University class takes on case of B.C. woman stripped of citizenship [Lost Canadian]

2016/12/06 Leave a comment

Good learning exercise (unclear whether the the person in question applied for an exemption, the normal route in such cases, which on the facts presented in the article, would likely have been granted):

A group of university students in Squamish, B.C., is hoping their school work will help change the life of a woman whose Canadian citizenship was stripped under a little-known policy.

Leanne Roderick, an instructor at Quest University, wanted the 20 students in her democracy and justice class to meet someone who was really wrestling with representative democracy in Canada, so she introduced them to a local woman named Byrdie Funk.

Funk was born in Mexico to Canadian parents and moved to a small community in Manitoba when she was two months old. Though her upbringing was quintessentially Canadian, Funk learned earlier this year that her nationality had been revoked.

An unknown number of people born abroad to Canadian parents between 1977 and 1981 were stripped of their nationality because they were unaware of an obscure piece of legislation requiring them to apply to retain their citizenship before the age of 28.

The American election made immigration a popular topic of conversation, and Roderick wanted her students to see how a real person was impacted by government policy.

“To be able to sit down with someone and hear their story, a very real story, I just wanted to put a face on this big issue of citizenship in Canada,” she explained.

After Funk spoke to the class, Roderick tasked them with developing a policy brief advising government on how politicians could help so-called lost Canadians.

The results were surprising, the instructor said, with students delivering in-depth, well-researched plans that included suggestions of private members’ bills and amendments to the Citizenship Act.

“They really are passionate. I think that age range kind of gets a bad rap sometimes, but they really do care and they really do want to be politically engaged citizens,” Roderick said.

Several students forwarded their work to MPs and cabinet ministers, encouraging them to get involved in Funk’s case.

Third-year student Ellie Fraser sent her policy brief to four MPs, but said not one responded, even with a note thanking her for writing.

Source: University class takes on case of B.C. woman stripped of citizenship | CTV News

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Tory leadership hopeful Chris Alexander mentions Rachel Notley at speech and crowd chants ‘lock her up

2016/12/06 Leave a comment

His political and personal judgement is in question.

Sharp contrast between John McCain showing leadership in 2008 when responding to a similar angry crowd by saying “I have to tell you. Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States.”

And the sheer hypocrisy, given his complaints about being subject to hateful tweets in last week’s CBC At Issue panel:

Federal Conservative leadership hopeful Chris Alexander says he didn’t stop a crowd calling for Alberta Premier Rachel Notley to be locked up because politicians need to listen to constituents.

The former immigration minister was speaking at a rally against the provincial NDPs’ planned carbon tax Saturday when protesters began the “Lock her up” chant popularized during president-elect Donald Trump’s campaign.

“I totally disapprove of that particular chant. I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t think it’s the right thing to say at a rally or elsewhere, and that’s why I didn’t join it,” Alexander said Sunday.

The Edmonton rally was organized by Rebel Media, an online news and right-wing opinion outlet, and video of the incident was posted on Twitter by the website’s Alberta bureau chief Sheila Gunn Reid.

The video shows the ralliers start by chanting “Vote her out,” but as they grow louder, the message changes.
As they chant “Lock her up,” Alexander smiles and appears to gesture in time with the chant, nodding along.

Someone can be heard shouting, “That’s enough! That’s enough!” in the background, and as Alexander smiles and nods, the camera turns to face the crowd.

At no point in the video does Alexander stop the protesters or say anything about their chant.

“You don’t pick it up in the video, but I started to say the words in time with them, ’Vote her out,’ and then the next point I made was about the ballot box,” he said. “I expressed my disapproval by talking about something completely different: voting. I think that was pretty clear.”

Source: Tory leadership hopeful Chris Alexander mentions Rachel Notley at speech and crowd chants ‘lock her up’ | National Post

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The Scourge of Racial Bias in New York State’s Prisons – The New York Times

2016/12/05 Leave a comment

Good but disturbing investigative reporting:

Most forbidding are the maximum-security penitentiaries — Attica, Clinton, Great Meadow — in rural areas where the population is almost entirely white and nearly every officer is too. The guards who work these cellblocks rarely get to know a black person who is not behind bars.

Whether loud and vulgar or insinuated and masked, racial bias in the state prison system is a fact of life.

It is also measurable.

A review by The New York Times of tens of thousands of disciplinary cases against inmates in 2015, hundreds of pages of internal reports and three years of parole decisions found that racial disparities were embedded in the prison experience in New York.

