Brian Dijkema: Who left the barbarians in charge of our books?

2023/09/16 Leave a comment

Uncomfortable parallels between book banning by the right and left:

Today, the CBC broke a story that showed how the Peel District School Board is culling books that fail to meet “equity-based” criteria for books in school libraries. Among the books that are thrown away, according to reporter Natasha Fatah, is Anne Frank’s diary. While they are not quite going so far as to host a bonfire to burn the books in school parking lots, the end result is pretty much the same. The board is not giving the books away, they are literally throwing them into the landfill to moulder. What an absolute abomination.

This practice is not just some random “woke” librarian on a rampage either. It is being done in response to a directive from the Ministry of Education, whose current minister is Stephen Lecce, a conservative. It comes from straight from the top.

The policy is the mirror image of the “anti-woke” book policy of the conservative governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. A list of books removed from Florida public school libraries shows plenty of books that are terrible and that really shouldn’t be on the shelves, but also plenty that are not just okay, but genuinely endearing and in line with the tradition of living books. Why should a sweet, rhythmic, story about a Thai mom trying to quiet the animals so her baby can sleep be put out of a school library? I can’t tell you. Arguably, the Peel Board’s practice is even worse, as it simply removed any book published before 2008.

While the policy has since been countermanded by Lecce’s office, these types of policies—one aimed at removing “woke” books and another one aimed at “non-inclusive” books are, sadly, a metaphor for the state of public education these days. The words that best describe this policy are brutal and barbaric.

By this I don’t mean that school administrators are clothed in fur and looking for blood (though, judging from other goings-on in the Peel board, you can be forgiven for this assumption). They are a clear attempt to cut off students from a living tradition of reflection on the beauty and complications of human life, in favour of a simplistic, ideological vision. The dearly departed Australian poet Les Murray describes the situation better in three lines than I could in three pages:

Politics and Art

Brutal policy,
like inferior art, knows
whose fault it all is.

This is the mentality shaping both the Left’s and the Right’s vision for educating our kids. Is this what you want for your kids? It’s not what I want for mine.

This is not to say that libraries shouldn’t make choices about what to put on their shelves. Those choices are both a practical and pedagogical reality and will depend in part on the type of person you are trying to form. Perhaps it’s time to give up the pretense that forming our kids is something a system that self-articulately takes a pass on deeper questions of meaning and formation can do. Given the fact that two ostensibly “conservative” premiers have given North America two perfectly opposite, but equally brutal, policies on the literature that will shape our children’s imaginations, perhaps it’s time to find a new lens for evaluating education.

And that lens, I should add, cannot simply be the technocratic one that our governments prefer. The culling of books based on ideological differences on sex or race or what have you is nothing compared to the culling of real, living, books that have been taking place in our libraries for years in the name of value-free technological “progress.” In many libraries—both public and school—books that would have once sparked flames of imagination in life in young children have been replaced by Chromebooks and electronic learning games or other bits of metal and silicon that are, literally, planned for obsolescence rather than for posterity. The beautiful, “eye on the object” look of children reading has been replaced by catatonic faces more often found in front of slot machines in a casino.

The fact that the minister’s office issued a directive without offering clear criteria by which a book would be deemed to be “inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant, and reflective of students” (or even a definition of what it means by these extremely vague terms) is an abrogation of duty. A read of the audit reports produced by Peel indicates that this technocratic mindset is the greater concern for those of us concerned with education as something intended to shape humans, rather than technically proficient machines. It cloaks terms and actions that have significant import for the formation of children in administrative bureaucratese and is executed almost entirely by staff who are accountable to no one in particular, and certainly not Ontarian parents.

Whether it’s ridding shelves of books like the Diary of Anne Frank in Ontario under Lecce, or Brother Eagle, Sister Sky under DeSantis, policies like this are another step in the alienation of children from the complexities of history and humanity. Even if this all is, as my friend Michael Demoor suggests, simply a case of bureaucratic stupidity brought on by the hugeness of the school boards (a view that is plausible, but which doesn’t deal with the very real and clearly articulated ideological nature of Ontario’s common school system, nor its increased centralization over the last few decades), it’s a stretch to say that this is a healthy way the system should be working. Overreach and bluntness of this sort are, as they say, a feature, not a bug, of systems where education is controlled by a bureaucratic state and massive, largely unaccountable, school boards.

Perhaps this might give all of us—regardless of which colour you vote for in a given election—some pause, and a desire for something better.

A month or so ago I was corresponding with the ever-so-gifted Mary Harrington about her recent book (reviewed here in The Hub) and mentioned that I appreciated how many of the concerns she raised in the book fit into an old-school “left-wing” model of politics. Her reply was enlightening. She said, “I don’t have a problem with being recognised as a leftist in some respects; it’s true, and besides I’m not sure the terms really apply anymore, as the split these days is more human vs posthuman.”

This, I think, is precisely where we need to be on education. Another word for brutal is inhumane. Both the Left and the Right are acting like barbarians and pushing a vision of education that is destroying our shared past and the reflections of human beings trying to make sense of the world. It has to stop. It’s time for a more humane, human-scale, vision of education. But to achieve that, humanists—of all political persuasions—will need to unite.

Source: Brian Dijkema: Who left the barbarians in charge of our books?

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Nicolas: Quand on «débat» de toi

2023/09/15 Leave a comment

Interesting parallel between the Charte des valeurs québécoises, and the tensions it provoked for visible minorities, and the current discourse around trans and non-binary and how this high profile debate adversely affects teenagers. And the irony, or symmetry, having the same minister, Bernard Drainville, responsible for both:

Ça aura fait dix ans, le 10 septembre dernier, que le projet de « Charte des valeurs québécoises » fut présenté à l’Assemblée nationale. La nouvelle avait eu l’effet d’une bombe dans mon cercle d’amis. Nous avions vingt et quelques années, notre expérience en mobilisation politique et sociale allait bien au-delà de notre âge, et nous étions déterminés à défendre l’idée d’un Québec « ouvert » ou « inclusif ».

En moins de deux semaines, nous avions cherché l’appui de regroupements juifs, musulmans et sikhs, puis rassemblé 5000 personnes au centre-ville de Montréal pour une manifestation où nous scandions notamment que « le Québec n’est pas la France, vive la différence ». Charles Taylor, déjà d’âge vénérable, avait escaladé devant nous la boîte de notre pick-up de location pour prononcer un discours passionné dont la force était directement puisée dans l’énergie de la révolte. Pour moi, qui n’avais vu l’homme que dans son rôle de « sage » aux audiences télévisées de la fameuse commission sur les accommodements raisonnables, l’image était saisissante.

Le poids de l’actualité était, bien sûr, le plus lourdement porté par les minorités religieuses, les femmes musulmanes, en particulier. Ce qui était plus difficile à prévoir, c’est que bien des alliés allaient aussi recevoir le projet de loi comme une attaque personnelle. Certains ont vu dans la « Charte » une attaque à leur conception des valeurs québécoises ou aux droits et libertés, de manière plus générale. D’autres ont vu un coup de couteau dans leur rêve d’un Québec indépendant et le signe d’un virage vers un nationalisme qui n’allait jamais pouvoir toucher le Québec dans toute sa diversité, ni même la génération montante.

Le sentiment de peur, lui, était ressenti avec le plus d’acuité par mes amis qui, comme moi, sont des enfants d’immigrants. Certains appartenaient à des minorités religieuses, d’autres non. Parce qu’« autre » aux yeux de la majorité, on se disait tous qu’un gouvernement qui s’attaquait ainsi aux droits d’un groupe minoritaire pouvait s’attaquer à n’importe quel autre groupe demain, dont le nôtre. Ce raisonnement était rarement explicite, et même pas toujours conscient. C’est moins par les mots que par nos comportements, l’urgence d’agir et les émotions partagées qu’on constatait qu’on se sentait tous un peu dans le même bateau.

