Regg Cohn: Doug Ford hits a new low by using immigrants to sell his Greenbelt scheme

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Of note:

Doug Ford is peddling a risky strategy to save his political skin, and it’s not pretty.

It goes like this:

Unless we gut the Greenbelt, we can’t construct all the homes needed for waves of new immigrants and refugees.

And unless we build all that new housing urgently, resentment will build up rapidly against all those newcomers.

Day after day, as the premier digs himself into a deeper and deeper political hole, he repeatedly raises the alarm: If you block the bulldozing of protected lands, you risk a popular backlash.

Far better to let me unravel the Greenbelt than allow my opponents to undermine tolerance for immigrants and refugees — which will surely happen if anyone thwarts my controversial new housing plan. Unless you let me chew up those protected lands, we will all choke on a housing shortage that is somehow the fault of foreigners.

If Ford’s fanciful scenario sounds over the top, the unpleasant reality is that he has hit a new low. Just listen to how Ontario’s premier keeps drumming up support by whipping up fears of an unaffordable foreign influx:

“Failing to act threatens to erode Canadians’ so-far unwavering support for immigration,” Ford claimed on Aug. 9, the day the auditor general delivered a damning report of his government’s political interference in gifting Greenbelt lands worth $8.28 billion to “favoured” developers.

He used the same phrasing again two days later, reading from the same Teleprompter: “Failing to act threatens to erode our unwavering support for immigration.”

Again on Monday, in a highly touted speech to municipal leaders from across the province, the premier repeated his gut-the-Greenbelt-or-else warning: “Failing that would threaten to erode Canadians’ unwavering support for immigration.”

Over and over, again and again, Ford purports to be raising the alarm in his role as a guardian of social cohesion. But if tolerance is truly his goal, the premier is playing with rhetorical fire.

It’s not a dog whistle. It’s a bullhorn being blown from Ford’s bully pulpit.

The premier’s comments this week to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario were especially unseemly and unsettling. His speech brought back memories of Ford’s performance in early 2018, when he told an audience of northern mayors that he wanted to put Ontarians to work first, before ever letting in foreigners who might take their jobs.

Back then, Ford’s parochial pitch fell flat in front of a more worldly audience of northerners, who well understood the massive demand for talented foreign doctors and nurses, teachers and preachers, traders and tradespeople in their rapidly depopulating cities and towns. But it took a while for the premier to catch on.

Again in 2018, Ford turned his wrath on “illegal border-crossers,” picking a fight with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by claiming, wrongly, that “this mess was 100 per cent the result of the federal government.” It was an attempt to whip up resentment then, just as he risks fanning prejudice now.

Let’s be clear about the housing squeeze, the Greenbelt gambit and the foreign factor. No matter how many times Ford tries to connect the dots and paint by numbers, he is making it up as he goes along.

As much as Ford keeps pointing to future immigration levels as justification for his action, the truth is that the housing shortage long predates it. Even as the premier continually cites the Greenbelt giveaway as the prerequisite to building new homes, the reality is that his own housing advisory task force (and the auditor) argued the precise opposite.

In fact, there is more than enough land that can be repurposed to meet the government’s building targets without cannibalizing protected lands. In any case, the auditor’s report notes that the government had already met its specific housing targets last October, a full month before it suddenly went back to the well by targeting the Greenbelt.

There is no shortage of land in the region, just a paucity of political will and economic ambition. There is, however, a shortage of skilled labour today that will grow more acute in future, which explains the need for rising immigration targets.

Historically, there has been a remarkable political consensus on the benefits of immigration for a small population in a big country. That’s not to say that asking questions about the right level of immigration should be taboo.

But an elected leader must be mindful of his musings lest he legitimize the blaming and scapegoating of outsiders for our own internal miscalculations and misconceptions. Our housing shortage remains a homegrown problem, and our affordability challenges are not about foreigners.

The environmentally and agriculturally sensitive lands that form a protective cordon against uncontrolled urban sprawl are neither the problem nor the solution — just a distraction and a temptation. Which is why this Progressive Conservative government is playing a dangerous game by pretending we cannot afford to preserve the Greenbelt without fracturing societal tolerance toward newcomers.

This premier has vowed never to back down on his scandalous rezoning of the Greenbelt — a bonanza that is benefiting developers with billions of dollars in windfall profits. The least he could do is stop using immigrants and refugees as fodder for his speeches.

Source: Doug Ford hits a new low by using immigrants to sell his Greenbelt scheme

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Tom Flanagan: Why the Liberals once tried to ban Black immigration

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Bit silly to tie this ban to the Liberals as Conservative government’s of that and other early periods were equally exclusionary:

“Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain….”

Oklahoma! is a classic work of American musical theatre. Probably everyone has heard some of the music even if they haven’t seen the stage play or movie. Composer Richard Rodgers and librettist Oscar Hammerstein immortalized the frontier conflict between “the cowman and the farmer” — but they left out a bigger, racially-charged conflict surrounding Oklahoma’s accession to statehood in 1907. This conflict included an inspiring Canadian dimension.

The new state had a large Indian population because it had been carved out of the United States’ Indian Territory. The so-called “Five Civilized Nations” of the southeastern American states (most notably the Cherokee), had been deported there in the 1830s by Democrat President Andrew Jackson in the infamous Trail of Tears expulsion.

These tribes had acquired, from their southern white neighbours, the practice of owning Black slaves. They brought along thousands of slaves, who became the nucleus of Oklahoma’s Black population. After the Union States of the North won the Civil War, the Indian tribes emancipated their slaves, but former slave-owners continued to look down on Black people. In this, they were joined by many white settlers who flooded into the Indian Territory from nearby southern states.

After the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 enunciated the odious segregationist doctrine of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, whites and Indians alike in Oklahoma began planning to entrench and extend “Jim Crow” segregation laws. Once Oklahoma became a state, legislators set to work, passing one Jim Crow law after another, segregating schools and public buildings, and outlawing interracial marriage.

Canada during this same period was actively seeking agricultural immigrants to fill up the Prairie provinces. Small groups of Oklahoma Blacks, led by their Baptist ministers, decided they didn’t like what statehood would mean for them without the protection of the U.S. federal government. As one immigrant put it: “Things began getting worse for our people. So, my father, always ambitious and proud, wanted to go where every man was accepted on his merit or demerit, regardless of race, colour or creed. So, in the summer of 1909, we moved to Canada.”

It was a long overland journey of more than 3,000 km. Between 1905 and 1911, about 1,000 Black people from Oklahoma moved to Canada to homestead in the West, establishing five small farming villages, of which the best-known were Eldon, near Maidstone in Saskatchewan, and Amber Valley, north of Edmonton in Alberta.

Some Canadians welcomed their new neighbours while others complained to the federal government. “We view with alarm the continuous and rapid influx of Negro settlers,” the Alberta chapter of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire wrote to the minister of the interior in Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government.

