacher in an inner-city school in Sacramento, Calif., no longer wanted to teach Shakespeare because she felt other works of literature better spoke to her ethnically diverse students. Many reacted negatively, with one teacher responding by saying that shared skin colour doesn’t equal shared experiences, and that Shakespeare still speaks to the human condition.

Closer to home, the Durham District School Board, east of Toronto, recently said that its students don’t necessarily have to read To Kill a Mockingbirdbecause a school official reportedly said it may make some uncomfortable.

At Jean Augustine, which opened its doors last fall and is named after a Canadian social-justice advocate, students in each grade are given a choice of books, ensuring that they answer an essential question around service, leadership, advocacy and innovation. (It is common in English courses for books to have an essential question.) Teachers at the school also decided to offer novels that are written by diverse authors and have characters more reflective of the students. This year, they are reading Indian Horse, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman and How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon, among others.

Lynn Filliter, head of the school’s English department, said there is still a place for Shakespeare and other traditional novels in the classroom. But by adding new voices, she has found that even the most reluctant readers are engaged in learning.

“I think that it validates their own experiences and it empowers them to understand that their voice and their perspective is valued,” Ms. Filliter said. “We try to be thoughtful about having the characters in the novels be reflective of students in our classrooms. We’re a very diverse board. So our books should also be very diverse.”

Ann Lopez, an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, has found in her research on culturally responsive pedagogy that students are more engaged when reading stories that reflect their communities. She said that literary canons are valuable, but she has seen schools make efforts to put other pieces of literature front and centre.

“It’s really about disrupting this idea that knowledge comes from a single space,” Prof. Lopez said. “Of course you must read Shakespeare. But you must read Shakespeare and Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind.”

Source: Ontario school board promotes literature diversity to reflect student body – The Globe and Mail

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ICYMI: ‘Dreamers’ unlikely to rush to claim asylum in Canada, immigration experts say

2017/09/12 Leave a comment

Good survey of opinions:

Canadians shouldn’t expect another flood of asylum seekers to illegally cross the border in the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to scrap a program designed to protect young, undocumented immigrants in the United States, immigration experts say.

The situation of the roughly 800,000 so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, is very different from that of the Haitians and other asylum seekers who’ve been coming to Canada in large numbers via irregular border crossings, said Ottawa immigration lawyer Ronalee Carey.

For one thing, it’s still unclear whether the Dreamers will actually face deportation from the U.S. once the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program ends six months from now.

“If I was a DACA recipient, I would not be trying to come to Canada irregularly,” Carey said. “I think they should sit tight and wait and see what happens.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has given Congress six months to come up with a solution for the Dreamers, so-called because of the proposed DREAM Act, voted down in the Senate in 2010, which would have offered them legal status in exchange for joining the military or attending college. DACA is a stopgap measure, implemented by the Obama administration, that has shielded the Dreamers from deportation but has not given them a path to citizenship.

On Tuesday evening, Trump tweeted that he will “revisit this issue” if Congress is unable to “legalize DACA” in the next six months. A majority of Americans believe Dreamers, many of whom have grown up speaking English and have attended American universities, should be allowed to stay in the U.S.

Carey said it would be a “huge mess” if the Trump administration actually tried to deport the 800,000 undocumented young people.

“That was a smart tweet on his part to sort of take back a little bit,” she said.

If some DACA recipients do head north, they will be very unlikely to meet the criteria for refugee status in Canada, she said. But some could come to Canada through normal immigration streams, like the Express Entry program for skilled workers, which would give them a path to permanent residence. Others could come as international students if they have the money, Carey said. In fact, at least one Canadian post-secondary institution is already trying to capitalize on the opportunity. Huron University College, in London, Ont., announced Wednesday it will be offering a $50,000 scholarship for students affected by the DACA decision.

Even if some Dreamers do decide to brave the odds and seek refugee status in Canada, most wouldn’t need to cross the border illegally to do so, she said, because of an exception in the Safe Third Country Agreement. Most would-be refugees who try to enter Canada from the U.S. can be turned away at official border crossings and told to make their asylum claims in the U.S., which is why so many have been coming into Canada at unauthorized points. But Mexicans, who account for about 70 per cent of DACA recipients, are exempted from this rule because they don’t need a visa to come to Canada. They can claim asylum at any border checkpoint, Carey said.