Déjà, au début de l’automne 2013, mes tripes me criaient que ce « débat » allait mal finir. Comme fille de la banlieue de Québec, je connaissais trop bien comment les discours médiatiques affectent rapidement notre quotidien. Enfant, j’avais pu sentir les regards se tourner vers moi les matins où, quand j’entrais dans l’autobus, André Arthur vociférait contre les Noirs ou les immigrants dans la radio du chauffeur. Ados, mon frère et moi avions été agressés verbalement par des clients à quelques reprises dans nos emplois d’étudiants, alors que politiciens, animateurs de radio et autres chroniqueurs pompaient quasi quotidiennement les gens contre les « minorités qui exagèrent » en plein coeur de la « crise des accommodements raisonnables ».

La plupart ne voyaient la « Charte des valeurs » que pour ce qu’elle était explicitement, c’est-à-dire un projet de loi proposant des idées précises pouvant être adoptées ou non au terme d’un débat. Quand on comprend, ou qu’on a subi directement le pouvoir des mots dans une société, on voit d’abord la « Charte » comme un désinhibiteur de parole, qui prend par ailleurs la forme d’un projet de loi.

Le texte de la « Charte » n’est jamais devenu loi, mais un certain type de discours sur les minorités s’est répandu comme une traînée de poudre dans l’espace public québécois à partir de 2013. Il y a dix ans, les plus sensibles pouvaient déjà comprendre que le moment allait transformer, au moins pour une génération, ce qui était dicible et audible en politique québécoise.

Ce que j’écris sera difficile à recevoir pour plusieurs lecteurs. Je vois venir d’ici les « avec des gens comme elle, on ne pourrait plus débattre, on ne pourrait plus rien dire ! ». Bien sûr, là n’est pas mon propos. Ce genre de réactions est le plus souvent nourri par une insistance sur les intentions — des gens qui proposent certaines idées politiques ou tiennent certains discours dans l’espace public — et un refus de se pencher sérieusement aussi sur les conséquences des mots, leurs effets, leur pouvoir.

Il me semble que si on veut être en mesure de faire un exercice de réflexion honnête sur un événement politique aussi marquant que le fameux débat sur la « Charte », on ne peut pas faire semblant que la circulation des idées dans l’espace public n’a pas aussi un effet direct sur le sentiment de sécurité, au quotidien, des Québécois dont on décide de « débattre ».

Le hasard fait que l’homme qui avait déposé le projet de « Charte des valeurs » en 2013 est aujourd’hui toujours ministre, et que cette fois, il est en train de trouver comment réagir à ceux qui voudraient qu’on fasse des enfants trans et non binaires un objet de débat national.

M. Drainville, et tous les acteurs de la classe politique et médiatique concernés, laissons de côté nos différends une minute. Je vous invite à imaginer ces enfants et ces ados, déjà vulnérables pour un ensemble de raisons, entrer dans l’autobus au moment où l’on « débat » du pour et du contre de leur existence et de leurs droits à la radio, et à voir les regards se tourner vers eux. Je vous intime de bien vouloir vous mettre dans leur peau. Tentez de votre mieux de comprendre l’impact de chacun de vos mots sur leurs interactions sociales quotidiennes. Interrogez-vous sur la place qu’ils auront la certitude d’avoir, ou non, dans la société québécoise. Dites maintenant ce que vous avez à dire comme si ces jeunes étaient directement en face de vous. Parce que, croyez-moi, ils vous écoutent.

Anthropologue, Emilie Nicolas est chroniqueuse au Devoir et à Libération. Elle anime le balado Détours pour Canadaland.

Source: Quand on «débat» de toi

Filed under gender, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Palestinian politicians lash out at renowned academics who denounced president’s antisemitic remarks

2023/09/15 Leave a comment

Sigh:

Palestinian politicians on Wednesday raged against dozens of Palestinian academics who had criticized President Mahmoud Abbas’ recent remarks on the Holocaust that drew widespread accusations of antisemitism.

They lambasted the open letter signed earlier this week by over a hundred Palestinian academics, activists and artists based around the world as “the statement of shame.”

The well-respected writers and thinkers had released the letter after footage surfaced that showed Abbas asserting European Jews were persecuted by Hitler because of what he described as their “social functions” and predatory lending practices, rather than their religion or ethnicity.

“Their statement is consistent with the Zionist narrative and its signatories give credence to the enemies of the Palestinian people,” said the secular nationalist Fatah party that runs the Palestinian Authority.

Fatah officials called the signatories “mouthpieces for the occupation” and “extremely dangerous.”

In the open letter, the legions of Palestinian academics, most of whom live in the United States and Europe, condemned Abbas’ comments as “morally and politically reprehensible.”

“We adamantly reject any attempt to diminish, misrepresent, or justify antisemitism, Nazi crimes against humanity or historical revisionism vis-à-vis the Holocaust,” the letter added. A few of the signatories are based in east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

In Geneva on Wednesday, Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, blasted Abbas’ comments as “overtly antisemitic” and distorting of the Holocaust. She said the open letter from the Palestinian academics was “stronger almost than what I had to say.”

“There’s no question about it: These kind of statements must stop, because they do nothing to advance peace, and worse than that, they spread anti-Semitism,” Lipstadt told The Associated Press outside an event on antisemitism attended by dozens of diplomats on the sidelines of a session of the Human Rights Council.

The chorus of indignation among Palestinian leaders over the letter casts light on a controversy that for decades has plagued the Palestinian relationship with the Holocaust. The Nazi genocide, which killed nearly 6 million Jews and millions of others, sent European Jews pouring into the Holy Land.

Israel was established in 1948 as a safe haven for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust, and remembering the Holocaust and honoring its victims remains a powerful part of the country’s national identity.

But the war surrounding Israel’s establishment displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, who fled or were forced from their homes in what the Palestinians call the “nakba,” or catastrophe. Many Palestinians are loathe to focus on the atrocities of the Holocaust for fear of undercutting their own national cause.

“It doesn’t serve our political interest to keep bringing up the Holocaust,” said Mkhaimer Abusaada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. “We are suffering from occupation and settlement expansion and fascist Israeli polices. That is what we should be stressing.”

But frequent Holocaust distortion and denial among Palestinians has only drawn further scrutiny to the tensions surrounding their relationship to the Holocaust. That unease may have started with Al-Husseini, the World War II-era grand mufti of Jerusalem and a Palestinian Arab nationalist. He was an enthusiastic Nazi supporter who helped recruit Bosnian Muslims to their side, and whose antisemitism was well-documented.

More recently, Abbas has repeatedly incited various international uproars with speeches denounced as antisemitic Holocaust denial. In 2018, he repeated a claim about usury and Ashkenazi Jews similar to the one he made in his speech to Fatah members last month. Last year, he accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” against Palestinians.

For Israel, Abbas’ record has fueled accusations that he is not to be trusted as a partner in peace negotiations to end the decadeslong conflict. Through decades of failed peace talks, Abbas has led the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that began administering parts of the occupied West Bank after the Oslo peace process of the 1990s.

Abbas has kept a tight grip on power for the last 17 years and his security forces have been accused of harshly cracking down on dissent. His authority has become deeply unpopular over its reviled security alliance with Israel and its failure to hold democratic elections.

The open letter signed by Palestinian academics this week also touched on what it described as the authority’s “increasingly authoritarian and draconian rule” and said Abbas had “forfeited any claim to represent the Palestinian people.”