In response, Laurier’s cabinet passed an order-in-council prohibiting Black immigration to Canada for one year. Its rationale? The “race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada.” The order, however, did not need enforcement because the Liberal government had already run newspaper ads and sent speakers to Oklahoma to tell Blacks that they would not be happy in the cold Canadian climate. Laurier rescinded the order after losing the 1911 election, knowing that Robert Borden’s newly elected Conservative government would repeal it.

The Black homesteaders survived and thrived in their villages; their children and grandchildren eventually moved to the cities, and indeed all over the world. Today the largest concentration of their descendants remains in Edmonton. They founded the Shiloh Baptist Church there in 1910 because other churches didn’t want them as members. That church still functions as the religious home of a mixed-race congregation.

The U.S. was the world’s first large-scale democracy, which was truly a historic achievement. But the democratic rule of the majority can lead to the oppression of racial minorities. Black Oklahomans found greater toleration in Canada’s constitutional monarchy than in American democracy.

Is it surprising that a Liberal government deliberately excluded the Black race from immigrating to Canada? Not really. Liberal governments wrote the first Indian Act in 1876, banned Chinese immigration in the 1920s and interned Japanese Canadians during World War II.

Because of their suffering on the notorious Trail of Tears, the Five Civilized Nations are one of the prime victim groups of American history. Yet they adopted the practice of Black slavery from the whites who drove them out of their ancestral homes and continued it in the West.

Despite all these ironies and hypocrisies, this story had a happy ending. Freedom-seeking people found refuge and a new life in Canada, and that’s worth celebrating.

The original, full-length version of this essay was recently published in C2C Journal.

Tom Flanagan is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary.

Source: Tom Flanagan: Why the Liberals once tried to ban Black immigration

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , ,

Mike Moffatt: Canada’s housing crisis demands a war-time effort

2023/08/22 Leave a comment

Hard to disagree with Prof Moffatt but how realistic is that his recommendations can or will be implemented in the short-term. Much more complex that rolling out pandemic income benefits and complex jurisdictional issues and a federal government that has “Deliverology” implementation issues.

But a really good article by which government action (or inaction…) can be judged. And while I am being repetitive, need to address the demand side (permanent and temporary migration) along with the supply side:

A war-time-like effort is needed for Canada to build the 5.8 million homesthe Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) estimates need to be built by the end of 2030 to restore affordability. This goal can only be achieved through a robust industrial strategy, as a “more of the same” strategy is doomed to fail in at least three different ways.

The first failure point is speed. The CMHC target requires Canada to triple homebuilding in a short period, and we cannot scale that construction sector that quickly without innovation. The second is labour shortages. Canada needs a robust housing workforce strategy to increase the talent pool from electricians to urban planners, but that will not be sufficient. Housing construction must experience rapid productivity increases. The third is climate change. Simply tripling what we are doing now will not be compatible with Canada’s climate targets due to emissions from construction and land-use changes. Furthermore, we must ensure that what gets built is resilient to a changing climate.

A federal industrial strategy can address all of these by changing what we build and how we build to make the process faster, less labour-intensive, and more climate-friendly. The government can begin by curating a list of climate-friendly, less-labour-intensive building methods that exist today in Canada but need support and expansion financing to grow, such as mass timber, modular homes, panelization, and 3D printed homes. 

Next, a strategy is needed to create a market for these technologies. The CMHC can facilitate this by creating a free catalogue of designs as they did in the 1940s. This catalogue would include designs for various housing types incorporating these technologies, from midrise apartment buildings to student residences, with diverse designs appropriate for different climate conditions. Builders using these designs could be fast-tracked for regulatory approvals, such as ones from the CMHC, since the building design had already been approved.

Government can act as the first customer for these projects, further accelerating uptake. It can build homes to address the estimated 4,500-unit shortage for Canadian Armed Forces families. Social housing can be built with the use of an acquisition fund. Colleges and universities should be given funding and instructed to build on-campus student housing to support a rapidly growing population of international students or risk losing their status as designated learning institutions, which would eliminate their ability to bring in those international students.

Tweaks to the tax system will be needed to help make these projects viable, from removing the HST on purpose-built rental construction to reintroducing accelerated capital costprovisions. The approvals process at all orders of government must be streamlined, and agencies must be staffed up to address backlogs, such as in the CMHC’s MLI Select program. Building codes will need to be amended to be compatible with these technologies, and zoning codes will need to be amended to allow for more as-of-right construction, such as in New Zealand, where six-story apartment buildings are permissible as-of-right within 800 metres of any transit station.

The federal government cannot alter municipal zoning codes, but it can offer incentives to do so. It could set up a set of minimum standards (call it a National Zoning Code), and any municipality that altered its zoning code to be compliant could be given one-time per-capita funding to spend on infrastructure construction and maintenance, no other strings attached. For example, a $200 per-capita fund would give the City of Toronto an additional $600 million to upgrade infrastructure and cost the federal government a maximum of $8 billion should every municipality in Canada sign-up. It could also follow Australia’s lead, which is giving states an extra $15,000 for every home built over a target. These incentives would not only cause provinces and municipalities to approve more homes, but they would also give them the infrastructure funding holding up current homebuilding. 

We should view this strategy as an investment, not a cost, as the economic opportunities are enormous. New housing will allow workers to live closer to opportunities, and scaling up these technologies creates manufacturing jobs across Canada and new products to export worldwide.

The key to this industrial strategy working is speed. The federal government must avoid setting up new approvals processes and micromanaging the system. Instead, it should set straightforward standards, and as long as those standards are met, approvals should be granted and payments made. New infrastructure funding to municipalities should not be on a project application basis, as it slows the process, and cities know best what they need.

We are in a crisis, and a war-time-like effort is needed. The federal government must prioritize speed and act now.

Source: Mike Moffatt: Canada’s housing crisis demands a war-time effort

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

ICYMI: ‘Some of my closest friends are from Iran’: How this human rights hearing sparked a fight over ‘unconscious bias’

2023/08/22 Leave a comment

Interesting case, which seem always to follow Professor Attaran. And while “some of my closest friends…” arguments can hide explicit or unconscious bias, one needs to assess the context of the remarks and the actual behaviour of the person involved.

An unfortunate side effect of this case is that it provides a disincentive for public office holders to share more of their thinking:

The former head of Canada’s human rights watchdog may have left the door open for an appeal of one of his final rulings by taking the time to make clear his views on the topic — and allegations — of “unconscious bias.”

In doing so, he opened a rare window, observers say, into the private thinking of an adjudicator — one that may now become the subject of scrutiny before the courts.

In July, David Thomas, the former chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, dismissed a complaint against the Immigration Department.

Thomas also took the unusual step of including a seven-page addendum with his 109-page decision. In those extra pages, he addressed the fact that he had been accused of unconscious bias during some heated exchanges at the hearing.

“I feel the need to speak on the record from a personal perspective,” Thomas wrote. “Allegations of racial bias are very toxic in today’s world. The mere allegation of such impropriety carries with it significant stigmatization.

