Lawyer’s lawsuit highlights Ottawa’s court clashes over Charter rights

2015/09/22 Leave a comment

A case worth watching and the fine balance between ‘fearless advice and loyal implementation.’ Watching the Government’s track record before the Courts suggests that he may have a point:

Edgar Schmidt was once a lawyer earning $155,000 a year for the federal Justice Department, examining proposed laws for consistency with the Charter of Rights. But he felt uneasy about the way he was told to do his job, believing that officials in his own department – and the Justice Minister himself – were involving him in breaking the law. So he sued his employer.

Monday, in an Ottawa courtroom, his lawsuit against the Justice Minister, deputy justice minister and the department comes to trial, calling attention to an issue that has received little notice thus far in the federal election campaign: the Conservative government’s frequent clashes with the courts over the Charter of Rights.

The Justice Minister is required under a 1985 law to tell Parliament if a proposed law is not “consistent” with the Charter. To Mr. Schmidt, a law is either consistent or it is not. But his superiors in the department didn’t agree.

“Oh, that’s not what we do,” he says he was told. “We ask ourselves whether there’s an argument.” And even if the argument has less than a five-per-cent chance of success in the courts, it can still be “credible” – in other words, consistent.

“That is a kind of doublespeak,” the now-retired Mr. Schmidt says. (The justice department suspended him when he sued and, after six months without pay, he retired.) “Most of us, when we hear the word ‘credible,’ think ‘worthy of being believed.’ But that’s not what the department meant.”

If he wins, “it means government will likely pay a lot more attention to the Charter consistency of their legislation,” he said in an interview.

The Schmidt case lacks the sex appeal of the Mike Duffy trial, about alleged fraud and bribery in the Senate, or the criminal trial of Bruce Carson, a former staffer in the Prime Minister’s Office, charged with influence peddling. Nor is it limited to the current government; the Justice Department’s interpretation of the 1985 law goes back many years.

But the trial raises sharp questions on governing in the Charter era for the Conservative government. No other government has clashed so often with the courts on Charter rights.

From refugee health-care cuts, to mandatory minimum sentences for illegal gun possession, to an end to supervised use of illegal drugs at a Vancouver medical clinic, to retroactive loss of early parole for non-violent offenders, many Conservative laws have been struck down by the courts. (Three Supreme Court judges supported the mandatory minimums; but in several other cases, the court was unanimous in rejecting Conservative laws.)

To the federal government, the case is about carving out a space for elected politicians, not judges, to decide which laws to write. “Democracy is about who makes the difficult decisions about what a ‘right answer’ might be,” the Justice Department argues in an affidavit filed with the Federal Court of Canada. “It is for the Minister alone to decide whether he concludes that he has ascertained that a provision in a bill is inconsistent with guaranteed rights.”

It says that Mr. Schmidt’s approach to examining legislation would harm the principle that the civil service is neutral and supports the government of the day. “Political neutrality calls for an examination standard that supports the Minister in performing his duties, not one which purports to dictate how he should exercise them.”

But to the 62-year-old Mr. Schmidt, the government’s neutrality argument is faulty. “It starts from the wrong premise. It assumes that your loyalty is owed to the government. It’s not. The public service owes its loyalty to the Canadian democratic constitutional state.” He likens Justice Department lawyers to auditors for Enron, a U.S. energy company that engaged in fraud, who deemed their job to serve the executives, rather than the company itself.

Source: Lawyer’s lawsuit highlights Ottawa’s court clashes over Charter rights – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism

Canada-Québec: le grand rendez-vous manqué | Bouchard

2015/09/22 Leave a comment

I have the greatest respect for Prof Bouchard, and the work we [the Multiculturalism Division within CIC] did with him in 2010-11 to capture the nuances between multiculturalism and interculturalism was among the most interesting work we did (for the summary charts see: Table 9: Diversity Paradigms, Table 10: Multiculturalism/ Interculturalisme Comparison).

Where I would disagree with him is that Canada has not accommodated Quebec (it has, but not to the extent that he and others may like, two examples being the Quebec Pension Plan and the Cullen-Couture Immigration agreement). He also implies more opposition between interculturalism and multiculturalism than is warranted, although he recognized that the explicit emphasis on integration by Minister Kenney made differences smaller.

