Canadians ask Trudeau the tough questions – and some answers don’t come easy

2016/02/02 Leave a comment

Greater transparency and honesty in responses than we have come to expect:

But if this government is about openness and transparency it must continue to demonstrate that by taking risks like this one. And that sometimes means being confronted by the harsh reality that answers aren’t always possible and that solutions to problems will be difficult and sometimes take an awfully long time.

The prime minister sat face to face with a woman named Nikki, who wanted assurances her indigenous daughter would be safe growing up and that her life was valued. She was emotional. Trudeau spoke bluntly: “Indigenous lives matter. That you even have to say that is, you know, frustrating to me. And then you demonstrate it.”

It’s the demonstrating part that Trudeau acknowledged will be the most challenging. Some of what his government has promised for indigenous peoples, he said, will take “years and even decades.”

That is not surprising, but it is risky to admit this truth so publicly — that “real change” on many issues likely won’t happen as quickly as most people would like or even need.

Some change must happen more immediately for strict economic reasons.

At least, that’s what Danny, the oilsands worker from Alberta, demonstrated. He wanted to know the government’s plan to save the oil fields and keep everyone working.

There again, the prime minister admitted not everyone would still have a job at the end of the day — or, at least, not a particularly high-paying one.

Danny asked Trudeau what he should do and the prime minister told him to keep working hard. And he hinted later that measures will be in the budget to help people like Danny and other regions struggling with the low price of oil.

By the end of the exercise, a town hall with a twist, Trudeau seemed to have won over many of the chosen Canadians, who he admitted had been “tough” and “challenging” with him.

He shook their hands, and you could hear them off mic thanking him and wishing him luck.

It is a large part of this government’s gamble: not just the openness, but the listening. The bet that by hearing people out, you can also convince them to come along with you, or stick with you, or have faith in you.

But as Jenna, the first to get 10 minutes with Trudeau, told him so honestly, “Forgive me if we’re a little bit skeptical …”

Source: Canadians ask Trudeau the tough questions – and some answers don’t come easy – Politics – CBC News

And of particular interest:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says a change in culture is needed within Canadian police forces to ensure indigenous people are treated the same as everyone else.

Trudeau told a CBC forum Sunday night that a “pervasive culture” in police forces, governments and religious communities has led to indigenous people being less valued.

He said that culture must be changed and he predicted the push for change will come from the Canadian people.

Police forces need culture change: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

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Douglas Todd: ‘Ethnic economies’ on the rise in North America

2016/02/01 Leave a comment

Interesting piece on ethnic economies, familiar to anyone in Canada’s major cities with ethnic neighbourhoods. My sense is this is particularly true for small businesses (e.g., stores, restaurants) and thus the larger questions of discrimination are less likely to have a significant impact:

Although the concept is sometimes considered controversial because it suggests ethnic groups are in competition with each other, most Western scholars are either neutral or positive about the rapid expansion of ethnic economies.

Light and Gold assert that ethnic solidarity can be highly advantageous in business. “Ethnic-based collectivism makes a difference to the economic status of immigrants and minority groups.”

Ethnic economies are particularly important to cities such as Metro Vancouver and Toronto, where the populations are more than 45 per cent foreign born.

Metro Vancouver and Toronto have dozens of Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Iranian, Pakistani, Korean and other ethnic enclaves, which often form the basis of ethnic economies (although ethnic economies can operate outside a specific geographical area).

University of B.C. geographer Daniel Hiebert has found people in enclaves in which a single ethno-cultural group predominates tend to do better economically than people in enclaves in which no single ethic group prevails.

Comparing neighbourhoods by income levels, unemployment, welfare rates and home ownership, Hiebert says residents of enclaves in which one group dominates have the benefit of unique business and job opportunities.

“Ethnic economies are situations where entrepreneurs in a group employ co-ethics and specialize in particular industrial sectors, for example, Vietnamese immigrants in nail salons in New York City or Indian immigrants in the American hotel sector,” Hiebert says.

