Semotiuk: Deporting 11 Million U.S. Undocumented Immigrants: Mission Impossible

2024/07/23 Leave a comment

Indeed:

Recently, America’s Voice, a pro-immigration NGO, spoke up about the ramifications of former President Donald Trump’s plan to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. “It means detention camps full of immigrants waiting to be removed. This would affect all undocumented people living in the US, even those who have lived here for decades.” It added, “The moral cost to the country would be unimaginable. It would also lead to economic disaster. The cost to deport 11 million people would come to more than $265 billion. The deportation of every 1 million immigrants would cause an estimated 88,000 American job losses. We would lose trillions in immigrant taxes, economic contributions, and payments into Social Security and Medicare.”

Legally Speaking

Legally speaking, the complications of such an endeavour have been summarized as follows: “Even undocumented immigrants in America have certain constitutional rights, particularly those who have been here for longer periods of time. For example, longer-term noncitizens are entitled to the right to counsel, albeit at their own expense. They are also protected by at least the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process. These immigrants also have other legal protections.

These constitutional rights mean that removing illegal immigrants from America would require legal hearings in courtrooms. In addition to considering the rights of the defendants, this would create a logistical nightmare, tying up the courts from dealing with other substantive issues. Judges, prosecutors, defence counsel as well as the persons concerned would all have to coordinate their calendars to schedule mutually agreeable dates for hearings before illegal immigrants could be deported. If you multiply this by some millions of cases, you have a better idea of why legally removing these immigrants from America is going to take a long time and will be very expensive.” What is more, trying to do it without respecting these legal rights essentially involves converting America into a dictatorship and is, therefore, unacceptable.

Other Consequences

But one other consequence of all this has not been considered: its impossibility and the likely destabilization of other states if it were done.

At least 15 countries that will not accept the return of their nationals due to deportation. These include China, India, and Russia, for example. Indeed, it can be anticipated that as many as 150 countries will refuse the return of large numbers of their nationals from the U.S. Trump’s threats to cut American aid to them may work on some, but few, and certainly not on most. Thus, the proposal becomes impossible to implement.

Case In Point: Mexico

Special problems arise in the case of Mexico. Over four millionundocumented Mexicans live in the United States. When added to the problem of the flow of hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. through Mexico, the addition of four million returning Mexicans would be overwhelming for the country. There is no guarantee of cooperation in this venture.

What About Canada?

In the case of Canada, the commencement of deportation measures in the U.S. against 11 million people would likely drive many undocumented immigrants northward, legally or illegally. Each year, Canada’s current immigration levels come in at about 500,000. In past years, irregular crossings from the U.S. to Canada of about 100,000 migrants at Roxham Road were a major burden for Canadian authorities. It is not hard to imagine the dislocations in Canada that could be caused if, say, even one million noncitizens of the U.S. decided to make their way northward to avoid U.S. deportations back to their homelands.

Conclusion

In short, deporting 11 million noncitizen migrants from the United States is a mission impossible. But instead of deportations, there is another more reasonable way of dealing with this problem. It would be to allow those undocumented immigrants who have been here for many years to stay by moving the registry date forward but to require them to do some community service to atone for their undocumented entry. Let reasonable minds prevail and avoid the disaster former President Trump has in mind for America.

Source: Deporting 11 Million U.S. Undocumented Immigrants: Mission Impossible

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Snyder: Both sides

2024/07/23 Leave a comment

Good critical commentary on both sides-ism:

Our media people do not see it this way, of course.  The restoration of the mystical equilibrium of Both Sides brings our priests a pious satisfaction, visible on the red faces of correspondents in Milwaukee this last week.

If pressed, the shamans of Both Sides insists that their dualistic dances are nothing other than correct method to describe the universe.  The cult and its performance is protected from critique by the totemic terms “objectivity” and “balance.” 

All shamans do this: they insist that their dogma must be our reality.   But when we allow the cult of Both Sides to shape our own minds, ethical judgement and factual investigation disappear, and with them any chance for constitutional order and democracy.