In most prisons, blacks and Latinos were disciplined at higher rates than whites — in some cases twice as often, the analysis found. They were also sent to solitary confinement more frequently and for longer durations. At Clinton, a prison near the Canadian border where only one of the 998 guards is African-American, black inmates were nearly four times as likely to be sent to isolation as whites, and they were held there for an average of 125 days, compared with 90 days for whites.

A greater share of black inmates are in prison for violent offenses, and minority inmates are disproportionately younger, factors that could explain why an inmate would be more likely to break prison rules, state officials said. But even after accounting for these elements, the disparities in discipline persisted, The Times found.

The disparities were often greatest for infractions that gave discretion to officers, like disobeying a direct order. In these cases, the officer has a high degree of latitude to determine whether a rule is broken and does not need to produce physical evidence. The disparities were often smaller, according to the Times analysis, for violations that required physical evidence, like possession of contraband.

Blacks make up only 14 percent of the state’s population but almost half of its prisoners. Racial inequities at the front end of the criminal justice system — arrest, conviction and sentencing — have been well documented.

The degree of racial inequity and its impact in the prison system as documented by The Times have rarely, if ever, been investigated. Nor are these issues systematically tracked by state officials. But for black inmates, what happens inside can be profoundly damaging.

Bias in prison discipline has a ripple effect — it prevents access to jobs and to educational and therapeutic programs, diminishing an inmate’s chances of being paroled. And each denial is likely to mean two more years behind bars.

A Times analysis of first-time hearings before the State Board of Parole over a three-year period ending in May found that one in four white inmates were released but fewer than one in six black inmates were.

Source: The Scourge of Racial Bias in New York State’s Prisons – The New York Times

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Ottawa: Community tells Ontario government of systemic racism

2016/12/05 Leave a comment

The last in a series of public consultations to help inform the Ontario anti-racism directorate:

Hiwot Adhanom couldn’t believe what she was hearing from two co-workers conducting a hiring process for a public service job.

Her colleagues were attempting to determine who might meet the job criteria’s preference for Canadian citizens. “The first answer is ‘I guess we can tell by their name’,” Adhanom said she overheard them say. It wasn’t until they saw her nameplate that they stopped to think that Canadian citizenship means more than that. It was not her first experience with racism in a workplace.

At another job, a manager at a retail store who hired her nonchalantly told her how she was “not anything like all of the other black people who come in here looking for work.” “She saw nothing wrong with that, she thought she was paying me a compliment by insulting me and every other person who happens to be black,” said Adhanom, one of dozens of people who lined up behind microphones Saturday to tell their experiences to Ontario’s political leaders.

The anti-racism directorate is attempting to come up with a strategy to address systemic racism within government. The meeting is the last of 10 public consultations held across the province before it comes up with a policy, which is expected to be released in the spring of 2017.

For Adhanom, it was asking the directorate to develop tools and resources that employers are required to use to ensure fairness and equality in hiring.

It was just one of a spectrum of concerns about systemic racism and injustice that Ontario’s minister responsible for anti-racism, Michael Coteau, heard about from an audience of 200 during the two-hour meeting at the RA Centre. Others described systemic racism in the criminal justice system, health care, child welfare system, schools and the hiring process. Many called on more education as a means to combat it.

Attorney General Yasir Naqvi also attended the meeting, along with local MPPs Nathalie Des Rosiers, John Fraser and Marie-France Lalonde. Ottawa police chief Charles Bordeleau, other senior police officers and Ottawa councillors Jeff Leiper and Mark Taylor were also present.

The directorate’s goal is to eliminate systemic racism in institutions governed or regulated by the Ontario government, increase awareness and understanding of systemic racism among the public, promote fair practices and policies that lead to racial equity, and collaborate with the community, business organizations and the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

“You have to start in government. You can’t go out there preaching that change needs to happen but not take care of that change internally,” said Coteau. “What we are talking about today is not about putting in quotas or saying ‘X amount of jobs have to be this,’ it’s about removing barriers so people have the opportunity to compete on a fair basis to get the types of jobs that they are qualified to get.”

Source: Ottawa Citizen | Latest Breaking News | Business | Sports | Canada …

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Europe’s Jews have reason to fear today’s political climate: Saunders

2016/12/05 Leave a comment

Interesting column by Doug Saunders:

To understand this, it’s worth following the work of Yascha Mounk, a Harvard University scholar. Mr. Mounk made headlines this week with a new study, co-authored with Roberto Stefan Foa at the University of Melbourne, which found that voters in most European countries and the United States are increasingly less likely to believe it is “essential” to live in a democracy. This effect is stronger among younger people and right-wing voters.