“Living in the midst of a large co-ethnic group may be beneficial, perhaps by enabling people to access social capital, or perhaps through the employment opportunities that may arise in … ethnic economies.”

A few decades ago, the conventional theory was that ethnic economies formed because immigrants faced discrimination in the mainstream job market. But, with the rise of equal rights in the 1960s, scholars now generally believe it’s frequently a bonus for immigrants to have access to ethnic economies.

Alireza Ahmadian, an Iranian-born research associate at Vancouver’s Laurier Institution, said enclaves fuel ethnic economies because they provide a place where newcomers and strangers can meet co-ethnics and discuss challenges.

“One of the first items on their agenda is business. These conversations sometimes lead to business partnerships. The issue of trust is an important one in driving ethnic economies. For many new and first-generation immigrants, it is easier to trust someone from their own culture who speaks their language.”

Few researchers of ethnic economies have taken on the kind of ethical issues that the co-author of Freakonomics explored in his discussion of possibly discriminatory hiring practices, however.

North American human rights law places many restrictions on hiring people based on their ethnicity, particularly if a company has more than 10 to 15 employees.

For instance, a Mexican restaurant in Houston, Texas, was recently fined for terminating a black and a Filipino employee because they didn’t speak Spanish.

The U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission successfully argued the Mexican restaurant was using language as a “pretext” for hiring only Hispanics.

Despite such anti-discrimination laws, it has become increasingly common for some employers in Canada, particularly in Metro Vancouver and Toronto, to require proficiency in a foreign language.

Albert Lo, head of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, said it’s often possible to make a legitimate “business case” that a prospective employee might need to speak a certain foreign language.

But Lo said it’s always crucial to keep an eye out for when a language requirement is used as a cover for ethnic discrimination — and for when the ethnic-employee ratio of a company becomes “out of sync with the community it serves.”

Lo, a former real estate developer, said the subject of ethnic economies can sometimes be “divisive.”

In Western societies in which most companies, the public sector and non-profit organizations are legally required to be “colour-blind” — and are pressed to hire employees from a range of ethno-cultural groups — ethnic economies go the opposite direction.

Despite thorny questions regarding discrimination and ethnic competition, the traditional theory that ethnic economies rise because of discrimination in the larger marketplace is now rarely heard, according to the book Landscapes of the Ethnic Economy, edited by David Kaplan and Wei Li.

Immigrant-fuelled economies have “matured” and “drastically transformed” Canada’s major cities, says York University’s Lucia Lo. Scores of Chinese malls, for instance, now exist in the “ethno-burbs” of Toronto and Vancouver, Lo writes, because that’s what many ethnic Chinese want.

Source: Douglas Todd: ‘Ethnic economies’ on the rise in North America

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Newly elected Peel police board chair sets a fresh tone | Toronto Star

2016/02/01 Leave a comment

Plain language:

“It doesn’t affect brown people and white people — it affects black males.” With that sharp rebuke of a report on police street checks — insisting that it missed the essence of the controversy — the man now heading the oversight of Peel Region police made clear that change is coming.

Minutes after Amrik Singh Ahluwalia stood Friday morning and moved to his new seat following his unanimous election as chair of the Peel Police Services Board, he joined other members calling for change within the country’s third-largest municipal police force.

The first issue: frustration with a consultant’s report commissioned by police chief Jennifer Evans.

“It was offensive,” said Brampton Mayor Linda Jeffrey, who just moments earlier had nominated Ahluwalia for the job as chair. “It was supporting the status quo,” Jeffrey said of the report, put together and presented by Louise Doucet and Liz Torlee, joint managing directors of TerraNova, a strategic marketing company.

Ahluwalia’s leadership could spell trouble for Evans if she continues to challenge the board on the controversial issue of police street checks, known as carding in Toronto. Unlike the outgoing chair, Laurie Williamson, who sided with Evans on the issue, Ahluwalia says the practice is harmful and has to stop.

“It disproportionately effects one segment of the society,” Ahluwalia told the Star after the meeting. “Three-and-a-half times the probability of stopping black men — it effects them significantly.”

