Intel Discloses Diversity Data, Challenges Tech Industry To Follow Suit : NPR

2016/02/04 Leave a comment

Intel_Discloses_Diversity_Data__Challenges_Tech_Industry_To_Follow_Suit___All_Tech_Considered___NPRAn ambitious approach with clear, quantifiable goals, publicly available that provide accountability:

Intel set a goal last year: of all new hires, 40 percent have to be women or under-represented minorities (black, Latino, Native American). The company had never hit that level in the past. So for Intel, it was an ambitious goal. And the company reports today: it managed to exceed it, hitting 43.1 percent.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich shares some of his motivation: “I have two daughters. They’re both technically very bright. I want them to come into a workplace that’s a better place than the way the workplace is today.”

To do that, he says, Intel has to open up about how it’s doing inside. “There’s nothing here [that’s] top secret or should not be shared with the rest of the world in my mind.”

Other tech giants don’t agree. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft — companies that value metrics so much — have not publicly stated any measurable goals when it comes to diversity hiring, or the retention of employees. They haven’t disclosed the numbers of new hires or of exits from their companies, by gender and race.

Facebook, Google and Microsoft say their goals are not publicly available. An Apple spokesperson says the company has purposely decided to not set goals.

Intel is now an exception. Today’s report gets in the weeds. The company aims to increase its external diverse hiring rate to 45 percent this year, and it’s establishing a new target within this goal of a 14 percent hiring rate for underrepresented minorities.

There’s a sense of urgency. By 2020, Krzanich says, Intel must reach “full representation.”

By that he does not mean the company will look like America or its global consumer base. He means it’ll reflect the available talent pool. Intel has a long way to go — currently at 75 percent male and a combined 86 percent white and Asian.

Source: Intel Discloses Diversity Data, Challenges Tech Industry To Follow Suit : All Tech Considered : NPR

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Marni Soupcoff: Reviving the court challenges program is the wrong way to address a real problem

2016/02/03 Leave a comment

Soupcoff’s overall point about the excessive costs of going to court and the more fundamental need to address these is valid.

However,  the complexity of reducing costs and the time required to do so, makes restoration of the court challenges program a sensible interim step (disclosure, I used to have the team that managed the program under my branch at Canadian Heritage and it was small and low-cost):

Only if we address the outlandish costs — in both time and money — of suing government will we actually approach a reality of constitutional litigation being a meaningful check on government power and a meaningful protector of Canadians’ rights. The details of who pays those costs are far easier to sort out.

The fact that challenging a law should not be as painless as, say, buying a sandwich, is worth mentioning. Only, we’ve ended up at such an extreme in the opposite direction, with a typical constitutional challenge quite easily requiring several millions of dollars and a good decade of time, that worries about opening the floodgates seem best left for later, once we’ve made battling for constitutional justice slightly more accessible than walking on the moon.

While it might be true that reducing the price tag of a constitutional case by even $50,000 or so (the amount at which the Court Challenges Program used to max out per matter) would help citizens hold government to account, reducing government delay, document dumping, and excessive procedural manoeuvring during constitutional litigation would be even more productive. Assuming that most Canadians who challenge a law are also federal taxpayers who’d be paying for both a Court Challenges Program and the legions of crown lawyers and other government employees defending the status quo, the plaintiffs would be getting a better deal with a streamlined judicial and litigation process than with a challenges program.

Achieving access to justice is complex, but cutting, rather than adding, bureaucracy is usually a dependably positive step.

Source: Marni Soupcoff: Reviving the court challenges program is the wrong way to address a real problem | National Post

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Light Government Touch Lets China’s Hui Practice Islam in the Open – The New York Times

2016/02/03 Leave a comment

Interesting contrast to the repression of the Uighurs:

As the call to prayer echoed off the high walls of the madrasa and into the surrounding village, dozens of boys, dressed in matching violet caps, poured out of their dorm rooms and headed to the mosque.

That afternoon prayer ritual, little changed since Middle Eastern traders traversing the Silk Road first arrived in western China more than 1,000 years ago, was at once quotidian and remarkable.

That is because in many parts of the officially atheist country, religious restrictions make it a crime to operate Islamic schools and bar people under 18 from entering mosques.

Asked about the Chinese government’s light touch here, Liu Jun, 37, the chief imam at the Banqiao Daotang Islamic School, offered a knowing smile.