“It is often very difficult for the accused to achieve redemption because the allegation, though difficult to prove, is also quite difficult to disprove. My personal reputation was impugned by Dr. Attaran’s allegation, so I wish to reply to defend myself.”

The case Thomas was hearing centred on a human rights complaint brought by Amir Attaran, a University of Ottawa law professor and an American-born Iranian.

In 2009, Attaran had applied to sponsor his aging parents, both U.S. citizens, to Canada under the family class immigration program.

The next year, he complained to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, claiming the Immigration Department discriminated against parents and grandparents by delaying the processing of their applications based on age, race, family status and national/ethnic origin.

It was taking immigration officials, at the time of the complaint, 42 days to screen the sponsors of spouses and children — but 37 months for those who wanted to bring their parents and grandparents to Canada.

After some legal wranglings and delays caused by COVID-19, Attaran’s complaint was heard in 2021 by Thomas, who left the tribunal later that year but continued to preside over the case.

Thomas said in dismissing the complaint that both Attaran and the commission, as a party at the hearing, failed to establish a “prima facie” case demonstrating “adverse” differential treatment in the provision of a service by the Immigration Department.

The commission is mandated to promote human rights through education, research and policy development, and is responsible for screening human rights complaints and referring them to the tribunal, the independent body responsible for hearing the cases.

The tribunal ruled in favour of the government’s arguments that the delays in processing parent and grandparent sponsorships were caused by Canada’s annual immigration levels plans and the immigration minister’s instructions — neither of which is considered “a service” under the Canadian Human Rights Act.

While the process for parents’ and grandparents’ applications may be different from spousal sponsorships, the tribunal dismissed the allegation that the practices were discriminatory.

That was the ruling. Then came the addendum.

In it, Thomas referred to Attaran’s “insinuations” of bias, including a suggestion that he had given preferential treatment to a government witness because the adjudicator and the government witness were both white men, rather than to the complainant’s expert witness, who was female and Asian.

Thomas also made reference to an incident during the hearing in which he called out the “mannerisms” that Attaran demonstrated as others spoke — rolling his head back, mock-laughing and throwing his face into his hands — that prompted the complainant to raise his concern over the perception of bias.

“I honestly feel it gives rise to an apprehension of unconscious bias. I have spent my entire working life, as a minority person, being told I should speak differently, I should behave differently, it is not something I welcome,” Thomas quoted Attaran in his addendum.

“And I am unhappy that it has happened here and from somebody I respect, as I very much do you. The case law requires me to put notice of an apprehension of bias on the record when it happens.”

Attaran did not ask the adjudicator to recuse himself.

Although Thomas in his decision recognized Attaran had the “protected characteristics” under the human rights act, he said he did not observe the complainant to speak with an accent or differently from any North American.

“I have only seen him on a video screen. He does not even appear to me to be a visible minority. Perhaps it might be different in person. I also highly doubt that I have a subconscious bias against people with a Persian ethnic background,” Thomas continued.

“Some of my closest friends are from Iran, including my college roommate who has remained a lifelong friend and participated as a groomsman at my wedding. In the absence of a motion for my recusal, I did not view the allegation as being serious. I perceived it more as an attempt to intimidate me, which it did not.”

Thomas went on to trace unconscious bias to the “controversial” implicit-bias test developed by researchers 30 years ago that he said failed to meet “the accepted standard of consistent test results” and suggested the implications to discrimination were not “supportable.”

“While the complainant may argue that the respondent is discriminatory due to the unconscious bias that is unseen, the respondent is equally open to argue that the complainant is delusional and seeing discrimination where it doesn’t exist,” Thomas wrote.

“Neither of these arguments are helpful to the adjudicator.”

In an interview, Attaran said he did not ask Thomas to recuse himself because he believed the comments on his “mannerisms” were a lapse of judgment.

Attaran defended his own demeanour at the hearing, saying cross-examinations can be unpleasant because no one likes to have their evidence pierced. But he took issue with Thomas’s claim that he couldn’t be biased against Iranians.

“This is basically like saying I can’t be a racist because I have a Black friend,” said Attaran. “I am not calling Mr. Thomas a racist, but I am saying that his approach on unconscious bias and denying that I am a racial minority person is something a racist might do.”

The human rights tribunal refused to comment on the case, but said its adjudicators are independent decision-makers.

Thomas declined the Star’s request for interview, saying he will let the decision speak for itself.

“It would be highly inappropriate for me to make any comments about it at this time,” Thomas said in an email. “Decision-makers avoid speaking about their decisions while under review lest their comments be construed as supplemental reasons or something else that might interfere with the process which must run, undisturbed, through the courts.”

Generally, the court system is of the opinion that it’s difficult to prove bias against a tribunal adjudicator and that one must rely on surrounding circumstances to make any determination, because it’s impossible to get into the decision maker’s mind.

But what makes this human rights tribunal decision unusual — and potentially disputable — is that the adjudicator laid out his way of thinking and response in the seven-page addendum.

“The court said it’s difficult to get into the (person’s) state of the mind,” Caroline Carrasco, senior counsel of the Canadian Human Rights Commission on this case, said in an interview.

“I’m saying to you, though, I haven’t seen anything like this. It’s unconventional.”

She said that through the addendum: “We have an opportunity to get the personal perspective of a decision-maker on the issue of unconscious bias and his thoughts about the complaint.”

The human rights commission told the Star it’s appealing Thomas’s decision because the case touches on racial bias, systemic discrimination, the definition of service and the rights of older immigrants as they navigate Canada’s immigration processes.

Both the commission and Attaran, representing himself, have asked the Federal Court to overturn the tribunal decision, arguing that it was not transparent, intelligible and justified. They want the case referred back to the tribunal for reconsideration.

Source: ‘Some of my closest friends are from Iran’: How this human rights hearing sparked a fight over ‘unconscious bias’

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Hundreds of appointed positions vacant after 8 years of Trudeau’s government

2023/08/22 Leave a comment

Seems like another example of failure to deliver. But surprising that article makes no mention of the increased diversity of GiC appointments which is one of the successes of the current government (also seen in ambassadorial, senate and judicial appointments).

I am, however, less charitable than UoO professor Gilles Levasseur regarding excusing the government given that they have been in power for 8 years and the system should operate more smoothly:

Almost eight years after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government came to power, hundreds of government-appointed positions — from boards of port authorities and advisory councils to tribunals that hear refugee claims or parole cases — are vacant or are being occupied by someone whose appointment is past its end-date.

A CBC news analysis of governor in council (GIC) appointments to 206 government bodies or institutions found that 418 of the 1,731 positions — 24.1 per cent — are either vacant or are being occupied by someone whose appointment has continued past its end date.

Of that number, 280 positions — 16.2 per cent ot the total — were vacant. Another 138 appointees — 7.9 per cent — were past their end-dates and were awaiting either replacement or renewal of their appointments.