Independent Senator Ratna Omidvar said she has spoken to a number of Dreamers in recent days, and they seem less inclined to seek asylum in Canada than to look at immigrating through other channels.

“That was the least attractive to them,” she said. “They see themselves in a different way.”

Still, Omidvar said Canada should look at taking in 10,000 to 30,000 DACA recipients over the next several years, though she doesn’t believe the government needs to create a special program for them. She compared the Dreamers to the draft dodgers who came to Canada in the 1960s to escape the Vietnam War.

“I feel that Canadians have a huge amount of empathy and compassion, but their empathy for young people is always louder,” she said.

Irene Bloemraad, a sociology professor at the University of California Berkeley who specializes in immigration, said she doesn’t expect floods of Dreamers to make their way to Canada immediately, but it could be an appealing prospect if Congress fails to come up with a solution in the coming months.

“I don’t think there’s going to be hundreds of thousands of people coming north,” she said. “But I think there’s going to be interest.”

She believes Canada should create a special provision to fast-track DACA recipients who want to come north as skilled workers, students or asylum seekers. What Canadians dislike, she said, “is when you have unanticipated numbers of people crossing the borders and then claiming asylum. … But when those flows can be structured in a way, then I think Canadians are very, very generous.”

The issue has come up at a sensitive time for the Canadian government, with NAFTA negotiations underway between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Asked about a potential influx of Dreamers to Canada, Hursh Jaswal, spokesperson for Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen, said the government “won’t speculate on any possible future trends.”

But Bloemraad said Canada needs to look ahead. “Even if the Canadian government is worried about how being proactive with regards to the DACA recipients might have complications for NAFTA negotiations, the alternative, not doing anything, is going to create much bigger policy problems down the road.”

Andy Semotiuk, a Canadian and U.S. immigration lawyer, said Canada has other immigration hurdles to face beyond the DACA recipients. He pointed to the 260,000 Salvadorans and 86,000 Hondurans whose temporary protected status in the U.S. is set to expire, saying the trend of illegal migration to Canada could become “overwhelming.”

Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez is set to go to Los Angeles this week to try and head off that possible next wave of migrants by correcting misinformation about Canada’s immigration system.

Source: ‘Dreamers’ unlikely to rush to claim asylum in Canada, immigration experts say | National Post

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Travelling. Blog restarts Tuesday 

2017/09/08 Leave a comment

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Canada should welcome up to 30,000 DACA young people facing deportation in U.S. – Senator Omidvar

2017/09/07 Leave a comment

As long as they come through the regular immigration program, meet the requirements, and are part of current levels, suspect most Canadians would be comfortable with accepting Dreamers:

Canada could gain from the Trump administration’s decision to end a program that has allowed young, undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States for years, says Ontario Independent Sen. Ratna Omidvar.

In an interview on CBC News Network’s Power & Politics, Omidvar said the program’s beneficiaries are precisely the kind of immigrants Canada should be pursuing for its economic migrant program.

“These individuals are low-hanging fruit for us,” Omidvar told host Rosemary Barton. “They speak fluent English, they’ve been educated in the U.S., most of them have been to college or university, some of them have work experience. They understand the North American working culture.”

“On top of that, in order to qualify to be a ‘Dreamer’ you have to have biometrics testing, you have to have a criminality check. So this is America’s loss but it could be Canada’s gain.”

People who reside in the U.S. under this program are often called “Dreamers” after the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM). The bill was crafted to help those brought to the U.S. as children by allowing them to live there providing they graduate from school and have no criminal record.

The act has been struggling to become law since 2001, and has often seemed close to bipartisan success. But in recent years more Republicans have turned against it.

The estimated 800,000 young people who migrated to the U.S. illegally with their parents and are now living there under the DACA program face deportation to a country they now have little connection with, after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Tuesday the Trump administration would rescind DACA.

Omidvar proposes that Canada give “special consideration” to 10,000 to 30,000 of these young people either through the existing economic stream or as international students.

An opportunity for Canada

“We know that international students have already been identified by our system as priorities for permanent residency,” said Omidvar. “And in truth, we have not done so well in turning an aspiration into a reality because most international students still choose to go back.

