Working site on citizenship and multiculturalism issues.
2023/10/14 Leave a comment
In case interested, my interview on Ottawa morning. Was a bit more punchy than usual but leave others to judge:
Source: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-100/clip/16014776 https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-100/clip/16014776
2023/10/14 Leave a comment
Valid commentary on the limits of “settler colonial” and decolonization language. Assume NDP MPP Jama is not going to leave Canada despite being “a politician who is participating in this settler colonial system.”
While history is always being reviewed and revised, that it is different from being erased, as we have to know the past in order to bring about a better present and future:
After 24 hours of outrage, Ontario NDP MPP Sarah Jama has apologized.
On Tuesday, Jama posted on Twitter that she was “reflecting on my role as a politician who is participating in this settler colonial system, and I ask that all politicians do the same. #FreePalastine (sic).” This was followed by a lengthy statement in which she condemned Israel, where, she said, “For 75 years, violence and retaliation rooted in settler colonialism have taken the lives of far too many innocent people.”
This earned her a rebuke — but not a demand for resignation — from NDP Leader Marit Stiles. Jama now says that she understands “the pain that many Jewish and Israeli Canadians, including my own constituents, must be feeling.” But as of Thursday morning, her original post remains up, and Jama remains in caucus.
Jama’s statement illustrates the absurd lengths to which the “decolonization” movement has been taken. Today, the word “decolonization” has lost all meaning. It has become a trope for overthrowing whatever order someone finds offensive.
Decolonize Palestine of Jews. Decolonize Canada of white people. Decolonize language of words that might cause offence. Decolonize the math curriculum of Eurocentric “ways of knowing.” Never mind that much of modern mathematics was developed by Arabic mathematicians — history doesn’t matter, only dogma does.
But history does matter. And in modern times, a lot of it is revisionist. It fails to note that many of the colonized people of today were once colonizers themselves, and vice versa. Jews may be considered settlers in Israel by some people in 2023, but they were subject to thousands of years of oppression there, including by the Roman Empire, the Crusaders and the Ottoman Empire.
As a result, the Jewish people became scattered throughout the world, and had no haven to flee to when Adolf Hitler dragged six million to the gas chambers, before finally being allowed to return to their ancestral homeland.
In North America, the descendants of Irish Catholics would be considered “settlers” by Indigenous people. But Catholics in Ireland were displaced by British and Scottish settlers in the 1600s, setting off centuries of conflict, the partition of Ireland and Northern Ireland and the Troubles, which claimed over 3,500 lives at the end of the last century.
In Canada, Quebec francophones would also be considered “settlers” today, despite themselves having been conquered by the British at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and spending 200 years seeking to become “maître chez nous” (masters in our own house), mostly but not exclusively by political means.
Canada’s First Nations were also both conquered and conquerors. Over the past 500 years, Indigenous people were systematically colonized by Europeans, who moved into their territories, waged war on them and eradicated their traditional way of life through the reserve system, the pass system, residential schools and other means.
But before the Europeans arrived, Indigenous nations made war on each other, engaging in both guerrilla tactics and sophisticated battles. The Haida Nation routinely conducted slave raids down the West Coast. The Iroquois Confederacy warred with the Huron-Wendat. War was as much a part of Indigenous societies as it was in other parts of the world.
Today, few people talk of these things: Indigenous peoples are portrayed as harmonious and peace-loving, while non-Indigenous people are seen as aggressive and violent. But we should talk about them, and in light of what’s happened in Israel, maybe we finally will.
Human history is a miserable river of blood, and all our ancestors bathed in it. We will never erase the sins of the past. All we can do now is move forward and decide what we will and will not tolerate today and in the future.
We can choose to stand for the principles of human rights and dignity. We can stand for equality of races and sexes. We can stand for the rule of law and democracy. We can say never again will we force children into slavery, or “re-education,” or murder them in their beds.
These concepts, it should be noted, are not “colonial.” As African political philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò writes in his brilliant work, “Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously”: “The problem is that many of our decolonizers too easily conflate modernity and westernization.”
For example, he rejects the argument that capitalism is colonial and discusses how colonialism actually blocked the economic aspirations of millions of Africans. Táíwò does not reject things such as western legal systems and the scientific method simply because they were not derived from African thought. He argues that to do so implies that colonized people have no agency and cannot decide for themselves what path to follow.