Ethical judgement would involve a notion of right and wrong, which the activity of the priests erodes.  The worse the evil of one side, the more artfully it must be forgiven, and the more viciously the other side must be berated.  Believers in the cult of Both Sides experience this as moral action, whereas in fact the performative relativism erodes all morality.

Factual investigation would involve identifying other perspectives which the cult of Both Sides disregards.  It would necessitate separating the two aspects Both Sides from each other and confronting their words with the facts of the world.  To believers in the cult of Both Sides, it is a relief clothed in righteousness never to have to perform such labor.

Earlier dualistic faiths were no more outlandish than our own cult of Both Sides.  Indeed, they had something to say about foundational issues.  The Indo-European, Near Eastern and East Asian beliefs, to which I briefly referred above, generated stories about the world that inspired philosophy and science.  The cult of Both Sides is the dogmatic distraction from the bloody sacrifice of a republic.

Source: Both sides

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Hansen: How the OPEC oil crisis caused mass migration

2024/07/22 Leave a comment

Interesting thesis but Hansen overly captured by his narrative as migration has existing for centuries as has elite exploitation of labour:

…By destroying economic growth and reconfiguring the global economy and geopolitics, the OPEC oil crisis set in motion processes that resulted in more than 100 million unexpected, and unwanted, labour migrants. Entire wage-debased sectors – meat processing, agriculture, construction, retail, textiles and garments, and domestic labour – are wholly dependent on badly paid, poorly treated low-skilled migrants. And oil-driven wars – the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq War, and the two U.S. attacks on Iraq – generated about 15 million refugees. The world is awash in immigrants driven by war, drawn by work and destined to desire our insatiable consumer wants.

There is little evidence that anything will change. The dependence of multiple sectors, of middle-class affluence, and of economies as diverse as those of Germany, Thailand, the United States and Korea on low-skilled migrant labour suggests that, in the absence of a fundamental reform of how low-skilled work is valued and paid, such migration will continue. “Mass immigration,” is not, as economist Sir Paul Collier claims, “a temporary response to an ugly phase in which prosperity has not yet globalized.” Rather, large-scale, low-skilled, badly paid and ill-treated migrants are a structural feature of global capitalism and global politics. They, and the exploitation they suffer, are here to stay.

Source: How the OPEC oil crisis caused mass migration

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A Critical Gap in Democracy? ‘Yawn,’ Say Canadian Politicians.

2024/07/22 Leave a comment

NYTimes focusses on the weakness of party nomination process that no major Canadian party appears willing to address:

It is the “Wild West” of Canada’s political system, a “critical gap” in its democracy. But Canadian political leaders — and some foreign nations — are big fans.

Canadian elections have long rested on what many experts say is an undemocratic foundation: opaque nomination races in which political parties select their candidates for general contests in a process mystifying to most Canadians.

Party bosses enjoy an unshakable grip. Money flows, often unaccounted for. Rules tend to be lax, with no impartial judge in sight.

“After Tammany Hall, the U.S. went through a series of reforms that resulted in the modern primary system,” said Michael Chong, a high-ranking lawmaker from the Conservative Party. “But our system is largely based on a 19th-century system.”

Though the machinations behind nominations have long been an open secret among insiders, they have recently come under a harsh spotlight with Canada’s continuing sweeping investigation into foreign meddling in its political system.

Nominations have been singled out as glaring weaknesses in the country’s democratic system that some foreigners — primarily China and India — are increasingly exploiting to back certain candidates and oppose others.

Lawmakers from Canada’s major parties passed a bill last month to help fend off and prosecute foreign meddling, including with the creation of a registry of foreign agents.

But the new law did not address how parties choose their candidates despite increasing calls to overhaul nominations — including by placing them under the oversight of Elections Canada, the nonpartisan agency responsible for conducting federal elections.

The holdouts? Parties themselves.

