After 40 years, Immigrant Settlement Program needs an overhaul – The Globe and Mail

2014/04/22 Leave a comment

Robert Vineberg, formerly Director General of Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s Prairies and Northern Territories Region, on the need to reform and update settlement services (which are primarily language training). One point that he doesn’t make is the need for better information on how effective some of these programs are. If I recall correctly, former Minister for CIC Kenney was frustrated by the lack of performance information and testing results on language training, a valid concern.

And Vineberg’s wish to essentially broaden settlement services to all and sundry has to be balanced by the need to focus on the groups that need it most, given fiscal realities. And while I can see the merit to provide services to refugees and some temporary foreign workers transitioning to permanent residency, I fail to see the need to provide these services to those graduates of Canadian universities. Surely their Canadian experience and language skills surpass anything settlement could offer?

In updating the Immigrant Settlement Program, the federal government should provide services to those in transition to immigrant status, as well as to those who have become Canadian citizens if they are still in need. It must also develop a new funding model that recognizes the ongoing nature of Canada’s Immigrant Settlement Program instead of treating it as something that could end tomorrow.

After 40 years, Immigrant Settlement Program needs an overhaul – The Globe and Mail.

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Spotlighting a law that stripped U.S.-born women of citizenship

2014/04/22 Leave a comment

Good reminder of some of the past history of citizenship policy, and how people lost their citizenship, in this case due to marriage of an immigrant:

Daniel Swalm was researching his family when he came across a disturbing episode in immigration history. That discovery would lead to a move in the U.S. Senate to apologize for action the nation took more than a century ago.

Swalm discovered that under an obscure 1907 law, his grandmother Elsie, born and raised in Minnesota, was stripped of her U.S. citizenship after marrying an immigrant from Sweden.

Swalm had never heard of the Expatriation Act that required a U.S.-born woman who married a foreigner to “take the nationality of her husband.”

Swalm, who lives in Minneapolis, found out about the law when he stumbled across an alien registration form filled out by Elsie Knutson Moren.

“I could not figure out why Grandma Elsie had to fill one out, because she was born in the United States,” he said.

The law has caught others by surprise, too.

“There are all these people doing their genealogy, and they come across relatives who were declared alien enemies during World War I, and they’re trying to figure out why that would be if they were born in the United States,” said Candice Bredbenner, a history professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Spotlighting a law that stripped U.S.-born women of citizenship – latimes.com.

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Under new rules, rich Chinese should learn French if they want to move to Canada | South China Morning Post

2014/04/22 Leave a comment

One of the perverse consequences of Quebec continuing its business immigration program while the rest of Canada has suspended it. Never liked this “buy a visa” approach and government officials are basically poor at assessing entrepreneurial and business skills:

Whether or not the language exemption is abused matters to Vancouver, since 89 per cent of all investor immigrants supposedly bound for Quebec end up living elsewhere in Canada. Assuming the dispersal rate under the federal scheme holds true for these immigrants too, that means about 59 per cent of all Quebec investor immigrants actually end up living in Vancouver.

As with the axed federal scheme, Chinese millionaires dominate Quebec’s investor immigration scheme, making up 71 per cent of 2012’s applicants.

This habit of rich Chinese to quickly flee their new “home” of Quebec has not gone unnoticed.

In testimony to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Official Languages last June, then Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was scathing.

“I think there is some skimming going on in the programme, whereby Quebec is taking the money of immigrant investors and using it, but the British Columbia taxpayers must pay the price for the social services provided to immigrants selected by Quebec,” Kenney said.

Under new rules, rich Chinese should learn French if they want to move to Canada | South China Morning Post.

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You mean, the free market actually works? vs The Slow Death of Free Speech

2014/04/21 Leave a comment

Funny piece by Tabatha Southey bringing some perspective to those who claim the decline of free speech following the Hirsi Ali Brandeis controversy:

Socrates is not remembered as that guy who, found guilty of corrupting the young minds of Athens, was denied an honorary diploma – but invited to come back to the agora to debate any time.