In September, the Star published six years of street check data, obtained from the force under freedom of information laws, that showed black individuals were three times as likely to be stopped by Peel police as whites.

The next day, Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie, Jeffrey, Ahluwalia and Norma Nicholson won a 4-3 vote to stop street checks, requesting that Evans take immediate action. She refused, claiming they did not have authority over her on operational matters. Anti-carding advocates, including the Law Union of Ontario, have refuted this claim. In October the provincial government announced it will ban the practice of random street checks.

Sophia Brown Ramsay, programming director for the Black Community Action Network of Peel, attended Friday’s meeting and is thrilled to have a new chair who supports her group’s goal to end street checks.

Source: Newly elected Peel police board chair sets a fresh tone | Toronto Star

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Quebec cabinet shuffle reflects momentum from Trudeau’s gender parity commitment: Hébert

2016/02/01 Leave a comment

Chantal Hébert gets it right on gender parity in her comments on Quebec Premier Couillard’s recent cabinet shuffle:

But before concluding that this only proves that merit is a casualty of gender politics, ask yourself the following question: if one has to run out of competent male candidates before filling senior posts with equally or more talented women, is it any wonder that gender parity has been so elusive in Canada?

Source: Quebec cabinet shuffle reflects momentum from Trudeau’s gender parity commitment: Hébert | Toronto Star

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ICYMI: Court program for drug addicts helping mostly white males, report finds – Politics – CBC News

2016/02/01 Leave a comment

Suggests ongoing issues with program design and service delivery that have not identified the reasons for low uptake by the target population:

A federal court program to divert drug addicts away from prison and into treatment is still not reaching the people it was supposed to help: aboriginals, women and youth.

A new evaluation says the program is largely helping white males over the age of 30, the same skewed population a previous assessment warned about six years ago.

Drug treatment courts “continue to experience difficulties … attracting women, aboriginal people, other visible minorities and youth into the program, and retaining them once they have entered it,” says a recently released report.

syringe needle

Drug Treatment Courts in Canada require addicts to stay drug-free for a year or more and to take counselling, while helping them to find housing and a job. (CBC)

“Caucasians, men, and individuals over 30 still represent the majority of … participants.”

The finding is part of an otherwise positive report on the Drug Treatment Court Funding Program, under which Justice Canada spends $3.6 million annually for a diversionary system to stop the “revolving door” of addiction and crime.

A five-year evaluation posted earlier this month found that the program, then offered in six cities, is generally effective in reducing drug use and criminal recidivism, and is a much cheaper alternative to imprisonment, with net savings of up to 88 per cent.

Repeats 2009 warning

Under the program, defence lawyers and Crown prosecutors nominate drug-addicted offenders for treatment that can last a year or more. The charged person must plead guilty, abide by a host of conditions that include regular urine tests for illicit drugs, and attended counselling.

The programs have an average “graduation” rate of 27 per cent, but even non-graduates were found to have cut their drug use and had fewer drug-related offences afterwards. Graduates must be drug-free, have proper housing, as well as a job or be enrolled in school.

The report repeated the warning of a 2009 evaluation, however, that the prime target groups of aboriginals, women and youth were still not getting into the programs, and that “individuals with little prior criminal history” were being served.

Source: Court program for drug addicts helping mostly white males, report finds – Politics – CBC News

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Conservatives didn’t cherry-pick religious minority refugees: Alexander

2016/02/01 Leave a comment

Valid defence of the policy but the documents suggest a more interventionist approach. Alexander, in the article, is silent about the tiny numbers admitted (which suggest more ‘cherry picking’ – see Conservatives cherry picked certain Syrian refugee files: documents).

More interesting, he does not comment on the implications of the PMO audit: that PMO did not trust Alexander, CIC, or PCO to ensure that the policy direction of preference for religious minorities was being implemented, and what would likely be unprecedented PMO involvement in a refugee file .