“So, here are people who could apply for international student programs. Universities and colleges could come up with some special initiative or special outreach — college-to-college, university-to-university — maybe even a special scholarship program. But over time, they would be top of the line for economic integration,” Omidvar added.

While Omidvar is sensitive to the fact that Canada is in the midst of complex trade negotiations with both the U.S. and Mexico (the country of origin for many DACA young people) she says if Canada fails to reach out, other countries could reap the benefits:

“Just as this is an opportunity for Canada, it is also an opportunity for other countries — including source countries of origin like Mexico and other Latin American countries.

“These young people have resiliency. They understand how the American system works. They understand American insecurities and securities. And if their personal safety can be guaranteed in source countries, maybe this is the new elite that will participate in nation building in those countries which their parents left, 20-plus years ago.”

Larry Smith, the Conservative leader in the Senate, declined to comment.

The Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is a temporary reprieve from deportation, renewable every two years (for a fee), but has no path to citizenship.

Canada should welcome up to 30,000 DACA young people facing deportation in U.S., senator says – Politics – CBC News

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Andrew Potter: Don’t be so free to set limits on your right to hear

2017/09/07 Leave a comment

The first part of the article provides a useful account of the rationale for free speech along with its purpose, and why some free speech is subject to less protections than free speech that meets these core principles: “search for truth, the quest for self-development and the fostering of democracy.”

But then, when Potter turns to the right to hear, he seems to ignore the question of whether the right to hear should also be subject to the same test of core principles or not. Perhaps his next column?:

After a few hundred years of working on it you’d think by now we’d have a handle on this freedom of expression thing. But it’s 2017 and here we are, still arguing about who has the right to speak, on what platforms, to which audiences and in what contexts. We don’t agree on much, except that free speech is a good thing except when it isn’t. And increasingly, it isn’t more often than it is.

This failure to take free speech seriously is a thoroughly bipartisan affliction. The monkey-king leaders of the alt-right and their talking muppet servants like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos have effectively turned hate speech into performance art, with no real interest in either the consequences of the hate or in the value sincere debate can contribute to democracy.

And the ctrl-left, from campus snowflakes to the just-in-it-for-the-riot forces of antifa, happily play into their hands, from whining about safe spaces to forcibly and violently preventing people from exercising their legitimate civil liberties.

But there’s a bigger problem at work, which is that this sort of behaviour from both sides is not actually at odds with the most common understandings of free expression and its rationale. In fact, just the opposite is the case: most of the current attempts to restrict free speech are natural extensions of the justifications for it.

If you ask most people why free speech is a good thing, they’ll point out that it’s in the constitution. But why is it in the constitution? Well, maybe because it’s good for democracy, for artistic ennoblement, or self-discovery, or because it is the foundation of scientific inquiry or for the search for truth more generally.

What all of these justifications for a right to free expression have in common is that they are consequentialist in nature. That is, they ground the defence of freedom of speech in the effects speech has. On the whole, we believe that allowing broad protections for freedom of expression results in good things for society.

Actually, the court goes even further. It has identified what it calls the “core principles” that are served by free expression, which include the search for truth, the quest for self-development and the fostering of democracy. As the court sees it, speech that doesn’t serve these goals is not necessarily entitled to the same constitutional protections.

Lots of people have pointed out that this amounts to a reverse-onus clause. In theory, it should be up to the state to explain why it should have the right to limit speech, but in Canada we are well down the road to a place where people have to justify to the courts why their speech should be permitted. It’s not a long toss from there to the bizarro-land conclusion that entire groups can be silenced on the grounds that this silencing is an effective way of serving the goals that free speech serves more generally.

We got here because the problem is with the way we framed the question in the first place, as a debate over the benefits of free speech and the consequences we are willing to tolerate. Instead, what we should be focused on is the right of people to hear what others have to say, and how this fits into a broader account of individual freedom.

What’s the difference? If you turn the free speech debate on its head and treat it as a right to hear what someone has to say, the constitutional rationale for it becomes a lot clearer: The right to hear or read something and judge its worth or merit for yourself is the basis for being treated as an equal, rational and autonomous agent. We shield things from children precisely because we don’t think their rational faculties are sufficiently well developed. They don’t know how to evaluate something by their own lights. That’s why a big part of parenting is bringing kids along the path to autonomy, teaching them to judge and think for themselves.