“Party leaders want to have a level of power so that they can abuse their power and not be held accountable,” said Duff Conacher, a founder of Democracy Watch, an Ottawa-based watchdog organization.

In each federal electoral riding, or district, parties hold nomination races to choose candidates for parliamentary elections. Those vying to win try to sign up as many party members as possible and then must ensure they show up for the nomination vote.

A yearlong public inquiry into foreign interference describednomination races as “gateways for foreign states who wish to interfere in our democratic processes.” A special parliamentary committee’s redacted report concluded that nominations were “a particularly soft target” and “a critical gap” in Canada’s democracy, recommending that they be regulated the same way general elections are.

The findings were of little surprise in the immigrant-rich suburbs of Toronto that, along with similar neighborhoods around Vancouver, have been the main targets of foreign interference.

In Brampton — home to a large Indian diaspora, including Canada’s biggest Sikh population — Sikh activists have warned for years about interference by Indian government officials and their proxies in nomination races.

India uses pressure and money, activists say, to sideline Sikh candidates — especially those critical of the Indian government’s policies toward the Sikh minority population in India and those who advocate a separate Sikh homeland in India.

“In Brampton, the Indian Consulate decides who they want to help and who will be a party’s candidate,” said Jarmanjit Singh, a mortgage broker and Sikh activist who ran unsuccessfully in 2017 for a nomination for a provincial election. Community organizations with ties to the consulate then back the candidates on the ground, he added.

Sikh activists say the Indian government tries to curtail the influence of Canadian Sikhs, who otherwise have had an outsize impact on Canada’s political system through elections and appointments to senior government positions.

The parliamentary committee described India as the second-biggest perpetrator of foreign meddling after China.

Sanjay Kumar Verma, India’s ambassador to Canada, said in an email that the Indian government “does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries” and has not been given “concrete evidence” backing up the accusations.

“These allegations appear to be based on hearsay,” he said, “possibly originating from anti-India extremist and terrorist elements based in Canada, who have a vested interest in undermining Canada-India relations and interfering in India’s internal affairs.”

Last year, Canada accused the Indian government of being behind the killing in Vancouver of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Canadian Sikh leader and supporter of a separate homeland. India has denied any involvement.

Jaskaran Sandhu, a criminal lawyer and former leader of the World Sikh Organization of Canada who has been involved in political campaigns for several parties, said he had observed widespread foreign meddling in nominations.

“Parties are not very inclined to speak about nominations publicly,” he said, “because nominations are messy, nominations are often corrupt. Nominations are the dirty laundry of every political party.”

Nominations are a mystery to most Canadians and even to party members because each party has different rules, said Fred DeLorey, a former national campaign manager for the Conservative Party who said he had overseen more than 1,000 nominations.

“Political parties in Canada are private clubs,” Mr. DeLorey said, allowing them to carefully screen candidates and choose the strongest ones.

“At the end of the day, political parties are about winning elections,” he said.

Still, Mr. DeLorey does not believe party nominations need to be regulated, arguing that foreign meddling in Conservative nominations was not “something that’s happening widespread, if anywhere.”

In many districts, local party associations are often inactive, and candidates form committees only during nomination contests, said Jack Heath, a former deputy mayor of Markham, a suburb north of Toronto, and a veteran of Liberal Party campaigns.

“This is the Wild West,” Mr. Heath said.

In the past, buying memberships was a “relatively widespread” practice, he said. A candidate, he added, would gain instant supporters before a nomination vote by paying for their annual party membership fees — $10 before the Liberals made membership free in 2016.

In the continuing public inquiry, evidence also indicated how China and its proxies had capitalized on nominations’ freewheeling nature.

In a 2019 Liberal Party nomination race in Don Valley North, a Toronto district with a large Chinese diaspora, China “had a significant impact in getting” nominated a preferred candidate, Han Dong, according to the parliamentary committee’s report.

Buses transported 175 to 200 foreign students from China to vote, and the Chinese Consulate told them “that they must vote for Mr. Dong if they want to maintain their student visas,” according to the report.

