Canada’s immigration points system is flawed, a new report says. Here’s how it proposes to fix it

2024/05/09 Leave a comment

More advocacy on need to focus on productivity:

Canada should revamp its immigration points system to better select those with the skills to boost productivity, a new report says, even if the changes might favour applicants from some countries.

Immigration has long been premised on newcomers being the engine of economic growth and prosperity, said the study by the Business Council of Alberta. But “cracks” have emerged with Canada’s recent population surge, which has magnified challenges in housing and health care.   

“That’s always been the promise of immigration over the years, but it hasn’t delivered recently,” said Mike Holden, the council’s chief economist and vice-president of policy.

“We need to make sure we’re selecting the right immigrants because otherwise that national consensus and that perception of immigration is going to continue to fall.”

Prompted by concerns over Canada’s rising immigration intake amid a stagnant economy, researchers looked at how the country selects skilled immigrants and released the report on Wednesday. The council recommends “a prosperity-driven immigration system” to ensure it delivers on its promise and grows Canada’s per-capita gross domestic product.

Although the Canadian economy is getting bigger as a result of a surging population, primarily driven by immigration, the report said productivity — an indicator of living standards — has been weak for decades and, more recently, has turned negative.

“We’re not getting wealthier. There are just more of us around,” said the 40-page study, titled “Delivering the Promise.”

“Future prosperity requires that the Canadian economy generate more value, not just because there are more of us, but because each one of us is better off.”

The business council’s own survey of Canadians released this month found less than half of the 2,300 respondents think immigration is good for Canada’s economy and standing in the world, society and prosperity; only 28 per cent believe the current approach is effective in its selection and support of immigrants…..

Source: Canada’s immigration points system is flawed, a new report says. Here’s how it proposes to fix it

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‘They don’t matter’: Advocates frustrated Ottawa not including anti-Palestinian racism in upcoming update of anti-racism strategy

2024/05/09 Leave a comment

Maybe I am missing something but wouldn’t anti-Palestinian be covered by a mix of anti-Arab and for Muslim Palestinians, Islamophobia? Not convinced by the arguments and like all one-off proposals, will have implication for other groups, including of course Israelis and Jews.

The broader question is whether the Canadian Anti-Racism Strategy has been effective, the rising numbers of hate crimes suggest it has not, as does the 2023 evaluation of the strategy:

Advocates for Canada’s Palestinian community have been told that a definition of anti-Palestinian racism will be missing from Ottawa’s newest anti-racism strategy, an inclusion they say would have helped Canadian institutions properly recognize and respond to the growing form of hate.

“I’m concerned that members of our community shared potentially traumatic, harmful, personal stories with the Trudeau government and that the government has disregarded those stories and ignored them outright,” said Dania Majid, head of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA).

“That’s going to make our people, our communities, those who participated (in government consultations) feel even more unheard, more unseen, and feel even more like they don’t matter.”…

Source: ‘They don’t matter’: Advocates frustrated Ottawa not including anti-Palestinian racism in upcoming update of anti-racism strategy

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Ottawa not sufficiently addressing flood of access requests for immigration records, watchdog says

2024/05/09 Leave a comment

Biting and justified comments:

…While she commends IRCC and CBSA’s efforts to increase the efficiency of their access teams, those measures aren’t enough to stem the tide, and amount to “treating the symptoms” instead of “curing the illness,” Ms. Maynard says in the report.

“It’s frustrating, because I think they do know how to fix it,” Ms. Maynard said in an interview. IRCC’s operations division, responsible for processing immigration applications, “are not doing their part in fixing the root cause,” she said.