Source: Palestinian politicians lash out at renowned academics who denounced president’s antisemitic remarks – Yahoo! Voices

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Here’s just how high immigration has gotten

2023/09/15 Leave a comment

A reminder by the National Post:

A majority of Canadians now seem to think that immigration is too high, according to a recent Nanos poll. Of respondents, 53 per cent said that the government’s plan to accept 465,000 new permanent residents was too high. It’s a sharp turnaround from just a few months prior, when a similar Nanos poll in March found that only 34 per cent of Canadians thought immigration was too high.

Canada has long been one of the most pro-immigration countries on earth, and since at least the 1990s the mainstream Canadian position on immigration levels was that they were just fine. On the eve of Justin Trudeau’s election as prime minister in 2015, an Environics poll found that a decisive 57 per cent of Canadians disagreed with any notion that there is “too much immigration in Canada.”

But if this sentiment is changing, it might be because Ottawa has recently dialled up immigration to the highest levels ever seen in Canadian history. Below, a quick guide to just how many people are entering Canada these days.

Immigration is nearly double what it was at the beginning of the Trudeau government (and way more when you count “non-permanent” immigrants)

In 2014 — the last full year before the election of Justin Trudeau — Canada brought in 260,404 new permanent residents. This was actually rather high for the time, with Statistics Canada noting it was “one of the highest levels in more than 100 years.”

But last year, immigration hit 437,180, and that’s not even accounting for the massive spike in “non-permanent” immigration. When the estimated 607,782 people in that category are accounted for, the Canadian population surged by more than one million people in a single calendar year. Representing a 2.7 per cent annual rise in population, it was more than enough to cancel out any per-capita benefits from Canada’s GDP rise for that year.

It’s about on par with the United States (a country which is eight to 10 times larger)

Proportionally, Canada has long maintained higher immigration than the United States. But in recent months immigration has gotten so high that Canada is even starting to rival the Americans in terms of the raw number of newcomers.

Last year, while Canada marked one million newcomers, the U.S. announced that its net international migration was about the same. Given the size of the U.S. (331 million vs. 40 million in Canada), this means that Canada is absorbing migrants at a rate more than eight times that of the Americans.

When these trends first began showing themselves in early 2022, CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal credited it with driving down Canadian wage growth. “The last time I checked, the U.S. is 10 times larger than we are,” he said.

Housing construction isn’t even close to keeping up with the influx

In the last few weeks, the Trudeau government seemed to acknowledge for one of the first times that their aggressive immigration policy was helping to worsen the country’s housing shortage, and thus drive up real estate unaffordability.

“We want to better align our immigration policies with the absorptive capacity of communities that includes housing,” was how housing minister Sean Fraser put it to CTV on Sunday. Notably, Fraser was immigration minister before being shifted to the housing file in July.

According to one Scotiabank estimate, Canada would need to build 1.8. million homes to return the housing market to any semblance of affordability. But right now the rate of new homes isn’t even keeping up with the population increase, much less addressing the existing deficit.

In 2022 there were just 219,942 housing completions across Canada. It’s about as many homes as Canada was building in the mid-1970s, a decade when Canada was bringing in fewer than 100,000 new immigrants each year. But with current immigration rates, Canada is now bringing in about five new people for every new apartment or townhouse getting built.

It’s like repopulating all three northern territories every month

In a routine update on employment numbers last week, Statistics Canada announced the good news that the country had added 40,000 new jobs in August — before noting that all this new employment had been immediately cancelled out by immigration. That same month saw the arrival of 103,000 temporary and permanent newcomers into Canada, with the result that the country’s net employment rate actually went down. “Given this pace of population growth, employment growth of approximately 50,000 per month is required for the employment rate to remain constant,” reported Stats Canada.

The rate of 103,000 is a bit higher than normal, and was driven in part by the arrival of international students. But since the beginning of 2023, the influx of newcomers has averaged about 81,000.

For context, the entire population of the Canadian North is about 118,000. Comprising three territories — the Northwest Territories, the Yukon and Nunavut — and dozens of communities, the North has daily newspapers, several dedicated airlines, power plants and even a skyscraper. And on average, Canada is absorbing enough new people every 43 days to completely fill its North.

There are worrying signs that rising numbers of immigrants are dropping almost immediately into poverty

In the 2021 census, the trend seemed to be that poverty rates among newcomers to Canada were going down, in part due to “higher government transfers.” While there’s been no new data to contradict this trend, Canada has seen a smattering of incidents that seem to point towards an immigrant community that isn’t finding opportunity the way they used to.

A report last month found that Toronto-area food banks were experiencing a massive spike in usage among recent immigrants. Feed Scarborough, for one, released a survey finding that three quarters of their users have been in the country for less than a year. “Immigrants are struggling to meet their most basic needs,” it read.

Shelters across Ontario and Quebec have reported being overwhelmed by recent migrants, many of whom entered the country via the longstanding Roxham Road illegal border crossing. A Toronto international student found homeless and living under a bridge recently became the subject of a viral TikTok video. And in July, the Toronto-area community of Brampton was shocked by videos showing a job fair at a local supermarket being attended by massive queues containing hundreds of applicants, many of whom were international students.

Source: Here’s just how high immigration has gotten

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This program aims to attract startups to Canada. Critics say it’s being used as ‘a backdoor way into the country’

2023/09/15 Leave a comment

Another questionable immigration program and pathway it appears, on substantive, due diligence and processing time grounds:

They come from every corner of the world with big dreams and ideas, looking for a base and investment capital to plant the seeds of their startup enterprises — and potential permanent residence in Canada.

So much is at stake for their success — and for Canada’s Start-Up Visa (SUV) immigration program, which gives these entrepreneurs a pathway for permanent residence by harnessing their business innovations and brilliance.

Amid a current economic slowdown, the federal government has vastly scaled up its annual SUV intake from 1,000 spots (including the entrepreneurs’ family and those in the self-employed stream) in 2022 to 3,500 this year, 5,000 in 2024 and 6,000 in 2025.

Yet, it is also one of the economic immigration programs that has received the least public attention — and scrutiny — despite the significant role it plays in Canada’s job creation and global competitiveness.

While no one disputes the need to expand the initiative, critics fear its rapid growth feeds a wild-west-type landscape amid the program’s already lengthy processing time and concerns over its potential misuse for immigration to Canada.

“What the program has done is created an enormous number of applications from people who want to move to Canada and are ready to pay money to find a backdoor way into the country,” said Sunil Sharma, managing director of Toronto’s Techstars, whose workshops are meant to connect budding entrepreneurs with capital, mentors and networking.

Launched in 2013, the SUV program has no minimum requirements on education, net worth or business experience, in contrast to Canada’s typical economic immigration process, which favours those who are younger and have Canadian education credentials and work experience.

The most crucial qualifying element is the letter of support by an organization designated by the Immigration Department to vet applicants’ business proposals based on their worthiness and readiness. Notably, successful applicants are not obliged to carry through their business plans upon becoming permanent residents.

The SUV replaced the archaic Entrepreneur Program, which offered a three-year conditional residency for people with a minimum net worth of $300,000 and required that they open mall kiosks, corner stores, restaurants and other small businesses before they obtained permanent status. Today, Canada is looking to attract innovative business startups that will give the country a cutting edge on the global stage.

The new SUV pilot program got off to a slow start. It fell short of its initial target of 2,750 applications a year. In the first three years, it only attracted 113 principal applicants, whose business plans, until June 2016, were subject to mandatory industry peer reviews as a quality control mechanism.

“There were minimal levels of fraud and misuse associated with the SUV pilot and the integrity mechanisms employed were successful in identifying issues,” said an Immigration Department evaluation report in late 2016.

“However, there is a potential program integrity gap regarding the monitoring of designated entities’ SUV activities.”