Mr. Dong won the nomination by “a small margin” and cruised to victory in the general parliamentary election.

Nominations are an appealing target for foreign meddling, according to the report, “because the number of votes required to sway riding nominations is so small.”

And while all parties require members to be residents of a district to vote there, it is “relatively easy to show an altered phone bill with the wrong address, or a fraudulent letter from a school, in order to vote in a nomination,” the report said.

“You can fake it in five minutes,” said Bob Mok, a Hong Kong-born Canadian who has campaigned against Chinese government interference in the Toronto region. The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, which has denied interfering in Canadian politics, did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Mok, who has been active in Conservative politics, said buying party memberships remained common. An individual pays for membership but is reimbursed later by a candidate, Mr. Mok said.

Still, party leaders are reluctant to tighten the system, Mr. Mok said.

“That would take away the absolute power of the absolute dictator of each party,” he said.

The Liberal Party — which has the loosest rules, allowing even foreigners living in Canada to become members and vote in nominations — did not make anyone available for an interview. A party spokesman, Parker Lund, said in a statement that “when it comes to nominations, the Liberal Party of Canada’s rules for electing a candidate are the most robust in Canadian politics.”

Good governance groups say the parties can no longer act as private clubs, especially with mounting evidence of foreign states’ exploiting the parties’ weaknesses.

The parties effectively control who gets into Parliament and receive significant public support through tax credits and reimbursement of election expenses, said Sabreena Delhon, the head of the Samara Center for Democracy, a Toronto-based organization that has studied nominations.

“It stands to reason that there be a higher standard for accountability in the interest of our democracy’s integrity,” Ms. Delhon said, adding that Elections Canada should be given oversight over the nominations.

Only the Green Party has shown any openness toward the idea.

Elizabeth May, the Green leader, said in an interview that all nomination races should be regulated.

“It’s obviously a threat to democracy, and it’s easily fixed,” Ms. May said. “We need to act as leaders and send the message loud and clear that, no, Canada’s not a soft target.”

Source: A Critical Gap in Democracy? ‘Yawn,’ Say Canadian Politicians.

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Matthew Lau: Black justice strategy would be a disservice to Canadians of African descent

2024/07/22 Leave a comment

Second article critical of the strategy in a week in the Post:

….According to the steering group, the federal government should also “establish a committee of Black justice professionals, academics and community leaders to study options for reparations to Black people for enslavement, segregation and racially biased laws,” work to give lower interest rates and debt forgiveness to Black articling students and early-career lawyers, increase resources “for the development and improvement of Black businesses,” categorize Black people as a “priority group” in federal employment and housing programs and so on.

The steering group’s Black justice strategy focuses on dividing society by race and delivering governmental favours to the Black population. But this is a failing strategy, as seen most evidently in the United States and documented by, in addition to Thomas Sowell, prolific Black scholars such Walter Williams and Jason Riley. As their work has shown, Blacks and other communities make the most progress when focused on building human capital through education and economic advancement instead of trying to achieve political clout. Black Americans made much greater progress before the explosion of Black elected officials, welfare programs and affirmative action in the 1960s than after it.

It is no different in Canada. Among Canadian-born men and women, those of Japanese, Chinese and Korean ancestry have significantly higher average earnings than the white population. These groups are also underrepresented among criminal offenders. Their relative success in Canadian society has nothing to do with federal programs giving them preferential treatment or with the Department of Justice having a Japanese justice strategy, Chinese justice strategy or Korean justice strategy — that much is clear. Such government favours and strategies will not help Canada’s Black population, either.

Source: Matthew Lau: Black justice strategy would be a disservice to Canadians of African descent

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Monash University: Enhancing Contraceptive Knowledge Among Young Multicultural Women

2024/07/22 Leave a comment

Of note, not sure if any equivalent by any provincial government in Canada:

An online educational video aimed at increasing contraceptive knowledge among young women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds is being distributed in five languages.