The colonization lens has become a trap that pits group against group, nation against nation. It ignores the common principles that led to the recognition after the Holocaust that war was not “a continuation of politics by other means,” as Carl von Clausewitz famously put it, but something to be avoided. If we’re ever going to put a stop to the cycle of violence, we must first stop dividing ourselves into “colonizers” and “colonized” and recognize that we are all just one thing: human beings condemned to sharing space with each other.
Terrorism, such as the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas last weekend, doesn’t make the world a better place. It won’t create an independent Palestine. It won’t lead to progress of any kind, for anyone. All it does is drag us back to the brutal past from which humanity has striven for centuries to escape.
2023/10/14 Leave a comment
Of note:
Ce n’est pas un hasard si le mot razzia nous vient d’Algérie. Depuis le Moyen Âge, Arabes et Ottomans menèrent des razzias ininterrompues sur les côtes méditerranéennes, où ils capturaient des otages qui étaient ensuite vendus comme esclaves, jetés dans des harems ou réduits aux travaux forcés.
Ce n’est pas un acte de guerre, mais une razzia à la puissance mille qu’a perpétrée le Hamas le 7 octobre dernier en pénétrant dès l’aube en territoire israélien pour « tuer du Juif » et assassiner plus d’un millier de militaires, de civils, de femmes et d’enfants confondus. Sans oublier de rafler une centaine d’otages qui serviront de boucliers humains, de monnaie d’échange ou de chair humaine dans des exécutions diffusées sur les réseaux sociaux afin de terroriser les mécréants.
Ceux qui font profession d’aveugles n’y verront qu’un attentat de plus dans la longue histoire du conflit israélo-palestinien. Nous sommes pourtant devant le pire carnage commis depuis 1945 à l’égard de civils juifs, assassinés pour la seule raison qu’ils étaient juifs. Sur leur chemin, les djihadistes ont abattu 260 jeunes qui participaient à la rave party Supernova. Quand ils ne les ont pas égorgés ou violés. Des fous de Dieu surgis d’un autre âge face à l’insouciante jeunesse mondialisée de Tel-Aviv, le contraste ne pouvait être plus étourdissant. Pour nombre de juifs, dont le secrétaire d’État Antony Blinken, cela n’évoquait rien de moins qu’un pogrom.
Certes, cette offensive poursuivait aussi des objectifs politiques. Il s’agissait de torpiller les accords d’Abraham, qui étaient sur le point de réconcilier diplomatiquement Israël et l’Arabie saoudite. Une alliance particulièrement inquiétante pour l’Iran, principal soutien du Hamas. Notamment parce qu’elle montre que juifs et musulmans peuvent vivre en harmonie, comme l’illustrent les 150 000 Israéliens qui visitent chaque année les Émirats arabes. Autre vision intolérable pour le Hamas, car le moindre signe de réconciliation signerait son arrêt de mort.
Ce carnage n’a donc rien à voir avec la cause nationale palestinienne, et encore moins celle d’un État indépendant. Il s’inscrit au contraire dans la lignée des grands attentats islamistes du 11 septembre, de Charlie Hebdo et du Bataclan.
Le mot terrorisme, que la prude CBC et l’extrême gauche française se refusent à prononcer, est d’ailleurs largement insuffisant pour désigner cette organisation islamiste, antisémite et totalitaire qui tient Gaza sous sa férule. Ses crimes vont bien « au-delà du terrorisme », pour reprendre les mots du bédéiste Joann Sfar. Car le Hamas n’a rien d’un banal mouvement de libération qui aurait commis quelques attentats. Créé en 1988, il est la branche palestinienne des Frères musulmans, nés en Égypte dans les années 1920, qui ont notamment soutenu l’alliance entre Hitler et le grand mufti de Jérusalem. Ici, l’oumma remplace la nation, l’islamisme le nationalisme, et le califat l’État démocratique.
Radicalement opposé aux voix libérales palestiniennes — que les Frères musulmans ont d’ailleurs souvent éliminées physiquement —, le Hamas n’a jamais eu d’autres buts que d’islamiser la société palestinienne et d’empêcher que ne s’impose une direction laïque soucieuse des intérêts nationaux de son peuple. « La mort sur le chemin de Dieu est la plus éminente des espérances », proclame sa charte fondatrice qui stipule aussi que « la bannière d’Allah » doit flotter « sur chaque pouce de la Palestine ». L’État palestinien ne pouvant être, à la rigueur, qu’une étape avant l’expulsion complète des Juifs de la région.