The report also pointed to the small size of the applicants, which allowed immigration officials to watch the designated organizations and applicants’ activities closely.

In 2018, Ottawa made the pilot a permanent program. Since then, the total number of applications received has shot up to a total of 2,035 in the past five years, up from just 291 between 2013 and 2017.

And so has the program’s average processing time, which has crept up from an initial 158 days to 16 months in 2019, and now sits at 32 months. As of last September, there were 1,368 permanent residence applications in the queue for the SUV business program.

Critics attribute the exponential growth of interest in the program to the rogue promotion by unscrupulous recruiting agents, sometimes lawyers and consultants, who pitch it as an easy pathway for immigration with minimal requirements.

These agents, say critics, offer to enrol prospective candidates with business plans and ideas in incubation and accelerator programs — some of them provided by government designated SUV assessment organizations — at a hefty fee, to get the coveted letter of support.

“They’re making millions of dollars in fees and they’re flooding the program with applications,” said Sharma, whose accelerator is a federal government-designated organization under the SUV program.

“For those of us who are using the startup visa for its true intention, we’re having a very, very difficult time getting those visas through.”

Immigration consultant Phil Mooney said unscrupulous agents and middlemen often target prospective immigrants who otherwise have a tough time qualifying for the restrictive economic immigration programs that favour young people with Canadian education and work credentials in the Express Entry points selection system.

A contract to a prospective SUV applicant he recently perused from a Lagos-based investment company in Nigeria asked for a $165,500 (U.S.) payment that included eligibility assessment, business validation and a month-long incubation training in business strategy preparation and market analysis.

It also claimed that two designated SUV entities in Canada agreed to offer consultancy services.

“It became pretty clear that anybody over 35 could never get here through Express Entry. Anybody with less than perfect English or anybody with no Canadian work experience or no degree in Canada, nobody can come anymore,” said Mooney.

“But there’s still a whole lot of people out there with a lot of money.”

Their motivation, he said, is Canadian permanent residence, and not about starting a business. (Immigration data shows those aged 40 and over made up more than half of the SUV applicants since its inception, though almost 86 per cent had at least a bachelor’s degree.)

SUV applicants can get their letter of support from three tiers of designated organizations recommended by two investment industry groups and sanctioned by the Immigration Department:

Business incubators that support a startup or early stage company to grow by providing them office space, mentorship, management support;

Angel investor groups made up of wealthy individuals who provide financial backing for small startups, usually asking for ownership equity in these companies; or

Venture capital funds consisting of a group of investors which pools money to place it in startups which show promise of growth.

Under the program, designated angel investors and venture capitalists have to commit $75,000 and $200,000, respectively, to the business proposals they have chosen to support.

Between 2014 and 2022, 881 SUV business applications were approved for permanent residence but an overwhelming 78.4 per cent of them were supported by business incubators, according to government data obtained by immigration lawyer Siavash Shekarian.

Startups endorsed by angel investors made up 18 per cent of the successful SUV applications and less than three per cent were put forward by the high-return venture capitalists.

When the SUV program was launched in 2013, there were only 28 designated organizations, including 25 venture capital funds and three angel investor groups.

By 2018, when it became a permanent program, the number of entities almost doubled, with 21 ventures, eight angels and 24 business incubators.

Today, there are 88 groups — 28 ventures, eight angels and 52 incubators — that have the authority to issue the letter of support to SUV applicants.

To be designated, these organizations must be vetted and recommended to the Immigration Department by the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) and the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA).

The industry organizations are also responsible for convening peer review panels, at the request of immigration, to independently assess and ensure due diligence is given by the designated entity that issues the letter of support.

The Immigration Department prohibits designated entities from charging fees for the assessment of business proposals or for the issuance of the support letter. However, there are no specific rules on other fees.

National Angel Capital Organization’s (NACO) website says the designated entities under its watch cannot charge applicants fees for the use of physical space, services and programs “above industry standard rates” without references to what the industry standards are.

With willing patrons looking for a shot at permanent residence to Canada and loose regulations over designated organizations, critics say the SUV program is open to abuse.

“The designated entities are the gatekeepers to the whole thing,” said immigration consultant Ramin Mirzadegan, who focuses on economic immigration and has assisted in dozens of SUV applications from Iran, the top source country of applicants.

“The clients feel like if they do this, they get the LOS (letter of support) and everything will be done. That’s how it’s sold and that’s how people are taken advantage of.”

Under the traditional business immigration programs, immigration officials are responsible for assessing the merits of the business plan, but that task in the SUV program has been entrusted to the third-party designated groups based on their business and investment expertise.

“The program by design is outsourcing innovation to the designated organizations,” said immigration lawyer Shekarian, whose practice focuses on business immigration.

“And here’s the problem. The way I define innovation can be very loose and very easy. But how do I as immigration (department) ensure that those incubators pick good people with good ideas as opposed to those organizations that are in it just for the money?”

Shekarian said immigration officials and designated organizations should raise the bar to qualify only SUV applicants whose business ideas are already in “post-ideation” stage rather than just accept a business proposal on paper.

“If you say, ‘I need more than just ideation now. I need validation. I need traction now. I need tech readiness. I need to see something,’ ” he explained, “it attracts genuine entrepreneurs and makes it harder for bad actors to just bring new people who just want to buy a passport.”

The Star reviewed more than a dozen Federal Court judgments over the past five years involving SUV applicants who were refused under the SUV program and challenged the immigration decisions.

Although the designated entities that issued their letter of support were not a party or the subject of the judicial reviews, the court rulings often cited the immigration officials’ concerns over the lack of “due diligence” in the assessment process that were concurred by independent peer review panels.

One court decision in 2020 cited an immigration officer’s claim that a Vietnamese woman was pursuing her proposed business venture for the primary purpose of acquiring status in Canada despite a commitment from Empowered Startups Ltd., a designated organization in B.C., to “incubate” her business venture.

The officer, according to Justice Patrick Gleeson, raised concerns that Empowered provided the applicant the business idea to develop and market a wearable sensor technology.

In another case in 2019, the court said an immigration officer referred another Vietnamese applicant’s business proposal to a peer review panel to assess whether due diligence was completed by Empowered when accepting it for incubation. The panel, according to Justice Rene Leblanc’s ruling, concluded that there had been an insufficient level of due diligence by the designated organization.

In yet another court decision in 2019, now retired Justice Robert Barnes referenced a peer panel review ordered by the immigration department with “concerns about possible (Empowered) involvement in assisting applicants in acquiring status or privilege.”

The review panel’s report, said the court decision, stated that the female applicant from Hong Kong “has committed to paying $300,000 for a year of incubation services,” saying that was “not normal for an incubator in Canada.”

A court case in 2022 involved two applicants in China who received a letter of support from Spark Commercialization and Innovation Centre in Oshawa for a joint partnership with an existing client of the organization.

The peer review panel, cited Justice Shirzad Ahmed’s decision, found a lack of due diligence on Spark’s part in its assessment of the Chinese applicants’ business proposal.

All the four judicial review applications were dismissed by the court.

Christopher Lennon, president and general counsel of Empowered, declined to comment on the specific cases but pointed out that the company was not a party to those proceedings and anything stated in these cases is not necessarily correct and in some cases, might be incorrect.

“Our role as designated entities is to recruit, vet and find high potential entrepreneurs to start new businesses in Canada. And part of our role is also to help them start those new businesses in Canada. So we’re advisers and mentors. So we definitely have involvement in crafting and helping them launch the new business,” Lennon said.

“Are we involved in the conceptualization of the business in many cases? Absolutely. Do we give them business ideas off the shelf? No, never.”

