Matt Gurney: Quotas have no place in our military

2014/05/22 Leave a comment

The predictable reaction to the story regarding revising Canadian Forces diversity targets downward (Canadian military hopes to cut hiring targets for women, minorities).

There is merit in the argument that the military recruiting base tends to be more rural and more white. But merit arguments sometimes also disguise unconscious biases and preferences. Having targets (I oppose quotas) ensures focus on what is a likely long-term challenge:

A more diverse military is a desirable goal, of course — albeit one that should be treated as completely secondary to the primary objective of fielding a competent force. And as Canada becomes increasingly diverse, the military naturally will draw recruits from a wider pool of applicants. But as it stands now, many recruits join to escape local economic difficulties in parts of the country that are less multicultural than our large cities, or to honour long family traditions of service. We owe all of them a fair chance and, of course, our thanks.

But we owe the country a properly trained and equipped fighting force, regardless of what it looks like. If someone is willing to put on the uniform and defend Canada and our values abroad, and meets reasonable definitions of fitness and suitability, that’s all that matters. Our soldiers defend the country, not just those who look like them.

Matt Gurney: Quotas have no place in our military | National Post.

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Tory MP given federal contracts months before, after failed 2008 election bid

2014/05/22 Leave a comment

Interesting story. In contrast to multiculturalism and  historical recognition grants and contributions (G&Cs), not delegated to officials, integration programming, largely language training, was delegated. When Minister Kenney became Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, officials had to explain why the sheer volume of G&Cs made Ministerial review impractical.

Minister Kenney had bad experience with the multiculturalism G&Cs as officials remained in denial mode, continuing to favour traditional organizations and approaches, leading the Minister to reject most proposals. Ministerial staffers would routinely Google organizations, to check for consistency between departmental descriptions of individual projects and the overall approach of the organization. It sometimes led to uncomfortable discussions, but his office was applying due diligence, more so than some of the officials (I eventually also would Google before approval).

Given the Minister’s concerns about delegation, a system was put in place to provide a heads-up on planned project approvals, an early detection system to avoid surprises and reduce the likelihood of project approval contrary to the Minister’s wishes. This was partially prompted by the Canadian Arab Federation case (Jason Kenney’s decision to cut funding to the Canadian Arab Federation):

When asked whether Diane Finley, who was the CIC minister at the time, was aware of the contract, spokesman Marcel Poulin said only that “officials award contracts, not ministers.”

That fall, Ms. Young ran in Vancouver South for the Conservatives, losing by just 20 votes to Liberal incumbent Ujjal Dosanjh.

The questions about the first contract didn’t deter Ms. Young’s consulting firm – her office declined to say how many employees the firm had beyond Ms. Young – from seeking a second one just over a year after the election. The November, 2009, pact totalled $452,900 for planning the same conference, this time in early 2010. It included $337,000 for “program delivery” and $115,900 for “administrative” functions. Again, the specific costs are redacted.

A spokeswoman for Jason Kenney, who had succeeded Ms. Finley as CIC minister when the second contract was awarded, said he had “no knowledge of or involvement” with the contracts.

A statement from the department echoed that. “Both contracts were assessed and approved by the appropriate delegated departmental official,” spokeswoman Sonia Lesage said.

Tory MP given federal contracts months before, after failed 2008 election bid – The Globe and Mail.

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Alberta Labour Minister blasts feds over foreign workers

2014/05/22 Leave a comment

Kind of amusing given previous bad blood between the two Ministers (Jason Kenney apologizes to Thomas Lukaszuk for a-hole email gaffe). But substantively, another call for pathways to permanent residency and citizenship:

“We need you here to stay. A revolving door is simply not humane, and economically not sound,” he said.

“In most cases what we need in Canada, and particularly in Alberta, is permanent foreign workers.”

Lukaszuk blasted federal Employment Minister Jason Kenney for suspending the TFW program in the food sector last month to launch a review, after several Canadian businesses were accused of giving TFWs more hours or priority work status.

Alberta Labour Minister blasts feds over foreign workers | Alberta | News | Calg.

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Canadian military hopes to cut hiring targets for women, minorities

2014/05/21 1 Comment

Sigh….