Others in Quebec have been much less nuanced, portraying multiculturalism in Canada as ‘anything goes relativism’ while ignoring that it is within the Canadian constitutional and legal framework (including the primacy of official language rights), and was always within a context of  fostering integration, participation and equality:

Ce qui différencie l’interculturalisme québécois du multiculturalisme canadien, c’est entre autres le fait que, ici, la majorité francophone se perçoit comme une minorité menacée à l’échelle de l’Amérique du Nord — ce qui n’est évidemment pas le cas pour la majorité anglophone du Canada. « Mais s’il y a une majorité au Québec, il y a aussi des minorités, ajoute Gérard Bouchard. En conséquence, le rapport majorité/minorités est fondamental dans la vie interculturelle québécoise. »

« Un Québécois francophone d’aujourd’hui, c’est d’abord quelqu’un qui s’identifie à son groupe francophone parce qu’il a des aspirations communes, qu’il a aussi des craintes et des inquiétudes et qu’il a une volonté d’agir pour surmonter ces problèmes, résume-t-il. Et tout cela se manifeste à tout moment. »

Selon Gérard Bouchard, c’est d’ailleurs ce qu’on a vu se manifester au moment de la crise des accommodements et de la commission qu’il a coprésidée. « Une très vive inquiétude est apparue au sein de la majorité francophone à cause de la perception négative qu’elle a développée des immigrants et des minorités », observe-t-il. Même chose lors du débat sur la Charte de la laïcité : « Il y a deux ans, on a vu encore la majorité se manifester, dit-il, et les minorités descendre alors dans la rue pour protester contre la majorité ! On se trouve donc toujours au coeur de ce rapport majorité/minorités ! »

Si, dans les années 1960, le Canada avait accepté la notion des deux nations fondatrices, voilà qui aurait changé l’histoire, estime Gérard Bouchard, « puisque nous nous serions alors sentis en sécurité sur notre territoire. Ça, ça a été un grand rendez-vous manqué de la part du Canada anglais ». En fait, nuance-t-il, c’est avant tout un rendez-vous manqué de notre point de vue, car, du côté du Canada anglais, ce ne l’est pas. « Ce ne l’est pas, déclare M. Bouchard, puisque pour eux tout est très bien ainsi. En effet, jusqu’à maintenant, le Canada a su survivre et a évité la rupture en prenant certaines mesures pour dénouer les petites crises et en gérant intelligemment et prudemment les choses… Et les Canadiens anglais savent y faire, lance-t-il, puisque ça fait longtemps qu’ils composent avec le problème francophone. »

Et M. Bouchard est formel : « Jamais le Canada anglais n’acceptera d’accommoder le Québec et jamais il ne répondra aux demandes du Québec ! Les Canadiens anglais prennent simplement des mesures d’atermoiement pour que les choses n’éclatent pas… et on ne peut pas dire qu’ils ne réussissent pas bien puisque… regardez où nous en sommes aujourd’hui ! »

Source: Canada-Québec: le grand rendez-vous manqué | Le Devoir

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The Franco-American Flophouse: US State Department Confirms the New Consular Fee for Expatriation

2015/09/22 Leave a comment

Victoria Ferauge on the explanation of the fee structure for renouncing US citizenship:

The US State Department has finally responded to those of us who took exception to the rather extraordinary rise in the fee to renounce US citizenship.  It now costs $2,350 USD for an American citizen to exercise his or right under international law to expatriate.

Does this fee constitute a barrier to exercising that right?  The State Department doesn’t think so.  I disagree and it’s not just the fee that’s the problem, it’s the entire process which is cumbersome, time-consuming and, yes, costly for everyone – renunciants and State Department alike.

A US citizen wishing to renounce or relinquish citizenship must travel to the nearest US consulate which may be in a city far from where he or she actually lives.  There can be more than one interview required which means multiple trips.   Some of the paperwork is complex enough it would be wise to consult a lawyer before filling them out and filing the tax and bank account declarations.   All of these things taken together can make paying that high consular fee another burden laid on top of the others that already exist.  The onus should be on the State Department to prove that these burdens placed before someone seeking to exercise the human right to expatriate are legitimate and necessary.