For Mr. Mounk, this is part of a larger phenomenon. Two years ago, he published Stranger in My Own Country, a memoir of his life as a young German Jew. It noted that the Christian Europeans around him, while professing liberal tolerance, were continuing to treat Jews such as himself as different, other or outside. In an essay titled “Europe’s Jewish Problem,” he linked these observations to the rise of the new right-wing populist movements.

“Europe’s political climate is more hostile to Jews now than at any time since the second intifada,” he wrote. But he concluded that it wasn’t Muslim anti-Semitism leading the trend; rather, it was the far larger populations of Christians. As he noted, the number of Spanish citizens who express unfavourable views of Jews is almost 50 per cent; Muslims make up less than 3 per cent of Spain’s population and aren’t growing fast. So “a European anti-Semite remains far more likely to be Christian than Muslim.”

The larger problem, he concluded, is “the tendency of wily politicians to play Jews and Muslims against each other for purposes of their own.”

A recent large-scale survey of French attitudes toward Jews by political scientist Dominique Reynié found that anti-Semitism in general is declining, but the country’s Muslims do indeed have higher rates of anti-Jewish beliefs than the general population. What really stood out, though, were the many people who support Marine Le Pen’s National Front party: They were even more likely than Muslims to agree with Jewish-conspiracy claims such as “Jews use their status as victims of the Nazi genocide for their own interest” or “the Jews are responsible for the current economic crisis.” And they were almost equally likely to support statements such as “there is a Zionist conspiracy on a global scale,” at rates twice as high as the general population. Muslims make up only 7 per cent of the population of France, but Ms. Le Pen commands at least one-fifth of the population, and her support is rising fast.

These parties and movements, Mr. Mounk concluded, attract those who are hostile toward both Muslims and Jews. “The very same revival of nationalism that has been fuelled by their invocation of Jews [as foils for their politics],” he wrote, “can, in this way, quickly turn into anti-Semitism.” And that, combined with a growing group of voters who don’t care about democracy, is something that Europe ought to fear.

Source: Europe’s Jews have reason to fear today’s political climate – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Interest in public service jobs has increased since Trudeau’s election – Macleans.ca

2016/12/05 Leave a comment

Of note:

Not only is enrollment up in public administration fields of study, but now experts say there’s a new enthusiasm among students.

“Let me be blunt. It was miserable under the Harper government,” says Robert Shepherd, a Carleton University professor and president of the Canadian Association of Programs in Public Administration. “Nobody wanted to be there. Our numbers dropped off for [programs] connected to the federal government. It was hard to attract students.”

Now Ottawa seems to be investing in its public service employees, and Trudeau’s big budget means greater job opportunities. So while some might attribute the reason for students’ renewed enthusiasm to a “sunny ways” Prime Minister, the spike in interest for public policy and administration programs isn’t always altruistic.

Shepherd credits the sputtering economy as a common thread he hears from students looking for public service work. “[Students] see government as being a relatively stable way to anchor themselves,” he says. “Back in the 1980s, that’s what I was thinking too. The economy sucked and I saw government as having a stable career.”

While the current crop of students are not thinking about a 35-year career with a pension at the end, the Baby Boomers who did see retirement beckoning. “We’ll be in a market where we’ll need a lot of people in a hurry,” says Michael Wernick, clerk of the Privy Council of Canada. “We’re not hiring clerical people, because that stuff is pretty much automated. We’re looking for people with social media and acute management skills.”

That’s not to say everyone is jumping at available jobs. Shepherd remembers a job posting for the CRTC recently hitting his desk, which he sent out to various universities asking them to send back names of interested students. The response? Crickets.

“Where demand is outstripping supply is in the area of regulatory public policy. I’m thinking places like the CRTC, Food Inspection, Health Canada,” Shepherd says. “If you said to students there are good jobs in a regulatory agency, they look at you as though, “Why would I want to do that?’ ”

Source: Interest in public service jobs has increased since Trudeau’s election – Macleans.ca

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Thousands of alleged fugitives nabbed at Canadian borders in wake of CBC Toronto investigation

2016/12/05 Leave a comment

Hard to understand why this took so long:

Canada’s borders have become less porous in the wake of a CBC News investigation that revealed a major security gap in the way passengers were being screened before being allowed into Canada.

In the past 12 months since new screening measures came into effect on Nov. 21, 2015, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) apprehended 3,067 people with outstanding criminal arrest warrants at border crossings.

In the previous 12 months, before the changes came into effect, the CBSA caught just 556 alleged fugitives.

The almost fivefold increase is in large part due to the efforts of a southwestern Ontario woman who demanded answers after being sexually assaulted — allegedly by a Nigerian man who was able to get back into Canada despite having warrants out for his arrest.

