Human rights tribunal chair showed unconscious bias in dismissing immigration complaint: Federal Court

2025/01/09 Leave a comment

Of note:

The former head of Canada’s human rights watchdog demonstrated an “apprehension of unconscious bias” and lost “the necessary objectivity” in dismissing a complaint against the Immigration Department for discrimination, a court has ruled.

In criticizing the decision by David Thomas, the former chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, the Federal Court concluded the adjudicator breached the duty of procedural fairness by failing to properly address the allegation of bias levelled against him during the human rights complaint proceedings.

Instead, the court said, Thomas erroneously made his own findings on the accusation in an “unexpected addendum” in rejecting the complaint by Amir Attaran that Ottawa discriminated against parents and grandparents by delaying the processing of their permanent residence applications based on age, race, family status and national/ethnic origin.

“The panel did not give the Applicants an opportunity to know the case against them and to fully and fairly respond,” wrote Justice Henry Brown in a rulingon Friday to send the case back to the tribunal for redetermination.

“The panel lost its necessary objectivity by engaging personally and subjectively in the assessment of the bias allegation against him.”

Thomas, in his analysis, denied having unconscious bias against people of Persian background such as the complainant because “some of my closest friends are from Iran.” 

The court decision has added another side note to the already lengthy legal battle by Attaran, a University of Ottawa law professor and American-born Iranian, who filed his complaint to the rights tribunal in 2010 over the Immigration Department’s processing delays for parent/grandparent sponsorships.

At the time of the complaint, it was taking immigration officials 42 days to screen the sponsors of spouses and children — but 37 months for those who wanted to bring their parents and grandparents to Canada.

After some legal wrangling and delays caused by COVID-19, Attaran’s complaint was heard in 2021 by Thomas, who left the tribunal later that year but continued to preside over the case….

In a written statement, Charlotte-Anne Malischewski, the human rights watchdog’s interim chief commissioner, said the decision was important in the evolving jurisprudence in cases involving racial discrimination.

“It clarifies that the legal test for reasonable apprehension of bias is not about the actual state of mind of the adjudicator, but rather whether a reasonable observer would believe them to be biased,” she said.

“If left unchallenged, the (tribunal) decision could be used to make it harder for people to prove discrimination.”

Source: Human rights tribunal chair showed unconscious bias in dismissing immigration complaint: Federal Court

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Newcomers feel Canada accepts ‘too many immigrants’ without proper planning, CBC survey finds

2025/01/09 Leave a comment

Good long detailed article with a mix of data and testimonies. Not surprising that immigrants have many of the same concerns as non-immigrants regarding lack of planning with respect to housing, infrastructure etc among other issues raised in a fairly comprehensive survey:

More than 80 per cent of newcomers to Canada feel the country is bringing in too many people through its immigration system without proper planning, a poll commissioned by CBC News has found.

The survey conducted by market research firm Pollara Strategic Insights in November asked 1,507 people about their experiences coming to Canada. Among its findings was that four in five newcomers believe the Canadian government has accepted “too many immigrants and international students with no planning for adequate housing, infrastructure or having sufficient job opportunities.”

Shabnoor Abdullateef, a physician who immigrated to Canada from Iran in 2022, says she agrees with this statement.

“There was absolutely no thinking behind this,” said Abdullateef, who graduated from the health-care administration management program at Fanshawe College in London, Ont., last spring….

Source: Newcomers feel Canada accepts ‘too many immigrants’ without proper planning, CBC survey finds

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Why Legal Immigration Is Impossible for Nearly Everyone

2025/01/08 Leave a comment

Wonderful graphic illustrating the complexity of immigration to the USA. Canadian system if anything is more complex, given Provincial Nominee Program and the various “boutique” or targeted programs. Would be nice if IRCC could prepare such a chart as part of the briefing package for the expected incoming Conservative government as a basis for streamlining, simplification and automation:

My latest policy analysis published today explains why it is impossible for nearly all immigrants seeking to come permanently to the United States to do so legally. The report is a uniquely comprehensive and jargon-free (to the extent possible) explanation of U.S. legal immigration. Contrary to public perception, immigrants cannot simply wait and get a green card (permanent residence) after a few years. Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: it happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case.