L’idée qu’avec le temps, le Hamas deviendrait un interlocuteur sérieux apparaît aujourd’hui comme un leurre. Cette organisation a toujours agi afin de faire capoter toute perspective de paix et de création d’un État palestinien. C’est ce qui faisait dire au journaliste israélien Stéphane Amar, que nous avions interviewé à Tel-Aviv, en 2016, que « le rêve des deux États est mort depuis longtemps ». Il ne pourrait renaître que le jour où Israël, seule démocratie du Moyen-Orient, trouverait un interlocuteur qui ne souhaite pas son extermination.
Nous avions alors constaté sur place combien la seconde Intifada, avec ses attentats kamikazes contre les civils, avait achevé de tuer tout espoir de paix, anéantissant du coup la gauche israélienne depuis longtemps ouverte au compromis. Tant que l’islamisme dominera le mouvement palestinien, la théorie des deux États demeurera un mythe. Quel État dans le monde souhaiterait la création à ses frontières d’une théocratie doublée d’un État terroriste ?
Les véritables défenseurs du peuple palestinien aujourd’hui ne sont pas ceux qui, trop heureux de s’en laver les mains, renvoient dos à dos les potentats du Hamas et le gouvernement démocratiquement élu de Benjamin Nétanyahou. Ce sont ceux qui combattent l’islamisme dans l’espoir que renaisse un jour un leadership palestinien digne de ce nom.
Le temps de juger les graves erreurs de Nétanyahou viendra bien assez vite. On peut compter sur le peuple israélien pour cela. Comme pour exiger une riposte ciblée et proportionnée. Mais, pour l’instant, constatons que la guerre que mène le Hamas pour détruire Israël n’a rien d’une lutte nationale et tout d’une guerre de civilisation.
On pourrait rêver d’un autre combat. Mais on ne choisit pas ses ennemis. C’est eux qui nous choisissent.
Source: Terroriste, mais encore…
2023/10/14 Leave a comment
Of note, MP Kwan predictable in her discounting the history and meaningfulness of citizenship. Presume she prefers weddings, funerals and graduations and the like to be in person, given the stronger sense of connection and belonging compared to virtual. But becoming Canadian? Meh:
A petition to stop the federal government from allowing new Canadians to take their citizenship oath by clicking a button online is set to be tabled in Parliament.
The petition (Petition (e-4511), which was launched in July of this year, garnered more than 1,500 signatures. It was backed by the Conservative Party’s Critic for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Tom Kmiec.
In a statement released last month, Kmiec said the measure would “cheapen” the citizenship oath by reducing it “to a click on a website or an app as if citizenship were no more than consenting to terms in a contract.”
In February, the Liberal government announced it was planning to allow for self-administered citizenship oaths. The proposed process would permit aspiring new Canadians to log onto a secure online portal to administer their citizenship instead of attending an in-person or virtual ceremony with other successful citizenship applicants.
Andrew Griffith, a former director general at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), started the petition to maintain the citizenship ceremony as an important milestone in the Canadian immigration journey. Griffith, who attended many ceremonies as part of his previous role, says they are an important way of marking a critical step for new citizens. “Citizenship is not just a mechanical process of getting a driver’s licence. It’s making a decision to come to Canada, to contribute to Canada and to vote in Canadian elections. [Citizenship ceremonies] really give a sense of belonging and inclusion.”
The petition further called on the government to “revert to in-person ceremonies as the default”, limiting virtual ceremonies to only 10 per cent of the overall total. It also urged the government to explore more evening and weekend ceremonies to make them more accessible and flexible for attendees.
Claudio Chalom, who recently became a Canadian citizen after arriving from Brazil six years ago, said while he would have preferred having his citizenship ceremony in person, he still appreciated the chance to do it online and thinks other new Canadians should have the opportunity to do the same. “I think we should still have some sort of ceremony to mark the celebration of this special moment,” he said, describing his own experience as “emotional”. “It was a moment we won’t forget in our lives.”
The one-click citizenship proposal was initially introduced by former Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Sean Fraser, to reduce backlogs in the immigration system. The government said the move to self-administered citizenship would cut processing time by three months and eliminate the need to take time off work to attend ceremonies. The new minister Marc Miller said the government is still considering moving forward with the proposal.