While Empowered is a big supporter of the SUV program, Lennon said the peer review is one area that is structurally flawed by design because it sets up some serious conflict-of-interest issues when a business proposal approved by a designated organization is reviewed by a peer panel made up of direct competitors.

The SUV program, he said, does not prescribe the due diligence process and allows each organization to have their own, as long as they can demonstrate a thorough process to assess business proposals, he said.

“You need that flexibility,” said Lennon, and immigration officials already have the leverage to remove an entity’s designation “if they’re ever concerned an entity is routinely or flagrantly not complying with their process.”

With the cost of recruiting entrepreneurs for Canada being downloaded to private entities like his, Lennon said they have to be reimbursed to cover marketing, travelling and staff to vet and support these foreign entrepreneurs.

“We need to be able to run a business ourselves. There are enough designated entities and there’s enough competition that people can shop around for different designated entities and different prices,” said Lennon.

“This is where this whole price thing that I hear comes up from time to time.”

Sherry Colbourne, president and CEO of the Spark Centre, said it was approved as a designated entity in 2018, at a time when NACO came in and took over the administration of the program from another now defunct group.

She said Spark, one of 17 not-for-profit innovation centres in Ontario, ran into a problem with “due diligence” with some of the early clients because the SUV program lacked clear guidance, said Colbourne.

“So in that particular (court) case, I really chalk it up to us not fully understanding the rule because there was no onboarding or training or any guidance,” she said.

Colbourne said it is challenging to come up with industry standards in fee structure because the costs in delivering these incubator and accelerator programs differ by regions, though she agrees on the need to improve the vetting of the designated entities because the administration of the SUV program relies on a “trusted network.”

“I absolutely believe that increasing the number (of SUV spots) is the right thing to do,” said Colbourne, who has heard “a lot of stories” about people being exploited and about people trying to exploit the program.

Claudio Rojas, NACO’s CEO, was unavailable for an interview and referred the Star’s questions about the backlogs and alleged misuse of the SUV program, as well as queries about the issues of due diligence and peer review panels, to the Immigration Department.

In a statement, Rojas said business incubators in Canada offer a wide variety of programming and thus fees will also vary. NACO now has about 100 organizational members, who pay between $750 and $2,500 a year to join the group.

Since 2020 and through the pandemic, he said NACO recommended an average of four organizations to immigration for designation (4 in 2020, 7 in 2021 and 2 in 2022), said his statement.

Kim Furlong, CVCA’s CEO, said her members’ approach is very different from the accelerators and incubators and groups applying to CVCA for designation are independently and individually vetted by KPMG before they are recommended to the Immigration Department.

The process is very selective and the bar is high, said Furlong, hence the number of SUV applications supported by its designated entity is very limited.

“These are serious investors and they’re willing to make a commitment in investing in a company,” said Furlong. “Our members have skin in the game.”

The Immigration Department touted the SUV business program as a success, having welcomed 900 entrepreneurs as permanent residents and bringing in more than 300 startups, including ApplyBoard, Litmus, ProteinQure, Clik.ai, Virtro and AGADA Biosciences.

Designated organizations have committed over $7 million to approved startups through the program, and some of the businesses have been acquired by larger companies.

The department said it has internal mechanisms for reporting suspected fraud and the means to investigate or refer cases to the Canada Border Services Agency or law enforcement agencies, as warranted.

Officials can “inspect” an organization for compliance and suspend a designated entity or revoke its designation if there’s a reason to suspect it submitted false, misleading or inaccurate information, said Immigration Department spokesperson Remi Lariviere.

However, between 2013 until March 2021, only one designated entity had been inspected; one had been suspended and 25 had been de-designated. The department said most de-designated organizations requested to be de-designated.

Currently, SUV applicants are eligible for a one-year closed work permit, which allows them to work on their business project inside Canada while waiting for the processing of their permanent residence.

Under the changes announced by the immigration minister in June, these applicants will be able to apply for an open work permit that lasts for three years in duration and allows them to work in Canada for any employer. Some critics worry the prospect of an extended open work permit would give unscrupulous agents another tool to market and abuse the SUV program.

“SUV applications will be prioritized for processing if they are supported by designated entities that have committed capital to the startup proposal,” said Lariviere. “The amount of capital required for the prioritization of these applications will be announced shortly.”

Meanwhile, talented entrepreneurs are not going to wait for Canada to open its doors to them.

Andrew Airelobhegbe, a serial startup entrepreneur from Nigeria, and three partners started Lenco, a multinational online business banking platform, in 2021, which now employs 49 in Zambia and Nigeria. The company processes $600 million (U.S.) in transactions per month and have over 36,000 businesses as customers.

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He and three of his co-founders applied for permanent residence under the SUV program in March 2021 and are still waiting for a decision. Meanwhile, he received his O-1 visas to the U.S. and Exceptional Talent visa to the U.K. last year — both within weeks — to take his operations there.

Airelobhegbe said he would’ve loved to base Lenco’s North American operations in Canada with its huge immigrant market, and the company’s four jobs in software engineering and data science in San Francisco could have been Canada’s.

“At the end of the day, it’s not even about permanent residence. We just want to build a successful business and have access to the market,” said the 30-year-old, who applied for a work permit in December 2021 to work on his project in Canada. It was refused in January because Canadian immigration didn’t believe he would leave.

“You stay where your work is. If you need to spend more time in one market, you need more access to it.”

Source: This program aims to attract startups to Canada. Critics say it’s being used as ‘a backdoor way into the country’

Filed under Immigration Tagged with

BC Business Council: Canadians face 40 years of stagnant incomes – government’s economic strategy is failing, vs Coyne’s supply side immigration approach

2023/09/14 Leave a comment

Good hard hitting look at the government’s economic and related immigration policies. Money quote: “… like believing Christmas dinner will be made easier if you invite more people because they can help with the washing up.”

Sharp contrast to the Andrew Coyne piece below “hallelujah for all those extra people, and let’s have lots more,” which reminds me of voodoo supply side economics and the Laffer curve:

The House of Commons resumes sitting Sept. 18. One of its first orders of business should be to debate the government’s economic growth strategy, which is failing and needs a rethink.

In the five years to 2019, Canada’s real GDP per capita growth was an anemic 0.5 per cent per annum. Since 2019, it has been the fifth-weakest of 38 OECD countries – and per capita GDP growth has even turned negative over the past year.

For the second quarter of 2023, year-over-year GDP growth was 1.1 per cent. But population growth was 3.1 per cent, the highest since 1957-58, after the Hungarian Revolution and the Suez Crisis. Thus, in per capita terms the Canadian economy is shrinking by 2 per cent year-over-year.

Canada is one of the few advanced countries where real incomes are lower than before the pandemic. Real GDP per person is $55,170, compared with $56,379 in 2019, meaning the economy is generating $1,200 less income per person, or $2,830 less income per household, than it was four years ago.

We estimate Canada will not recover its 2019 income per capita until at least 2027, based on the federal budget’s projections for GDP growth and likely population growth. The OECD forecasts that Canada will be the worst-performing advanced economy over both 2020-30 and 2030-60, with the lowest growth in real GDP per capita. The principal reason is that Canada is expected to rank dead last among OECD countries in productivity growth over most of 2020-60.

Young and aspirational Canadians face 40 years of stagnant average real incomes. The only way to feel confident about future living standards is to avoid looking at the data.

Several of the government’s core policy beliefs are misguided. The first is that freewheeling government spending, untethered by the defined limits of a credible fiscal anchor, is not “consumption” but rather “investment” that raises real incomes. The data say otherwise.

A related belief is that government programs are what entice companies to become more innovative and productive, rather than signals from well-functioning, competitive product markets and discerning customers. The government has relied on households and business taxpayers to fund subsidies for preferred recipients and has massively expanded the bureaucracy without much to show for it other than shrinking the relative size of the private sector. That is a recipe for a low-productivity, low-wage economy.