“Knowing that potentially some other person’s rapist has been caught at the border, or somebody that’s done something terrible to someone else, gives me some comfort,” she said.

CBC News is not identifying her because she is a victim of sexual assault.

The changes to national border security came last November after CBC News looked into her case and discovered front-line border agents at primary inspection points did not have access to the Canadian Police Information Centre.

CPIC is a database detailing criminal records, individuals with outstanding arrest warrants and other information outlining who might be a risk to Canadians. Only travellers deemed suspicious and sent for more secondary checks were being screened through CPIC at border crossings. Now CBSA agents at all inspection points screen every passenger arriving in Canada through CPIC.

Jean Pierre Fortin, the head of the union representing Canada’s border and immigration agents, says the changes have boosted national security.

Border picture

Canadian governments had quietly been aware of the loophole in border security since at least 2002. Yet giving all front-line CBSA agents access to a database was considered too costly. (Sarah Bridge/CBC)

“It’s sad that this only came because of a terrible situation … but we got a better tool through CPIC to our front-line officers to be able to intervene right away.”

Source: Thousands of alleged fugitives nabbed at Canadian borders in wake of CBC Toronto investigation – Toronto – CBC News

Filed under Immigration, Security Tagged with ,

Syrian exodus to Canada: One year later, a look at who the refugees are and where they went

2016/12/03 Leave a comment

Really good analysis and charts in the Globe regarding Syrian refugees (sample below):

Across the country, Syrians have arrived in new neighbourhoods and schools and, as with so many waves of immigrants before them, both the refugees and the communities that receive them will be changed by the experience. As Canada marks the first year of this initiative, we take a closer look at Syrian refugees through the demographic data.

syrian_exodus_to_canada__one_year_later__a_look_at_who_the_refugees_are_and_where_they-went_-_the_globe_and_mailOther charts highlight family size (larger than expected), education (most high school or less), aged (most under 18), knowledge of an official language (about 40 percent, mainly English).

Source: Syrian exodus to Canada: One year later, a look at who the refugees are and where they went – The Globe and Mail

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Facebook’s AI boss: Facebook could fix its filter bubble if it wanted to – Recode

2016/12/03 Leave a comment

While Zuckerberg is correct that we all have a tendency to tune-out other perspectives, the role that Facebook and other social media have in reinforcing that tendency should not be downplayed:

One of the biggest complaints about Facebook — and its all-powerful News Feed algorithm — is that the social network often shows you posts supporting beliefs or ideas you (probably) already have.

Facebook’s feed is personalized, so what you see in your News Feed is a reflection of what you want to see, and people usually want to see arguments and ideas that align with their own.

The term for this, often associated with Facebook, is a “filter bubble,” and people have written books about it. A lot of people have pointed to that bubble, as well as to the proliferation of fake news on Facebook, as playing a major role in last month’s presidential election.

Now the head of Facebook’s artificial intelligence research division, Yann LeCun, says this is a problem Facebook could solve with artificial intelligence.

“We believe this is more of a product question than a technology question,” LeCun told a group of reporters last month when asked if artificial intelligence could solve this filter-bubble phenomenon. “We probably have the technology, it’s just how do you make it work from the product side, not from the technology side.”

A Facebook spokesperson clarified after the interview that the company doesn’t actually have this type of technology just sitting on the shelf. But LeCun seems confident it could be built. So why doesn’t Facebook build it?

“These are questions that go way beyond whether we can develop AI technology that solves the problem,” LeCun continued. “They’re more like trade-offs that I’m not particularly well placed to determine. Like, what is the trade-off between filtering and censorship and free expression and decency and all that stuff, right? So [it’s not a question of if] the technology exists or can be developed, but … does it make sense to deploy it. This is not my department.”

Facebook has long denied that its service creates a filter bubble. It has even published a study defending the diversity of peoples’ News Feeds. Now LeCun is at the very least acknowledging that a filter bubble does exist, and that Facebook could fix it if it wanted to.

And that’s fascinating because while it certainly seemed like a fixable problem from the outside — Facebook employs some of the smartest machine-learning and language-recognition experts in the world — it once again raises questions around Facebook’s role as a news and information distributor.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long argued that his social network is a platform that leaves what you see (or don’t see) to computer algorithms that use your online activity to rank your feed. Facebook is not a media company making human-powered editorial decisions, he argues. (We disagree.)

But is showing its users a politically balanced News Feed Facebook’s responsibility? Zuckerberg wrote in September that Facebook is already “more diverse than most newspapers or TV stations” and that the filter-bubble issue really isn’t an issue. Here’s what he wrote.