Canada’s immigration system has recently seen record numbers of new immigration and visa applications, rising to nearly 2.3 million in July. The latest IRRC data from September shows citizenship and spousal sponsorship applications currently face a 19 to 24 per cent backlog. IRCC aims to keep backlog at 20 per cent or less.
IRCC projections suggest backlogs are expected to drop over the coming months, although there is a chance they could continue into 2024.
Jenny Kwan, the New Democratic Party’s Critic for Housing, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, said her party supports the Liberal government’s proposal as it allows for more flexibility for new immigrants with different needs. Attending the ceremony, she said, can be hard to schedule for some.
She pointed to her own family’s experience. Her family came to Canada from Hong Kong when she was a child and lost income as a result of having to take the day off to take their citizenship oath in person. “When we became citizens, both my parents had to take time off work, and we were a low-income family. And that was a very stressful situation that my parents were faced with.”
She said this is why she supports moving to a move flexible system: “Everybody’s circumstances are different. What is important is to ensure that there is flexibility and options made available for people so that they can choose the most appropriate option for themselves. I don’t think there is strictly one way to do it.”
The federal government solicited feedback on the proposed amendments to the citizenship regulations earlier this year, and almost 700 people responded. Two-thirds of those who voiced their opinions disagreed with the government’s proposal. Opposition was particularly strong among Canadian-born citizens and immigrants.
However, strong support for the proposed changes came from citizenship applicants facing delays in the system, with at least 66 per cent indicating they would prefer to allow for citizenship online.
The petition (e-4511) is set to be debated in the coming months.
Katrya Bolger, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, New Canadian Media
Source: Will the federal government go ahead with a one-click citizenship oath? – Yahoo News Canada
2023/10/14 Leave a comment
Sensible:
The question, then, is what to do about those monuments that glorify what should be a shameful moment for the men who served in the Waffen SS and cause for sombre reflection by Canadians, particularly the Ukrainian community?
…
2023/10/13 Leave a comment
While I understand the worries, I also find that they are overwrought, given that the only way to manage large numbers is through AI and related IT tools.
And as Kahneman’s exhaustive survey of automated vs human systems in Noise indicates, automated systems deliver greater consistency than solely human systems.
So by all means, IRCC has to make every effort to ensure no untoward bias and discrimation is embedded in these systems and ensure that the inherent discrimination in any immigration or citizenship processes, who gets in/who doesn’t, is evidence based and aligned to policy objectives:
Canada is using a new artificial intelligence tool to screen would-be international students and visitors — raising questions about what role AI should be playing in determining who gets into the country.
Immigration officials say the tool improves their ability to figure out who may be trying to game Canada’s system, and insist that, at the end of the day, it’s human beings making the final decisions.
Experts, however, say we already know that AI can reinforce very human biases. One expert, in fact, said he expects some legitimate applicants to get rejected as a result.
Rolled out officially in January, the little-known Integrity Trends Analysis Tool (ITAT) — formerly called Lighthouse or Watertower — has mined the data set of 1.4 million study-permit applications and 2.9 million visitor applications.
What it’s searching for are clues of “risk and fraud patterns” — a combination of elements that, together, may be cause for additional scrutiny on a given file.
Officials say that, among study-permit applications alone, they have already identified more than 800 “unique risk patterns.”
Through ongoing updates based on fresh data, the AI-driven apparatus not only analyses these risk patterns but also flags incoming applications that match them.
It produces reports to assist officers in Immigration Risk Assessment Units, who determine whether an application warrants further scrutiny.
“Maintaining public confidence in how our immigration system is managed is of paramount importance,” Immigration Department spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald told the Star in an email.
“The use of ITAT has effectively allowed us to improve the way we manage risk by using technology to examine risk with a globalized lens.”
Helping with a big caseload
Each year, Canada receives millions of immigration applications — for temporary and permanent residence, as well as for citizenship — and the number has continued to grow.
The Immigration Department says the total number of decisions it renders per year increased from 4.1 million in 2018 to 5.2 million last year, with the overwhelming majority of applicants trying to obtain temporary-resident status as students, foreign workers and visitors; last year temporary-resident applications accounted for 80 per cent of the decisions the department rendered.
During the pandemic, the department was overwhelmed by skyrocketing backlogs in every single program, which spurred Ottawa to go on a hiring spree and fast-track its modernization to tackle the rising inventory of applications.
