Immigration is religion’s only hope – UnHerd

2023/09/21 Leave a comment

Of interest (similar trend in Canada):

When my father was going through the process of becoming an Elder in the United Methodist Church, he was required to take courses on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. One course involved a presentation on how white people needed to make room for, and amplify the voices of, “people of colour”. My father is an immigrant from China. He, like other immigrant preachers, was confused about who the term “person of colour” referred to, and why a faith founded on the idea that there is “neither Jew nor Greek” is so obsessed with racial divisions.

Who can blame them? The progressive ideology that in recent years has swept through mainstream American Protestantism is often impenetrable to those from non-Western countries.

And yet, it is just such immigrants who are keeping Christianity alive in our secular world — everywhere from France’s Afro-Caribbean megachurches to London’s Black Majority Churches. In America, the number of citizens identifying as Christians has fallen from 90% to 64% in the last 50 years, while immigrants are becoming more influential: more than two thirds of them are Christians.
American progressives are increasingly stoking fears of an incipient “white Christian nationalism” bringing about a Cromwellian theocracy. But white Americans have actually been secularising at a slightly faster rate than other ethnicities. While black Americans have also experienced secularisation, they are still more likely to go to church and pray than the average American. And African immigrants to the US are more religious than American-born black people. The rise of Latino evangelicals in America has also been receiving mainstream coverage.

“Conservative Christians”, the bogeyman for white progressives, are therefore increasingly likely to be people of colour — the very people whose voices progressives apparently want to amplify. Christians of African origin are far more likely to hold conservative views on sexuality, while Latino evangelicals are quickly becoming a Republican bloc.

White conservatives, meanwhile, have a tendency to bemoan the secularisation of the West and the decline of traditional values, while supporting restrictive immigration processes — perhaps not realising that non-Western immigrants are more likely to be socially conservative than American-born citizens, or perhaps because their economic or tribal instincts trump their religious ones. Both progressives and conservatives are therefore mired in contradiction.

Despite the fact that liberals are secularising faster than conservatives, for the last decade, the leadership of the United Methodist Church has been adopting views on sexuality and gender identity that are in line with those of secular progressives, triggering a slow-motion denominational schism. Some years ago, I attended a UMC conference with my parents at which some attendees wore rainbow armbands in support of a movement to ordain gay clergy. Almost all of them were white. None of the representatives from immigrant congregations, and few from black congregations, wore the armbands. “Before I came to America, I thought this was a nation built on Christian values,” commented one attendee. “Why are these people going against God’s will?”

A progressive Christian might see this as a contradiction: if Jesus came from Heaven to help the marginalised, why do these marginalised Christians antagonise a fellow marginalised group? Liberal white people, who usually preach multicultural ideals, cannot answer this question honestly without making it sound like Western culture has the “correct” view on sexuality — the major irony being that progressives dismiss Western culture for what they see as regressive views.

While progressives blame “the Christian Right” for society’s ills, religious conservatives often complain about “woke Christianity”. They point to examplessuch as Allendale United Methodist Church, which had a “non-binary” drag queen deliver sermons and bills itself as “a church that is committed to anti-racism and radical solidarity with folx on the margins”. They argue that such acts are based on ideology stemming from the secular world rather than theology based on Biblical exegesis.

A similar dynamic can be observed in the UK. Earlier this year, the Church of England floated the idea of using gender-neutral pronouns for God, and allowed prayers of blessing for gay couples. The backlash was swift. Many bishops in Africa and Asia rejected the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury — and criticised the Anglican church’s (largely white) leadership. But even within the UK, there was fierce opposition to progressive Christianity from ethnic minorities, who are keepingBritain’s Christian population from declining.

However, the religious conservatives probably have less to worry about than the progressives, in the long run. If progressive Christian churches align themselves more closely to the values of secular society than to religious ones, they will cease to exist. A similar phenomenon can be seen in American Judaism. Orthodox Jews, who take their faith seriously, and mostly vote Republican, are currently in the minority, but they are estimated to grow to become the dominant branch of American Judaism by 2050. This is partly due to birth rates, but also because non-Orthodox Jews, who mostly vote Democrat, are secularising quickly; they are far more likely to partner with non-Jews, stop observing Jewish traditions, or to cease to identify as Jewish altogether. Christianity, too, looks set to depend on the most orthodox sustaining the faith.