“Three years ago, we told them, ‘You have to find a different way to provide that information. You have to fix your system, you have to increase the amount of information that’s provided to new applicants.’ They said they would do it. But, as you can see in the report, it’s now three years later and it still hasn’t been fixed.”…

Source: Ottawa not sufficiently addressing flood of access requests for immigration records, watchdog says

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John Ivison: CUPE is being held to account for its obsessive anti-Israel vitriol

2024/05/09 Leave a comment

Words and actions matter. Will be interesting to see how the Marshall lawsuit progresses:

….Keffiyehs are now the cultural appropriation of choice for leftists, including CUPE Local 905 president Katherine Grzejszczak, who wore one during a video meeting with members to discuss remote-working policies, as National Post recently reported. One fellow union member who raised objections to the keffiyeh was told participants were not allowed to talk about anything political. When the Post reporter called Grzejszczak for comment, she said that “intimidating and harassing individuals for wearing traditional cultural clothing is a form of racism.”

At least CUPE is not yet on record as threatening its critics with violence. But a communications officer with the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, Vic Wojciechowski, recently warned U of T professor Kevin Bryan to watch his back after Bryan penned a thread saying the majority of protesters he talked on his campus to were neither students nor affiliated with the university. “There need to be street-based consequences for clumsy buffoons like Kevin,” Wojciechowski tweeted.

This kind of thuggery seems to be where we are heading.

The CUPE-supported rally at the U of T sported a huge banner that bore the legend: “Long live legal armed resistance.” This wording is a variation of the aforementioned tweet on Oct. 7th by CUPE Local 3906, which represents academic workers at McMaster University. That tweet was later taken down because the union said it was not aware of the full scope of the situation on the ground.

The reality was that the massive expression of revulsion across the country shocked even the ivory tower revolutionaries into rethinking their support for slaughter.

But we seem to be inured to such outrages. Students and their public sector union allies can now parade across campuses inciting and glorifying violence without fear of repercussions or even censure.

Source: John Ivison: CUPE is being held to account for its obsessive anti-Israel vitriol

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Hours on hold and long queues: Canadians still grappling with poor passport service

2024/05/09 Leave a comment

I had thought that the earlier problems with backlogs had been solved. Largely yes according to the data but it now appears that the problems are wait times for call centres and for in person service. Ongoing accountability issue between IRCC, with policy responsibility, and Service Canada for service delivery. Appears that the accountability issues mentioned in the IRCC evaluation in 2020 have not been addressed:

Canadians routinely wait hours on the phone and in person when dealing with Passport Canada, leaving many travellers infuriated by the quality of the agency’s customer service.

Post-COVID chaos at passport offices prompted the federal government to step up and promise a series of changes to get the documents into travellers’ hands in a timely manner.

Passport Canada claims that after a prolonged period of pandemic-related delays, the agency has returned to its normal “service standard” of getting passports to most people in 10 or 20 business days, depending on where an application is initially filed.

But the agency’s service standard makes no promises about how quickly they will serve people in person or over the phone.

Data and anecdotal reports suggest Passport Canada’s customer service track record is poor.

A CBC News analysis of passport office wait times shows people in urban centres often wait several hours to get face-to-face with a customer service agent at Passport Canada-branded offices.

On a weekday morning in mid-March, for example, Passport Canada’s website estimated the wait time at its west-end Ottawa location at 2 hours and 45 minutes.

In downtown Toronto that month, would-be passport holders faced a three-hour wait to get to the front of the line before noon.

The wait times in late April were much the same: people in Mississauga, Ont. were being told then they’d have to wait about 2 hours and 45 minutes to be served if they were on site at 9:30 a.m. There was a bright spot in Halifax — there the wait was only an hour.

On Monday, prospective passport holders in Brampton, Ont. faced a nearly three-hour wait shortly after that city’s office opened, according to Passport Canada data published online.

At Calgary’s Sunpark Drive location, travellers were told it would be at least three hours before they could speak to somebody after it opened its doors for the day, online data shows.

More than 12 hours on hold

Debbie Braun is a retiree who lives in High River, Alta., less than an hour south of Calgary.

She told CBC News that the prospect of those long in-person wait times led her to skip the drive into the city and send her passport application by mail in February.

And given Passport Canada’s commitment to process the vast majority of mail-in applications “within 20 days,” Braun thought she’d have her hands on a renewed passport well before her Mexican vacation in April.