When I worked in PCO, the normal way PMO would ‘manage’ what was considered a problematic file (one that departments were not managing well), was through PCO, not directly:

Former immigration minister Chris Alexander is defending his government’s approach to resettling Syrian refugees, denying that the Conservatives cherry-picked cases by prioritizing religious and ethnic minorities.

Every country working with the United Nations refugee agency on the humanitarian crisis in Syria operated under agreed-upon criteria for how to decide which refugees they’d accept, Alexander said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

The basic principle was to focus on the most vulnerable, but additional priorities had to be applied, Alexander said.

“To determine who was the most needy, who is the most vulnerable among four million people, you need to set some priorities,” he said.

“And that’s what the Syria core group has done from the beginning and that’s what Canada’s operation to resettle Syrian refugees has striven to do.”

Alexander, who lost his Toronto-area seat in last fall’s election, was at the helm of the Immigration portfolio when the Conservatives announced last January they would increase the number of refugees accepted by Canada from 1,300 to 10,000.

But they also announced they would concentrate on bringing in members of religious and ethnic minorities, prompting accusations of an anti-Muslim bias and charges that the government was violating UN rules.

Most religious minorities in the region are from Christian groups. The UN also specifically asks countries not to use religion as a factor in determining who to take in.

‘Areas of focus’

How exactly the Conservatives applied their approach was made clear this week via documents tabled in the House of Commons in response to a question from the NDP.

In them, the Immigration department said visa officers working in Lebanon and Jordan pulled cases that met the “areas of focus” criteria and processed those on a priority basis, while others were processed on regular timelines.

‘The principle we respected all along was humanitarian need. There were a variety of priorities under that heading’ – Former immigration minister Chris Alexander

Alexander said religion and ethnic status were not the sole area of focus and that they were working from a set of principles agreed upon by resettlement states.

A document he provided outlining those principles makes no mention of religion or ethnicity, but Alexander said they were understood to be part of a category described as people “belonging to a group for whom the authorities are unable to provide protection.”

He also pointed to another document, available on the website of the British arm of the UN refugee agency.

“Refugees who face serious threats to their physical security, particularly due to political opinion or belonging to an ethnic or religious minority group, may also be prioritized,” the document states.

In prioritizing religious minorities, the Conservatives were not picking a single faith, Alexander noted.

But applying that lens to the program reflected the nature of the conflict, which includes Islamic militants targeting Christian minorities or the Assad regime in Syria going after Sunni Muslims.

“This is the way this conflict is unfolding and those groups who face persecution because of their faith, or their ethnicity or their political views deserve special forms of protection,” he said.

Source: Conservatives didn’t cherry-pick religious minority refugees: Alexander – Politics – CBC News

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The York mural controversy: when art and politics collide – Yakabuski

2016/01/30 Leave a comment

Yakabuski on the YorkU mural controversy:

It is entirely legitimate to criticize Israel’s defiant construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moonagain this week called “an affront to the Palestinian people and the international community.” But there is nothing uncomplicated about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yet the terms “apartheid,” “racism” and “war crimes” steamroll over its discussion on campus.

The settlements are an obstacle to peace and the creation of a Palestinian state. They call into question Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s commitment to a two-state solution. But the settlements are not the cause of the conflict. And, as the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, reminded the Security Council this week, “settlement activity can never in itself be an excuse for violence.”

Only the mural’s artist, Ahmad Al Abid, knows what he intended to convey in his painting. Personally, I see Palestinian frustration and impotence more than the “purely anti-Semitic hate propaganda” Mr. Bronfman sees. But since he’s far from alone in his view, York should seize on this controversy to do what universities are supposed to do: open minds.

“The response of college officials can make a difference,” Prof. Saxe [Brandeis University Jewish Studies professor whose survey of 3,000 Jewish students revealed hostility towards Jews] explained “Each incident should be seen as an opportunity to educate students, not merely referee a dispute.”