It is ironic that Christianity is now seen as “problematic” by progressives, because the roots of liberalism, which opened the door for progressivism, partially derive from Christianity — or Protestantism, to be specific. It was the Reformation that shifted religious practices away from a central authority to that of individuals. As Tom Holland has pointed out, almost every country that has legalised gay marriage has been shaped by centuries of both liberalism and Protestantism.

It is also ironic that white progressives support multiculturalism over assimilation, because it is the latter that would align the beliefs of immigrant communities with the values of the utopia dreamed of in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion trainings. In other words, though liberalism paved the way for immigration and multiculturalism, immigration and multiculturalism actually weaken liberalism; though Christianity paved the way for liberalism, Christianity could prove liberalism’s downfall.

The tension between a multicultural utopia pushed by secular progressives versus the socially conservative, religious-inflected attitudes many non-white groups hold has led to quite a few awkward skirmishes. While most black people vote for the same party as white liberals, 37% of black Democrats say their religious views influence how they think about transgender topics, compared to only 11% of white Democrats. While 66% of black Democrats say a person’s gender is their sex determined at birth, only 27% of white Democrats say the same.

Conservatives in America are also tying themselves in strange knots. A common refrain is that Islam is incompatible with Western civilisation. And yet, some conservative Christians find themselves allied with Muslims against what they both see as America’s decadent hyper-individualistic secular culture. In a number of American cities, Muslims have joined conservative Christiansto protest the inclusion of explicitly LGBT-themed books in elementary schools, leading to accusations that “some Muslim families” are “on the same side of an issue as White supremacists and outright bigots”. To progressives, a “bigot” is a stereotypical white Christian conservative; to see non-white Muslim families standing beside them in droves caught many off guard. An all-Muslim city council in Michigan was once held up by liberals as a symbol of diversity, until it voted earlier this year to ban Pride flags being flown on city property, to the delight of many social conservatives. Slate has gone so far as to call Muslim voters “the new Republicans” — an unexpected twist after two decades of Republican fear-mongering against Islam.

At the same time, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a Hindu, has gone from a virtual unknown to third place in the Republican primary, by picking up the support of many conservative Christian voters. Ramaswamy does not shy away from his faith, but rather emphasises the similarities between certain schools of Hindu and Christian thought. Many conservative Christians, it seems, would rather ally with conservatives from other religions than Christians on the other side of the political divide.

It has taken a cosmic convergence of contradictions to get to this point. White progressives, with their absolute devotion to immigration, have inadvertently championed immigrants from cultures that outrightly reject progressivism. With their just-as-absolute devotion to multiculturalism, those same white progressives have created a trap for themselves where they are unable to criticise a non-white person’s culture, values or beliefs — even when they actively go against sacred progressive views on gender and sexuality. Meanwhile, white conservatives find themselves forging alliances with people they never thought they’d work with — people whose entry into the country they might have objected to. Old alliances are dissolving — and battle lines are drawn anew.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Could these steps help fix Canada’s international student system? Senators think so

2023/09/21 Leave a comment

Sound assessment of some of the weaknesses and lack of integrity in international student recruitment and the complicity of education institutions and provincial governments.

Generally sensible recommendations but given jurisdictional issues, I favour some variant of provincial caps that oblige the provinces to tighten up approval of DLIs to address some of the worst abuse.

Ideally, of course, higher education would have adequate funding but defining “adequate” should not be equated with the status quo nor should it be assumed that provincial governments would simply pick up any shortfalls due to reduced international students:

Canadian governments must better police the educational sector and develop a national policy to manage foreign student intake to maintain the integrity of the country’s international education program, says a new study.

In a report released on Wednesday, four independent senators recommended stricter criteria for the so-called designated learning institutions (DLIs) to host international students and steeper penalties to hold them accountable to “unscrupulous behaviour and negligence” of their recruitment agents.

“Canada’s international student program benefits significantly from the presence of agents since they are the drivers of an industry that contributes tens of billions to the economy each year,” said the report prepared by Senators Sabi Marwah, Ratna Omidvar, Yuen Pau Woo and Hassan Yussuff.

“Agents and DLIs are not necessarily acting with the best interests in mind of international students themselves. There is little incentive and no oversight by Canadian governments to ensure both agents and DLIs place international students at DLIs most suitable for each student’s educational, career and immigration objectives.”

The integrity of Canada’s international student program has increasingly come under public scrutiny after hundreds of students from India were found to have come here with allegedly fraudulent college admission letters earlier this year.