Release of the 13-minute videos follows a significant research project, EXTEND-PREFER, undertaken by the SPHERE Centre of Research Excellence at Monash University, the results of which were published in the BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health this month.

Funded by the Department of Health and Aged Care, EXTEND-PREFER benefited from the input of the Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health and the Centre for Excellence in Rural Sexual Health at the University of Melbourne.

Almost three in 10 people in Australia* are born overseas. Previous research suggests young people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds can experience greater barriers in accessing sexual and reproductive health information and care, due in part to lower health literacy, limited awareness of health services and other barriers such as cost.

These educational videos are crucial in ensuring all women have access to accurate contraceptive information so that they can exercise autonomy in reproductive decision making.

Co-designed with young women from five main language backgrounds, the videos discuss all the contraceptive options, including long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), such as intrauterine devices (IUDs) and the contraceptive implant.

SPHERE will circulate the videos to multicultural communities, women’s and general health websites and social media platforms.

The BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health paper, led by the Head of Monash University’s Department of General Practice Professor Danielle Mazza AM, found these online educational videos were effective in improving contraceptive knowledge by 41 per cent amongst young women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, aged 16 to 25.

The related study involved 160 young women from Arabian, Cantonese, English, Hindi and Mandarin speaking backgrounds.

“Designed to increase knowledge of LARC (long-acting reversible contraception), the research addressed many of the questions and concerns young women of various ethnic backgrounds have about these products”, Professor Mazza said.

“LARC methods are over 99 per cent effective at preventing pregnancy. However, use of LARCs by Australian women from multicultural communities is low due to limited knowledge, stigma and misconceptions.

“Combining contraceptive education with support to LARC access is crucial for empowering these young women to make informed contraceptive decisions and prevent unintended pregnancies. ”

In the 13-minute videos, young women from the five language groups provide information on the contraceptive methods available in Australia.

Information includes the presence and types of hormones found in various contraceptive methods, effectiveness, how the contraceptive is used, inserted and removed, length of use, cost, whether a prescription is needed, effects on bleeding patterns, non-contraceptive benefits, whether the contraceptive provides protection against sexually transmissible infections, and common side effects.

This study aligns with the National Women’s Health Strategy 2020-30 goal to increase the availability and uptake of LARCs, particularly in multicultural populations, and was funded by the Federal Government.

It builds on a number of SPHERE projects since its inception in 2019 that focus on improving the sexual and reproductive health of women from multicultural backgrounds.

Source: Monash University: Enhancing Contraceptive Knowledge Among Young Multicultural Women

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Cornellier | Nos esclaves

2024/07/22 Leave a comment

Interesting history of slavery in Quebec:

Quand on parle de la présence de l’esclavage en Nouvelle-France, j’ai mal à mon identité. L’idée que mes ancêtres aient pu s’adonner à cette pratique inhumaine me blesse. Je sais bien, comme le montrent de récentes études, que l’esclavage traverse toute l’histoire du monde, et ce, presque partout sur la planète, mais j’aurais souhaité que mon peuple n’ait pas trempé dans cette calamité.

Les faits, malheureusement, me forcent à déchanter. Dès 1960, en effet, l’historien Marcel Trudel, après de rigoureuses recherches dans les registres de l’état civil (baptêmes, mariages et sépultures), établissait que la Nouvelle-France, elle aussi, avait bel et bien été, à sa mesure, esclavagiste, comme la mère patrie et comme la Grande-Bretagne.

Dans son Dictionnaires des esclaves et de leurs propriétaires au Canada français, publié en 1990, Trudel identifiait 4092 esclaves sur un siècle, dont 2692 Autochtones et 1400 Noirs. Les Autochtones asservis, précisait-il dans Mythes et réalités dans l’histoire du Québec (BQ, 2006), ne provenaient pas des peuples alliés aux Français. Il s’agissait plutôt de membres de la nation des Panis, dont le territoire se situait dans le bassin du Missouri.