Source: The York mural controversy: when art and politics collide – The Globe and Mail

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Azeezah Kanji: Counterpoint: While on the topic of Muslims, here are a few other numbers to note

2016/01/30 1 Comment

Kanji effectively rebuts Barbara Kay’s early piece stoking fear of Muslims (Barbara Kay : Most Muslims aren’t jihadists, of course. But some of them are), providing context to the numbers Kay uses and comparisons to attitudes within other religious groups:

In order to cast her net of suspicion beyond the small number of Muslims actually involved in violent activity, Kay cites data regarding the percentage of Muslims around the world who “hold beliefs in retrograde cultural practices that cannot co-exist in harmony with Western civilization.” These beliefs include a minority of Muslims’ endorsement for capital punishment for apostasy, adultery, and homosexuality: opinions which are certainly disturbing, and are vigorously opposed by Muslim activists in those countries. But the Pew study Kay relies on does not suggest that Muslims are trying to impose these beliefs in “the West” (on the contrary, available research indicates the opposite) — so on what basis is the threat to Western civilization construed?

Indeed, when it comes to attitudes deleterious to “harmony,” surveys suggest that Kay should be directing her gaze elsewhere. American Muslims are more likely to oppose attacks on civilians (which Barbara Kay defines as “terrorism”) than any other major religious group polled in the United States. And while Kay claims that “support for terrorism is high in Islamic countries” (where, according to Pew, support for such attacks ranges from 1 per cent to 40 per cent), a 2011 Gallup poll question on whether it is ever appropriate for a military to target civilians reveals it is proportionately far higher among Christian Americans (58 per cent) and Jewish Americans (52 per cent). Curiously, Kay references the numbers on Muslim support for “terrorism” but is silent on the non-Muslim statistics.

Kay’s tunnel-vision perspective leaves out more than half the picture. In addition to her selective use of statistics, Kay also makes unsubstantiated accusations about Muslims’ use of the legal system and “political/institutional membership” to advance some nefarious but unspecified agenda — recalling the fomentation of moral panics about other minority groups in other periods of history. Exaggerated narratives about the “disease of radical Islam” have been debunked by government data, academic analyses, and expert commentary. The fact that they still have any purchase reveals the perturbing resistance of stereotypes to reality.

Source: Azeezah Kanji: Counterpoint: While on the topic of Muslims, here are a few other numbers to note | National Post

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Israeli novel Borderlife is cut from school curriculum, becomes bestseller

2016/01/30 Leave a comment

Seems like these are the kinds of novels that should be read by high school students to help them see the humanity in the other (as should comparable readings be part of Palestinian and Arab curricula):

A novel by an Israeli author about a love affair between an Israeli Jewish woman and a Palestinian Muslim man from the West Bank who meet in New York has been excluded from Israel’s regular high school curriculum, out of concern it might threaten the Jewish identity of students reading it.

The book, written by Dorit Rabinyan and known in English as Borderlife, was recommended for inclusion in the curriculum of upper high school grades by a committee advising the education ministry, which nevertheless decided against it. “Young people of adolescent age tend to romanticize and don’t, in many cases, have the systemic vision that includes considerations involving maintaining the national-ethnic identity of the people and the significance of miscegenation,” a senior ministry official said, according to Ha’aretz, an Israeli newspaper. (The Hebrew word translated by Ha’aretz as “miscegenation” can also mean “assimilation.”) The official, in other words, feared that reading the book might lead students to accept as normal romance between Jews and Muslims.

The education ministry later backtracked to some degree and said the book could be taught in advanced literature classes, but would not be part of the regular curriculum, according to Ha’aretz.

In an interview, Rabinyan describes the novel’s central romance as one in which the protagonists for the first time discover a member of their homeland’s opposite community as an individual. Hilmi, the Palestinian, is simply Hilmi, a man. And Liat “is no longer her Israeli people, her Israeli country, army, government. She’s herself.”

At the same time, Rabinyan says, every individual is shaped by the soil on which they grow, and she wanted to explore the resulting tensions when the two characters connect. “What I was looking into was the power of love to drift us into each other’s identity, and to have our mutual third identity that is born be a threat, be the one that can colour us with the loved one’s colours, and take over and maybe swallow ourselves and our original identity,” she says.