Amid the country’s worsening housing crisis, the exponential growth of the international student population — inching toward 900,000 this year — has prompted the federal government to consider reining in their intake by strengthening its program integrity.

According to the Senate report, some 51 per cent of international students settle in Ontario, followed by B.C. (20 per cent), Quebec (12 per cent), Alberta and the Atlantic Provinces (both at 5 per cent) and Manitoba and Saskatchewan (both at 3 per cent).

While Canada has benefitted financially and culturally from international students — $22 billion in tuition revenues and spending to the economy a year, the report said there have been costs associated with the growth of the enrolment.

Canadian colleges and universities have continued to count on international tuition fees as a revenue source as government investments in education declined. Since 2006, said the report, the gap in tuition between international and domestic students has risen from double to five times as of last year.

“DLIs are responsible for setting admissions criteria for international students, but their desire to recruit as many as possible often results in low admissions standards,” said the 26-page report.

“DLIs then discover certain international students are not academically proficient enough to keep up with their programs in Canada.”

The recruitment frenzy has been fuelled by education agents, who typically receive from the schools a commission that ranges between 15 and 20 per cent of the admitted international student’s first year of tuition. The report said it works out to average commissions of $1,500 to $7,500 per student.

Adding to the mix are unscrupulous private colleges and ghost agents who prey on the ignorance of international students with “empty promises” about career prospects in Canada upon graduation and who lie about eligibility for work permits and permanent residence.

“The International Student Program has been a victim of its own success. International students have a strong desire to come to Canada, however they face many challenges including high tuition fees and abuse. In many cases they do not receive the support they need to overcome these difficulties,” said Sen. Omidvar.

“They are also being blamed for the many current economic and social challenges facing Canada, but they are the victims and not the perpetrators. We need to change the program to ensure it works for Canada and the students that contribute so much to our country.”

The Senate report said the top priority to address the integrity of the program is to conduct a national review to ensure the Canadian post-secondary sector is financially sustainable because funding shortfall is what has led to the aggressive recruitment of international students.

It also recommended a higher bar for schools to qualify to admit international students by requiring them to submit detailed plans on how they assist students in securing housing, asserting legal rights, finding employment — similar to what they had to comply during the pandemic as a condition to welcome international students back on campuses.

“DLIs who do not live up to standard should be subject to losing their ability to welcome additional international students,” said the report.

Given the “outsized role” education agents play in the industry, it recommended that immigration officials must regulate these recruiters and impose stronger penalties, such as fines and the revocation of DLI status against schools who benefit from unscrupulous agents.

The report said Canada should follow Australia’s step in requiring educational institutions to upload agent information into a centralized portal, including which agents they have written contracts with, and study visa outcomes by their agents including whether applications were approved, refused, withdrawn, or deemed invalid.

While many of the international students are lured by the prospects of permanent residence, just 30 per cent of them managed to become permanent residents within 10 years of arrivals due to the limited spots available annually.

The report said Canada must develop a national strategy to align the number of international students admitted with its annual permanent resident targets based on the needs of provinces, educational institutions and employers.

Source: Could these steps help fix Canada’s international student system? Senators think so

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Feds still working through family reunification backlog for immigration ‘golden ticket’

2023/09/21 Leave a comment

Lottery is the easiest way to manage high demand and increasing demand.

Weakens the demographic arguments justifying current high levels but understandable that families would like to have parents and grandparents with them (many do help with childcare):

Demand always Immigrants hoping to reunite with family members through the federal government’s Parents and Grandparents Program will be invited to apply beginning Oct.10 — but for the fourth consecutive year, those invitations will only be delivered to eligible applicants who expressed interest by 2020.

And even then, as has been the case since 2017, those invitations will be randomly selected in a lottery.

“We try not to make any promises,” said Laila Joud, 34, who wants to sponsor her parents so they can move from Syria to Ottawa to live with her family. Joud is now a permanent resident who moved to Canada from Syria via Qatar with her husband and child in 2019. She was also pregnant at the time

Her parents split their time between Syria and Qatar, waiting for the chance to come to Canada.

“The situation in Syria right now — the economic and the social — it’s just not the best and I would love to have the chance to give them the opportunity to be here,” said the communications specialist who works at a non-profit in Ottawa.

“It will mean they have a better life.”

Joud has not been able to get her name into the draw for the program, since she wasn’t eligible in 2020, the last time the federal government accepted interest-to-sponsor (ITS) applications.