Currently, the military is expected to aim for these targets: females should make up 25.1 per cent of full-time military personnel and reservists; 11.7 per cent should be visible minorities; and 3.3 per cent should be aboriginals.

Those target numbers are lower than for other federal departments, in recognition of the unique nature of military service.

The Canadian Forces place well compared to many of Canada’s allies, particularly on the percentage of women in uniform. The military has also seen recent progress in the number of visible minorities and aboriginals joining up.

Yet it has never actually met its targets. Women currently account for 15 per cent of personnel in uniform, a number that hasn’t changed in several years, while visible minorities represent 4.2 per cent, and aboriginals 1.9 per cent.

…

The proposed targets, contained in a briefing note to Canadian Army commander Lt.-Gen. Marquis Hainse from February, are 17.6 per cent for women, 8.2 per cent for visible minorities, and 2.6 per cent for Aboriginal Peoples.

…

Canadian military officials have previously highlighted the importance of increasing diversity within the Canadian Forces given the country’s changing demographic makeup, which includes more visible minorities and a growing aboriginal population.

“The changing makeup of Canada’s population makes it mission critical that the (Canadian Forces) take proactive measures to be inclusive for men and women of all cultures,” rear-admiral Adam Smith wrote in 2011 when he was chief of military personnel.

Chantal Fraser, a retired lieutenant colonel who spent the last part of her 28-year career looking at employment equity in the military, is worried about the impact reducing the targets would have on the Canadian Forces and their connection to average citizens.

“If we reduce the goals, then they don’t have to strive as hard to reach them,” she said. “And we may end up in a situation where the Canadian military no longer reflects Canadian society. And that’s bad news no matter what country you live in.”

Fraser said the problem isn’t unrealistic targets; it’s that the Canadian Forces aren’t doing enough to recruit women, visible minorities and aboriginal people.

That includes measures to improve the work-life balance for women; focus recruitment efforts on the country’s three biggest cities for visible minorities and on the North for aboriginals; and showcase people from those communities who are already in the military.

Canadian military hopes to cut hiring targets for women, minorities.

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A Debate Over A Troublesome Book – Nicholas Wade

2014/05/21 Leave a comment

More on Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History by Agustín Fuentes, a professor of anthropology at Notre Dame. The following on human genetics is helpful:

1) Genes matter, but they are only a small part of the whole evolutionary picture and focusing on DNA segments won’t get you very far in understanding human evolution. The roundworm C. elegans has about 20,000 genes and humans have about 23,000 genes—it is pretty obvious that humans are more than 15% more complex than roundworms.

2) When making scientific argument about genetic variation you need to focus on populations–and be clear about your definitions (a common one for “population” is a geographical cluster of people who mate more within the cluster than outside of it). Many people talking about this subject use the words cluster, population, group, race, subrace and ethnicity in a range of ways, with few concrete definitions and occasionally interchangeably.  If you do not define something then you cannot measure it, test for it, or try to construct and refute or support hypotheses for it—in short you can’t do science.

3) Humans all share 100% same genes and 99.9% of the variation in the DNA. So the variation we are interested in is .1% of the entire genome. And yes, understanding that variation is important

4) Most genetic variation is due to gene flow and genetic drift so the further apart two populations are the more likely they are to have more differences

5) Nearly all the genetic variation in our entire species is found in populations just in Africa, with most of the variation found in all populations outside of Africa making up a small subset of that variation.

Margaret Wente to note (What if race is more than a social construct?)!

A Debate Over A Troublesome Book « The Dish.

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Creepy Ad Watch – Coke

2014/05/21 Leave a comment

Lack of judgement and values – Coke normally does better than this:

In March, Coke installed five special phone booths in Dubai labor camps that accepted Coca-Cola bottle caps instead of coins. In exchange for the cap from a bottle of Coke—which costs about fifty-four cents—migrant workers could make a three-minute international call. The ad shows laborers in hard hats and reflective vests lining up to use the machine—and grinning, for the first time in the video, as they wait. “I’ve saved one more cap, so I can talk to my wife again tomorrow,” one man tells the camera. More than forty thousand people made calls using the machines. Then, in April, after the booths had been up for about a month, the company dismantled them