The figure below shows the U.S. legal immigration system for people who are abroad who presently intend to immigrate permanently to the United States. Below I briefly describe the main problems and choke points in this labyrinth.

Flow chart of the entire legal immigration system

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Until the Immigration Act of 1924, everyone in the world was eligible to immigrate to the United States unless the government proved they fell into an ineligible category. In other words, innocent until proven guilty. Since then, the foundational principle of U.S. immigration law is that everyone in the world is ineligible to immigrate unless they prove to the government they fit into an eligible category. The result is that over 99 percent of all those wanting to immigrate to the United States cannot do so legally.

Source: Why Legal Immigration Is Impossible for Nearly Everyone

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Todd: Can Ottawa solve the problem of millions of expiring Canadian visas?

2025/01/08 Leave a comment

More commentary on immigration policy and program failures:

…How did we get to this muddled state, where the government admits the numbers are out of control — and that it can’t even track, let alone control, the movement of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of the country’s guest workers and foreign students?

In 2019 I wrote an optimistic column about how the Canada Border Services Agency was going to bring in “exit controls” to help fix our infamously leaky borders.

The upshot was that proper exit controls would increase the likelihood officials catch homegrown terrorists, individuals who illicitly take advantage of taxpayer-funded health care and, particularly, people who overstay their visas.

The plan was to better track when people leave the country by land, sea or air — using techniques long in place in Australia, the U.S. and the European Union. But even though upgraded exit controls were instituted in 2019, they have not made an obvious difference in compelling people to follow the rules regarding how long they can stay in the country.

To add to the disorder, 2024 had a drastic rise in the volume of temporary residents — 130,000 — trying to overstay their work and study visas by applying for refugee status. That’s up from 10,000 less than a decade ago. The asylum claims process can take several years.

In response to questions from Postmedia, the CBSA said it does what it can to monitor and penalize people who overstay. Specifically, officials said that for various reasons it issued more than 3,700 “removal orders” in 2024, compared to 1,517 in 2020.

Sam Hyman, a retired Vancouver immigration lawyer, said Canada, unlike many countries, doesn’t have exit immigration controls that require all travellers who leave to be examined and their departure confirmed. But, he said, there is a certain degree of border-crossing monitoring.

Vancouver lawyer Richard Kurland, publisher of a monthly migration newsletter called Lexbase, says more rigorous entry and exit controls, while useful, won’t solve Canada’s border crisis alone.

He’s more concerned the government is trying a number of strategies to avoid taking blame for the migration turmoil, first by “denying” it, then by “distracting” from it and now by “repackaging” it, while making new promises.

After Trudeau spent years accusing critics of his high migration policies of being xenophobic or racist, Kurland said he and Miller last year “did a 180 (degree turn) and offered a mea culpa,” admitting to overshooting.

However, they then compounded their blundering, Kurland said, by promising temporary residents who overstay their visas a general amnesty.

“But when you have immigration amnesties, why obey rules, when all you have to do is to hide and wait for the next amnesty?” Kurland said. After the public rose up in criticism, Kurland said the Liberals had to pull back their scheme.

“We are left with the chicken in the python,” Kurland said, “which will be a ticking immigration time bomb for whoever replaces the Trudeau government.”

Source: Can Ottawa solve the problem of millions of expiring Canadian visas?

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Jamie Sarkonak: Good riddance to all the Liberal bills that Trudeau just culled

2025/01/08 Leave a comment

…Also dead is that bill that would have made thousands of people around the world eligible for Canadian citizenship.

Bill C-71, if you remember, would give the children of Canadians born abroad citizenship through descent, as long as the parents can establish a “substantial connection” to Canada. The guardrail wouldn’t be a secure one, since some judges don’t believe that there are any citizens who lack a connection to the country.

The bill’s proponents marketed it as a remedy to a rare problem that sometimes afflicts Canadian families who live abroad, such as military families. However, in trying to solve their problems, the bill would have made it much easier for citizenship to be obtained by the grandchildren of birth tourists (people who who travel to Canada to give birth, which secures Canadian citizenship for their child)…

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Good riddance to all the Liberal bills that Trudeau just culled

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Saudi Arabia presses Florida man to give up US citizenship over critical tweets, family says

2025/01/08 Leave a comment

Of note:

Saudi Arabia has forced a Florida retiree to try to renounce his American citizenship after jailing him over social media posts critical of the kingdom’s crown prince, according to the man’s son.