En faisant la traite des fourrures, des commerçants français recevaient « en cadeau », de leurs alliés autochtones, des personnes, souvent très jeunes, et en faisaient leurs propriétés. Les esclaves noirs, quant à eux, sont souvent un « butin de guerre pris sur les Anglais à l’occasion d’incursions dans le New York ou dans le Massachusetts ou acquis par les marchands dans leurs courses aux Antilles », écrit Trudel.

Dans le numéro de printemps 2024 de l’excellente Revue d’histoire de la Nouvelle-France, une équipe de chercheuses, dirigée par l’historienne Dominique Deslandres, spécialiste du Québec ancien, revient sur le dossier en le poussant un cran plus loin.

Trudel, dit Deslandres, a réalisé un extraordinaire travail de pionnier, mais il a considéré l’esclavage ici « comme un phénomène mineur », comme l’affaire de quelques riches qui auraient souvent traité leurs esclaves avec une certaine bienveillance. Ce faisant, ajoute l’historienne, il a nourri le mythe d’un esclavage doux.

Trudel, pourtant, n’est pas si naïf. Dans Mythes et réalités dans l’histoire du Québec, il conteste le « tableau idyllique », tracé par « des historiens de grandes familles », qui montre des « esclaves noirs ou amérindiens parfaitement intégrés à leur milieu ». Dans l’ancienne bourgeoisie, précise-t-il, le domestique n’est jamais considéré comme membre de la famille et l’esclave, inférieur dans l’échelle sociale, encore moins.

Deslandres, pour illustrer la cruauté du phénomène, fait ressortir « l’extrême jeunesse d’une grande partie de la population autochtone asservie ». Entre 1632 et 1760, on recense 2199 esclaves. On connaît l’âge de 1574 d’entre eux et on constate que 734 de ces derniers ont moins de 12 ans. Selon la chercheuse Cathie-Anne Dupuis, jusqu’en 1759, « la moitié des esclaves masculins autochtones meurent avant 17 ans ». Après la Conquête et jusqu’à l’abolition de l’esclavage en 1834, c’est pire : l’âge médian au décès est de 11 ans. Pour les femmes esclaves autochtones, les chiffres équivalents sont de 21 ans et de 13 ans.

Selon Deslandres, la bizarre idée d’avoir un enfant esclave s’expliquerait par le désir de « s’assurer une retraite paisible à l’abri de l’avidité des héritiers ». Ces enfants, donnés « en cadeau » par des alliés autochtones déjà familiers de cette pratique avant l’arrivée des Européens, se sont fait voler leur destin.

Les historiennes engagées dans cette recherche s’intéressent notamment à l’agentivité des esclaves, c’est-à-dire à leur capacité d’agir par eux-mêmes. En fouillant les archives judiciaires et notariales, Catherine Lampron a découvert l’histoire de cinq esclaves, dont la fameuse Marie-Josèphe-Angélique, accusée d’avoir mis le feu à Montréal en 1734, qui se sont retrouvés devant les tribunaux après des gestes de révolte. La liberté empêchée est rarement source de bonheur tranquille.

Dans une émouvante contribution, la doctorante Astrid Girault, originaire de la Guadeloupe, se penche sur la pratique des danses africaines par les esclaves des Petites Antilles françaises au XVIIe siècle, afin d’illustrer la lutte de ces asservis pour leur survie culturelle.

Deux missionnaires français s’étonnent que les esclaves profitent de tout leur temps libre, incluant la nuit, pour danser, malgré leur fatigue. Ils ne comprennent pas, dit Girault, que ces danses ont une dimension spirituelle et culturelle pour les esclaves. Elles « sont donc essentielles à leur survie dans un environnement hostile qui vise à leur enlever tout ce qui fait leur essence ».

Le désir de liberté et l’expression de l’identité sont irrépressibles et magnifiques.