Hearing what people have to say and judging its merits for yourself is the mark of being an adult. And part of being an adult is having the right to make mistakes, to make bad judgments or decisions, and take responsibility for what follows.

It just so happens that a society made up of autonomous individuals making independent rational judgments about what others have to say is the basic condition for the possibility of a liberal democracy. The fact that so many people, on the right and the left, are willing to have their right to hear limited by governments, universities or even social media mobs, is a further sign of the relentless infantilization of our culture — and goes a long way toward explaining the current crisis of liberalism

This line of defence has a solid philosophical and legal pedigree. Probably the best-known version is found in John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty, where he argued that the right to speak was limited by the harms that result. But this focus on the consequences of speech is firmly embedded in the Supreme Court’s interpretations of the freedoms outlined in section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court’s take, through various rulings from Taylor to Keegstra to Whatcott, has been relentlessly consequentialist, always taking care to weigh the guaranteed right to free expression against the harms — both actual and hypothetical — that might come from hate speech.

Actually, the court goes even further. It has identified what it calls the “core principles” that are served by free expression, which include the search for truth, the quest for self-development and the fostering of democracy. As the court sees it, speech that doesn’t serve these goals is not necessarily entitled to the same constitutional protections.

Lots of people have pointed out that this amounts to a reverse-onus clause. In theory, it should be up to the state to explain why it should have the right to limit speech, but in Canada we are well down the road to a place where people have to justify to the courts why their speech should be permitted. It’s not a long toss from there to the bizarro-land conclusion that entire groups can be silenced on the grounds that this silencing is an effective way of serving the goals that free speech serves more generally.

We got here because the problem is with the way we framed the question in the first place, as a debate over the benefits of free speech and the consequences we are willing to tolerate. Instead, what we should be focused on is the right of people to hear what others have to say, and how this fits into a broader account of individual freedom.

What’s the difference? If you turn the free speech debate on its head and treat it as a right to hear what someone has to say, the constitutional rationale for it becomes a lot clearer: The right to hear or read something and judge its worth or merit for yourself is the basis for being treated as an equal, rational and autonomous agent. We shield things from children precisely because we don’t think their rational faculties are sufficiently well developed. They don’t know how to evaluate something by their own lights. That’s why a big part of parenting is bringing kids along the path to autonomy, teaching them to judge and think for themselves.

Hearing what people have to say and judging its merits for yourself is the mark of being an adult. And part of being an adult is having the right to make mistakes, to make bad judgments or decisions, and take responsibility for what follows.

It just so happens that a society made up of autonomous individuals making independent rational judgments about what others have to say is the basic condition for the possibility of a liberal democracy. The fact that so many people, on the right and the left, are willing to have their right to hear limited by governments, universities or even social media mobs, is a further sign of the relentless infantilization of our culture — and goes a long way toward explaining the current crisis of liberalism.

Source: Andrew Potter: Don’t be so free to set limits on your right to hear | National Post

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ICYMI – Attitudes to Islam in Europe are hardening: The Economist

2017/09/07 Leave a comment

Good summary of recent European polling and worrisome (and correct) fear of further polarization:

IF integration means doing a bit better in education and the job market, then there are grounds to be optimistic about the status of Muslim communities across western Europe. But when you ask Europeans how they feel about Islam and its adherents, then the picture is much harsher and in some ways getting worse.

Those are the broad impressions left by a raft of recently published surveys on the subject. The authors of a study by Germany’s Bertelsmann Foundation, focusing mainly on Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, found some encouraging indicators on schooling and employment but still reported a big income disparity between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Professional progress was “not accompanied by an equal level of…social acceptance,” noted the report, which looked not at refugees but longer-standing Muslim residents. The authors were troubled by the finding that 20% of respondents did not want Muslim neighbours. That number would almost certainly have been higher if the study had looked at countries further south and east. A poll by Pew Research, an American think-tank, found that a majority of people in Hungary, Italy, Poland, Greece and Spain harboured hostile attitudes to Islam while only a minority of northwestern Europeans held similar views.