A third belief is that “ever-increasing” immigration is an economic panacea. The academic literature overwhelmingly finds that the level of immigration has a negligible or neutral overall impact on indicators that determine a country’s living standards: labour productivity, real wages, the employment rate, the population’s age structure and, crucially, GDP per capita.

Ramping up immigration to fill low-wage jobs instantly increases demand for things that take years to build, such as housing (especially rentals), roads, schools and hospitals. We have no idea how provinces and municipalities can be expected to quickly address the needs of 800,000 extra temporary residents arriving in the past two years – people they did not know were coming – along with 920,000 additional permanent residents. Our concern is compounded by the revelation that Statistics Canada has undercounted – by one million – the number of temporary residents already here. The federal government’s immigration strategy is like believing Christmas dinner will be made easier if you invite more people because they can help with the washing up.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so,” wrote Mark Twain. Demonstrably, federal policies are yielding “prosperity-free” economic growth.

We believe Canada needs an economic policy agenda focused on raising average living standards. The country would benefit from modest (and co-ordinated) fiscal and monetary policy restraint to dampen inflation, alongside a productivity-focused agenda to expand the economy’s supply-side capacity, expedite business investment and innovation, scale domestic firms and ensure Canada can supply the world with responsibly produced natural resources and manufactured goods.

This will require overdue reforms to our inefficient tax and regulatory systems. Such a policy agenda would aim to cool demand and enhance supply, bringing them into balance. Critically, this would lift rather than reduce or stagnate average real incomes, as is happening under the federal government’s current approach.

David Williams, DPhil, is vice-president of policy at the Business Council of British Columbia. Jock Finlayson is the council’s senior policy adviser.

Source: Canadians face 40 years of stagnant incomes – government’s economic strategy is failing

Coyne:

By now the consensus has more or less become set in stone. Why are housing prices in Canada so high – fifth highest, relative to income, in the OECD? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s because we’re taking in too many people. Supply and demand and all that. Common sense, really.

The same goes for our stagnating standard of living. Canada’s GDP per capita is no higher than it was in 2017; labour productivity, having fallen for five consecutive quarters, is back to where it was in 2014. That, too, we are told, is on account of there being too many people about. Again, simple math, right? More labour relative to capital equals less investment per worker equals lower productivity. QED.

Or health care. Wait times are now three times what they were 30 years ago. Must be because of all of those immigrants.

It’s true that Canada’s population has been growing over the past year or two at rates that exceed recent experience: a million more people last year, probably at least as many this year.

Of course, that’s coming off a relatively slow year in 2021, when the population grew by only 200,000 and change, but still: We’re looking at an average population growth rate, over the past three years, of nearly 2 per cent annually. And yes, most of that has been the result of immigration.

Of course, 2-per-cent population growth isn’t especially high by historical standards. From 1946 through 1982, that was the average growth rate; throughout the 1950s, indeed, it was well in excess of that mark. I do not believe the 1950s are commonly associated with either sluggish growth rates or housing shortages.

For that matter, soaring house prices and lagging productivity growth – and health care wait times – have been issues in Canada for many years, long before population growth began to take off. As they are in other advanced countries, with stable or even falling population numbers.

So perhaps the case that Canada, of all places, suffers from Too Many People may not be quite so self-evident as it may have first appeared. If GDP per capita is straggling, is it because of the denominator (population) or the numerator (GDP)? If housing prices are soaring, is that because of the demand, or the supply? Is the problem too many people, or too little of the investment and housing needed to support them?

It would be one thing if the supply of either were running flat out – if investment or output or housing starts were at record or even unusually high levels, but still could not keep up with the torrid growth in population. But such is not the case.

I suppose it’s possible to connect the relative stagnation of per capita GDP over the past several years to the surge in population over the last two. But it’s surely at least as significant that GDP growth itself has slowed markedly throughout. At roughly 1.5 per cent a year, after inflation, GDP growth since 2014 has averaged less than a third of what it was in the 1950s.

The same with housing. Maybe you can put the current level of house prices down to the number of people living here. Or maybe we should look at the number of houses. At 424 housing units per 1,000 residents, economists at Scotiabank have observed, Canada has the lowest supply of housingof any G7 country.

Why? Because the supply of housing in recent decades has slowed to a trickle. Housing starts, at roughly 260,000 annually, are lower now, in absolute terms, than they were in the early 1970s, when our population was barely half what it is today. Adjusting for population, the rate of housing starts is a third less than it was in the 1960s and 1970s (600 per 100,000 population versus 900).

If we were still building as many houses, proportionately, as we did then, we’d be adding more than400,000 units a year, and no one would be talking about a housing shortage. We’re not overpopulated, we’re underhoused.

It’s just too simple, in other words, to look at the number of people, or the growth rate, as our neo-Malthusians would have it. It’s certainly true that an increase in population, given a fixed quantity of investment or housing, will lead to increased pressure on these resources. But these quantities aren’t fixed, or certainly needn’t be. If they are, it’s worth asking why – notably, what contribution ill-considered policy might be making to this.

As, in fact, we now are. What can be said about population growth is that it makes the costs of bad policy more apparent. If it means we are now beginning, at long last, to have a serious conversation about the barriers to investment and housing construction that have bedevilled this country for decades, then hallelujah for all those extra people, and let’s have lots more.

Source: It’s not that we have too many people. It’s that we have too few houses

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Kheiriddin: Pierre Poilievre’s path to victory could run through the culture wars

2023/09/14 Leave a comment

She may well be right given that most of these resolutions were carefully crafted and reflect issues that many may feel activists and advocates have been excessive in their demands and approaches. And her point on that voters may have different views on each of these resolutions appears likely:

The Conservative policy convention has come and gone amid a hail of plaudits, photo-ops, and favourable polls. Leader Pierre Poilievre has managed to unite the party faithful and win over Canadian voters, by tapping into their economic angst and fatigue with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is increasingly seen as out of touch, and out of time.

But the convention also opened a new political fault line: the culture wars. Delegates voted that children should be prohibited from gender-related “life-altering medicinal or surgical interventions,” upheld women’s rights to single-sex spaces and sports, and rejected mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training and race-based hiring practices. A majority also supported allowing Canadians to refuse vaccines on the grounds of “bodily autonomy.”

Pushback was swift. A former Conservative candidate who is trans said a vote against gender-affirming care could cause some children to commit suicide. A local riding president warned against reopening the vaccine debate. But most of the criticism came from the media and analysts who say the culture wars are a distraction that will hurt the Tories at the polls, like the “barbaric practices” tip line did in the 2015 election. Poilievre has a huge lead, based mostly on economic issues: why blow it? People only care about the rent and the grocery bill; these other concerns will not inform their political choices.

For some voters, however, these issues are highly motivating. Research firm Angus Reid Institute recently asked Canadians what they think about the culture wars, and identified two groups of voters who strongly engage on them: “zealous activists” who favour “progressive” policies like pronoun use and represent 17 per cent of voters, and “defiant objectors” who reject such changes and constitute 20 per cent of the electorate. Broken down by party affiliation, a clear pattern emerges: 47 per cent of Canadians who voted Conservative in 2021 are defiant objectors, while only three per cent of Liberal and NDP voters are.

But while 44 per cent of NDP voters are zealous activists, only 22 per cent of Liberal voters are, suggesting that there is much less dogmatism in this group.

For the parties, this means picking their battles and carefully choosing their bedfellows. The culture wars are not intersectional. Parents who object to the medical transitioning of children do not necessarily support restrictions on abortion. Advocates for women’s only spaces don’t necessarily believe people should be able to refuse vaccines. They may also be uncomfortable lining up with people who do.