Source: Chronique | Nos esclaves

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Prousky: Canada’s housing crisis is fuelling a population crisis

2024/07/20 Leave a comment

Interesting turning around debates over immigration levels. But yes, levels have to come down given the time it takes to increase housing:

…The global pool from which to attract smart, employable immigrants is slowly shrinking. Africa is now the only region on Earth whose population is expected to grow by the end of the century. Meanwhile, the world’s population is expected to decrease in that time period. So in the coming century, rich nations – all of which have birth rates well below 2.1 – may be competing for the same small pool of working-age migrants.

Beyond immigration, there are a host of pro-natal policies that countries have devised to boost fertility. Governments in Asia have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to stave off looming population crises. Singapore, with one of the lowest fertility rates in the world at just 0.97, offers generous grants and tax rebates to parents with two or more children. But its fertility rate hasn’t budged.

It’s only a matter of time, it seems, before the Canadian government begins throwing big money at the country’s nascent fertility problem. The lesson from abroad is, don’t wait. Increasing the country’s housing supply today could be the best defence against a population crisis down the road.

Source: Canada’s housing crisis is fuelling a population crisis

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Jamie Sarkonak: Expect more injustice from the Liberals’ forthcoming Black Justice Strategy

2024/07/20 Leave a comment

Sarkonak continues her focus on the excesses of some advisory panels in recommendations that cross the line between recognizing different experiences and issues and developing separate bodies or processes to accommodate them:

…The report amounts to a socialist manifesto advancing cliché policy ideas that were all the rage during the Summer of George Floyd. Which is probably what the Liberals hoped to get out of the process: some kind of document that allows them to run the “experts said” defence when they ultimately propose to vandalize the Criminal Code.

Indeed, Canadians are overwhelmingly in favour of colourblind (rather than colour-conscious) policy at a rate of 70 to 30. When it comes to drugs and crime, a 2023 Leger survey found that nearly 80 per cent believe that too many violent offenders are being given bail, and about the same amount believe that the justice system is too lenient on criminals. About 70 per cent wanted more policing and tougher laws on drugs.

Beyond being plain offensive to the general public’s sense of justice, the ideas currently being weighed in Minister Arif Virani’s office likely miss some number of their target audience, too. One prominent voice, Conservative MP Jamil Jivani, is one example in the “no” camp.

“Black Canadians, like all Canadians, deserve a justice system focused on community safety,” he wrote last week on X.

“If the policies contained in the so-called ‘Black Justice Strategy’ report are adopted, there will surely be more crime, drugs and disorder in our communities. There will also be more victims of crime, and black Canadians will be affected along with the rest of the country.”

If the final Black Justice Strategy looks anything like what handpicked experts envision, it will be painfully out of touch. It will cost. It will reek of unfairness, diverting even more public resources to a fraction of Canadians to the detriment of everyone else. And it will be genuinely harmful by hamstringing the state’s ability to separate bad actors from the law-abiding public — by imprisonment or deportation.

Perhaps worst of all, it will promote the corrosive conception of Canada as a confederacy of racial groups rather than a unified state for Canadian citizens.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Expect more injustice from the Liberals’ forthcoming Black Justice Strategy

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Regan: The lazy and dangerous lie that’s taking hold

2024/07/20 Leave a comment

Good take from Malta that applies more broadly:

Multiculturalism has failed.

This is the constant and confident verdict of many commentators, academics, keyboard and ‘culture’ warriors and many a politician in recent years, in Malta and more broadly across Europe and beyond.

Allied to this is the assertion that very many of the problems and challenges we face from health and housing to identity and education to religion, infrastructure and immigration are the result of pursuing this ‘failed’ philosophy and strategy.

In short, ‘we’ are not responsible for society’s ills and failings, ‘they’ – most especially those who promote or pursue this multiculturalism- are. The ‘we’ and the ‘they’ are deliberately vague and are a movable feast depending on context, culture and, inevitably, politics and prejudice.