“Muslims from other parts of China who come here, especially from Xinjiang, can’t believe how free we are, and they don’t want to leave,” he said, referring to the far-west borderlands that are home to China’s beleaguered Uighur ethnic minority. “Life for the Hui is very good.”

With an estimated Muslim population of 23 million, China has more followers of Islam than many Arab countries. Roughly half of them live in Xinjiang, an oil-rich expanse of Central Asia where a cycle of violence and government repression has alarmed human rights advocates and unnerved Beijing over worries about the spread of Islamic extremism.

But here in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a relatively recent administrative construct that is the official heartland of China’s Hui Muslim community, that kind of strife is almost nonexistent, as are the limitations on religion that critics say are fueling Uighur discontent.

Throughout Ningxia and the adjacent Gansu Province, new filigreed mosques soar over even the smallest villages, adolescent boys and girls spend their days studying the Quran at religious schools, and muezzin summon the faithful via loudspeakers — a marked contrast to mosques in Xinjiang, where the local authorities often forbid amplified calls to prayer.

In Hui strongholds like Linxia, a city in Gansu known as China’s “Little Mecca,” there are mosques on every other block and women can sometimes be seen with veils, a sartorial choice that can lead to detention in Xinjiang.

Source: Light Government Touch Lets China’s Hui Practice Islam in the Open – The New York Times

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ICYMI: Ten Theses on Immigration – Douthat, The New York Times

2016/02/03 Leave a comment

Buried in Ross Douthat’s concerns regarding immigration and integration, is an endorsement of Canadian and Australian approaches:

As someone who is (obviously) skeptical of the elite-level consensus on immigration’s benefits, I’m glad to see the G.O.P. and conservatism tilting away from George W. Bush/Rubio-Schumer “comprehensivism” on immigration policy. But I also think that the stampede to Trumpism is being unduly influenced by a conflation of the American and European situations. Europe faces a real, potentially deep and epoch-defining crisis — a refugee problem that could threaten the very foundations of the continent’s post-Cold War order. America faces a much more normal sort of policy quandary, to which the ideal political response could reach the destination that Salam proposes in his essay — sharper limits on low-skilled migration and a more Canadian or Australian approach to immigration as, effectively, recruitment  — without huge and wrenching shifts, mass deportations, religion-specific entry bans, and all the rest of the Trumpian bill of goods.

So while we should be guided, no less than Europe, by a greater prudence than our leadership has shown to date, we should also recognize that what is (for Germany especially) now a crisis Over There remains as yet an opportunity for us.

Source: Ten Theses on Immigration – The New York Times

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ICYMI: Islam isn’t inherently violent or peaceful

2016/02/03 Leave a comment

Good lengthy piece by Andrew Mack providing context and data regarding violent extremism:

The reality is that Islam—like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and other major world religions—is neither inherently violent nor inherently peaceful. Like every other great religion, the history of Islam is darkened by periods of violent bloodletting. And the holy texts of all religions can be mined for quotes to legitimize terrorism—or indeed principled nonviolence.

Thus ISIS and other extreme Islamist radicals have no difficulty finding justification in medieval Islamic texts for their ultra-violent ideology and barbaric practices. But these extreme interpretations have minimal support among Muslims around the world and tell us nothing about the propensity for violence in mainstream Islam.

In October 2014, the first opinion polls on public attitudes toward ISIS were published in three Arab countries for the Fikra Forum. The findings were instructive. Just 3 percent of Egyptians held favorable views of ISIS. The figure for Saudi Arabia was 5 percent and for Lebanon less than 1 percent. A year later Pew Research found that just 1 percent of Lebanese held “favorable opinions” of ISIS, 3 percent in predominantly Sunni Jordan, and 1 percent in Israel. In the Palestinian territories the figure was 6 percent, but even here a massive 84 percent held unfavorable opinions of ISIS. Previous polls revealed very similar trends about Muslim opinions toward al-Qaida.

Discussions about the violence of contemporary Islam focus overwhelmingly on armed conflict and terrorism. But a more appropriate metric for determining the propensity for violence of a particular society, culture, or religion is the incidence of intentional homicide.

In almost all societies it is murder, not war, that accounts for the large majority of intentional killings. And perpetrating homicide, unlike embarking on wars or terror campaigns, does not require long preparation, intensive organization, a huge range of weaponry, complex logistics, political mobilization, intensive training, or a great deal of money—which is one reason why war and terrorism death tolls around the world are far smaller than the number of homicides. It is far more difficult to mount an armed campaign against a state than to kill an individual.