Angus Reid will be publishing more data in the weeks to come on specific issues, but their findings on gender identity align with the results of the Conservative convention: 43 per cent of Canadians say parents should both be informed and give consent if a child wants to change how they identify at school, while 35 per cent believe that parents should be informed but consent is not required. Those who supported the Conservative Party of Canada in the 2021 federal election are twice as likely as past Liberal voters (64 per cent to 30 per cent) and three times as likely as past NDP voters (20 per cent) to say parents’ consent is needed. At the Conservative convention, the resolution outlawing medical transition passed on the convention floor with 69 per cent.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the three words that came up most often in the survey to describe the culture wars were divisive (60 per cent), exhausting (59 per cent), and unnecessary (40 per cent). Pundits who say they are a side issue are wrong: they have seeped into Canadians’ daily lives. Their kids go to school and are told to state their preferred pronouns on the first day of class. Their grandmother goes to an aquafit program and is uncomfortable changing alongside men in an all-gender locker room. They attend DEI sessions where they are shamed for their skin color and just “go along” so as not to get cancelled.

As pollster Nik Nanos observed, although some may see risk on the social-policy front, the reality is that the Conservatives don’t need every voter: they need about 36 per cent. “A majority could oppose their social conservative agenda and they can still win an election.” And a silent majority could guarantee it.

Source: Pierre Poilievre’s path to victory could run through the culture wars

Filed under gender, Politics Tagged with , ,

Breguet: It’s time to reduce immigration

2023/09/14 Leave a comment

But will they? Despite all the signals on possible changes, any pivot may be too hard a political reversal for the government and its NDP partner to make.

But Breguet makes a convincing case, as it is the only short-term measure that can show seriousness on housing and other related files.

And I continue to believe that given these issues affect immigrants and non-immigrants alike, this may be less of a third rail then appears:

How could the Trudeau government interject new political life into itself? It could switch its position on immigration. I’m not talking about going PPC or [Quebec Premier Francois] Legault, but a significant pivot from ongoing increase to the country’s immigration in-take target and its general “century initiative” rhetoric.

This isn’t such a far-fetched idea. We’ve seen recent glimpses when government raised the prospect of a possible cap on the number of international students, a group that has ballooned massively in recent years to reach 900k recently, and is believed, at least by some, to put significant pressure on rents and housing prices. 

While the Liberals have, at times, given the impression that they don’t take the housing crisis seriously and are inclined to double down on satisfying their increasingly mortgage-free boomer base, we must also recognize that the Liberal Party of Canada has historically been remarkably good at adapting and pivoting when needed. They read the room much better than the Conservatives and New Democrats. 

So, if they decide to get more serious on the housing file, they’ll need to confront the fact they can’t build enough (or, more precisely, incentivize provinces and cities to build) to make a meaningful difference on prices before 2025. They could however pivot on immigration and have results quickly. 

It might start with reducing the number of international students. But the government’s track record on immigration and built-in strengths could enable it to go further by reducing the number of permanent residents (including points-based immigrants and refugees) without the risk of people questioning its commitment to immigration and diversity. 

It’s hard to know how much such a policy pivot would affect housing demand and in turn prices but it may not matter per se. Politics, of course, is ultimately about optics. The government would look like it’s trying to get to the root of the housing crisis. The Conservatives, by contrast, appear afraid of their own shadows with anything related to immigration. 

The prime minister might therefore gamble that his name and decades of good-faith support for immigration and multiculturalism would allow him to pivot without alienating voters from cultural and visible minorities—something that the Conservatives likely cannot afford, especially after the 2015 election. The Liberals in short may have the political maneuverability to counterintuitively run to the right of the Conservatives on immigration. 

Polls have shown people are ready to support a reduction in immigration levels. A well-crafted message centered on helping the housing market could succeed and take this topic away from Poilievre who currently enjoyed a de facto monopoly on it in the past couple of years. 

Bryan Breguet, Too Close to Call founder and pollster

Source: It’s time to reduce immigration

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Bayard Rustin Challenged Progressive Orthodoxies

2023/09/14 Leave a comment

Of interest, a progressive who challenged progressive orthodoxies:

Bayard Rustin, a trusted adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, was a towering figure in the fight for racial equality. Remarkably for a man of his generation and public standing, he was also openly gay. When Mr. Rustin died in 1987, obituaries downplayed or elided this fact. Emblematic of this erasure was this paper, which made only passing mention of his homosexuality and obliquely described Mr. Rustin’s longtime partner as his “administrative assistant and adopted son.”

In the decade since President Barack Obama awarded him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, there has been a welcome resurgence of popular interest in Mr. Rustin’s extraordinary life. He was frequentlyinvoked in commemorations of the march’s 60th anniversary last month and will be the subject of a feature film produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s company that will come out later this year.

Whereas remembrances of Mr. Rustin once evaded the issue of his sexual orientation, today, in accordance with our growing acceptance of gay people and awareness of the discrimination they have faced, such tributes are likely to center it. This past June, for instance, the PBS NewsHour aired a segment for Pride Month titled “The story of Bayard Rustin, openly gay leader in the civil rights movement.” Other representative encomiums celebrate the “gay socialist pacifist who planned the 1963 March on Washington”and “the gay black pacifist at the heart of the March on Washington.”

Mr. Rustin is today often extolled as an avatar of “intersectionality,” a theoretical framework popular among progressives that emphasizes the role that identities play in compounding oppression against individuals from marginalized groups. While it’s admirable that Mr. Rustin is being recognized for something he never denied (according to one associate, he “never knew there was a closet to go into”), these tributes studiously ignore another aspect of his life: how, throughout his later career, Mr. Rustin repeatedly challenged progressive orthodoxies.

Mr. Rustin, who was characterized by The Times in 1969 as “A Strategist Without a Movement” and, upon his death, an “Analyst Without Power Base,” would most likely find himself no less politically homeless were he alive today. A universalist who believed that “there is no possibility for black people making progress if we emphasize only race,” he would bristle at the current penchant for identity politics. An integrationist who scoffed at how“Stokely Carmichael can come back to the United States and demand (and receive) $2,500 a lecture for telling white people how they stink,” he would shake his head at an estimated $3.4 billion diversity, equity and inclusion industry that often prioritizes making individual white people feel guilty for the crimes of their ancestors while ignoring the growing class divide. A pragmatist who noted, “There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement which would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts,” he would have no patience for social justice activists unwilling to compromise. And a committed Zionist — supportive of the state but likely critical of its government — he would abhor the Black Lives Matter stance on Israel and the recent spate of antisemitic outbursts by Black celebrities. Mr. Rustin’s resistance to party dogma is a neglected part of his legacy worth celebrating, an intellectual fearlessness liberals need to rediscover.

The origin of Mr. Rustin’s estrangement from the progressive consensus began with his belief that once federal civil rights legislation was achieved, the American left would need to turn its attention from racial discrimination to the much more pervasive problem of economic inequality. Four months after the march, Mr. Rustin was invited to deliver a speech at Howard University to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. According to the Times account, Mr. Rustin “said that the civil rights movement had gone as far as it could with its original approach and that the time had come to broaden the movement, which, he said, faces the danger of degenerating into a sterile sectarianism.” To avoid this fate, he argued, it must “include all depressed and underprivileged minority groups if their own movement is to make another leap forward.” Deriding direct-action protest tactics as mere “gimmicks,” Mr. Rustin counseled the young activists that “Heroism and ability to go to jail should not be substituted for an overall social reform program … that will not only help the Negroes but one that will help all Americans.”