By contrast, we are rarely if ever enlightened (except by extreme far right groups) as to what the ‘alternative’ to multiculturalism is – mono-culturalism, uniculturalism, assimilation, exclusion? Instead, we get vague and unspecified assertions that ‘our culture’ and ‘way of life’ is being eroded by multiculturalism and that we need to somehow ‘return to’, ‘rediscover’ or redefine our ‘original’ or ‘untainted’ identity and culture.

And this it is assumed we can do without too much disagreement or dissent.

Routinely, the result is that we avoid dealing with the substantive issues before us, for example – overdevelopment and its associated ills, the absence of effective policies and governance, deeply embedded dishonesty and criminality and a toxic and self-defeating political culture.  ‘Multiculturalism’ has become our ‘get out of jail’ card.

Despite this supposed ‘failure’ of multiculturalism, we actually live in a Malta, a Europe and a world where every facet of life (even ethnicity, language, religion, identity, culture and more) is, by definition multicultural, embodying elements, facets and components of not just one but multiple cultures.

Malta and all things Maltese are by dint of history, geography and the experience of life over time (locally and internationally), suffused with multicultural DNA. In this sense, the story of Malta and the Maltese is a/the universal story. There is no ‘pure’, single-cultured Malta.

Inevitably (and for me, positively) the realities of a multicultured life does indeed pose challenges, some fundamental and many potentially transformative. The Maltese know this deeply as their internationalised history and culture attest.

I was born into and grew up in an Ireland that was, despite its history, prone to idealising a particular definition and interpretation of what it meant to be Irish. To be ‘really’ Irish, one was required to tick a number of selective ‘ethnic or cultural boxes’ – white, catholic, nationalist, an Irish speaker, ‘straight’, a follower of all things Gaelic, committed to a united Ireland etc.

Defining ‘Irishness’ in this manner was as much about excluding as it was about including. Needless to say we were (and are) not unique in this regard but nonetheless, this ‘Gaelic’ culture was literally beaten into us in school.

As a result, our constitution, our formal and informal institutions, laws and practices were crafted to protect and deliver this selective and rarified definition of ‘Irishness’.  Those who did not adequately tick the required boxes were forced to ‘navigate’ and ‘survive’ the dominant definition and culture often at huge personal and social cost. Our history is littered with the human and social consequences of attempting to promote one overarching and often supposed superior monoculture.

As a result, discrimination became widespread, even if routinely unspoken. It existed in employment, in religion, in gender, sex and marriage, in sport, in education and, most deplorably and cruelly, in healthcare and the institutional ‘care’ of children.

As I grew older, travelled in Europe, studied in Canada and Australia and eventually worked in various countries in Africa, I realised that having more than one established culture is vital for the well-being and the prospering of any society.

Slow learner that I am, I eventually came to realise that culture has no overarching or co-ordinating authority nor should it. Culture is never static or settled, it ebbs and flows in the superstructure and the substructure of any society. It displays and speaks with many voices and very rarely with just one. Culture is, by definition, complex and contradictory with multiple layers of ambiguity or ‘fuzziness’.

Ultimately, culture is a porous world of ideas and experiences, one that is constantly open and interactive with other worlds. As such, cultures benefit from external exposure and from ongoing engagement with different ways of living, thinking, defining value and satisfying individual and social needs.

Valuing and embracing multiculturalism need not imply or indicate a dismissal or diminution of one’s own culture, community, identity or heritage. Rather it signifies a deep appreciation of it including recognition of its limitations and failings.

At the core of multiculturalism lies a series of common values or aspirations based around the principles of human dignity and rights, for example, those of respect for self and for others, the mutual need for equality of opportunity, freedom of cultural expression and respect for conscience and for diversity.

Blaming Malta’s current ills (especially those associated with our chosen model of growth without development) on multiculturalism is lazy and mistaken. It is also dangerous as the history of so many other countries (my own included) attests. It is indeed time to address Malta’s existential problems but not by pointing the finger at multicultural others but pointedly at ourselves and our choices.

Source: The lazy and dangerous lie that’s taking hold

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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