Ghiath Joud and Sawsan Youssef during a trip to Ottawa to visit their daughter. (Submitted by Laila Joud)

Over 200,000 potential sponsors expressed interest in bringing their family members to Canada that year, said IRCC spokesperson Isabelle Dubois.

“Given the volume of ‘interest to sponsor’ received in 2020 that are still remaining in the pool, IRCC will again use the 2020 pool of submissions for the 2023 intake,” said Dubois.

Over a two-week period beginning Oct. 10, IRCC will begin sending invitations for 24,200 people to apply, said Dubois. From those, IRCC hopes to process 15,000 successful applications.

“We don’t understand the rationale behind it,” said Joud, who was hopeful the government would take new ITS applicants this year.

“I understand the complications and everything that’s affecting this process but I want a chance like many others.”

Super visa not a substitute

“I think everybody can agree that having the last expression of interest, the last ability to put your name in, in 2020, that is really unfair,” said Tamara Mosher-Kuczer, senior lawyer and founder at Lighthouse Immigration Law.

“If they didn’t get in the pool in 2020, this is another year, yet another draw that has passed them by,” she said.

And even if someone is lucky enough to be selected to apply, “they’d have to wait at least probably two years for the application to be processed,” Mosher-Kuczer said.

There is another more costly option, she said. Parents and grandparents can apply for a Canadian super visa which allows them to visit their children or grandchildren for up to five years.

“The problem is they have to pay for health insurance the whole time the family members are here,” said Mosher-Kuczer. “And the family members aren’t able to work. So it’s prohibitive for a lot of people.”

In fact, Joud’s parents came to Canada on a super visa but decided it was too restrictive and have since returned home.

Laila Joud says having her parents, Ghiath Joud and Sawsan Youssef, living with her in Ottawa would bring huge emotional support. (Submitted by Laila Joud)

Get your paperwork in order

Mosher-Kuczer has some advice for people in the 2020 pool.

“Start gathering the supporting documents now,” she said. “If you get one of these invitations, it’s the golden ticket. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, you’re unlikely to get invited again. So you need to be able to have that application submitted in 60 days.”

It’s not a lot of time to get everything together, but if you wait, you’re up against a tight deadline, she said.

“A lot of this information is hard to gather and then everything has to be translated according to IRCC’s very strict specifications,” she said, adding the process can be costly.

“But people don’t want to spend the money to start making those translations and getting those documents and getting the police clearances.”

Mosher-Kuczer said she also wishes the government would institute a weighted lottery: the longer you’ve been on the list, the stronger your chances of being selected.

Joud is still hopeful the government will soon reopen the parent and grandparent sponsorship program to people not yet in the pool.

“There are the obvious reasons,” she said. “Being immigrants into the country. Being away from family. Being in a country where you almost have no one. It’s just having that family bond, having them with my kids.

“I am waiting for the day.”

Source: Feds still working through family reunification backlog for immigration ‘golden ticket’

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Petition e-4511 – Opposing self-affirmation of the #citizenship oath “citizenship on a click” – Signatures to September 19

2023/09/21 Leave a comment

The chart below breaks down the 1,503 signatures as of 19 September by province. No significant change.

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

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Clark: Canada once more forced to reckon with era of foreign intimidation

2023/09/20 Leave a comment

One of many articles on the intelligence revelations that the Indian may have been behind the Canadian Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar:

It was a jolt for Canada when China retaliated for the arrest of a Huawei executive in Vancouver by locking up two Canadian bystanders, the two Michaels, five years ago. Now a second shock shows us foreign governments are continuing to reach into Canada to intimidate.

This time, agents of a supposedly friendly country, India, are alleged to be linked to the death of a Canadian, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh community leader who in June was shot in his truck in the parking lot of the Guru Nanak Gurdwara in Surrey, B.C.

There has never been anything like this before: an explosive public allegation that a foreign government’s agents targeted and killed a Canadian citizen, in Canada.

Certainly, there has never been a moment like the one on Monday afternoon when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood up in the House of Commons to tell the country that Canada’s security agencies are pursuing “credible allegations” of a potential link to the Indian government.

India is not supposed to be an enemy, or even an adversary. There are tensions, because the Indian government has for decades accused Canada of being soft on Khalistani terrorists, who seek to carve an independent Sikh state out of what is now northern India. But India has often conflated non-violent Sikh separatist advocates with terrorists and extremists. Mr. Nijjar was organizing an unofficial referendum on the creation of a Sikh state when he was killed.