Those figures do not include a number of positions currently occupied by someone who is in an acting or interim capacity. Some of those positions have been held by interim or acting appointments for years.

While some GIC appointments come with lucrative six-figure salaries, others provide only per diems of a few hundred dollars plus expenses when board members attend meetings.

Former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s government went on an appointment spree in the weeks before it left office in 2015, leaving very few vacancies and making 49 “future appointments” of individuals whose terms weren’t due to be renewed until well after the election that brought Trudeau to power.

Some experts say leaving hundreds of positions vacant can affect wait times for services or decisions, while leaving boards staffed by people who are past their end-dates can affect an organization’s ability to make decisions.

Other experts, however, argue that the backlog is understandable given the Trudeau government’s decision in its first mandate to overhaul the appointments process to make it less political and boost diversity.

The problem isn’t confined to GIC appointments.

In the Senate, 14 of 105 seats are empty, with vacancies in nine out of 10 provinces. The Senate’s clerk, who manages the day-to-day operations of Canada’s upper house, has been acting in an interim capacity since December 2020.

There are 86 vacancies for federally-appointed judges across Canada, including one seat on the Supreme Court of Canada. All of the seats on seven of the Judicial Advisory Committees set up to assess judicial candidates — including all three committees in Ontario — are vacant.

In June, Supreme Court Chief Justice Richard Wagner warned of an “alarming” shortage of federally appointed justices.

“There are candidates in every province,” Wagner told reporters. “There’s no reason why those cannot be filled.”

Government officials say they are working on filling positions. Stéphane Shank, spokesperson for the Privy Council Office (PCO), defended the government’s appointment process.

“Governor in Council (GIC) appointments are made through an open, merit-based process on a rolling basis throughout the calendar year,” Shank said in an e-mail.

“The process takes into account current and forecasted vacancies, as well as [incumbents remaining in place], to maintain operational integrity of these institutions. Legislative provisions for appointees to continue in office can provide organizational continuity until such time as a new appointment is made.”

No timelines

Shank said the government made 780 GIC appointments in 2022 and will continue filling openings. He said he could not predict when positions such as the commissioner for conflict of interest and ethics — which has been vacant since mid-April — will be filled.

“A new Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner will be appointed by the Governor in Council in due course,” Shank wrote.

Shank pointed to a website with 49 GIC “appointment opportunities” posted. But most of those appointments began the application review process months ago. Ten of the postings list dates in 2022 for application reviews to begin — one dates back as far as March 2022.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/QPx9m/1/

The problem isn’t spread evenly throughout the government.

An analysis by ministerial office found the highest percentage of vacant or past-due appointments at Transport Canada: 47.8 per cent of its 230 GIC positions. The boards of several port authorities across Canada consist entirely of vacant positions or board members who are past their appointment dates.

The second highest percentage was at Global Affairs — 42.1 percent of its 19 GIC positions — followed by Housing, Infrastructure and Communities, with 40.9 per cent of its 44 positions.

Nadine Ramadan, press secretary for Transport Minister Pablo Rodriguez, pointed out that the department has more GIC positions to fill than most other ministries.

“Lots of factors go into appointing the best candidates for the roles,” she said. “Due to the complexity of the files across Transport Canada, these roles are often very technical and finding the perfect candidate with the necessary technical requirements for the position takes time.”

But other ministers with large numbers of GIC appointments to make had better track records.

In his former role as minister of heritage, Rodriguez left only 13.3 per cent of 150 appointments vacant or past their appointment dates. He also made several future appointments to renew or replace positions that were near their end dates.

There are two notable exceptions to that track record, however. The board of directors for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is 58.3 percent vacant or composed of individuals past their appointment dates, while three of eight positions on the National Arts Centre board are vacant.

Former employment minister Carla Qualtrough had more than 100 appointments to manage — including members of the Social Security Tribunal, which hears appeals of decisions involving things like employment insurance and pension benefits. She left that portfolio with a vacancy rate of only 5.5 per cent.

The Prime Minister’s Office plays an overall role in GIC appointments but is also directly responsible for 22 appointments. After two vacancies on the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency were filled Friday, just two PMO appointments remain vacant: the conflict of interest commissioner and the law clerk of the House of Commons 

Sen. Percy Downe, who served as director of appointments to former prime minister Jean Chrétien, said it’s important to keep GIC positions filled and a normal vacancy rate should be “three to four per cent at the most.”

These appointments “affect Canadians in many ways,” he said. “They affect their security … they affect the economy.”

Downe said positions that are occupied by people past their appointment dates make it difficult for government departments and agencies to make plans.

“For the boards and agencies, it’s important to know the status as you undertake projects and works that may be required,” he said. “Will this person actually be here in three months or six months? Should we involve them? Should we make them a head of a subcommittee?”

Gilles Levasseur, a professor in law and management at the University of Ottawa, said a higher level of vacancies isn’t surprising given the changes the Trudeau government made to the appointments process and the need to reflect Canada’s diversity.

“People can criticize but we’ve also got to make sure that we understand the system itself and the challenge we’re facing because of these new elements that we didn’t have 10, 15 years ago,” he said. “And because we want to be more open to the society, it takes more time to fill these positions.”

Levasseur said it is not a problem if people are past their appointment dates if they’re doing the job and their presence doesn’t interfere with decision-making. He added the government could do more to let Canadians know about openings.

“A lot of people don’t even know that these positions are available,” he said.

Michael Barrett, Conservative critic for ethics and accountable government, said the level of vacancies is symptomatic of a bigger problem with the current government.

“After eight years of Trudeau, this incompetent Liberal government can’t deliver basic government services like passports and there are backlogs, delays and chaos in everything they touch,” he said in a media statement.

“It has been nearly half a year without an Ethics Commissioner and widespread judicial vacancies are allowing repeat violent criminals to walk free because there are not enough judges to hear cases.”

The New Democratic Party has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Source: Hundreds of appointed positions vacant after 8 years of Trudeau’s government

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

ICYMI: A Major Hollywood Diversity Report Shows Little Change—Except for One Promising Stat

2023/08/22 Leave a comment

Of note:

Over the last 16 years, Hollywood has certainly discussed the need for better representation in onscreen. Movements like #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo dominated red-carpet conversation and social media. And there has been some change: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences grew and diversified its voting body in hopes of nominating a wider array of movies and performances—and the nominees and winners have in fact been more diverse in recent years. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

But a new study from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative suggests that, despite the talk of progress, not much has actually changed onscreen. Stacy L. Smith, a professor of communications and head of the initiative, led a review of 1,600 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2022. The largest study of its kind, it examines a whopping 69,858 speaking roles across those movies to see whether Hollywood has generated a significant shift in representation in terms of gender, race and ethnicity, LGBTQ+ identity, or disabilities. 

“It’s all talk and little action,” says Smith. “Many of these numbers did not move or went backwards. That shows us that the industry does not know how to change without the intervention of experts to work with them to change the systemic processes that lead to inequality and discrimination.”