The retiree, 74-year-old Saad Almadi, is one of at least four dual Saudi-American nationals who accuse Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s government of pressuring them to give up their U.S. citizenship, a U.S.-based Middle East human rights group said.

The alleged tactic by a key strategic partner of the U.S., which has not been previously reported, tracks with similar efforts to silence even mild criticism, including the threat of imprisonment and exit bans like the one that has kept Almadi from returning to the U.S. after being released from more than a year in a Saudi prison.

“There are Saudi princes that come to the U.S. for routine medical checkups, so why can’t an American citizen return home for his health?” Ibrahim Almadi said of his father.

“It’s all because we don’t want to upset our ally’s feelings,” he said in an interview from Washington. “If this were Russia, Iran or North Korea, he would’ve been declared wrongfully detained months ago.”

The Saudi Embassy in Washington acknowledged receiving a request for comment on the allegations but did not otherwise respond. The Saudi government doesn’t recognize dual citizenship. It regularly rejects criticism of its actions, saying they are part of a multiyear crackdown on corruption, terrorism and other security threats.

The plight of the elder Almadi and others could complicate U.S. efforts to turn the page on tensions arising from the 2018 killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi….

Source: Saudi Arabia presses Florida man to give up US citizenship over critical tweets, family says


















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Beijing is harassing diasporas in Canada – and victims need better protection

2025/01/07 Leave a comment

Not new but better documentated:

…But for many diaspora communities in Canada, threats from Beijing are not new. Canadians of Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Tibetan and Uyghur heritage have long raised alarms about foreign interference – and our responses should take their needs into account.

To better understand the experiences of diaspora communities targeted by the Chinese government, Digital Public Square, in collaboration with the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy’s China Governance Lab and Abacus Data, fielded a national survey last June. In particular, we wanted to better understand the scale of transnational repression targeting these communities. Transnational repression is when governments reach across borders to silence diasporas and exiles, including through threats, abductions and – at the most extreme level – assassinations.

The survey found that 14 per cent of people in Canada who identify as having Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Tibetan or Uyghur heritage – one in seven – have experienced threats from a foreign government or know someone who has. Respondents who personally experienced such threats cited online harassment, physical threats, threatening phone calls and harassment of family members as the most common forms.

Understandably, those who have experienced transnational repression feel less safe in Canada. Seventy-nine per cent of respondents agreed that “Canada is a safe and secure place for people like me,” but only 43 per cent of those who personally experienced threats agreed. This suggests that victims are not getting the support they need.

Investigating and raising awareness about the problem are necessary first steps but are not sufficient to make affected communities feel more secure. Our survey found that 68 per cent of ethnically Chinese respondents were worried that reports on foreign interference would lead to more anti-Asian racism. Without measures offering tangible support to affected communities, raising the alarm of Chinese government interference risks heightening feelings of insecurity among those at the greatest risk….

Alexander Chipman Koty is a project lead at Digital Public Square.

Source: Beijing is harassing diasporas in Canada – and victims need better protection

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Thousands of caregivers’ status at risk as immigration programs stall 

2025/01/07 Leave a comment

Another example of poor management:

Thousands of caregivers from overseas may need to leave the country or risk staying here illegally as Ottawa delays the rollout of a new pathway to permanent residency for nannies and home support workers.

Since 2019, the Home Child Care Provider and the Home Support Worker pilot programs have brought caregivers and support workers to Canada from overseas on temporary work permits, allowing them the ability to apply for permanent residency.

But those programs ended in June, when the federal government announced it would introduce new pilot programs that have yet to be launched.