“One of the things we’re really proud of at Facebook is that, whatever your political views, you probably have some friends who are in the other camp. … [News Feed] is not a perfect system. Research shows that we all have psychological bias that makes us tune out information that doesn’t fit with our model of the world. It’s human nature to gravitate towards people who think like we do. But even if the majority of our friends have opinions similar to our own, with News Feed we have easier access to more news sources than we did before.”

So this, right here, explains why Facebook isn’t building the kind of technology that LeCun says it’s capable of building. At least not right now.

There are some benefits to a bubble like this, too, specifically user safety. Unlike Twitter, for example, Facebook’s bubble is heightened by the fact that your posts are usually private, which makes it harder for strangers to comment on them or drag you into conversations you might not want to be part of. The result: Facebook doesn’t have to deal with the level of abuse and harassment that Twitter struggles with.

Plus, Facebook isn’t the only place you’ll find culture bubbles. Here’s “SNL” making fun of a very similar bubble phenomenon that has come to light since election night.

Filed under Other, Social Media Tagged with ,

Influential Chinese-Canadians paying to attend private fundraisers with Trudeau [investor immigrant angle]

2016/12/03 1 Comment

Sigh … One of the better initiatives of the Conservative government was shutting down the business immigrant program after evaluations showed just how flawed it was and just how few benefits it provided Canadians.

And of course the broader ethical issue of such fundraising – paying for access – remains:

Mr. Chan was at the most recent Trudeau fundraiser, which was held on Nov. 7 at the West Vancouver mansion of B.C. developer Miaofei Pan, a multimillionaire from Wenzhou province who immigrated to Canada a decade ago. More than 80 guests got their pictures taken with Mr. Trudeau at the $1,500 per ticket event, including Mr. Chan.

Mr. Pan told The Globe and Mail he lobbied the Prime Minister to make it easier for well-heeled investors from China to come to Canada. He said he told Mr. Trudeau the program put in place by the former Conservative government was “too harsh.”

In exchange for permanent residency, rich immigrants must invest $2-million and are subject to strict audits.

“If they don’t do business over two years here, they cannot stay or they have to leave the country. So I wanted the Prime Minister to know that is not a very merciful policy towards these people because they want to invest or stay,” Mr. Pan said. “It’s all about investment that Canada needs. I have friends, and [they are] wealthy people, who want to stay and invest.”

A Chinese government agency in Mr. Pan’s hometown that builds ties with and keeps tabs on expatriate Chinese, supplied photos of the Trudeau-Pan event to media in China. The Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the Wenzhou People’s Government promotes China’s interests abroad, according to former Canadian diplomat and China expert Charles Burton.

“That is an agency of the Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Burton told The Globe and Mail. “The fact that the photos appeared in the [Wenzhou Metropolis Daily] in China suggests that the people who participated in that activity must have been tasked by the Chinese state to try and promote the Chinese position with influential people in Canada. In this case, our Prime Minister.”

Mr. Pan is honorary chair of a Chinese-Canadian organization that is an unabashed backer of Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and East China Sea.

In 2012, he was part of a campaign by overseas Chinese groups to rally public support for the Chinese government’s position in a dispute with Japan over islands in the East China Sea that are close to key shipping lanes, bountiful fishing grounds and possible petroleum reserves.

That year, Mr. Pan was quoted in the Macau Daily newspaper saying his organization, the Canadian Alliance of Chinese Associations, had “declared its stand in newspapers” and that “overseas Chinese were responsible for defending China’s territorial integrity.”

In 2015, the Canadian Alliance of Chinese Associations held a symposium at which speakers backed Beijing’s assertion of title to islands, reefs and banks in the South China Sea, and issued a statement saying it “strongly supports the Chinese government’s defence of sovereignty over the South China Sea.”

The Prime Minister’s Office and the Liberal Party kept the Nov. 7 fundraiser confidential. Neither the PMO nor the party website noted the event. At the time, Mr. Trudeau was in Vancouver to announce a new marine strategy.

“The party has … been clear that not every event is on the party’s national website, while it’s important to note that the Liberal Party of Canada is still the only major federal political party that maintains an active online events listing in any form at all,” party spokesman Braeden Caley said in an e-mail. “All fundraising by the Liberal Party of Canada fully complies with all Elections Canada rules and regulations for political fundraising.”

The Liberal Party would not provide The Globe and Mail with a list of attendees. Mr. Pan said all the guests were his friends, and all are Canadian citizens.

Source: Influential Chinese-Canadians paying to attend private fundraisers with Trudeau – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Government, Immigration Tagged with , ,

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