But the study did identify one major exception: In the last 16 years, the percentage of Asian characters with speaking roles onscreen skyrocketed from 3.4% to 15.9%. In that same time period, Black characters saw little change, from 13.0% to 13.4%, and the proportion of Latino characters grew from just 3.3% to just 5.2%. “My initial reaction is I’m very happy but very guilty,” says Bing Chen, the CEO and Co-Founder of Gold House, an organization that champions and invests in Asian Pacific creators and companies. “We need to support all multicultural communities.” But he finds the data encouraging: change is achievable across demographics.

Chen identifies three major milestones for Asian characters onscreen in the last several years. In 2018, Crazy Rich Asians, the first film by a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority Asian cast in 25 years since The Joy Luck Club premiered in 1993, became a genuine blockbuster. The next year, The Farewell and Parasite—movies partially or completely featuring non-English dialogue—performed well at the box office against their budgets and won awards. Parasite won four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film. “The year former President Trump was spitting all sorts of really anti-Asian xenophobic commentary, talking about ‘kung flu’ and all that nonsense,” says Chen. “So when Parasitewon, that was a really big affirming moment of, we’re actually creatively excellent, even if we don’t speak your language.” 

And last year, Everything Everywhere All at Once became a surprise box office smash and the most-awarded film of all time.

And that’s just in film. On TV, shows like Fresh Off the Boat, Squid Game, and Kim’s Convenience have had a major cultural impact. And cultural exports from Asian countries have gone mainstream in the U.S. “There’s no question that the rise of K-Pop as a institution has directly and indirectly contributed to the acculturation of the masses to K-content, writ-large,” says Chen. Smith agrees that while the U.S. dominated the global pop culture space for decades, much of that power has shifted to Asian countries that are exporting music, television, film, and even social media content to the U.S. at high rates, and K-Pop paved the way for mass cultural events like the Korean show Squid Game.

Here’s why experts think we’ve seen a shift onscreen—and why there’s still work to do.

Most underrepresented groups have seen little progress

Movies remain very white, very straight, very cis, and very male. 

The few highlights in the data come with major caveats. As Barbie‘s massive box office numbers demonstrate, female-led pictures can succeed when studios actually make them. Executives are finally starting to learn that lesson: 44% of leading or co-leading roles went to women and girls in 2022, a 16-year-peak and more than double the number in 2007. But, on the whole, casts are still dominated by men. The percentage of female characters with speaking roles ticked up just 4.7 percentage points from 29.9% in 2007 to 34.6% last year. 

And while women of color made major strides in representation onscreen—19% of movies in 2022 featured a woman of color in a leading role, up from an abysmal 1% in 2007—there has been little progress throughout the late 2010s and 2020s. The percentage of women of color in leading roles has remained flat for years. And 70 of the top 100 films of 2022 featured no women of color in any role. 

“We now have 16 years of evidence that shows that activism failed particularly with girls and women since it’s almost a flatline from 2007 to 2022,” says Smith. The advocacy arm of Time’s Up, the celebrity-filled organization that sprung up in the wake of #MeToo and promised to fight for gender equity in film, imploded last year. Whispers that after all the talk of change in 2017 the pendulum is swinging back to a more regressive approach to business have spread through Hollywood.

Other data points proved even more bleak. Only 2.1% of speaking characters in the top films of 2022 identified as LGBTQ+, a percentage which has not changed meaningfully since 2014 when the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative began measuring. There were 5 transgender characters in the top 100 films of 2022, a 9-year high point, but 4 of these 5 characters appeared in a single film: Bros.

And the number of speaking characters with a disability in a major film was just 1.9% in 2022, a drop from 2.4% in 2015 when Annenberg started recording stats.

In light of these data, the success of Asian characters onscreen stands out even more. Chen argues that those successes have come only after years of advocacy.

There’s been a renaissance of Asian stories onscreen

Chen attributes the rise of Asian representation in film to several factors. One is simply the proliferation of content largely thanks to streamers’ constant quest for new programming to court more subscribers: More storytelling has translated to more diverse storytelling. The rallying cry around #StopAsianHate tied to acts of violence against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic helped motivate activists to push for greater representation of Asian stories onscreen in hopes that movies could evoke empathy and relatability. But Chen says the efforts to tell Asian stories stretch beyond that one movement. “I would say within the community, the way we think about it is of course we still care about #StopAsianHate and ensuring that the safety and belonging of our community, but our community cares even more about creative excellence, as opposed to just sort of representation.”

And then there’s the surge in adaptations of bestselling books written by Asian authors, like Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series, and the forthcoming Interior Chinatown show, based on the book by Charles Yu. “You see a rise in both the number of Asian authors writing books and making the bestseller list but also, equally important, the quick adaptation of those works by Asian producers,” Chen says. “This has been a very concentrated effort in the community over the last three to four years.” 

In terms of original content, Chen points to writer-directors with newfound creative control over their projects. Beef’s Lee Sung Jin, Turning Red’s Domee Shi, Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung, Joy Ride’s Adele Lim, Never Have I Ever’s Mindy Kaling have gotten to tell stories “that reflect their real lived experience,” he says. There have, of course, long been Asian creators in Hollywood, but finally these particular movies and shows in all their specificity and detail have been greenlit. In a previous op-ed for TIME, Chen and his co-founder Jeremy Tran argued that diversity in studio leadership can trickle down to the content itself, pointing to the power of studio big wigs like Bela Bajaria and Marian Lee Dicus at Netflix, Albert Cheng at Amazon Prime Video, and Asad Ayaz and Nancy Lee at Disney.

Smith casts some skepticism on the notion that Hollywood has altered what stories it brings to the big screen—even in the face of massive box office takes. Yes, the ticket sales for Crazy Rich Asians afforded director Jon M. Chu the opportunity to direct other films with notably diverse casts, like In the Heights and the forthcoming Wicked adaptation. And the success of that same film boosted the career of Michelle Yeoh, who went on to win an Oscar for another film with a predominantly Asian cast, Everything Everywhere All at Once. But to Smith, those exceptions can obfuscate the work that still needs to be done.

“If you can think of a few instances, what that does is cause you to overestimate a particular event,” she says. “So if you call up someone like Jon Chu or the Daniels [directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once], you’re going to think, ‘Oh things are actually getting better.’ I would challenge the studios to look at the data.” The data, she says, suggests that shifts in Asian representation in film can largely be attributed to increased audience appetite for foreign films, not efforts by American studios to diversity Hollywood. “It’s a function of the box office changing,” she argues, “not the decisions of legacy studios.”

An influx of international content

What we watch has fundamentally shifted in the last few years. Back in 2020, when he won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film for Parasite, Korean director Bong Joon Ho said in his acceptance speech, “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” He could not have known then how quickly Americans would heed his advice. Parasite went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars and proved to be a box office phenomenon in the U.S.