In the State Department response they offer their justifications for the fee raise and answer those of us who sent comments.  For this they have my thanks.  I and others have answered other agencies’ requests for comments on matters concerning Americans abroad, and never received the dignity of a reply.  I may not like the answers but I appreciate that they took the time.

State argues that there is no burden, no restrictions on the right to expatriate and there is nothing punitive about the fee raise.   It is, they say, a matter of money.

“Rather, the fee is a cost-based user fee for consular services. Conforming to guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), federal agencies make every effort to ensure that each service provided to specific recipients is self-sustaining, charging fees that are sufficient to recover the full cost to the government.”

A perfectly reasonable argument if we were talking about something like, say, camping in a national park.  Not so reasonable when it concerns a fundamental human right guaranteed by national or international law.  It certainly costs money for US civilians and military to vote from abroad, but could we really argue that the FVAP and the local consulates should start charging overseas voters for providing services like the Federal Write-in Absentee Ballot?

That analogy is not perfect but the underlying principle is the same.  There are things that government does for which it has both a monopoly and a duty to provide services to its citizens in the exercise of their rights.  Voting is not just another service , and neither is expatriation.

My take on this is that there should be no fee for renunciations, relinquishments or requests for CLNs.  The first two concern a fundamental human right for which I contend cost should never be an issue.  As for the last, the CLN, this is a necessary document, the only one that exists to prove that one is no longer a US citizen and is often required by states that do not allow dual citizenship.

If that’s not possible then I’d propose an option to waive the fee if the renunciant can demonstrate that it would be a financial hardship to pay it.  That would be a very reasonable compromise and one that would be more consistent with what State claims is their goal:  protecting a US citizen’s right to expatriate.

Source: The Franco-American Flophouse: US State Department Confirms the New Consular Fee for Expatriation

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As resources dwindle, churches worry refugee response will slow

2015/09/22 Leave a comment

Another aspect to the refugee crisis. Report might have benefited from looking at the activities of the younger churches (e.g., evangelicals), churches with specific-ethnic group clienteles, and of course other faith groups to provide a more complete picture:

Slightly more than a decade ago, Canada admitted about twice as many government-assisted refugees as privately sponsored, but the streams began to converge after the Conservative government took office in 2006. By 2013, the number of new permanent residents who came as privately sponsored refugees, whose expenses in their first year in Canada are borne by citizens or faith groups, surpassed the number being assisted exclusively by the government, according to Library of Parliament research.

“When you look at these churches that sponsor refugees you’re going to see mainly people in their 60s, 70s and 80s,” said David Seljak, professor of religious studies at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ont. He says church membership is in very rapid decline, more rapid than previously appreciated, and that also means a decline in financial and human resources.

“I think this may be the last refugee crisis in which the churches have the resources to respond on a large scale. They will respond in future, I hope they see it as part of their mission, but whether they’ll have the resources to do it is really an important question,” Prof. Seljak said.

Back in 1979, it seemed natural for the government to partner with religious institutions to help confront the Vietnamese refugee crisis. Religion played a much more important role in community life, and churches still had strong attendance and were seen as key stakeholders. The Presbyterian Church, for example, had 211,000 members in 1981. By 2011, that number had been cut roughly in half, in a country that had grown by 10 million people.

“When you look at what’s going on [with refugee resettlement], you see great faith. They’re involved, they’re committed, but they’re seniors. They won’t be there forever,” Mr. Shropshire said.

Many Christian groups, guided by the biblical principle of welcoming the stranger, have done refugee-settlement work year after year, even when refugee issues were not leading the news agenda.

Source: As resources dwindle, churches worry refugee response will slow – The Globe and Mail

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Stephen Harper explains ‘old-stock Canadians’ comment: Defining the Term and What the Numbers Say

2015/09/21 1 Comment

Old and New Stock Ethnic Origins.001Hard to avoid drawing conclusion that this was not a slip of the tongue and was somewhat calculated given Teneycke’s comment that this was part of the ‘war room’ discussions. Even harder to believe that his definition, as stated Friday, second-generation or more, is how his base (and most Canadians) would hear it.