In the end, it took twice as long. Braun said she got her passport in 40 days — and only after a bureaucratic battle with multiple phone calls and more than 12 hours spent on hold.

It was the same time frame for Braun’s daughter, who filed separately by mail from northern Alberta.

That’s despite Passport Canada’s commitment that 90 per cent of all mail-in applications will be processed within 20 days.

The agency routinely blows past that target.

Government data from 2022-23 reveals Passport Canada only met that 20-day processing target 52 per cent of the time.

Numbers from the past fiscal year haven’t been published online yet. A year ago, Karina Gould, who was the minister in charge of passports at the time, suggested there had been a big improvement.

Andrew Griffith is a former director general at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) who also worked at Service Canada and on passport files during his long tenure in government.

“The wait times are excessive. Nobody leaves happy if they have to wait three hours in person or on the phone,” he told CBC News.

“They either need to staff up or find other ways to reduce the time lag. I think, from a service point of view, it’s really problematic and it’s the kind of thing that undermines the faith of people in government institutions.”

While they’ve promised the option in the past, the government doesn’t yet allow Canadians to apply for a passport online.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller has said “system vulnerabilities” have prevented Ottawa from fulfilling that commitment. “It’s not secure,” he told reporters in February.

People can only fill out the required forms on the computer. Applicants still have to print them out and send them by mail for processing, or submit them in person.

That’s what Braun did — but then she wanted to use the government’s online application status tracker to keep tabs on her progress.

The federal government launched the tracker after the chaos of 2022-23, billing it as a big fix to prevent future passport pileups.

But Braun soon discovered she needed a file number to log in. She said she had to call to get that information because the online file number generator was “useless” and never gave her one after days of failed attempts.

That’s when the trouble started.

‘Who has time for that?’

“That first morning I called, there were 376 calls ahead of me in the queue,” she told CBC News. “I had no choice — I had to sit there and wait.”

Passport Canada had somehow affixed an old mailing address to her file. Braun filled out the right address when she sent it in, she said, and she has a copy of the application to prove it.

Each time she dialled through, she said, she was faced with a wall of other callers in front of her.

Later in February, she was number 352 on the line to speak to an operator.

In March, 377 people were ahead of her on the phone. On another March call, she was caller number 367.

On her last and final call that month, there were more than 500 callers ahead of her on hold, she said.

“I mean, who has time for that? Five hundred calls?” Braun said.

Braun said her average wait time to get an agent on the line was two hours and 40 minutes.

“How can somebody at an office sit on hold for two and a half hours?” she said.

Braun described some of the operators as “quite rude” and argumentative, adding they blamed her for an address error that was really their fault.

“I worked for Greyhound Canada for 35 years and if I would’ve done what Passport Canada does to the people calling in, I would have been fired,” she said. “It just angers me and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you know?”

She said that while the government has “bragged” about its changes to the passport program, it has nothing to boast about.

“They just tell the people what they want to hear — ‘Oh, we’ve fixed everything’ — and the systems they put in place to improve things aren’t adequate because they don’t think it through,” she said.

40 days to get a passport

No one federal department is responsible for the passport program.

That’s a problem, Griffith said, because nobody wants to take ownership of a vital service that touches so many Canadians personally.

In 2023, after the passport fiasco, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau created a new cabinet position called “citizens’ services,” with a minister responsible for “serving as our government’s champion for service delivery excellence.”

Trudeau’s mandate letter to the minister, Terry Beech, said he should focus on “delivering services where and when Canadians need them” and deal with “service delivery challenges” on passports.

A spokesperson for Beech said he was not available for an interview.

Griffith said Beech’s appointment was political — an attempt to show people the government cares about wait times. But the minister does not seem to have the power to push through any real change, he added.

“I never really thought the ministerial role was a meaningful position,” he said. “I don’t think it needs a minister unless you’re really going to revamp government. You never see Beech, he’s not very active.”

IRCC, which is taking the lead on introducing online passport applications, said in a media statement that it “remains committed” to the concept but didn’t offer a timeline for a rollout.