Galileo is not remembered as the man who claimed the Earth revolved around the sun and, for that sin, was banned from becoming pope.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wasn’t trolled on Twitter for writing One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich – he was exiled. And Lady Chatterley’s Lover wasn’t published instantly, in its entirety, in 1928, then given a lot of uncharitable reviews on Goodreads. Indeed, it wasn’t published unexpurgated in the United Kingdom until 1960.

In short, a little perspective suggests that recent reports of the death of free speech have been greatly exaggerated….

The dystopian world of “political correctness,” of repressed expression and sexuality, not irrationally predicted in the sometimes silly 1980s, never materialized. We’re a gloriously loud, bawdy bunch these days. But a sleight of hand that equates being answered with being “silenced,” dissent with being “bullied,” allows old soldiers of that 1980s culture war to reenact battles and claim the victimhood they once dismissed as the left’s low moral ground….

To be to be less than universally celebrated is to be censored. The ideology that lambasted the “nanny state” whines for a “wet nurse state” and what you smell from those babies is hardly books burning.

You mean, the free market actually works? – The Globe and Mail.

On the other side of the argument, Mark Steyn:

Oh, don’t worry. There’ll still be plenty of ‘offending, insulting or humiliating’ in such a world, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Mozilla CEO and Zionists and climate deniers and feminist ‘cis-women’ not quite au courant with transphobia can all tell you. And then comes the final, eerie silence. Young Erin Ching at Swarthmore College has grasped the essential idea: it is not merely that, as the Big Climate enforcers say, ‘the science is settled’, but so is everything else, from abortion to gay marriage. So what’s to talk about? Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry but ‘safe spaces’ where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex, orientation, ‘gender fluidity’ and everything else except diversity of thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.

As it happens, the biggest ‘safe space’ on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there’s nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme’s famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.

As American universities, British playwrights and Australian judges once understood, the ‘safe space’ is where cultures go to die.

The slow death of free speech

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Joseph Heath: How to beat racism

2014/04/21 Leave a comment

More Joseph Heath, this time on racism. Helpful to have so much of his book in the National Post, not sure if this is helping book sales for Enlightenment 2.0 or substituting for them:

… What matters is not so much the differences between individuals but which differences we choose to invest significance in. This is the good news on race. It suggests that the best way to overcome race may simply be to distract people from it. If there is nothing else to attract people’s attention, the set of physical characteristics that distinguish race will be regarded as significant, but this can be overcome by reducing the salience of these characteristics. There is probably nothing we can do to stop people from classifying others into groups and developing animosity toward those whom they regard as belonging to an out-group. Yet even if we are unable to change this basic feature of human psychology, we can develop an effective work-around, by manipulating the environment so that people classify each other in ways that are less socially pernicious. For example, instead of allowing people to fixate on inherited features of individuals — such as skin colour — we could encourage them to focus on arbitrary or symbolic features — like hair style. The advantage of hair style is that it can easily be changed, and so does not translate into permanent disadvantage for any class of individuals.

This may explain why the military and sports teams have been far more successful at creating racial integration than many other institutions in American life. What distinguishes both of them is that they cultivate very intense, particularistic loyalties. There is good reason to think that these forms of group identification simply crowd out the other ones based on race. This can be far more effective than asking people to subscribe to some universalist ideal, one that forces them to overcome or suppress their “groupish” instincts.

From this perspective, the real problem in America is not so much racism as it is race consciousness. (Indeed, to any non-American, the most oppressive feature of intercultural relations in America is not that people are racist, but just that they talk and think incessantly about race, even worse than the way the English talk and think incessantly about class.) And yet this feature of American culture seems to be one that everyone, white and black, conservative and liberal, is involved in a giant conspiracy to sustain and reinforce. This is because most Americans who are progressive on the subject believe that racism must be overcome directly, and that this can only be done by increasing sensitivity and awareness of racial difference. A lot of progressive black politics has done the same, by rejecting the older ideal of a “colour-blind” society and insisting upon the recognition and affirmation of a positive black identity. This winds up being an inadvertent recipe for the reproduction of racism. Even though the intention is to create a positive group identity, its dominant effect is to make race salient as a basis of group identity, which means that it will also, inevitably, become a locus of negative valuation for some.