Mr. Rustin expanded upon this analysis in a seminal 1965 Commentary magazine essay, “From Protest to Politics.” Published after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and several months before the signing into law of the Voting Rights Act, Mr. Rustin argued that the main barrier to Black advancement in the United States would soon no longer be racism but poverty. “At issue, after all, is not civil rights, strictly speaking,” he wrote, “but social and economic conditions” that transcended race. The problems facing Black America, therefore, needed to be seen as the “result of the total society’s failure to meet not only the Negro’s needs, but human needs generally.” A stalwart social democrat, Mr. Rustin argued that meeting these needs required a coalition of “Negroes, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups” to push the Democratic Party to the left on economic issues.

Sectarian appeals based solely on race — whether from white segregationists or Black nationalists — threatened this aim. In May 1966, the moderate integrationist John Lewis was ousted from the chairmanship of SNCC by the Black Power radical Stokely Carmichael. Mr. Rustin responded with another Commentary essay, “‘Black Power’ and Coalition Politics.” Black Power, he wrote, was “simultaneously utopian and reactionary” as it “would give priority to the issue of race precisely at a time when the fundamental questions facing the Negro and American society alike are economic and social.” At a time when the Democratic Party is losing the support of working-class Americans of all races, this component of Mr. Rustin’s legacy is as important as ever.

Committed to a political program that would improve the lives of the poor and working class regardless of their skin color, Mr. Rustin opposed racial preferences . In 1969, he called a proposal for slavery reparations “preposterous,” elaborating that “if my great-grandfather picked cotton for 50 years, then he may deserve some money, but he’s dead and gone and nobody owes me anything.” Worse than a point of personal pride was the way in which the call for reparations divided the multiracial working class. As a “purely racial demand,” Mr. Rustin contended, “its effect must be to isolate blacks from the white poor with whom they have common economic interests.”

Testifying before Congress in 1974 against affirmative action, Mr. Rustin said: “Everyone knows racial discrimination still exists. But the high rate of black unemployment and the reversal of hard-won economic gains is not the result of discrimination,” but of the same, general economic conditions that affected the white unemployed. Contrary to contemporary “antiracism” advocates who claim that the existence of racial disparities necessarily constitutes evidence of racism, Mr. Rustin asserted, “That blacks are underrepresented in a particular profession does not by itself constitute racial discrimination.”

Another major source of tension between Mr. Rustin and the progressive left concerned American foreign policy. Briefly a member of the Young Communist League in the 1930s, Mr. Rustin followed the path of many a disillusioned ex-Communist by becoming a staunch anti-Communist. Although an early opponent of American military involvement in Vietnam, Mr. Rustin could not, as he wrote in 1967, “go along with those who favor immediate U.S. withdrawal, or who absolve Hanoi and the Vietcong from all guilt. A military takeover by those forces would impose a totalitarian regime on South Vietnam and there is no doubt in my mind that the regime would wipe out independent democratic elements in the country.”

In his role as chairman of Social Democrats, USA, the more hawkish faction to emerge from a split within the Socialist Party of America over the Vietnam War, Mr. Rustin was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and international Communism. He declined to endorse Democratic Senator George McGovern’s antiwar presidential candidacy in 1972 and joined other hawks in forming the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, an initiative to oppose the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch, becoming its vice chair. In the 1976 Democratic presidential primary, Mr. Rustin supported Senator Scoop Jackson of Washington, whose decades-long career combined strong support for civil rights and social welfarism at home with robust anti-Communism abroad.

Mr. Rustin’s evolution from absolute pacifist (epitomized by the two years he spent in a federal penitentiary during World War II as a conscientious objector) to Cold War liberal dismayed many of his allies on the left, who accused him of betraying the principles of Gandhian nonviolence he had brought to the civil rights movement. But Mr. Rustin’s transformation was born of long deliberation and genuine conviction; according to one biographer, Mr. Rustin repeatedly said that if he had been aware of the Holocaust during World War II, he most likely would not have become a conscientious objector.

If Mr. Rustin’s erstwhile comrades considered him a sellout, so too was he disillusioned with a political camp that posited a moral equivalence between the United States and its Soviet adversary. “Whereas I used to believe that pacifism had a political value, I no longer believe that,” Mr. Rustin stated flatly in 1983. “It is ridiculous, in my view, to talk only about peace. There is something which is more valuable to people than peace. And that is freedom.”

Yet another source of antagonism between Mr. Rustin and the left was his outspoken opposition to antisemitism within the Black community and fervent support for the state of Israel. “So far as Negroes are concerned,” he wrote in 1967, responding to an eruption of antisemitic statements by radical Black activists, “one of the more unprofitable strategies we could ever adopt is now to join in history’s oldest and most shameful witch hunt, antisemitism.” The following year, in an address to the Anti-Defamation League, Mr. Rustin condemned “young Negroes spouting material directly from ‘Mein Kampf.’” In 1975, as the United Nations General Assembly was preparing its infamous resolution condemning Zionism as a “form of racism,” Mr. Rustin assembled a group of African American luminaries including A. Philip Randolph, Arthur Ashe and Ralph Ellison into the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee (BASIC). “Since Israel is a democratic state surrounded by essentially undemocratic states which have sworn her destruction, those interested in democracy everywhere must support Israel’s existence,” he declared.

A descendant of slaves who was himself a victim of brutally violent racism, Mr. Rustin never let his country’s many sins overshadow his belief in its capacity for positive change. His patriotism was unfashionable among progressives while he was alive and is even more exceptional today. “I have seen much suffering in this country,” he said. “Yet despite all this, I can confidently assert that I would prefer to be a black in America than a Jew in Moscow, a Chinese in Peking, or a black in Uganda, yesterday or today.”

For his heresies against progressive dogma, Mr. Rustin was derided as a “neoconservative.” (Indeed, he was one of the first political figures to be branded with this epithet, coined as a term of abuse for members of the Social Democrats, USA by their more left-wing rivals.) But while Mr. Rustin may have taken part in various neoconservative initiatives and counted individual neoconservatives as friends and allies, he was not himself an adherent of this ideological persuasion. Unlike most of the thinkers and activists associated with neoconservatism, Mr. Rustin never abandoned his social democratic convictions, nor did he endorse Ronald Reagan. On the contrary, he wrote that “insensitivity and lack of compassion increasingly are becoming the hallmarks of the Reagan administration’s domestic program” and stated that the Black poor “have been victimized by years of Reaganism.”

Mr. Rustin’s life offers a sterling example of moral courage and personal integrity. Resisting the temptations of tribalism, standing up for one’s beliefs even when it angers one’s “side,” advocating on behalf of the least among us — Mr. Rustin embodied these virtues to an uncommon degree. And undergirding it all was a bedrock belief in our common humanity. Asked to contribute to an anthology of Black gay men the year before his death, Mr. Rustin respectfully declined. “My activism did not spring from my being gay, or for that matter, from my being black,” he wrote.

Rather it is rooted, fundamentally, in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me. Those values are based on the concept of a single human family and the belief that all members of that family are equal. Adhering to those values has meant making a stand against injustice, to the best of my ability, whenever and wherever it occurs.

I am heartened to see a new generation of Americans belatedly acquaint themselves with Bayard Rustin’s life and work. If we truly wish to honor his remarkable legacy, we should begin by recognizing him as he would have wanted: for his ideas, not his identity.

Source: Bayard Rustin Challenged Progressive Orthodoxies

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Petition e-4511 – Opposing self-affirmation of the #citizenship oath “citizenship on a click” – Signatures to September 12

2023/09/14 Leave a comment

The chart below breaks down the 1,497 signatures as of 12 Septembe by province. No significant change.

And if you haven’t yet considered signing the petition, the link is here: https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-4511

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