That being said, hard to find a neutral term for ‘old stock Canadians’ – I tend to use ‘long-established’ Canadians (in my mind  third-generation or more) rather than the ‘mainstream’ (excluding others).

The above chart shows the generations of different ethnic groups. Using the third generation definition, ‘old stock’ refers to European, mainly Western and Northern European ethnic groups (other African reflects the long presence of Blacks, Oceania is largely Australian). The difference between ‘old stock’ and ‘new stock’ visible minorities is clear.

In Quebec, “de souche” has a longer-term context, dating back to the original immigration from France before la Conquête, as is periodically played out in Quebec identity politics (e.g., Bouchard-Taylor Commission, Quebec Values Charter:

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper has elaborated on what he meant when he alluded to “old-stock Canadians” during last night’s leaders’ debate, saying it refers to “Canadians who have been the descendants of immigrants for one or more generations.”

Harper used the term Thursday while responding to criticism from Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau about the government’s move to scrap health-care services for some refugees.

The Tory leader asserted that the measures imposed by his government in 2012 to deny special health care to people whose claim for refugee status had been denied were supported by new immigrants and “old-stock” Canadians alike.

His retort immediately drew ire on social media, as many people seemed confused about what the phrase actually meant.

In his response to CBC News reporter Hannah Thibedeau’s question on Friday, Harper did not repeat the term — nor fully answer why he used it.

The Conservative leader repeated his position that the government should not give special health-care benefits “better than received by ordinary Canadians to people who are clearly not refugees and have been judged as such.”

“I know that that is a position supported widely through the Canadian population, it’s supported by Canadians who are themselves immigrants and also supported by the rest of us, by Canadians who have been the descendants of immigrants for one or more generations.”

….Conservative spokesman Kory Teneycke said after the debate, however, that he doesn’t “think there’s any insult or malice in that phrase.”
The Tory election war room had obviously anticipated the phrase could become a point of contention. Before Friday’s event, campaign representatives circulated an email to media that included quotes by Liberal politicians, including Trudeau, that contained the term.

The email cited a 2007 Toronto Star article that reported Trudeau had wondered in an earlier interview with a Montreal newspaper whether the Québécois nation included everyone in Quebec or just the “old stock” pioneers of the province.

The Conservatives also highlighted a 2014 quote from former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, translated from French, and a 2008 quote from current Liberal candidate Pablo Rogriguez that included the term, albeit in varying contexts.

Source: Stephen Harper explains ‘old-stock Canadians’ comment – Politics – CBC News

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How Ottawa’s war on data threatens all that we know about Canada

2015/09/21 Leave a comment

Good in-depth long read by Anne Kingston in Macleans on the Government’s reductions in data collection and dissemination (beyond the cancellation of long-form Census data).

Likely that the transition books being prepared by StatsCan include an option for reintroducing the long-form Census in the event of a change of government):

Disappearing data is only one part of a larger narrative of a degradation of knowledge—one that extends from federal scientists being prevented from talking about their research on topics as mundane as snow to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission being forced to take the federal government to court to obtain documents that should have been available under Access to Information. The situation has descended into farce: Library and Archives Canada (LAC), entrusted with preserving historic papers, books, photographs, paintings, film and artifacts, was so eroded by cuts that, a few years ago, author Jane Urquhart was unable to access her own papers, donated to LAC in the 1990s.

The result is a crisis in what Canadians know—and are allowed to know—about themselves. The threat this poses to a functioning democracy has been raised over the past several years, most recently, in the massive, damning June 2015 report “Dismantling democracy: Stifling debate and dissent in Canada”produced by Voices-Voix, a non-partisan coalition of more than 200 organizations and 5,000 individuals.

Less discussed, however, is how data erasure also threatens the economy, industry, the arts, and the country’s ability to compete internationally. The 2013 report “Information management in the Canadian federal government” is a title not likely to attract the non-librarian reader. But the conclusions drawn by its authors, a librarian at Carleton University and an information-management consultant, are chilling. Isla Jordan and Ulla de Stricker describe a country “without access to large parts of its institutional memory, and leaders without access to the information needed for strategic decision-making.” Toni Samek, a professor at the school of library and information studies at the University of Alberta, puts it more succinctly. Canada is facing a “national amnesia,” she says, a condition that will block its ability to keep government accountable, remember its past and plan its future.