Around the time of Parasite’s history-making Oscars win, streaming services, particularly Netflix, were taking a more international approach to producing and acquiring content. Audiences seemed decreasingly deterred by those pesky subtitles. Crossover hits like the Korean show Squid Game and the Indian film RRR have become some of the streamer’s biggest hits. (Squid Game set a record for the most watched show on Netflix ever and ranked No. 1 in more than 90 countries across the world.

“Netflix is spending literally billions of dollars in K-content and Indian content,” says Chen. “Korea and India, in particular, are becoming the dominant successful exporters of pop content.” The studio has invested in massive production infrastructure in Korea and is increasingly focused on doing the same thing in India in addition to acquiring original content in those countries.

Netflix is certainly the most globally minded of the American studios. “Bela Bajaria is way out in front as the Chief Content Officer at Netflix,” says Smith. “As a woman who comes from an underrepresented background, she’s hitting it out of the park in terms of curating global talent. The entire industry is following her league.” The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has previously found that Netflix performs better than traditional Hollywood studios on representation metrics, both in the U.S. and globally.

Beyond streaming, content from Asian countries has become increasingly dominant on TikTok and YouTube, platforms where Gen Z especially consumes most of its content. Younger viewers who hail from multicultural homes and are increasingly connected to people across the globe through social media don’t have the same bias toward a single language that past generations do.

In film, Katherine Pieper, program director at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, says the pandemic helped accelerate the shift toward international content as viewers sought out new content while stuck on our couches at home rather than relying on whatever Hollywood was putting in movie theaters for entertainment. “With the change in the box office from 2020 to 2022, we saw a couple of types of broad categories of films in the top 100 that had been relatively minimal in previous years,” she says, “namely anime films, Bollywood films, and international films set primarily in South Asia or in Japan with primarily Asian characters.”

Pieper and Smith attribute the influx in Asian representation largely to those foreign films suddenly overtaking their American counterparts at the domestic box office rather than any major change in how the traditional studios make decisions. “Each year there’s between five and eight films that meet those descriptions that we hadn’t seen before 2021, in addition to a couple of films from the U.S. that might have played the role, like Raya and the Last Dragon, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and The Eternals.” 

But of course, those few North American releases can have an impact as well. The Canadian show Kim’s Convenience found a significant American audience on Netflix and launched the career of Simu Liu, who became the first Asian man to lead a major American superhero film in Marvel’s Shang-Chi. That movie, in turn, afforded him opportunities in other mainstream movies, like Barbie. The impetus shouldn’t be only on creators of color to write for and cast non-white actors. 

“If an Asian writer-producer is producing a piece, there are probably going to be some Asian characters. But if a non-Asian one is, what is their propensity to write an Asian character and why?” asks Chen. “My best inference is that writers’ rooms have become more diverse in general—though there’s still a long way to go obviously.” 

That progress, of course, ties directly to issues being raised by the actors and writers on strike in Hollywood. The WGA has revealed that while the proportion of underrepresented writers has grown in the last several years, they largely occupy lower-level positions and are the first to be put in financial straits when studios decide to forgo writers’ rooms or make major cuts. “Creators of color are the first people to be penalized in these strikes for all sorts of systemic reasons,” says Chen. Both Smith and Chen are eagerly watching the strikes to see how changes to writers’ rooms might impact long-term trends. The ultimate goal, they say, is to empower writers and actors of color to continue to tell their own stories—and pressure studios to back their visions.

Source: A Major Hollywood Diversity Report Shows Little Change—Except for One Promising Stat

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Le débat sur les cibles d’immigration suscite l’engouement

2023/08/22 Leave a comment

Meanwhile in Quebec:

La consultation publique sur les cibles d’immigration qui aura lieu à la mi-septembre suscite un engouement sans précédent : 72 mémoires ont été déposés, soit plus du double que lors de la consultation précédente, il y a quatre ans, a appris Le Devoir.

Ce grand intérêt donne du fil à retordre au ministère de l’Immigration, qui doit organiser le calendrier pour entendre en un mois et demi une soixantaine d’individus et organismes ayant demandé à prendre la parole en commission parlementaire.

La période de dépôt des mémoires, qui devait se terminer le 11 août dernier, a été légèrement étirée pour quelques retardataires. En date du 17 août, la Commission des relations avec les citoyens avait reçu 72 mémoires venant de divers individus et organismes. Parmi eux, 66 ont demandé à intervenir lors d’audiences publiques. À cela s’ajoute une demande d’intervention non accompagnée d’un mémoire.

« On se réjouit de l’engouement que notre approche équilibrée de l’immigration permanente suscite dans la société québécoise », a déclaré Alexandre Lahaie, l’attaché de presse de la ministre Christine Fréchette. Or, la loi exige que la Planification pluriannuelle de l’immigration 2024-2027 soit déposée avant le 1er novembre, ce qui laisse au ministère à peine un mois et demi pour entendre tous les intervenants, qui pourront commencer à s’exprimer à l’ouverture des audiences, le 12 septembre prochain.

« Il y a des discussions avec les groupes parlementaires pour optimiser le déroulement de la consultation », a concédé M. Lahaie.

En mai dernier, le gouvernement de la Coalition avenir Québec a soumis au débat deux scénarios. L’un prône le statu quo, soit le maintien des cibles actuelles de 50 000 nouveaux arrivants. L’autre propose une hausse de 10 000, ce qui ferait grimper les seuils à 60 000 d’ici 2027. Par le biais d’un projet de règlement, le gouvernement a d’ailleurs exigé que l’ensemble des immigrants économiques admis au Québec parlent français.

Plaidoyers pour plus d’immigrants

Le président-directeur général de la Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec (FCCQ), Charles Milliard, se réjouit lui aussi de voir une aussi grande participation aux consultations publiques en immigration. « C’est tant mieux ! C’est un bien meilleur forum qu’une campagne électorale pour en parler. Je pense qu’il y aura un peu moins de raccourcis et d’effets de toge », a-t-il soutenu.

Toutefois, même s’il est d’avis qu’il faut maximiser l’immigration francophone, il croit que le Québec ne peut pas non plus se priver de « talents exceptionnels » pour une question de langue. « On a besoin d’aller chercher d’autres expertises que la langue », souligne-t-il.

Dans son mémoire déposé en prévision des consultations débutant le 12 septembre, la FCCQ dit appuyer une plus grande immigration « en français, en région, en nombre suffisant et en bas de six mois d’attente », résume M. Milliard.

Et pour le p.-d.g., il est nécessaire de mesurer la capacité d’accueil et d’intégration au moyen de données probantes, qui ne laisseront plus de place à l’interprétation. « J’entends des gens qui disent qu’il faut dépolitiser le débat sur l’immigration. On peut le souhaiter, mais ça n’arrivera pas. Sauf qu’on peut objectiver le tableau de bord et prendre des décisions en fonction de ça. »

La FCCQ croit que chacune des régions du Québec devrait déterminer le nombre de places en service de garde, de logements, d’infrastructures culturelles et médicales, etc. « Ensuite, on additionne les 17 régions administratives du Québec, et le chiffre qu’on va obtenir va être beaucoup moins débattable », avance M. Milliard.