The Bertelsmann report welcomed the fact that in France, only one in ten Muslims leaves school before turning 17, compared with about a third of Muslim youngsters in Germany. But learning doesn’t seem to guarantee earning. In neither Germany nor Switzerland was there much difference between the employment rate of Muslims and non-Muslims. In France, by contrast, the jobless rate was 14% for Muslims compared with 8% for non-Muslims.

Moreover, there are some clear signs of hardening attitudes. In England, around four people in ten acknowledged that they have become more suspicious of Muslims following terrorist attacks in London and Manchester. That was one of the findings of the latest study published by Hope Not Hate, an anti-extremism lobby group.

Looking at a series of recent data, it concluded that in many ways sentiment in England was gradually becoming more liberal and tolerant of diversity, but Islam and the reactions it inspired were a clear exception. About half the population apparently thought Islam posed a “threat to Western civilisation” while a quarter regarded it as a “dangerous” religion because of its perceived capacity to incite violence. The picture changes depending on how the question is framed. The pool of respondents who opined (50% versus 22%) that the Muslim faith was a civilisational threat also agreed by a clear majority that it was wrong to blame an entire religion for a few extremists.

In Germany, a widely-quoted poll last year found that more than half the population believed that Islam did not belong in their country. But attitudes to Muslim people, as opposed to their religion, can sometimes be much more emollient, albeit varying a lot with the respondent’s political ideology.

Pew found that half the Germans who hewed to the political left thought Muslims were making a good effort to adapt to the country’s way of life, compared with one in five of those who leaned rightwards. The numbers for Britons of right and left were almost exactly the same. Given the many different ways in which progress (or regress) can be measured, the state of Islam in Europe may always be a vessel that some see as half-empty and others see as half-full.

What’s worrying is that almost every terrorist movement aims to polarise feelings in a way that drives people into opposing camps. The terrorist who claims to represent a certain community often hopes that the authorities, and perhaps society as whole, will stigmatise that community and provoke in it a defensive mood, so that violence starts to seem like a reasonable option. Historically, such polarising tactics have often worked.

Although things have not yet reached that point, these poll results suggest something sinister: it’s perfectly conceivable that the murderous van-drivers and knife-wielders who claim to speak for Muslims in Europe could enjoy a similar “success” in polarising sentiment across the continent.

Source: Attitudes to Islam in Europe are hardening

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ICYMI – UN calls out Ottawa over lengthy immigration detention stays

2017/09/07 Leave a comment

No major surprises:

A United Nations committee has urged Ottawa to limit the use of immigration detention and drop a bilateral pact that turns asylum-seekers back at the U.S. land border.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination makes the recommendations in its recent review of how Canada’s government policies and programs are affecting minority groups.

“The Committee recommends . . . immigration detention is only undertaken as a last resort after fully considering alternative non-custodial measures. Establish a legal time limit on the detention of migrants,” said the report released in Geneva this week.

Canada should also “rescind or at least suspend the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States of America to ensure that all individuals who attempt to enter the State party through a land border are provided with equal access to asylum proceedings,” the report said.

Ottawa has been under intense criticism for its handling of migrants in detention and the surge of asylum seekers attempting to cross into Canada at unmarked points along the U.S. border.

A Star investigation, Caged by Canada, this year into immigration detention in Canada found a system that indefinitely warehouses non-citizens away from public scrutiny in high-security criminal detention facilities.

Some of the detainees are former permanent residents who were convicted for crimes and await deportation. Others are failed refugees waiting for removal or people deemed inadmissible to Canada, flight risks or dangers to the public. More than 100 of the detainees had spent at least three months in jail, and one-third of them have been held for more than a year.

“We raised the issue of indefinite detention of non-status immigrants and their children, and the committee has listened,” said Shalini Konanur, director of the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario.

The Safe Third Country agreement, introduced in 2004, prevents refugees from making asylum claims in both the U.S. and Canada, which clogs the system. Claimants are barred from entering the other country for asylum unless they belong to one of four exemption groups.

However, the ban does not apply to those who sneak through unmarked points along the border, pushing some asylum-seekers to trek through no man’s land, mostly commonly in Quebec, B.C. and in Manitoba, where hundreds walked in the dead of winter this year, sometimes overnight, to Emerson.