Canada’s closed-data stance is taking root at the very moment “open data” and “knowledge economy” are global mantras. The OECD and World Bank have led the charge for open-platform disclosures. In 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration launched openFDA to provide easy public access. Last year, the U.S. Federal Reserve posted full and revealing transcripts of meetings held by then chairman Ben Bernanke in the weeks and months leading to the 2008 recession—there for anyone with an Internet connection to read. U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2016 budget calls for an emphasis on making data “legally and practically” more accessible.

Canada certainly talks the talk. Last year, Tony Clement, Conservative MP and Treasury Board president, announced the Action Plan on Open Government 2014-16 to “foster greater openness and accountability . . . and, at the same time, create a more cost-effective, efficient and responsive government.” Rona Ambrose, the minister of health, announced a Transparency and Openness Framework that included a commitment to begin “transparently publishing drug safety reviews.”

Those dependent on these data balk at such claims. “Health Canada has improved its transparency in a few small areas, but overall, does an abysmal job,” says Joel Lexchin, a drug-industry watchdog and professor in the school of health policy and management at Toronto’s York University. “[It] doesn’t even make public a list of drugs withdrawn for safety reasons,” he says.

Access to federal scientific data is equally dire. Canada is in the Dark Ages, compared with the U.S., says biologist Jeremy Kerr, a professor at the University of Ottawa. Kerr works in climate change, ecology and conservation—“data-hungry fields,” he says. “I do big-picture ecology, where we think across countries and continents. But rapid scientific process stops at the Canadian border.” Detailed information about Canada isn’t available, says Kerr, noting that his American colleagues “make this data freely available.” Part of the problem is long-standing, he says, arising from “the difficult nature of federal-provincial relationships.” But “accessibility of data in Canada is becoming less, not more,” he says. “We are not collecting a lot of data that used to be routine.”

Canada not only lags other governments, but also international business, says Jan Kestle, founder and president of Toronto-based Environics Analytics: “Everyone is moving toward setting up data-governance processes inside companies to collect information and safeguard it,” she says.

But where digitization has helped other governments and companies make more information available, it is having the opposite effect here. The edict to eliminate information deemed “redundant, outdated and trivial” (known as “ROT”) gives federal managers licence to decide what data should be cut and what kept, says Li, the U of T librarian. “There is no transparency, oversight, or published criteria for the decision-making process,” she says. While the U.S. Federal Depository Library Program tracks U.S. government-publication digitization efforts, Canada has no such mechanism. It’s LAC’s mandate to preserve federal government information, but there has not been a comprehensive web crawl since November 2008….

Economic considerations are cited routinely to justify cutbacks in collecting, analyzing and digitizing information. A closer look at recent data erasure, however, suggests it runs counter to sound economic strategy. The glaring example is the elimination of the mandatory long-form census, a detailed survey of Canadians taken every five years. Its replacement, the voluntary National Household Survey, added $22 million to the cost of the 2011 census; the response rate dropped from 94 per cent in 2006 to 69 per cent, which makes the data totally unreliable. “A response rate of 75 per cent is the minimum required for sample accuracy,” says StatsCan’s former chief statistician, Munir Sheikh, who famously resigned in 2010 after Tony Clement, then industry minister, stated publicly that the decision to cut the long-form census came from within StatsCan. “The federal government misrepresented my advice,” Sheikh told Maclean’s, adding that ongoing cuts to the agency have undermined its credibility. StatsCan stands by the data: “The results for the 2011 census are of very high quality, as in previous censuses,” says Peter Frayne of StatsCan.