Enter: a new tool
ITAT, which was developed in-house and first piloted in the summer of 2020, is the latest instrument in the department’s tool box, one that goes beyond performing simple administrative tasks, such as responding to online inquiries, to more sophisticated functions, like detecting fraud.
MacDonald said ITAT can readily find connections across application records in immigration databases, which may include reports and dossiers produced by Canada Border Services Agency or other law enforcement bodies. The tool, he said, helps officials identify applications that share similar characteristics of previously refused applications.
He said that in order to protect the integrity of the immigration system and investigative techniques, he could not disclose details of the risk patterns that are used to assess applications.
However, MacDonald stressed that “every effort is taken to ensure risk patterns do not create actual or perceived bias as it relates to Charter-protected factors, such as gender, age, race or religion.
“These are reviewed carefully before weekly reports are distributed to risk assessment units.”
A government report about ITAT released last year did make reference to the “adverse characteristics” monitored for in an application, such as inadmissibility findings (e.g. criminality and misrepresentation) and other records of immigration violations, such as overstaying or working without authorization.
The report said that in the past, risk assessment units conducted a random sample of applications to detect frauds through various techniques, including phone calls, site visits or in-person interviews. The results of the verification activity are shared with processing officers whether or not fraudulent information was found.
The report suggested the new tool is meant to assist these investigations. MacDonald emphasized that ITAT does not recommend or make decisions on applications, and the final decisions on applications still rest with the processing officers.
Unintended influence?
However, that doesn’t mean the use of the tool won’t influence an officer’s decision-making, said Ebrahim Bagheri, director of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s collaborative program on responsible AI development. He said he expects human staff to wrongfully flag and reject applicants out of deference to ITAT.
Bagheri, who specializes in information retrieval, social media analytics and software and knowledge engineering, said humans tend to heed such programs too much: “You’re inclined to agree with the AI at the unconscious level, thinking — again unconsciously — there may have been things that you may have missed and the machine, which is quite rigorous, has picked up.”
While the shift toward automation, AI-assisted and data-driven decision-making is part of a global trend, immigration lawyer Mario Bellissimo says the technology is not advanced enough yet for immigration processing.
“Most of the experts are pretty much saying, relying on automated statistical tools to make decisions or to predict risk is a bad idea,” said Bellissimo, who takes a personal interest in studying the use of AI in Canadian immigration.
“AI is required to achieve precision, scale and personalization. But the tools aren’t there yet to do that without discrimination.”
The shortcomings of AI
A history of multiple marriages might be a red flag to AI, suggesting a marriage of convenience, Bellissimo said. But what could’ve been omitted in the assessment of an application were the particular facts — that the person’s first spouse had passed away, for instance, or even that the second ran away because it was a forced marriage.
“You need to know what the paradigm and what the data set is. Is it all based on the Middle East, Africa? Are there different rules?” asked Bellissimo.
“To build public confidence in data, you need external audits. You need a data scientist and a couple of immigration practitioners to basically validate (it). That’s not being done now and it’s a problem.”
Bagheri said AI can reinforce its own findings and recommendations when its findings are acted on, creating new data of rejections and approvals that conform to its conclusions.
“Let’s think about an AI system that’s telling you who’s the risk to come to Canada. It flags a certain set of applications. The officers will look at it. They will decide on the side of caution. They flag it. That goes back to the system,” he said.
“And you just think that you’re becoming more accurate where they’re just intensifying the biases.”
Bellissimo said immigration officials have been doing a poor job in communicating to the public about the tool: “There is such a worry about threat actors that they’re putting so much behind the curtain (and) the public generally has no confidence in this use.”
Bagheri said immigration officials should just limit their use of AI tools to optimize resources and administer its processes, such as using robots to answer emails, screen eligibility and triage applications — freeing up officers for the actual risk assessment and decision making.
“I think the decisions on who we welcome should be based on compassion and a welcoming approach, rather than a profiling approach,” he said.
Source: How Canada is using AI to catch immigration fraud — and why some say it’s a problem
2023/10/13 Leave a comment
Balanced and relevant reflections:
Quatre choses fondamentales semblent nous filer entre les doigts et échapper à notre vue, alors que le monde tente de prendre acte de la violence en Israël et à Gaza.