“Given the current xenophobic political climate in the U.S.A., it is no surprise that the committee has called on Canada to rescind or at least temporarily suspend the Safe Third Country Agreement. Canada cannot turn a blind eye to what is happening down south,” said Debbie Douglas of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants.

A Harvard University Law School review in February also warned about the negative effect of President Donald Trump’s administration on refugees and urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to consider pulling out from the bilateral deal.

Hursh Jaswal, a spokesperson for Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen, said Canada has a robust asylum system and the Safe Third Country Agreement is an important tool for the orderly handling of refugee claims on both sides of the border.

“While the executive order affected the U.S. system for resettling refugees from abroad, it did not impact the U.S. system for handling domestic asylum claims,” Jaswal said. “Our government is monitoring the situation closely and will carefully evaluate any new developments for potential changes to the domestic asylum system in the U.S.”

On immigration detention, a spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the government is committed to improving the system.

“We need to minimize the use of provincial jails and try to avoid, as much as humanly possible, the holding of children in detention,” said Scott Bardsley, adding that Ottawa is investing $138 million to expand alternatives to detention, improving detention conditions, providing better mental health services and reducing reliance on provincial jails for immigration holding.

“Under the new government, the number of immigration detentions has decreased, despite an increase in visitors to Canada,” Bardsley said.

The UN committee also raised alarm over the treatment of migrant workers in Canada.

“Although the temporary foreign worker program conducts inspections, temporary migrant workers are reportedly susceptible to exploitation and abuses, and are sometimes denied basic health services, and employment and pension benefits to which they may make contributions,” it warned.

The report called on Ottawa to collect race-based economic and social data to improve monitoring and evaluation of its programs that aim at eliminating racial discrimination and disparities.

On a positive note, the committee praised Ontario for establishing the anti-racism directorate; Quebec, for passing a bill on combating hate speech and incitement to violence; and Ottawa for its condemnation of Islamophobia, as well as progress made in addressing discrimination against Indigenous peoples, resettling 46,000 Syrian refugees and restoring health care funding for refugees.

Source: UN calls out Ottawa over lengthy immigration detention stays | Toronto Star

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

ICYMI: How Canada has been secretly giving asylum to gay people in Chechnya fleeing persecution

2017/09/07 Leave a comment

Good long read on the Government’s program to give asylum to Chechnyan gays (the Conservative government was similarly supportive of Iranian LGBTQ asylum seekers: Canada a haven for persecuted gay Iranians: Kenney | canada.com):

For three months, the federal government has been secretly spiriting gay Chechen men from Russia to Canada, under a clandestine program unique in the world.

The evacuations, spearheaded by Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, fall outside the conventions of international law and could further impair already tense relations between Russia and Canada. But the Liberal government decided to act regardless.

As of this week, 22 people – about a third of those who were being sheltered in Russian safe houses – are now in Toronto and other Canadian cities. Several others are expected to arrive in the coming days or weeks.

“Canada accepted a large number of people who are in great danger, and that is wonderful,” said Tanya Lokshina, Russian program director for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based organization, in a telephone interview. “The Canadian government deserves much praise for showing such openness and goodwill to provide sanctuary for these people. They did the right thing.”

“It’s important that our community, who are concerned about them, know that they’re here, that they’re safe” – Kimahli Powell, executive director of Rainbow Railroad

The decision may be seen as controversial. Homosexuals in many parts of the world are harassed, imprisoned, even – as happened recently in Indonesia – publicly flogged.

And the government is struggling to accommodate thousands of mostly Haitian asylum-seekers flooding into Canada from the United States, even as opposition politicians demand that Ottawa find a way to plug the loophole that lets them in.

But the Liberals decided the situation was unique: Chechen security forces were rounding up gay men in a program, placing them in need of immediate rescue.

Source: How Canada has been secretly giving asylum to gay people in Chechnya fleeing persecution – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Refugees Tagged with , ,

Number of asylum seekers dwindles as Ottawa’s messaging appears to pay off

2017/09/06 Leave a comment

Encouraging. But like all numbers, too early to say if an ongoing trend, as a result of better messaging and outreach, or a dip reflecting the start of the school year or, indeed, some mixture of the two:

An effort to inform potential asylum-seekers that crossing the border is no free ride to a new Canadian life appears to be working as their numbers continue to rapidly dwindle – but the start of the school year is also playing a role.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which is monitoring the reception of asylum seekers at the most popular irregular crossing south of Montreal, says the number of processed claims has plunged to 10-50 on recent days from a peak of several hundred daily arrivals earlier in the summer.