Un « faux débat » de chiffres ?

Représentant une centaine de membres, la Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes réfugiées et immigrantes (TCRI) fait valoir que le débat sur les seuils est un « faux débat ».

Étant donné qu’il y a environ 300 000 personnes à statut temporaire au Québec, dont plusieurs qui ont déjà postulé pour la résidence permanente, et que ce sont ces personnes qui vont bénéficier des places dans les seuils établis par Québec, pourquoi se livrer à un débat de chiffres ? demande Stephan Reichhold, directeur général de la TCRI.

« Que ce soit 50 000, 60 000 ou 70 000, c’est absurde de parler de chiffres », car les immigrants qui seront admis au cours des prochaines années sont déjà ici, logés et en emploi, même que plusieurs parlent français, poursuit-il. M. Reichhold se demande ainsi pourquoi on souhaite les comptabiliser dans les cibles. « Ce qu’on demande, c’est que les travailleurs et les réfugiés, notamment ceux reconnus sur place [dans la catégorie humanitaire], soient hors cible, comme ce sera le cas pour les étudiants étrangers. »

Le gouvernement avait effectivement annoncé en mai qu’il ne fixerait pas de plafond pour l’accueil de diplômés passés par le Programme de l’expérience québécoise (PEQ), qui subit par ailleurs une réforme. Donc aux 60 000 immigrants admis s’ajouteraient en réalité quelques milliers de diplômés du PEQ.

La TCRI souhaite par ailleurs profiter des consultations publiques en immigration pour remettre les projecteurs sur la question de l’immigration humanitaire, sa clientèle principale. « On a l’impression qu’on va être les seuls à en parler. Mais ce qui est proposé est une catastrophe. Maintenir les niveaux de 2019 pour l’immigration humanitaire, ça n’a aucun sens. »

Selon les scénarios du gouvernement du Québec, à peine 8000 places sont accordées à cette catégorie d’immigration, bien que le nombre de personnes s’y qualifiant soit en hausse, notamment en raison des arrivées par le chemin Roxham.

Source: Le débat sur les cibles d’immigration suscite l’engouement

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Watt: The Liberals tied immigration to housing: they need to prove it can work

2023/08/21 Leave a comment

But given the time lags involved in building new houses, even assuming the federal government provides funding, most municipal zoning restrictions are relaxed and service fees reduced where appropriate, any concrete results in terms of “shovels in the ground” will take a few years.

In other words, after the election. The federal and provincial (save Quebec) government fixation on increasing immigration, temporary and permanent, while largely ignoring the impact on housing, healthcare and infrastructure, will deservedly come back to haunt the Liberal government if no change occurs to planned permanent immigration levels and unrestricted temporary migration (students and workers):

The revamped Liberal cabinet retreats to Prince Edward Island this week while their party languishes in polling and the Conservatives surge. Underestimate Trudeau at your peril, perhaps, but something seems to have become particularly challenging.

While it is difficult to put your finger on just what that something is, it has become clear that much of that something is Canada’s housing crisis.

Apart from the PM himself, perhaps no one feels the heat on the way to Charlottetown more than Sean Fraser, the new housing minister. Fraser got this job because the Liberals have embarked on a strategy to tie immigration (Fraser previously led this portfolio) inexorably to housing, supposedly using newly arrived skilled labour to build the houses we desperately need.

All well and good, but it doesn’t seem Canadians are having any of it. The problem is, most Canadians aren’t convinced this works — and with house prices swelling, interest rates rising, and immigration continuing exponentially, I fear by combining these issues so closely the Liberals risk sparking a major backlash against their record-setting immigration plans.

Fraser has outlined his answer to the conundrum: add more supply through incentives to local governments and increase immigration rates to, in part, provide the labour required for this.

The new housing minister tackles this after the prime minister bluntly argued, “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility.” On cleanup duty, Fraser later stated the federal government should be more active in developing and enacting housing policy, as it once was.

This, of course, is the right approach. Nevertheless, Fraser’s major challenge will be convincing Canadians that high immigration levels are good when many can’t afford homes.

This week, videos of Canadians tearily lamenting the cost of living went viral. The narrative that, after eight years in office, this government has left many — the very ones they promised to fight for — behind is beginning to set like cement.

Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has taken the government to task on housing with brutal effectiveness. He has managed to own this rhetorical stance while still supporting immigration — making the disconnect between the Liberal’s immigration policy and inaction on housing even harder to ignore.

Under Fraser’s oversight, immigration increased exponentially but integration remained plagued with accreditation issues and failed to correspond with housing supply: the national housing strategy has only resulted in just over 100,000 homes. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation determined 5.8 million more are needed over the next decade. In 2022, our population grew by over a million.

The Bank of Canada also acknowledged recently that immigration drives up housing demand. As the problem becomes more acute, this is where people will focus — not on the “mirage of economic prosperity” immigration otherwise contributes to.

The Liberals, if they are to have any hope of winning the next election, must convince Canadians immigration is in their near-term interests and that it will result in more houses being built. That’s a tall order when voters are being priced out of even the remotest dream of owning a home. It’s a disconnect that also dissuades immigrants from wanting to come here in the first place.

By failing to acknowledge this and rectify the integration issues in our immigration system so newcomers can positively contribute to the housing supply, the Liberals risk allowing the social cohesion they so value to fray. And when that starts, the uniquely Canadian support for significant levels of immigration will fray with it.

That would be a terrible shame. No one needs a lecture on the fundamental role immigration has played in our past and the crucial role it will play in our future — much less that it is simply right.

What isn’t right is an approach to this issue driven by complacency and inaction rather than by a fundamental commitment — not just to policy statements but to actually building new homes.

Source: The Liberals tied immigration to housing: they need to prove it can work

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Corporate DEI initiatives are facing cutbacks and legal attacks

2023/08/21 Leave a comment

Of note:

Just three years after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis set off a torrent of hiring of chief diversity officers and other such roles, companies are coming under attack from conservative legal activists who argue that their DEI policies and programs constitute racial discrimination.

The challenges come as companies, faced with an uncertain economy, have already been laying off large numbers of people, including many only recently hired to implement their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) strategies.

The one-two punch has legal experts split on what’s ahead for these efforts, while longtime diversity advocates argue that companies should take these setbacks as an opportunity to reset.

“We cannot place the reasoning for it on something as subjective as the right thing to do. It has to be the smart thing to do,” says Janet Stovall, global head of diversity, equity and inclusion for the NeuroLeadership Institute, a consulting firm focused on culture and leadership.

A surge in hiring, followed by dramatic cuts

In the corporate DEI world, Catalina Colman’s story is a familiar one.

In 2020, she was working at a small tech company as a human resources generalist, handling tasks such as employee onboardings and exits.