Five years later, we are seeing the effects. Without the baseline provided by the long-form census, says statistician Doug Elliott, who runs Regina consultancy QED Information Systems, “when an employment rate or CPI [consumer price index] doesn’t make any sense, your immediate suspicion now is that the number is wrong, rather than trying to figure out why.” Voluntary surveys also create biased data, says Sheikh: Response rates from the very rich, the very poor, rural areas, immigrants and Aboriginal communities tend to be far lower—so these groups are not well-represented. “People who do not respond well to a voluntary survey are the very people social policy tries to help,” he says. “So if you were to base policy on data received, you’d say, ‘Gee, we don’t have a poverty problem in this country.’ ”

“You see this continual silencing of people who are not ‘winners,’ for lack of a better word,” says Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist with the Ottawa-based Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “The result is that the government can pretend they’re not there. It’s like, ‘If you’ve got any needs, we can’t hear you, we can’t see you, la la la.’”

Sheikh believes we’d be better off with no census data than what we have now: “Then you do the best you can using reasoning, logic, and whatever other stats may be available [on which] to base your decision. But when you have wrong information, chances are, it will put you on the wrong path to policy development.”

Source: How Ottawa’s war on data threatens all that we know about Canada

Filed under Multiculturalism

Immigration and refugee policies centre stage in federal election campaign: Party summaries

2015/09/21 Leave a comment

Star article summarizing party positions (pending formal release of their platforms):

Conservatives: The Conservatives are all about staying the course — with perhaps some small refinements along the way. Recent promises including trying to get the provincial governments to speed up processing of foreign credentials and increasing the number of loans to immigrants to upgrade their skills. Harper has pledged that his government would welcome 10,000 additional Syrian and Iraqi refugees — with an emphasis on religious minorities and those who are vulnerable over the next four years and create an emergency relief fund that would match Canadian donations up to $100 million for Syria.

NDP: The NDP want to repeal and rewrite parts of Bill C-24 — Strengthening the Citizenship Act — in particular the revocation and intent-to-reside clauses that are the subject a constitutional challenge. The party also wants to reduce the wait times in processing family reunification applications as well as increasing the number of Syrian refugees to Canada. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair has promised 10,000 Syrian refugees will be welcomed to Canada by the end of the year, with another 9,000 annually until 2019. And the party plans to make sure to reinstate health care for refugees.

Liberals: John McCallum, the Liberals’ former immigration critic, said reducing processing times for family reunification applications is high on the party’s list. That would mean more money and more resources to the department to cut wait times. As well the most egregious clauses of Bill C-24 would be rewritten. The Liberals would also increase the number of government supported refugees from Syria. Leader Justin Trudeau has said that he would welcome 25,000 refugees — many of whom would be government sponsored.

Source: Immigration and refugee policies centre stage in federal election campaign | Toronto Star

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Visible minority communities and the Election

2015/09/21 Leave a comment

From New Canadian Media, some good articles on different communities and the 2015 election.

Pulse: Arab Media Tack Conservative outlines support for the Government’s position among some Arab communities (primarily Syrian and Iraqi Canadian).

Chinese Canadians Step Up to Fill Representation Gap as there have been fewer MPs than their population warrants. A Willingness to Elect People Not Born in Canada explores the relative success of Canadian Sikhs, reflecting both absolute numbers and their relative concentration in a number of ridings in the Lower Mainland and the GTA.

Lastly, Where are the (Ethnic) Women? analyses the number of visible minority women candidates, showing that between 16 and 21 percent (depending on the party) of all women candidates are visible minorities, slightly greater than the number women visible minorities who are Canadian citizens (and thus who can vote).

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Donald Trump’s campaign manager: 400,000 ‘anchor babies’ born in U.S. every year | PolitiFact

2015/09/21 Leave a comment

The numbers in America of those born to undocumented immigrants and the much smaller amount due to ‘birth tourism’ (340,000 compared to 8,600, or 8 and 0.2 percent of total births respectively – Canadian figures from CIC analysis show 500 out of 360,000 total live births or 0.14 percent) :

Those figures may have been accurate several years ago, but they are outdated when compared to current estimates, said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer with the Pew Research Center. Passel is the author of a widely cited 2010 Pew Hispanic Center report that pins the number of children born to undocumented immigrants at 340,000 in 2008 (about 8 percent of all births that year).

“Figures as high as 400,000 per year are plausible for the mid 2000s, but our current estimates are around 300,000 per year,” he told us. “The numbers were higher in the mid 2000s than now — in part because there were more unauthorized immigrants then and overall birth rates, for natives and immigrants alike, were higher before the recession.”