Nearly 8,000 arrivals came in July and the first half of August in Quebec, the bulk of whom were Haitians who are threatened with removal from the United States by the Trump administration. The Quebec government says about 2,700 of them are under 18.

Jean-Nicolas Beuze, Canadian representative for the UNHCR, says while the information campaign has helped, other factors are also at play. The school year started in Quebec last week and will be in full swing in most of North America this week and it’s a major factor for migrant people who move around the globe.

“When you see the number of children, it helps explain the reduction,” Mr. Beuze said. “We see this everywhere. You don’t move with family during the school year unless bombs are falling on your head or you’re being individually persecuted.”

In recent weeks, the federal government and Haitian community leaders and media have spread word in the United States that asylum claims for Haitians who have lived long-term in that country are unlikely to succeed.

About half of Haitian asylum-seekers have been accepted in Canada in recent years, but those who have lived in the United States for six years or more under the country’s temporary protected status (TPS) permits will face questions about why they didn’t claim in the United States, hindering their chances.

“I think the message is getting through,” said Jean-Ernest Pierre, an immigration lawyer and community radio host in Montreal who has made appearances south of the border lately. “People understand better that nothing is guaranteed. Canada doesn’t want Haitians.”

Mr. Beuze, whose agency has conducted interviews with asylum claimants, said many are surprised to learn there are long delays for finding housing and getting work permits.

While conventional wisdom has taken hold that the vast majority of Haitian border crossers were among 50,000 holders of the TPS permit who have lived in the United States for 7-16 years with special permission, Mr. Beuze said more of them may have been just transiting through the United States than initially believed. He could not offer a statistical breakdown, however, nor have federal or provincial officials.

Wracked by a terrible economy, a massive cholera epidemic imported by UN troops, the fallout from a shattering earthquake and Hurricane Matthew in 2016, Haiti has had an exodus of people looking for a better life. Tens of thousands went to Brazil, Chile and Venezuela after hearing they might find work there. About 40,000 of them started making their way north mostly by land last year according to U.S. Homeland Security and about 10,000 have arrived in the United States through Mexico.

Steve Forester, an immigration policy co-ordinator with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, said it is “premature and unwise” for TPS holders to head to Canada right now, but it’s a different story for Haitians who more recently landed in the United States and have no status or protection.

He said getting a fair immigration hearing in the United States is increasingly difficult, particularly for those in detention who don’t have access to translation and legal services. “It’s not insane for people without status to try their luck in Canada, given the Trump administration’s general attitude.”

Mr. Forester said the struggle to get the Trump administration to extend TPS protection beyond the January deadline “is an uphill battle,” but Haitians with status in the United States should stay put for now.

He also said the lifting of the TPS protection in January means holders return to their previous immigration status. They won’t all immediately be deported. “Having status in the U.S. will do nothing good for claims in Canada,” he said.

Mr. Beuze said getting good information on the precise origins and reasoning of the Haitian asylum-seekers in Canada has been challenging. Many of them are wary of authority figures and fear accidentally damaging their claims, he said.

Mr. Pierre hosted a public radio town hall for Montreal’s Haitian community on Sunday in front of hundreds of people, but he heard surprisingly few queries about the Haitian immigrants from the crowd.

The new arrivals are causing as much controversy among Haitian-Canadians as the wider community, he said. “They’re our compatriots, but they’ve imposed their presence here. People who have lived here for 20 or 30 years are Canadian through and through. Giving welfare to people who have never worked here isn’t that popular with them, either.”

Mr. Pierre, however, hammered home how dire the situation is in Haiti, given what Mr. Forester described as the “triple-whammy” of earthquake, cholera and hurricane. “People are starving after crops failed with the 2016 hurricane,” Mr. Pierre said. “They’re just doing what any of us would do.”

Source: Number of asylum seekers dwindles as Ottawa’s messaging appears to pay off – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

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