Joseph Heath: How to beat racism | National Post.

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Why is the UK Law Society throwing its weight behind a regressive form of Islam?

2014/04/21 Leave a comment

More on the UK Law Society’s drafting of guidance of sharia-compliant wills, and the impact this has on already vulnerable women in some Muslim communities:

But this isn’t the whole story: both practically and symbolically the move undermines the axiom that all British people – male and female; gay and straight; Muslim, Christian and atheist – should be equal under the law. As Charlie Klendijan of the Lawyers’ Secular Society explained to me, “The Law Society’s guidance notes have a special influence and prestige. They’re the recognised benchmark of ‘good practice’ for all solicitors, so they have a major impact on how law is practiced in this country. By publishing this guidance note, it has effectively legitimised sharia in the eyes of the legal world.” …

But British Muslims aren’t a single culture with a monolithic faith, and it’s not up to the Law Society to decide which understanding of “sharia practice” is correct. Instead of producing a neutral description of sharia, it has effectively issued a declamation on behalf of a regressive, reactionary version of Islamic jurisprudence that more liberal-minded Muslims fight bravely against.

For an organisation ostensibly committed to the liberal values enshrined in British law to join the theological fray on the conservative side is a cruel blow to reformist Muslims. …

What makes the controversy over these guidelines all the more absurd is their utter pointlessness. The Law Society ought simply to remind its members that their job is to provide legal, not religious, advice: clients looking for guidance on what sharia requires should be advised to consult an Islamic authority of their choice.

The nature of British Islam in not fixed: both moderates like Dr Hasan and reactionaries with their flyblown dogma hope to inherit a greater share of its future. The case continues and continues. Meanwhile is it too much to ask of the Law Society to refrain from taking sides?

Why is the Law Society throwing its weight behind a regressive form of Islam? – Comment – Voices – The Independent.

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In Scotland, separatists love ‘money and the ethnic vote’ – Doug Saunders

2014/04/21 Leave a comment

Doug Saunders compares Scottish inclusiveness and the recent divisiveness strategy of identity politics in the Quebec Values Charter of the PQ. Ironic as the PQ used to have an inclusiveness strategy prior to the shock of the 2007 election when the ADQ (predecessor of the CAQ) became the official opposition by running on identity politics:

Behind many old-school separatist movements lies the late-19th-century concept of ethnic self-determination, which was given half-hearted official recognition in the Versailles Treaty and went on to create considerable bloodshed in the 20th century as former empires and federal countries collapsed into ethnic territorial claims. The uni-ethnic state was never more than an artifice of the imagination, and its legacy is so sad and unsuccessful that few voters are likely to back the creation of a new one. Ms. Marois learned this too late: The majority of potential separatism supporters, it turned out, were interested in economic and political self-sufficiency, but not ethnic solidarity.

Scotland’s separatists figured this out a generation earlier. “The SNP was never happy with ethnic-nationalist types within its ranks. It marginalized them at every opportunity,” says Peter Lynch, the author of a history of the SNP and a lecturer in politics at the University of Stirling.

In the early 1990s, SNP leader Alex Salmond led the most recent major purge of SNP ethnic nationalists. The party banned the right-wing Siol nan Gaidheal (“seed of the gaels”) movement and expelled party members who had joined the radical Settler Watch and Scottish Watch movements. The SNP’s most famous slogan, “It’s Scotland’s Oil,” and its centre-left message of higher social spending financed by petroleum windfall held a lot more appeal than Braveheart-flavoured jingoism. Besides, the Scottish people had become increasingly multihued and multireligious.

In Scotland, separatists love ‘money and the ethnic vote’ – The Globe and Mail.