So Lewandowski’s number is slightly exaggerated.

His characterization of these births as “anchor babies” is also problematic, however, as the metaphor implies intent that the numbers don’t back up. Based on past reporting, it’s not clear whether every birth to an undocumented mother was for the purpose of tethering the family to American soil.

“There are a million hardworking Hispanic people in San Diego who came here to work and then happened to have a baby,” midwife Lauren Weber said in the 2010 fact-check. “Then, there are people who come over in order to have a baby.”

Weber also described a practice known as “birth tourism,” in which middle- and upper-class visitors on tourist visas travel to the United States specifically to have a baby. The numbers for these types of births are much lower, at around 8,600, or 0.2 percent of all births, in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As for undocummented immigrants, experts don’t think they have the same motivations.

“I believe that most migrants come for economic reasons and opportunity,” said Theresa Brown, the director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Institute. “The idea that their child may be able to sponsor them for a green card in 21 years is probably too long term to be a primary driver of immigration.”

Source: Donald Trump’s campaign manager: 400,000 ‘anchor babies’ born in U.S. every year | PolitiFact

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Subtle racism is the real threat: Cole

2015/09/19 Leave a comment

Desmond Cole on subtle racism, following UofT’s ‘White Student Union’ controversy:

The SFWC [Students For Western Civilization] website also features an interview with University of New Brunswick professor Ricardo Duchesne, who claims that “there is a real bias in university against white students, against white history.” Duchesne is the founder of the Council of European Canadians, whose mission statement proclaims that “Canada should remain majority, not exclusively, European in its ethnic composition and cultural character.”

For the moment, these messages of blatant white supremacy, and resentment for racialized people and movements, are thankfully unwelcome in mainstream Canadian conversation. That could change, of course, which is why it is important to challenge and oppose Duchesne, SFWC and their sympathizers. But we must also recognize them as merely the leading edge of a racist undercurrent in Canada, a mainstream fear that insists white people are under attack, but skilfully avoids examining what whiteness is or where it originated.

Race is a social construct, a false classification of humanity with no basis in science. However, thanks to our human history of European colonialism, slavery, and appropriation, whiteness has been established in Canada as an unscrutinized norm, a blank standard against which all other races are measured.

In Canada, white people are rarely named as a definitive group of people with a common identity or culture, a collective existence or set of values. Instead, whiteness stands invisible behind the camera and the microphone, examining the actions of others and demanding an explanation without acknowledging its role in framing nearly all mainstream conversions.

This is why, for example, a Canadian national newspaper can publish the headline, “We can’t keep tiptoeing around black-on-black violence,” as if the public is consumed with some other form of intra-racial violence, or would even validate that, say, white-on-white violence, exists or is a problem. It is why I, as a well-known black Canadian, am routinely asked my opinion about the actions of alleged black criminals, when it is the opinions of our white-dominated media that truly guide that narrative.

Most political observers and even casual news watchers remember city councillor and former mayor Rob Ford’s statement that “Oriental people work like dogs.” That kind of shameless racism gnaws at our Canadian sensibilities. But few people remember that Ford, whose heritage is hardly indigenous to North America, also said that East Asian people are “slowly taking over.”

Ford didn’t have to say what “Orientals” were taking over or, more importantly, from whom they were taking over. Similarly, when Conservative politician Larry Miller recently said that Muslim women in Canada who cover their faces should “stay the hell where you came from,” he did so without irony despite the fact that his own ancestry is not indigenous to Canada.

We can all recognize overt racism, and we should all condemn it, but our bigger problem is the subtle, unexamined sort. While we may reject uncomfortable notions of white student groups and organizations that promote European “cultural character,” most of us are more accepting of the equally racist notion of a dominant “Western civilization” they employ as a substitute for talking openly about whiteness.

Our unacknowledged assumptions, and our language about human diversity are better indicators of racism and discrimination than the impolite outbursts we seem so prone to recognizing. The clumsy expressions of hatred on local university campuses this week are like weeds — we can tear out the unsightly offshoots that pop up, but ultimately we have to address the problem at its root.

 Source: Subtle racism is the real threat: Cole | Toronto Star

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

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