La vérité. Nul besoin de s’étendre face au malheureux mélange du journalisme en crise, de l’explosion de l’intelligence artificielle et de l’effondrement de Twitter (renommé X). Les petits crochets « vérifié » ne garantissent plus la crédibilité de personne, les services de modération du contenu et de vérification des faits des plateformes ne sont d’aucune efficacité et les fausses informations abondent. Résultat : il n’a jamais été aussi difficile de s’informer en ligne d’un conflit où les actions — et les morts — évoluent d’heure en heure.
Le temps. Bien des observateurs ont comparé l’attaque du Hamas contre des civils israéliens, y compris beaucoup d’enfants, samedi, à Pearl Harbour ou au 11 septembre 2001. Ce qu’on essaie de transmettre par cette image, c’est le sentiment d’une brèche. Il n’y a jamais eu autant de morts du côté israélien, tout comme les Américains n’ont pas l’habitude d’être attaqués sur leur propre sol. Les États-Unis ont disposé de temps pour entrer en deuil national, puis réagir : la guerre du Pacifique qui s’est soldée par deux bombes atomiques d’un côté, la guerre en Irak et la déstabilisation du Proche-Orient de l’autre.
On ne dispose pas, ici, de temps. La contre-offensive de l’armée israélienne à Gaza est déjà en cours. Le nombre de civils décédés monte d’heure en heure, dont là aussi, beaucoup d’enfants. Vu le déséquilibre des forces en présence, on craint ce qui suivra.
La quasi-totalité de la classe politique canadienne a condamné les manifestations propalestiniennes du week-end, comme si chaque personne dans la rue était là pour « célébrer » l’attaque du Hamas, et donc des morts juives. Bien qu’il y eût, certes, parmi les organisateurs, des personnages aux objectifs hautement condamnables, bien des participants en étaient mal informés et se montraient plutôt profondément inquiets, ainsi que solidaires du peuple palestinien, plus largement.
Comment peut-on vouloir envoyer ce message de soutien aux Palestiniens alors que les corps des victimes du Hamas sont encore chauds ? Parce qu’il n’y a pas de temps, justement. Toutes les préoccupations, les peurs, les colères et les deuils s’empilent les uns sur les autres, se blessent et s’enterrent les uns les autres. Dans un conflit où les émotions sont aussi à fleur de peau, le manque de temps envenime tout.
Le pouvoir. C’est une chose de souhaiter une couverture médiatique équilibrée et qui met de l’avant une représentation juste des points de vue de chaque partie impliquée, de chercher à traiter avec respect chaque victime de la guerre. C’est indispensable, même. C’en est une autre de gommer, de perdre de vue, ou de feindre de ne pas remarquer comment le pouvoir et ses iniquités affectent différemment chacun des camps.
Un exemple criant, parmi tant d’autres. D’un côté, Gaza fait l’objet d’un blocus depuis des années, et l’Égypte ne permet la sortie que de quelques personnes au compte-goutte au poste frontalier de Rafah, qui est d’ailleurs bombardé par Israël depuis le début de la semaine. De l’autre, on planifie avec l’appui de la communauté internationale des évacuations de l’aéroport de Tel-Aviv, où une proportion importante des Israéliens a une double citoyenneté, et d’où on peut circuler dans le monde sans visa.
Tout le monde cherche à fuir devant la peur, la peur atroce, la terreur, les morts. La peur peut être aussi grande de chaque côté. La peur est propre à chacun. La peur ne se mesure pas. Les moyens de fuir, eux, se mesurent.
La paix. J’ai le sentiment que chaque reportage, chaque entrevue doit se terminer sur un « avez-vous l’espoir de voir la paix un jour » ? Non seulement c’est cliché, mais il est aussi irritant de voir la paix présentée comme un processus qui appartient à une poignée d’hommes qui accepteraient un jour de parlementer autour d’une même table.
La paix n’est pas qu’un état politique, c’est une action que l’on peut choisir de mener, ou non, chaque jour. La paix est un moteur derrière nos gestes et nos paroles aussi.
On se souvient tous du « soit vous êtes avec nous, soit vous êtes avec les terroristes » de George W. Bush au lendemain du 11 septembre. C’était là une logique guerrière, qui a mené tout droit à la guerre réelle. Cette logique est manichéenne. Elle prend toute entreprise de contextualisation comme une injure, et est persuadée que de chercher à comprendre les actions du camp adverse, c’est les justifier, les excuser ou même s’en solidariser.