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Parenting skills put to the test in multicultural society – The Globe and Mail

2014/04/21 Leave a comment

Leah Mclaren on parenting when different views among parents of childhood friends:

Great advice, but what happens when two neighbours strongly disagree on what is morally right?

This is the tricky part. Because while I know I must respect my neighbour’s right to view the human body any way she wants, I also believe she is fundamentally wrong. And while I can usually balance these two conflicting notions in my head, it’s when she attempts to impress her values on my child that I find my tolerance reaching its limit. The same is true for her and bare bums.

Our boys remain best of friends – and that can only be a good thing, both for their own developing characters and for society as a whole. Post-bottomgate, Mohammed’s mother and I have arrived at an uneasy truce over tea and biscuits. Our unspoken agreement is like the unwritten contract that binds any multicultural society. Privately, we will each adhere to our own rules. And in public we will try our best to get along. Even if, like Bart Simpson, we are pretty darn sure the other person is wrong.

Parenting skills put to the test in multicultural society – The Globe and Mail.

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Can we really wash our hands of extremist dual nationals?

2014/04/19 Leave a comment

Konrad Yakabuski on C-24’s proposed revocation measures for terrorism-related crimes, calling for serious debate on the implications, given recent US and UK revelations regarding US drone strikes on former UK citizens whose citizenship was revoked. See also Chris Selley’s Actually, my citizenship is a right | National Post.

Will be interesting to see if the debate within Committee focuses on the long-standing principle since Diefenbaker that a citizen is a citizen, whether born in Canada or naturalized, or more on due process and rule of law in any referrals to the Federal Court seeking revocation.

Still, C-24 is not perfect. Its proposal to strip dual nationals convicted of terror-related crimes of their Canadian citizenship warrants serious scrutiny in light of recent revelations by the British news media. If the intent is to ease CIA drone strikes, or the extradition to the United States of terrorist suspects living abroad, MPs should think long and hard about what that means for Canada.

Mr. Alexander has said he is “confident” that many of the 130 Canadians believed to be fighting with extremist groups abroad are dual nationals. Revoking their citizenship while they’re outside the country could prevent them from ever returning to Canada. This country would effectively absolve itself of their fate, even though some of them may have been born here…

Mr. Alexander has insisted that “the courts will play a very important role” in the process of revoking the Canadian citizenship of a dual national convicted of terrorism. That’s an improvement over the British system, where most of the power lies with the Home Secretary. But is it enough? The Commons citizenship committee needs to ask Mr. Alexander some tough questions.

Can we really wash our hands of extremist dual nationals? – The Globe and Mail

Or, given the “shopping for votes” culture, opposition parties focus more on fee increases and increased residency requirements.

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Joseph Heath: The new nationalism

2014/04/19 Leave a comment

More excerpts from Joseph Heath’s book, Enlightenment 2.0, on one of the ironies of Trudeau’s policies promoting Canadian symbols. For the Conservative take on successive Liberal governments, see Chris Champion’s Tory History and Its Critics | The Dorchester Review.

So that is how, in a case of not inconsiderable historical irony, Trudeau — the avatar of pure reason — became the father of modern Canadian nationalism, in all of its most boisterous and vulgar manifestations. One wonders how he would have felt had he seen the closing ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, with its giant inflatable beavers, table-hockey players, moose hats, dancing lumberjacks and voyageurs, and Michael Bublé dressed as a Mountie singing “The Maple Leaf Forever.” The phrase “What have I done?” might have sprung to mind. And yet, almost 40 years after Trudeau made the initial moves, one could see the power of the strategy. Quebec artists essentially boycotted the Olympic ceremonies, refusing to participate in what they rightly anticipated would be an orgy of Canadian nationalism. And yet when the curtain closed, they proceeded to complain about the lack of “French content” in the program. A principled commitment to national sovereignty is all well and good, but no one likes to feel left out of a party. As far as political dilemmas go, the shoe had been moved to the other foot.

Joseph Heath: The new nationalism | National Post.

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