And even today, wars directly affect only a relatively small minority of countries. All countries suffer from homicides, however. In 2015, the Global Burden of Armed Violence published by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, found that between 2007 and 2012, for every individual killed in war or terror campaigns around the world, seven individuals were murdered. Worldwide, for most people, in most countries, most of the time, murder is a far greater threat to human security than organized political violence.

So if there really is an inherent—Islam-driven—propensity for deadly violence in Muslim societies, we should expect to find that the greater the percentage of Muslims in society, the greater would be the numbers of homicides. In fact, the reverse is the case: The higher the percentage of Muslims in a society, the lower the homicide rate.

In 2011, a major study by University of California, Berkeley, political scientist M. Steven Fish presented cross-national statistical data showing that between 1994 and 2007, annual homicide rates in the Muslim world averaged just 2.4 per 100,000 of the population. That was approximately a third of the rate for the non-Muslim world and less than the average rate in Europe. It is also approximately half the homicide rate in the United States.

In comparing individual countries, the difference is even greater. The latest homicide statistics from the U.N.’s Office on Drugs and Crime reveal that for every murder perpetrated in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, seven people are murdered in the United States. This reality should give American Islamophobes pause.

It is possible in principle, as some critics have argued, that the lower murder rates in Muslim countries could be due not to a generally low propensity for homicide but to authoritarian governments whose harsh anti–violent crime policies are more effective in reducing the incidence of murder than those of democracies like the United States. But Fish’s careful statistical analyses controlled for this possibility and found no evidence to support it.

When it comes to war, Fish found no statistical evidence to support Samuel Huntington’s controversial “clash of civilizations” thesis that Muslim societies are inherently more war-prone than non-Muslim states.

Moreover, a lot depends on what type of war is being counted. A 2011 analysis by the Human Security Report looked at which states had fought most international wars—including colonial wars—since the end of World War II. The top four were France, Britain, Russia/Soviet Union, and the United States—in that order. No Muslim-majority country was in the top eight.

Yet another metric for determining the violence-proneness of countries is the “conflict year,” the number of armed conflicts—civil as well as international—that a country experiences in a calendar year. Some particularly conflict-prone countries—Burma is the prime example—have frequently found themselves fighting several different wars in a single calendar year for decades. Here the Human Security Reportfound that the countries that had experienced most “conflict years” since the World War II were—in this order—Burma, India, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Britain, France, Israel, and Vietnam. Again no Muslim-majority country was in the top eight.

Fish does not, however, claim that Muslim societies are less violent than those in the non-Muslim world with respect to all forms of deadly violence. Indeed, he points out that when it comes to terrorism, Islamist radicals were responsible for 70 percent of deaths from “high-casualty terrorist bombings” around the world between 1994 and 2008. This means, he suggests, that while terrorism is very far from being a uniquely Muslim phenomenon, “… its perpetrators in recent times are disproportionately Islamists.” Since 2010, the incidence of Islamist terrorism has increased sharply.

But in this context it is instructive to note that approximately 600 million of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims live in Southeast Asia and China, while a little more than half that number—317 million—live in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet the rate of deadly political violence associated with radical Islamist groups in Southeast Asian and China today is only a tiny fraction of that of the less populous Muslim states of the Middle East and North Africa region.

Why should the level of political violence in the populations of these two regions differ so dramatically even though they share the same allegedly violence-prone religion? One possible answer is that religion is not the primary driver of conflict in these regions. In Southeast Asia, national governments in Muslim-majority countries have what political scientists call “performance legitimacy”—meaning they deliver the goods and services that their citizens want. With few exceptions, the governments of their co-religionists in the Middle East and North Africa do not.

In the radical Islamist conflicts that are tearing apart Syria, Iraq, and other parts of the region, the exclusionary politics, state repression, rights abuses, corruption, and incompetence of the regimes that the radicals have sought to overthrow provide more compelling insights into what drives the abhorrent violence of ISIS than does the extreme Islamist ideology that seeks to legitimize the killing.

Source: Islam isn’t inherently violent or peaceful.

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Book Sale – 25 percent off today only

2016/02/03 Leave a comment

Lulu_Feb_3rd

For those interested in the print version of Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote or Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism, one of Lulu.com’s regular sales.