She had already been thinking about how to help the company grow in a more diverse and equitable way, when in May of that year, George Floyd was murdered. Suddenly, everything accelerated.

“We recognized we just needed to move quickly, and we needed to start implementing things fast,” says Colman.

The racial reckoning unfolding across the country unleashed demands for change. Companies scrambled to respond to the moment. According to the jobs site Indeed, job postings with DEI in the title jumped 92% from July 2020 to July 2021.

But the deceleration has also come quickly. Economic pressures have led companies to pull back, cutting DEI jobs including Colman’s alongside other human resources roles. Since last July, Indeed has seen DEI job postings drop by 38%.

And then in June, in another blow to diversity advocates, the Supreme Court rejected the use of race-conscious admissions in higher education, setting off predictions that corporate policies around diversity will soon meet the same fate.

Predictions of what’s next for corporate DEI

To be clear, the court’s decision applies to affirmative action at colleges and universities, not employer efforts to foster diversity in the workplace.

In a statement issued after the ruling, Charlotte Burrows, chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, wrote, “It remains lawful for employers to implement diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs that seek to ensure workers of all backgrounds are afforded equal opportunity in the workplace.”

But in a Bloomberg opinion piece, Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman cited Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, in which “he made it crystal clear that in his view, the court’s rule that an educational institution ‘may never discriminate based on race’ now applies with equal force to employers.”

Feldman told NPR the writing is on the wall.

“There’s a high probability, a very high probability, that a majority of this current Supreme Court will say the exact same thing,” he said in an interview last month.

But other attorneys say such assumptions are premature. Bonnie Levine, founder of the law firm Verse Legal, points out that a day after the affirmative action decision, the Supreme Court ruled that a Christian wedding website designer could refuse to work with same-sex couples.

“The Supreme Court has been very clear about not wanting to infringe on the rights of private parties,” says Levine.

Regardless, conservative activists are already waging a new fight.

In early August, Edward Blum, the strategist behind the affirmative action case, filed a lawsuit against the venture capital group Fearless Fund over grants it awards to black female entrepreneurs. Blum argues that the program amounts to “express and intentional racial discrimination in the making of contracts,” according to the lawsuit.

Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller has also been busy, asking the EEOC to investigate hiring practices aimed at increasing minority representation at a long list of companies including Kellogg’s, Hershey and Alaska Airlines.

“They are bringing these cases to make law. That’s why they’re bringing them,” says Levine.

A moment to get out or double down

Even before this year, corporate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have come under harsh criticism, including that they’re expensive, performative, even a source of division themselves.

At companies where DEI was never a priority, this may be a moment to get out.

“It makes sense that you wouldn’t want to just jump into something that is going to be more complicated if you don’t feel like you have to,” says consultant Stovall.

But for clients who are in it for the long haul, Stovall is doubling down on advice she’s always given: Focus on the rationale. Make the business case for bringing on a diversity of backgrounds and experiences.

“Every organization has basically only three goals: make money, save money, achieve a vision,” she says. “If you can tie DEI directly to one of those goals, it gets a little bit harder for even those who want to destroy it to argue that they should.”

For Catalina Colman, trying to find another DEI job after her layoff in April was disheartening. Positions she applied for were eliminated midway through the interview process.

This summer, she decided to put herself out there as an independent consultant. She’s banking on companies wanting to continue the work they started, recognizing a business imperative.

“Consumers, users are still going to want — at the end of the day — diversity to be a key pillar for an organization,” she says.

Source: Corporate DEI initiatives are facing cutbacks and legal attacks

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Star Editorial: Ottawa is changing its temporary foreign worker program. It’s not clear this will help workers

2023/08/21 Leave a comment

Related editorial on the Recognized Employer Pilot along with advocating for open work permits to reduce abuse:

In early 2020, many Canadians noticed the once lush produce sections of their grocery stores were increasingly barren.

What many Canadians didn’t notice is the reason for the absence of fresh fruits and vegetables: COVID-19 outbreaks among migrant farm workers across Canada, including in southern Ontario.

The outbreaks, and their effect on food supply, reveal the value and vulnerability of the migrant workers, many of whom are hired through Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

The program, which is set to be altered this September, permits employers to hire foreign workers when no qualified Canadians are available. The initiative has proven wildly popular, and successful applications have increased exponentially in recent years. But so too have accusations of abuse, of workers enduring unsafe workplace and living conditions.

Temporary labourers frequently work long hours for low pay and limited benefits, and they often live in employer-supplied, cramped quarters replete with shared sleeping and washroom facilities — the very conditions that increase the risk of infectious disease outbreaks and other health threats.

Consequently, for the welfare of the workers Ottawa needs to ensure that changing the program doesn’t increase the abuse that has long plagued the regime.

For its part, the federal government insists the alteration, known as the Recognized Employer Pilot, will do the opposite. According to Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault, the pilot will reduce the administrative burden on employers who “demonstrate the highest level of protection for workers,” and allow them to receive permits lasting three years, rather than the current 18 months. The change will come first to employers in agriculture, then to all others starting in January.

Rewarding responsible employers could help to protect both workers and ease the paperwork, and Ottawa has also promised to conduct more rigorous assessments before permits are issued. But three years is a long time, long enough for workplace and living conditions to deteriorate dramatically.

Government inspectors do monitor employers’ compliance with regulations, but that oversight has itself been substandard. In response to the COVID outbreaks among farm workers, federal Auditor General Karen Hogan issued a scathing report accusing inspectors of failing to ensure employers followed regulations.

If the pilot program is to be successful, then, it must be accompanied by improved, vigilant monitoring of employers’ compliance with safety standards throughout the three-year period.

That won’t, however, eliminate the problem that makes abuse possible: The power imbalance between employers and workers. That is the product of two factors — employer-specific work permits, and the tenuous immigration status of workers.

Employer-specific permits require workers to remain with the employer who hired them, which means some must make the impossible choice of suffering abuse or unemployment.

Aware of this, Ottawa introduced the Vulnerable Worker Open Work Permit program, which can grant abused workers a permit that allows them to move to a different employer. But the worker must first complain, something many are loath to do for fear of deportation or reprisals for employers.

In any case, by limiting open permits to those who have faced abuse, the program essentially treats abuse as a kind of hazing, an initiation rite workers must endure if they’re to gain entry to the exclusive club of open permit holders.

In contrast, if Ottawa granted open permits to all temporary workers, it would help to empower them as they could choose their employers — and abusive employers would have trouble retaining talent unless they cleaned up their act.

As for immigration status, the Star reported that workers pay income tax and employment insurance and contribute to the Canada Pension Plan, yet most remain “guests” in the country.

Most workers therefore live under constant fear of deportation, some for decades, which eliminates what little leverage they have with employers. Opening up new pathways for permanent residence would, on the other hand, help to equalize the relationship between employers and workers.

And when workers’ welfare and Canada’s food system are on the line, an equal relationship is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.

Source: Ottawa is changing its temporary foreign worker program. It’s not clear this will help workers

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