I sent links to the ads to Nicholas McGeehan, a Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied labor conditions in Dubai. I was interested in his take on the questions of appropriateness and ethics that some viewers had raised. The videos, he said, were “odious.” For one thing, he said, Coke is not only using these low-income workers to advertise its product, it is also requiring them to buy soft drinks themselves—at nearly a tenth of their typical daily wages, he pointed out—to use the special phone booth. On top of that, he feels that the ads normalize and even glorify the hardship faced by migrant workers—at least some of whom may be working against their will. “If this was two hundred years ago, would it be appropriate for Coke to do adverts in the plantations of the Deep South, showing slaves holding cans of Coke?” he asked. “It is a normalization of a system of structural violence, of a state-sanctioned trafficking system.”

Creepy Ad Watch « The Dish.

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Language and morality: Gained in translation

2014/05/21 Leave a comment

Interesting finding but not surprising that slowing down thinking, through the language barrier, can lead to more rational outcomes:

Several psychologists, including Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 for his work on how people make decisions, think that the mind uses two separate cognitive systems—one for quick, intuitive decisions and another that makes slower, more reasoned choices. These can conflict, which is what the trolley dilemma is designed to provoke: normal people have a moral aversion to killing (the intuitive system), but can nonetheless recognise that one death is, mathematically speaking, better than five (the reasoning system).

This latest study fits with other research which suggests that speaking a foreign language boosts the second system—provided, that is, you don’t speak it as well as a native. Earlier work, by some of the same scholars who performed this new study, found that people tend to fare better on tests of pure logic in a foreign language—and particularly on questions with an obvious-but-wrong answer and a correct answer that takes time to work out.

Dr Costa and his colleagues hypothesise that, while fluent speakers can form sentences effortlessly, the merely competent must spend more brainpower, and reason much more carefully, when operating in their less-familiar tongue. And that kind of thinking helps to provide psychological and emotional distance, in much the same way that replacing the fat man with a switch does. As further support for that idea, the researchers note that the effect of speaking the foreign language became smaller as the speaker’s familiarity with it increased.

Language and morality: Gained in translation | The Economist.

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No ‘trust gap’ for average bureaucrat, Wayne Wouters says | Ottawa Citizen

2014/05/21 Leave a comment

There is some validity to his comments, given that it is true that most public servants have relatively little contact with the political level. But there are issues at senior levels, and after 8 years of a Conservative government, public servants have adjusted and many of those viewed as “enemies” have moved on. Destination 2020 was also carefully – and understandably – managed to focus more on the ways of working rather than addressing the fundamental relationship issues. Public servants tend to be cautious in voicing criticism while within the public service; those of us who are retired have more flexibility. And as Head of the Public Service, he has to encourage rather than discourage:

…. Privy Council Clerk Wayne Wouters says he barely heard any complaints about public servants’ relationship with Conservative ministers and their offices from the 110,000 bureaucrats across the country who took part in his Blueprint 2020 discussions on how to re-shape the workforce.

“The only time … I hear about a trust gap (is) from those who don’t necessarily work in government,” he told the Citizen.

“What I was amazed by on all this was the degree of commitment and passion people had … I don’t think we heard this whole trust thing that others seem to be talking about.”

His remarks were a striking contrast to what the association representing senior managers and executives running departments has said. The trust gap was one of APEX’s chief concerns during the Blueprint 2020 review and it suggested steps to restore respect and confidence between public servants and their political masters.

The Public Policy Forum also conducted a major study among public and private sector leaders on leadership skills for the future public service and said the trust gap emerged as a top issue.

Wouters acknowledged some senior executives may have concerns, but average public servants are far removed from that political interaction and their big worries are getting the tools to do their jobs, he said.

While I had provided the Clerk with a courtesy copy of my book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism, I did not necessarily expect substantive comment but was surprised that at the lack of acknowledgement by his office. Same thing with CIC’s Deputy. However, the President of the Canada School of Public Service did acknowledge and circulate the book to her senior management team.

From my discussions with current and former public servants, largely at the executive level, things are not quite so rosy as portrayed.

No ‘trust gap’ for average bureaucrat, Wayne Wouters says | Ottawa Citizen.