The direct link to my book page is: My Author Spotlight.

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Liberal MPs put heat on McCallum to address immigration processing ‘mess,’ say lengthy delays ‘unacceptable’

2016/02/02 Leave a comment

Not surprising, the range and nature of complaints (which may have been a factor among visible minority voters during the recent election) but turning this around takes time:

Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship John McCallum has been under intense pressure at recent national caucus meetings from Liberal MPs who want him to address the “mess” in the processing times of immigration applications, which in some cases is taking more than six years for family class applications.

“This is not acceptable. We have to do something about it,” Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal (Surrey-Newton, B.C.) told The Hill Times.

In the last two national caucus meetings—Sunday, Jan. 24 and Wednesday, Jan. 27—about 20 MPs spoke up, in total, in both meetings, Liberal sources told The Hill Times. Liberal MPs told Mr. McCallum (Markham-Thornhill, Ont.) that, up until the last election, Conservatives were to be blamed for the slow processing of applications because they were in power. But Canadians now want to know what the Liberals have done to speed up the processing times in the last three months, according to Liberal sources. During the Jan. 24 caucus meeting, Mr. McCallum and his departmental officials conducted a briefing for MPs about the causes of the delay and introduced them to some departmental resources that can help MPs in serving their constituents on immigration files.

Sources told The Hill Times that Liberal MPs recognize that Mr. McCallum and the Immigration Department is focused on the politically sensitive Syrian refugees file, but they also want swift action on Immigration applications in the regular streams.

During the last election campaign, the Liberals had promised to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of last year, but they missed the deadline and are now aiming to achieve this goal by the end of February. As of last week, about 14,000 have arrived in Canada. Because of the high-profile domestic and international implications of the Syrian refugee file, Mr. McCallum and the Immigration Department have been in the media spotlight for months. The Syrian refugee crisis is considered the biggest refugee crisis since the end of World War II and it’s estimated 12 million have been displaced as a result of the civil war in Syria.

Meanwhile, the Immigration application processing times are different for different categories including family class, economic class, refugee and humanitarian and compassionate classes.

In the case of parents and grand parents sponsorship applications, the department is currently processing the ones that were filed on or before Nov. 4, 2011, according to the departmental website. The processing time for spouses or common-law partners living inside Canada is 26 months and for the ones outside of Canada is 17 months.

In the economic class, if an application was filed between 2008 and 2010, the processing time is 67 months while for the ones filed between 2010 and 2014, is 13 months.

Canada takes in about 260,000 immigrants each year in all categories, combined. The statistics were not available for last year, but in 2014, 66,661 received Canadian immigration in the ‘family class’ category, 165,089 in the ‘economic class’ category and 23,286 in the ‘refugee class’ category, according to the departmental website. In 2013, Canada took in a total of 259,023 immigrants including 81,843 in family class, 148,155 in economic immigrant class and 23,831 in refugees class.

In interviews last week, Liberal MPs told The Hill Times that about 60-70 per cent of their constituency work is immigration related and specifically for family class applications.

Mr. Dhaliwal said that Mr. McCallum, who also served in former the Cabinets of prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, has assured MPs that he understands and recognizes the processing of applications and will take steps to speed things up.

“He [Mr. McCallum] has publicly said and he has privately said that he’s going to fix and fix [this issue] once for all. The pressure is on and this is one of the toughest ministries and tasks to handle and John McCallum comes up with a lot of experience behind him. He’s a thoughtful individual and working on this file. We are trying to help him by giving our input and he’s consulting people,” said Mr. Dhaliwal.

Source: Liberal MPs put heat on McCallum to address immigration processing ‘mess,’ say lengthy delays ‘unacceptable’ | hilltimes.com

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The right way to settle refugees: Dench and Douglas

2016/02/02 Leave a comment

Janet Dench and Debbie Douglas on supporting the government’s decision not to convert government-assisted refugees into privately-sponsored refugees:

We are fortunate to be in a situation in Canada where so many citizens want to sponsor refugees. This current reality is almost beyond the most optimistic dreams of refugee advocates just six months ago. It is important that this energy be harnessed, to provide solutions for as many refugees as possible and to reinvigorate a private sponsorship program that has been in decline recently, weighed down by barriers and delays.