Employment and Social Development Canada, which is responsible for managing the passport program on behalf of IRCC, told CBC News that it sometimes “experiences increased demand on a seasonal basis as popular travel times approach.”

As for long call centre wait times, the department said time spent on hold “can vary and some clients may experience either longer or shorter hold times.”

The department says it encourages people to use the online status tracker to “get updates on their applications without needing to call or visit Service Canada.”

“Service Canada remains committed to service excellence and improving the experience for clients applying for passports,” the department said.

Braun, meanwhile, said her experience left her with little faith in government’s ability to deliver.

“I followed the rules, I did what I was supposed to do and then you have to go through the nightmare and you get upset,” Braun said.

“It’s a good thing I did the 10-year passport thing because I don’t think I could go through this again in five years.”

Source: Hours on hold and long queues: Canadians still grappling with poor passport service

Filed under Citizenship, Passports Tagged with

Keller: The campus occupations aren’t protected by free speech, because they aren’t speech

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

Of note:

…Imagine if a Christian campus group took over King’s College Circle, and said it would remain until the university stopped funding anything to do with abortion. Should they be removed? Why? If your answer is they have to go because their opinions are wrong, you’re standing free speech on its head. This is Canada, not the People’s Republic of China.

The legal problem with an occupation, left or right, pro-Palestinian or anti-vaccine, isn’t what its participants are saying. It’s what they’re doing – taking over a space and holding it hostage.

What does that have to do with free speech? Nothing.

Source: The campus occupations aren’t protected by free speech, because they aren’t speech

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

While other countries add services, Canada adds public servants

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

Great header. One important point missing to deliver digital successfully, existing policies and procedures will need significant change. Tech cannot solve all the problems if the policies are too complex to understand and manage:

To change course, we must commit to:

  • Make digital skills a requirement for advancement in government. How will we progress if our leaders lack the skills, experience, and confidence necessary to own successful service delivery?
  • Deliver useful, simple wins quickly. Large projects are far more likely to fail than small ones. Let’s prove we can deliver value fast to restore confidence. The rapid delivery of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit proved that we can achieve wins when we must. 
  • Create a single government interface. Design services around citizen needs rather than around department responsibilities. Thirty-one countries have figured this out.
  • Change both citizen and government behavior.  All Canadians will have to relearn how they interact with their government using the new tools we build. The rewards will be significant: In Estonia, one simple rule—the government may not ask for a piece of information twice—slashed bureaucracy throughout the public sector.
  • Spending, schedules, and performance must be transparent. We’re clearly spending too much on transformation, and not getting enough in return. Yet nobody has a good handle on costs. From now on, every initiative must start with a clear definition of success, and then make simple metrics public throughout the delivery process. 
  • Let leaders do the hard work. There should be no responsibility without authority. If we task someone with making hard—even unpopular, changes—we need to give them the power, resources, and flexibility necessary to deliver citizen-centric services. It’s the only way we’ll attract serious digital talent to public service.
  • Create and re-use standard modules. Create software “building blocks” that make building services faster, easier, and more secure—and then insist that every department uses them. Freeze the budgets of departments who refuse.

In his 1993 resignation address, the then-prime minister Brian Mulroney said, “whether one agrees with our solutions or not, none will accuse us of having chosen to evade our responsibilities by side-stepping the most controversial issues of our time.” 

We have been side-stepping the biggest shift in government of our lifetimes. Digital power will define the best countries of the coming century. If we want to remain among them, we must become a digital-first nation.

Source: While other countries add services, Canada adds public servants

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McWhorter: The Columbia Protests Made the Same Mistake the Civil Rights Movement Did

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

Comparison of note:

Last week I wrote about the protests that had come to dominate my professional home, Columbia University, and make headlines across the country. I said that though I did not believe the participants were motivated by antisemitism, the volume, fury and duration of their protest left many Jewish students feeling under siege for their Jewishness. That assessment has turned out to be one of the more polarizing things I have ever written, in part because some readers interpreted my position as opposing student protest overall.