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Quantifying and Visualizing Global International Migration Flows

2014/05/20 Leave a comment

Migration flowsAn interesting study on global migration flows and patterns by the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital. Highlights:

Contrary to common belief (4–6), our data (Fig. 3) do not indicate a continuous increase in migration flows over the past two decades, neither in absolute or relative terms. According to our estimates, the volume of global migration flows declined from 41.4 million (0.75% of world population) during 1990 to 1995, to 34.2 million (0.57% of world population) during 1995 to 2000. A substantial part of the fall might be accounted for by ceasing of cross-border movements triggered by the violent conflicts in Rwanda and the ending of the Soviet-installed Najibullah regime in Afghanistan. The number of global movements increased by 5.7 million between 1995–2000 and 2000–2005, and by 1.6 million between 2000–2005 and 2005–2010, whereas the percentage of the world population moving over 5-year periods has been relatively stable since 1995.

The size of migration flows within and between 15 world regions in 2005 to 2010 (estimates are in database S1) is shown in Fig. 4. Several migration patterns shown in Fig. 4 are broadly in line with previous assessments based on global stock data (11) and flow data for selected countries published by the U.N. (3, 4, 18, 19). Earlier observations include the attractiveness of North America as a migrant destination, the substantial movements from South Asia to the Gulf states in Western Asia, the diverse movements within and between the European regions, and the general tendency for more developed regions to record net migration gains, whereas the less developed countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America sent more migrants than they received from 2005 to 2010.

Check out the nifty interactive graphic here as a good example of how to visualize data.

Quantifying Global International Migration Flows.

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Temporary foreign workers: Canada needs fewer guests – and more citizens

2014/05/20 Leave a comment

Globe editorial:

What should Mr. Kenney do?

Study the issue: Take the time needed to get this right. Commission a group of experts and give them at least six months. Bring the other parties in, and borrow their best ideas. Don’t just introduce legislation in the next few weeks, backed up by nothing more than a thin press release and no actual evidence, and try to hustle it through Parliament. Learn from the fiasco of the Fair Elections Act.

Be principled: A temporary worker program should be for jobs that are temporary. There’s a logic to bringing in seasonal agricultural workers. There may be a logic to some highly skilled workers being brought in under the program, in cases where no trained Canadians exist or where the job is temporary. But burger flippers?

Shrink the program: Make it smaller. Much smaller. Cap the number allowed in each year. Let Canada’s labour market work. If employers in low-wage fields find that they have to offer compensation in excess of minimum wage to attract short-order cooks, customer-service agents and retail sales people, that’s a good thing. It will lead to higher wages for people at the low end of the wage scale, and it will also spur innovation and productivity gains. We want the market to work and to self-correct as it is supposed to, with a tight labour supply in one area of the country forcing up wages, thereby drawing in the underemployed, be they part-time students from down the road or the unemployed from across the country.

Give temporary workers more rights: Shrink the program – but expand their rights. Why not give them the right to change jobs, and even complete labour mobility within Canada, just like Canadians? Give them the power to fight back against abuse and raise their own wages.

More citizens, fewer guests: Canada was built by immigrants who became citizens, not visitors who went home. That’s our future, too.

Citizenship Bill C-24 at Committee goes in other direction, by making citizenship harder to get and no longer providing credit for time spent in Canada as temporary foreign workers.

Temporary foreign workers: Canada needs fewer guests – and more citizens – The Globe and Mail.

Interestingly, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business includes in its recommendations on Temporary Foreign Workers a pathway to citizenship, while the government’s Bill C-24 makes this more difficult given removal of partial credit for pre-Permanent Residents time:

•  Ending the moratorium on restaurants

• Creating a pathway to permanent residence for all TFWs

• A Bill of Rights for TFWs

• Stricter enforcement of existing rules

• An accredited TFW stream for trusted employers

• Matching TFW/Canadian wages by employer

• Maximum 1:1 ratio of TFWs to Canadians

• Allowing permanent immigration for those in entry-level jobs

• Ensuring other government programs (eg. EI) address need for entry-level workers.

CFIB urges feds to end moratorium, enforce rules, protect TFWs’ rights – National Scene – Daily Business Buzz.

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