The sudden emergence of so many would-be sponsors has also created challenges, as the structures are not in place to orient and support them, nor are there adequate mechanisms ready to connect them with refugees in need of sponsorship. Experienced private sponsors, settlement agencies, members of the Syrian Canadian community and government officials have been working day and night for months now to respond to these new sponsors. The Syrian Family Links initiative, announced last week by the federal government, fills a gap by connecting sponsors with Syrian refugees who have family in Canada. It should be noted, however, that this role is already being played effectively by settlement agencies and private sponsorship groups in many regions of the country. The private sponsorship route is well-adapted to supporting people in Canada trying to reunite with their families overseas caught in dire situations and in need of protection.

If sponsors take over responsibility for government-sponsored refugees already here, that may very well result in the abandonment of refugees with family in Canada.

We must also remember that there are other refugee populations whose needs for protection are just as great. They should not be forgotten in the focus on the Syrian refugee crisis.

Source: The right way to settle refugees – The Globe and Mail

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Tajikistan: The battle against Islam’s bearded men

2016/02/02 Leave a comment

Almost comical – the 9/11 hijackers were all clean shaven so unclear how this is really an effective strategy:

In a bid to curb Islamist radicalization, authorities in the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan shaved the beards off nearly 13,000 men in the country. They also shut down about 160 shops selling traditional Islamic garb and supposedly “convinced” more than 1,700 women to stop wearing hijabs, or head coverings.

According to Radio Free Europe’s Tajik service, the measures were taken in the southwest Khatlon region, which borders Afghanistan. The region’s head of police said that 12,818 men with “overly long and unkempt beards” were “brought to order” in 2015.

The secular regime of President Imomali Rakhmon is known for its hard-line opposition to political Islam. From 1992 to 1997, Tajikistan endured a bitter civil war between government forces loyal to Rakhmon and an Islamist opposition. Estimates suggest that 50,000 to 100,000 people were killed.

The government has taken steps to push back against Islamic traditions it claims are being imported from Afghanistan. The U.S. State Department has estimated that more than 90 per cent of its population is Muslim, and that religious adherence appears to be growing in the country. Rakhmon, a secular leader though a Sunni himself, has been in power since 1992. His authoritarian government has repeatedly expressed concern over the rise of Islam, linking it to extremism.

Rakhmon had even linked the wearing of the hijab to prostitution in a televised address. In September, the country’s Supreme Court banned the only registered Islamist political party that was officially recognized. And in December, Rakhmon assumed further powers after parliament granted his family lifelong immunity from prosecution and designated him “the founder of peace and national unity of Tajikistan.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, troubles remain in this deeply impoverished nation of about 7 million people. Hundreds of Tajik nationals are thought to be in Iraq and Syria among the ranks of the Islamic State militant group. Last year, the chief of an elite police unit assigned to combating Islamist extremists disappeared and is now thought to have joined the Islamic State.

Source: The battle against Islam’s bearded men | Toronto Star

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Seven steps for reopening an embassy in Tehran

2016/02/02 Leave a comment

Good piece by Campbell Clark on the sequence and steps involved in re-opening an Embassy (I was part of the team that did so in 1988 and his list brings back memories):

Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion has publicly confirmed Canada’s desire to reopen the Canadian embassy in Tehran that’s been shuttered since the Conservative government suddenly cut ties on Sept. 7, 2012. It marks a symbolic end to diplomatic hissing and spitting. Now what?

There’s still a locked Iranian embassy in downtown Ottawa, behind eight-foot bars, with a faded Iranian flag outside – and a beige-brick and stained-glass ambassador’s mansion sitting empty in upscale Rockcliffe Park. But Canada lost the lease on its old four-storey concrete embassy building on Shahid Sarafraz Street in Tehran, so it will need a new home for an embassy where secure communications equipment and other special features can be housed.

But reopening an embassy is never as simple as calling movers. There’s not just a diplomatic dance, and political sensitivities to watch at home, but protocol and practical steps. Canada’s last full ambassador to Iran, John Mundy, thinks it will be many months before the two countries exchange diplomats, and late 2017 before they accredit ambassadors. If all goes well. “We’re starting almost from zero,” he said.

So how do you open an embassy in Tehran? A spokesman for the Global Affairs department said there’s “no standard approach.” But experts say there are some likely steps.

Source: Seven steps for reopening an embassy in Tehran – The Globe and Mail

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