I had no objection when the protests began last fall, but since that time, they escalated significantly. After students occupied the university’s storied Hamilton Hall — and police officers in riot gear conducted over 100 arrests — the administration closed the campus, moved all classes online and recommended that we professors either trim or eliminate final examinations in our classes. The mood is as grim now as when Covid forced the spring semester of 2020 to end with a desolate groan.

What happened this week was not just a rise in the temperature. The protests took a wrong turn, of a kind I have seen too many other activist movements take. It’s the same wrong turn that the civil rights movement took in the late 1960s.

After the concrete victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, a conflict arose within the movement between those who sought to keep the focus on changing laws and institutions and those who cherished more symbolic confrontations as a chance to speak truth to power.

The conflict played out most visibly in what became of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC began with grass-roots activism in the form of sit-ins and voter registration, but in 1966 John Lewis, a veteran of the Selma demonstrations who spoke at the March on Washington, was replaced as the group’s leader by Stokely Carmichael, who spoke charismatically of Black Power but whose political plans tended to be fuzzy at best. The term “Black Power” often seemed to mean something different to each person espousing it. It was, in essence, a slogan rather than a program.

This new idea — that gesture and performance were, in themselves, a form of action — worried the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who regarded some of the group’s demonstrations as “expressions of rivalry and rage, without constructive purpose,” according to the historian Taylor Branch.

James Bevel, who worked alongside King, scolded his fellow activist Hosea Williams for having no political strategy beyond putting Black people — he used a racial slur instead — “in jail to get on TV.” In response to what he considered dangerous rhetoric, Andrew Young asked some activists in Memphis, “How many people did you kill last year?” and proposed that they translate their militancy into an actual policy goal instead.

Did this focus on performance bear fruit? Here’s something: Name some significant civil rights victories between 1968 and the election of Barack Obama. It’s a lot harder than naming the victories up until that point. Of course, protest requires theatrics, as King knew. (Writing to Young in 1965 amid the Selma demonstrations, King said, “Also please don’t be too soft. It was a mistake not to march today. In a crisis we must have a sense of drama.”) But it’s perilously easy for the drama to become the point, for the protest to be less about changing the world than performing a self.

I share the campus protesters’ opinion that the war in Gaza has become an atrocity. Israel had every right to defend itself after Hamas’s massacre, which itself was an atrocity. However, the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, with uncountable more left maimed or homeless, cannot be justified. I am increasingly dismayed that President Biden does not simply deny Benjamin Netanyahu any further arms.

Beyond a certain point, however, we must ask whether the escalating protests are helping to change those circumstances. Columbia’s administration agreed to review proposals about divestment, shareholder activism and other issues and to create health and education programs in Gaza and the West Bank. But the protesters were unmoved and a subgroup of them, apparently, further enraged.

Who among the protesters really thought that Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, and the board of trustees would view the occupation of Hamilton Hall — and the visible destruction of property — and say, “Oh, if the students feel that strongly, then let’s divest from Israel immediately”? The point seemed less to make change than to manifest anger for its own sake, with the encampment having become old news.

The initial protest was an effective way to show how fervently a great many people oppose the war, but the time had come for another phase: slow, steady suasion. This is not capitulation but a change in tactics, with the goal of making the activists’ work pay off. We recall King most vividly in protests, including being imprisoned for his participation. However, his daily life as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was about endless and often frustrating negotiations with people in power, which eventually bore fruit. In this, as much as in marches, he and his comrades created the America we know today. Smoking hot orations about Black Power might have instilled some pride but created little beyond that.

Richard Rorty wrote in “Achieving Our Country” of the sense in our times that self-expression alone is a kind of persuasion. Marc Cooper, describing the left in the George W. Bush years, wrote of the danger of viewing “rebel poses” as substitutes for how “to figure out how you’re actually going to win an election.”

In our times, when the personal is political, there is always a risk that a quest to heal the world morphs into a quest for personal catharsis. Keeping in mind the difference will get the Columbia protesters closer to making the changes they champion.