Cette logique guerrière pullule. Elle accélère la droitisation de la société civile israélienne et prend sa gauche, qui souhaite une Palestine libre, en étau — alors que cette gauche est essentielle aux efforts de paix. Elle mène à des tensions douloureuses au sein des communautés juives d’ici, et rend d’autant plus ardue et coûteuse le partage de perspectives qui dissonent d’avec celles des grandes associations. Elle soutient tout autant le processus de radicalisation qui a permis l’émergence du Hamas et marginalisé le leadershipde l’Autorité palestinienne. La logique guerrière refuse de faire la distinction entre le soutien à une Palestine libre et un cri de ralliement terroriste. Elle ramène du même souffle toute la population d’Israël, et même tout le peuple juif, à l’administration de Nétanyahou.
La paix, comme choix à la portée de tous, c’est le choix de faire de la place dans son esprit et dans son coeur à plusieurs émotions et vérités en même temps. La paix cherche à comprendre à la fois le rôle du trauma de l’Holocauste et des siècles d’antisémitisme dans la charge symbolique que porte Israël, les 75 ans de délocalisation, d’oppression et de marginalisation du peuple palestinien, le rôle du colonialisme dans le contrôle britannique du territoire palestinien au moment où il a été donné à Israël et le pouvoir continu de l’Occident sur la région depuis. La paix cherche à écouter tout, entendre tout, faire assez de place pour tout.
Anthropologue, Emilie Nicolas est chroniqueuse au Devoir et à Libération. Elle anime le balado Détours pour Canadaland.
2023/10/13 Leave a comment
Good commentary with reasonable recommendations:
This time last year, the media buzz about the labour market was over The Great Resignation, a bigger phenomenon in the United States but occurring here too, as workers took advantage of record-high job vacancy rates to abandon suboptimal jobs for better ones.
This year there’s an emerging made-in-Canada phenomenon that has barely generated a whisper, let alone a buzz: wage slaves from abroad. It’s a result of public policy.
The idea of owning workers seems like an abomination from another time and place. In Canada, in 2023, it’s difficult to comprehend how any worker could be beholden to a single employer.
Nonetheless, this year the government of Canada has issued more than 142,000 permits to employers to hire temporary foreign workers who are not allowed to work for anyone else. It’s the highest number ever issued, and that figure only covers up to August. Intake through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program has grown by 45 per cent across Canada this year compared with the same eight months in 2022, a record-breaking year of population growth, almost exclusively (96 per cent) due to newcomers.
Permits are issued to employers who make the case that they cannot find a Canadian to do the job — at “prevailing wage rates,” that is. When the federal government finds the reasons provided on the Labour Market Impact Assessment form acceptable, it permits a foreign worker to enter Canada to work only temporarily, and only for that employer.
Just since August 2021, the federal government has expanded the categories of occupations eligible for such a permit and increased the allowable proportion of migrant workers working for an individual employer to 30 per cent from 10 per cent. That gives such employers huge influence over not just their migrant workers but all their workers. It is far from clear this was necessary policy reform. It should be reversed.
Ontario’s employers are escalating their dependence on the permanently temporary in sectors such as warehousing and transport trucking, personal care workers in long-term-care facilities, restaurants and fast food outlets, and farm workers.
The vast majority of employers are moral. But tying permits to a single employer increases the odds of exploitation and abuse.
Although the federal government conducts investigations of employers using the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, employers are often given a heads-up before the inspection takes place. Last year, more than 2,100 inspections were carried out. Only 116 were found non-compliant.
Of the 766 employers on a public registry of employers who broke the rules over the past seven years, the most frequent violation was wage theft — not providing the pay promised in the contract. Only seven employers were banned even temporarily from hiring migrant workers through this program; 23 were just given warnings.
Wage theft is not the only issue. Farm workers had an extraordinarily high incidence of disease and death during COVID because of their living conditions. Abuse and assault of workers providing care to people in their homes and institutions remains all too common. These are the very categories of migrant workers least likely to find a pathway to permanence.
Migrant workers may have the same rights as Canadian workers on paper but are less likely to know what those rights are and even less likely to exercise them for fear of jeopardizing their jobs and futures. That kind of contagion needs to be contained. It spreads rapidly in an uncertain world.
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology is studying this area of public policy. Last week, Tomoya Obokata, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, presented testimony to the committee about his recent visit to Canada, expressing concern for “low-wage and agricultural streams of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program as the workers at the higher risk of labour exploitation, which may amount to forced labour or servitude.”