In a statement to The Globe and Mail, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said the department needed time to reduce the number of existing permanent residence applications through the old pilot programs before launching the new ones. The statement from early December also said that full eligibility criteria and details on how to apply for the programs will be available in the “coming months.”…

Source: Thousands of caregivers’ status at risk as immigration programs stall 


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NP View: Canada’s welfare state crumbles under the strain of irresponsible immigration

2025/01/07 Leave a comment

Forgets that Canada was able to manage relatively high levels of immigration until the Liberals were seduced by Barton, the Century Initiative and others, along with provincial government, business and education pressures for more….:

…In Canada, 2024 may eventually be remembered as the year of Milton Friedman’s revenge. Late in his life, the American sage of free markets said on a couple of different occasions that immigration was good, and the mass immigration to the New World of the early 20th century was especially good, but that radically open borders are incompatible with large contemporary welfare states. This may strike many as an uncontroversial claim, but Friedman has never been totally forgiven by radical open-borders libertarians who otherwise venerate him.

As a result, it is rather hard to find any discussion of the Friedman dilemma that isn’t sharply critical. Bryan Caplan, a great admirer of Friedman and an important libertarian economist, for example, attributes Friedman’s warnings to senile “paranoia” and bad math.

We Canadians have all lived through a year in which the carrying capacity of a model welfare state was tested to its political limit, and beyond, by poorly controlled immigration. For a half-century, very high immigration levels, levels without much parallel anywhere else in the world, were a distinguishing core part of the Canadian political philosophy. We thought of ourselves as filling in a vast empty map and pursuing diversity as an end in itself, while being administratively careful to choose the most promising immigrants.

This has all transformed very suddenly, and is a major factor in the crisis now devouring the Liberal Party of Canada. In 2024, the public began to hear warnings from labour and bank economists that governments had lost control of fundamental immigration parameters, and the state lost the ability even to count resident non-citizens accurately in real time. Under pressure from the COVID pandemic, Liberals had opened the door to an unprecedented (even for Canada) flood of low-wage guest workers, asylum seekers and international students who were hypothetically supposed to be self-supporting.

These choices have had obvious first-order effects on semi-official safety-valve parts of our welfare state, like emergency shelters and food banks. They have put crazy pressure on housing construction, which remains constipated by heavy regulation, and have increased demand for health care, which is shielded from ever-suspicious “market forces” and thus cannot react to population growth in the way that shoe stores do.

They have also coincided with a period of stagnant labour productivity, disconcerting urban decay and grotesque reversals in per capita GDP — something that open-border advocates wouldn’t predict, didn’t predict and can’t really explain. We have behaved in the 2020s exactly like a welfare state that was determined to test Friedman’s principle, and we found it to be true.

Of course, if we could put a Friedman clone in charge of our country, or for that matter Bryan Caplan, we would be sure to end up with a more nimble and adaptable economy with less of a necessity for limiting newcomers. Canada is a country that tries to combine plenty of economic nationalism with sky-high immigration. This was always a curious and expensive mixture of ideals. After a decade of a Liberal government proclaiming our “post-national” character, and being openly hostile to cultural nationalism and historical traditions, it is beginning to seem like plain madness.

Source: NP View: Canada’s welfare state crumbles under the strain of irresponsible immigration

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DuVal: Enough With the Land Acknowledgments

2025/01/07 Leave a comment

One USA perspective. Sympathetic as they seem largely performative:

…My colleague Amanda Cobb-Greetham, the founding director of the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, Okla., and a citizen of the Chickasaw nation, told me that instead of lengthy discussions about whether and how to write land acknowledgments, institutions should engage in active and meaningful relationships with the Native nations that are now or were on the lands those institutions occupy. Florida State University and the Seminole Tribe of Florida have established such a relationship, which started with the tribe’s involvement in designing the mascot’s regalia but now extends to other partnerships, including creating a Native American and Indigenous Studies Center.

Cities, counties and states could share jurisdiction of some of their lands and projects to tribes and work as partners. The Covid-19 virus hit reservations particularly hard in the early months of the pandemic, but because in the past few decades many tribes took over the management of their public health systems from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, many tribal governments ultimately had better outcomes than neighboring non-Native-majority counties. Tribes already partner with the federal government in areas such as land and resource management, marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and cleaning up Superfund sites. Rather than mourn the past through land acknowledgments, institutions should expand these more practical efforts and work with modern Native nations as true partners.

Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author, most recently, of “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.”

Source: Enough With the Land Acknowledgments

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