Source: The Columbia Protests Made the Same Mistake the Civil Rights Movement Did

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Refugees ecstatic over golden opportunity to live in Canada

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

Of note. The purists miss the point:

…Dana Wagner, co-founder of TalentLift, a non-profit recruitment company that matches refugees with employers, said the program gives refugees, welcomed to Canada as skilled employees, a sense of self-worth.

Refugees who have endured extreme hardship also “have remarkable drive and resilience,” she said. But most employers are unaware that the pathway to Canada exists.

Unlike claims for asylum from people fleeing persecution in their home country, the pilot program links refugee resettlement with economic immigration.

It’s a program that raises concerns for Yvonne Su, assistant professor in interdisciplinary refugee and diaspora studies at York University. She warned against creating categories of refugees that are rooted in their economic value, rather than just welcoming people because they are in danger and deserve help.

“If a program like this becomes very popular then we will have refugees that are seen as ‘ideal refugees’ who have a well-founded fear of persecution and have huge economic potential so they are more deserving of a faster visa-immigration process,” she said…

Source: Refugees ecstatic over golden opportunity to live in Canada

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Khan: Ontario’s keffiyeh ban dares to define the scarf’s meaning for everyone, Regg Cohn: Israel and the UN have allowed the kaffiyeh. Why does Queen’s Park need to ban it?

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

More commentary. Not in favour of this kind of one-off decision. If the legislature chamber is going to allow this, it needs to revise the policy to allow symbols with significant political meaning in a consistent manner:

….The ban is a betrayal of the ideals of the Emancipation Act that Mr. Arnott proudly co-sponsored – namely, upholding the “ongoing struggle for human rights.” After calling on independent MPP Sarah Jama to leave the House for wearing a keffiyeh, he sent an official to deliver the message in person. In an iconic photo, a white man leans over the desk of Ms. Jama, a Black woman clad in a hijab and a keffiyeh, and seated in a wheelchair. Let’s hope the Ontario Black History Society, recognized in the Emancipation Day Act, chronicles this shameful event and sends a letter of protest to Mr. Arnott.

Ontario MPPs had two opportunities to reverse this ban by unanimously voting against it. Yet Robin Martin and Lisa MacLeod, two PC MPPs, supported the ban,keeping it in place. It’s reminiscent of the case of the town of Saint-Apollinaire, Que., in 2017, when 19 naysayers were enough to nix plans for a Muslim cemetery run by the Islamic Cultural Centre, which also operated the Quebec City mosque where six worshippers were massacred just a few months before. That vote was rooted in ignorance and prejudice. Plus ça change.

Premier Doug Ford says he personally opposes the keffiyeh ban. But by declining so far to put forward a government motion to end it, he is failing to stand firmly for the basic human rights of all Ontarians. Now it’s up to the rest of us to strive toward a just society with human dignity at its core.

Source: Ontario’s keffiyeh ban dares to define the scarf’s meaning for everyone

From Martin Regg Cohn:

…Put another way, if it walks and talks like a political protest, it’s a protest. When so many people of all backgrounds suddenly don the Palestinian kaffiyeh, it’s no longer merely cultural or sartorial but political.

Yet even if the Speaker was speaking the truth — and Stiles was surely straining credulity by claiming the kaffiyeh isn’t political at this point — Arnott made the wrong call. Technically, he’s right, but practically his ruling was unenforceable and unsupportable.

Which is why no party leader supported him last month — not just Stiles but her Green, Liberal and Progressive Conservative counterparts asked him to reconsider. Yes, even Premier Doug Ford, mindful of a hard-fought byelection last week with many Muslim voters, echoed the NDP’s call.

The Speaker reminded them all that he is merely their servant, and that they are free to overrule him. But when MPPs were asked to give unanimous consent to permit the kaffiyeh, a number of Tories demurred, leading to the present standoff….

Source: Israel and the UN have allowed the kaffiyeh. Why does Queen’s Park need to ban it?

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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