Rabinyan drew on her own past when writing the book. “I did live a year in New York. I did meet a group of young Palestinians who impressed me and really made me tick in a way that inspired me.” But she says that when writing literature, memories are not enough. “We have to add a portion of fantasy.”

The political undertones of the book might not have been Rabinyan’s primary concern, but they are unavoidable. The symbiosis of the couple, she says, is like the symbiosis of Palestinians and Israelis inhabiting the same land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “We have no borderlines between us, and we have no definition of our identities in ways that usually two neighbours have, and this is why we treat one another in such a way that maintains the conflict to be more than just a fight of two gangs over territory,” she says.

Instead, says Rabinyan, the conflict is defined as an existential question of identity. “It’s a matter of the Jewish DNA being threatened by the surrounding Arab culture,” and it is this fear of being swallowed that justifies—demands, even—Jews’ isolation from their Palestinian neighbours.

Source: Borderlife is cut from school curriculum, becomes bestseller

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Study: When It Comes To Identifying As Multiracial, Gender Matters

2016/01/30 Leave a comment

Interesting large-scale US study on how people present their ethnic identity:

In families where biological parents are of different races and ethnicities, daughters are more likely to self-identify as “multiracial” than sons, according to a new study in the February issue of the American Sociological Review. This is especially true in families with one black parent and one white parent.

“It would seem that, for biracial women, looking racially ambiguous is tied to racial stereotypes surrounding femininity and beauty,” said Lauren Davenport, assistant professor at Stanford University and author of the study. She suggests it may be easier for women to identify with multiple racial groups because they are “cast as a mysterious, intriguing ‘racial other'” as opposed to men, who are more likely to be seen as a “person of color.”

Davenport’s study was based on a sample of more than 37,000 incoming college freshmen across the county who fit into one of three mixed backgrounds — Asian-white, black-white, and Latino-white. Using data from 2001 to 2003, Davenport looked at how these individuals chose to identify themselves.

She found that a higher percentage of women than men self-labeled as multiracial across all three groups. Among black-whites, 76 percent of women identified as multiracial, compared to 64 percent of men in that group. Fifty-six percent of Asian-white women classified as multiracial, as opposed to 50 percent of Asian-white men. And 40 percent of Latino-white women self-labeled as multiracial in comparison to 32 percent of those men.

In addition to gender, Davenport looked at how religion and class affect the way people identify. Multiracial people who don’t have strong religious ties were more likely to identify as multiracial, as well as those from highly affluent neighborhoods.

Overall, those with black and white parents were the most likely to identify as multiracial, and the least likely to describe themselves as white only. Seventy-one percent of black-white study participants identified as multiracial, while only 54 percent of Asian-white and 37 percent of Latino-white participants opted for the same label.

In the paper, Davenport attributed this tendency among people with black and white parents to the “one-drop rule,” more formally known as hypodescent, which structured how part-black individuals were once legally and socially identified in the United States:

Because people in this group have so strongly been expected to identify as black, they are choosing to assert a new identity, one that incorporates both their black and white heritages. It is also likely that, for some, a multiracial label reflects a desire to socially distance and distinguish oneself from blacks.

Davenport says understanding the way people identity themselves racially is crucial for its political consequences. Not only does self-identification shape the American racial landscape, but it also impacts the enforcement of laws, implementation of affirmative action, and allocation of political resources.

But studying multiracial identity can be tricky. The Pew Research Center spent a lot of time last year researching the mixed population of America. Not only did they find that many mixed-race Americans changed how they viewed their racial identity over the course of their lifetimes, but also that self-identification was highly dependent on situational circumstances, others’ perceptions, and personal upbringing.

So does this mean we’ll all start to subconsciously assume that all wealthy biracial women with zero religious affiliations are mixed? Probably not. But if the projection that one in five Americans will be of mixed race by 2050 bears out, we’re going to need to keep understanding how people relate to being multiracial.

Source: Study: When It Comes To Identifying As Multiracial, Gender Matters : Code Switch : NPR

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