I appeared before the committee as well and presented some ideas for policy reform.
First: end the practice of tying work permits to an employer. An open work permit, tied to a region (for example, in parts of the country that are aging more rapidly) or in an industry or sector with high vacancies (such as hospitality or long-term care) would mean workers could leave terrible workplaces without risking deportation. This change could reduce the number of bad jobs and improve the quality of life in communities. Addressing potentially crippling labour shortages, while limiting the abuse of workers, seems a promising avenue of reform.
Second: create simpler pathways to permanent residency for all those who seek it and make those pathways clear before people arrive. Canada has developed an incredibly complex system, with more than 140 types of temporary permits in the immigration database, according to Rupa Banerjee of Toronto Metropolitan University.
In 2022, three times as many people were permitted temporary resident status versus permanent resident status in Canada. Less than a third of those who came here to work or study for a restricted period transitioned to permanent status, even after 10 years of temporary residency; but many more will grab at the chance, without knowing the odds.
There is a whole industry designed to lure international students and migrant workers here on what often turns out to be the false hope of permanent residency; and the relationship between temporary and permanent admissions to Canada is getting more lopsided every year.
Although Canada’s job creation rate has been remarkable, including for Canadian-born and landed immigrant workers, the fastest-growing rate of job creation has been among migrant workers: 61 per cent more jobs than pre-pandemic levels.
We are expediting the intake of migrant workers for entrenched needs, not temporary ones.
Increasing reliance on temporary foreign workers to do the work that needs doing, while not allowing them to form families, get sick, age or retire may be an employer’s dream and a labour market “solution.” But it risks creating a dystopian future for Canadian society.
Armine Yalnizyan is a leading voice in Canada’s economic scene and Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers. She is a freelance contributing columnist for the Star’s Business section. Follow her on Twitter: @ArmineYalnizyan. You can write to her at ayalnizyan@atkinsonfoundation.ca.
2023/10/13 Leave a comment
Former “citizen of convenience,” Indian film star Akshay Kumar:
For several years, Akshay Kumar had Canadian citizenship. He faced backlash over it, and this year became an Indian citizen. He has now spoken about the matter.
Actor Akshay Kumar, who earlier had Canadian citizenship, has opened up about why he had opted for it in the first place. Speaking with news agency ANI, Akshay revealed that he took the step because his films ‘were not doing well at one time’ and he gave 13 to 14 flops”. Akshay often faced criticism over his Canadian citizenship. On Independence Day this year, the actor had announced that he was now an Indian citizen. (Also Read | Akshay Kumar gets Indian citizenship, shares proof on Twitter)
Akshay on becoming a Canadian
Akshay told ANI, “I became a Canadian because my films were not doing well at one time and I gave 13 to 14 flop films. At that time, my friend used to live in Canada and he said you come here and we will work on something. My friend had offered me that we would do cargo business together. I said okay my films are also not going well and a person has to work, no matter where he is. When I started living in Toronto, I got a Canadian passport. In between that, two films were left for release. After the two movies got released it became a big superhit. I told him that I was going back. Then I got more films and reached here today. But I never thought people got a hold of it, it was just a travel document. I just pay my taxes, and I am the highest taxpayer.”Akshay on Indian citizenship
Speaking on getting Indian citizenship, he said, “For 9 to 10 years I didn’t go there. It’s a very nice place and one of my best friends is there. I decided that I should take my citizenship. It was just a coincidence that I had received a letter on 15th August that I had got citizenship. But it is not just a passport, it is your mind, it is your heart, it’s your soul that has to be Indian. What is the point if I do have an Indian passport but my soul mind and heart are not Indian?”
Akshay got Indian citizenship this year
Earlier, Akshay had shared a picture of his official government documents, proving that he has finally got his Indian citizenship. “Dil aur citizenship, dono Hindustani (Heart and citizenship, both Indian). Happy Independence Day! Jai Hind,” Akshay had captioned the post.Akshay had spoken about backlash in 2019
Akshay has faced a lot of criticism on social media platforms for holding Canadian citizenship in the past. In 2019, after receiving backlash for his Canadian citizenship, Akshay issued a statement on his official X (formerly known as Twitter) account, stating that he does not understand the negativity around the subject.
Source: Akshay Kumar reveals why he got Canadian citizenship in the first place – Hindustan Times
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