The idea that New Delhi might send agents to kill a Canadian in Canada is stunning.

Mr. Trudeau said on Monday that he had spoken to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the allegation “in no uncertain terms” at last week’s G20 summit in New Delhi, but there was no word from the Canadian government on Mr. Modi’s response. There’s no sense Mr. Trudeau was given a satisfactory answer, or that he was promised Indian co-operation on an investigation.

Canada has already expelled an Indian diplomat who was the chief of the Indian foreign intelligence agency in Canada, but it’s not clear what, if anything, will happen next.

Again, Canada is jolted into recognizing a new world in which foreign governments reach out to influence, intimidate and coerce Canadians in Canada. Again, there is new reason to believe foreign interference might be a bigger, broader danger than this country is prepared to counter. This time, the allegation is assassination, which underlines the direct threat to the security of Canadians – especially those who belong to diaspora communities here.

Already, many in Canada’s Sikh community believed that the Indian government had been involved in Mr. Nijjar’s killing, and his death had sparked anger and protests. Indian diplomats had complained to Mr. Trudeau’s government that those protests were becoming threatening. The killing brought tension to Canadian streets.

It wasn’t quite the same thing in 2018, when China arrested Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on U.S. charges. But that was an attempt to intimidate Canada for exercising its own laws. It showed Canadians can’t expect sovereignty without foreign coercion.

And there have been more examples of China and other countries feeling they can reach inside Canada. The RCMP said earlier this summer that they had shut down illegal Chinese police activity in several Canadian locations. The Globe and Mail has reported on a series of attempts by Beijing to influence Canadian elections. Canadian relatives of victims of the 2020 downing of Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752 by Iranian armed forces reported that people close to the Iranian regime had approached them in Canada, in an attempt to intimidate them into silence.

Now, Mr. Trudeau has made an explosive, albeit unproven, allegation of an extreme example – an alleged assassination in Canada – and promised to work closely with allies “on this very serious matter.” In the Commons, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh called on allies to “condemn this violence … in the harshest terms possible.”

But it is far from certain that the U.S. and other Canadian allies will rush to hold India to account.

For one thing, credible allegations in the hands of intelligence agencies aren’t the same as evidence gathered by police for a trial. And in a world where Western allies have imposed extensive economic sanctions against Russia and are increasingly seeking to counter China’s influence, the U.S. and European nations won’t relish the prospect of conflict with another major power.

But if the allegation is true, it will be fuel for the coming public inquiry into foreign interference. Foreign governments apparently feel as though they can reach into Canada with impunity. Countering that is now a pressing national priority.

Source: Canada once more forced to reckon with era of foreign intimidation

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Girard: L’intégrisme religieux, une menace aux droits des femmes

2023/09/20 Leave a comment

A reminder:

De nombreux récents événements démontrent, sans équivoque, que l’intégrisme religieux constitue une menace à l’égalité des sexes ici et dans le monde. En voici quelques exemples : « À travers plus de 50 édits, ordres et restrictions, les talibans n’ont laissé aucun aspect de la vie des femmes indemne, aucune liberté épargnée. Ils ont créé un système fondé sur l’oppression massive des femmes qui est à juste titre et largement considéré comme un apartheid de genre », déclarait la directrice d’ONU Femmes, Sima Bahous, le 15 août 2023.

Nulle part ailleurs dans le monde, il n’y a eu d’attaque aussi généralisée, systématique et globale contre les droits des femmes et des filles qu’en Afghanistan. Tous les aspects de leur vie sont restreints sous le couvert de la moralité et par l’instrumentalisation de la religion. Les politiques discriminatoires et misogynes des talibans nient le droit des femmes à l’égalité.

Le 14 août 2023, on apprenait que le premier ministre d’Israël, Benjamin Nétanyahou, négociait, dans le cadre d’un accord avec des alliés ultraorthodoxes, des concessions qui pourraient transformer radicalement le visage d’un pays où l’égalité des droits pour les femmes est garantie dans la déclaration d’indépendance de 1948. Bien que les lois israéliennes n’aient pas encore été modifiées pour refléter ces concessions, d’aucuns craignent que ces changements soient déjà en cours, aux dépens des femmes.

Les médias israéliens ont ainsi fait état, ces derniers mois, d’incidents jugés discriminatoires : des chauffeurs de bus ont refusé de prendre de jeunes femmes parce qu’elles portaient des hauts courts ou des vêtements de sport ; des hommes ultraorthodoxes ont arrêté un bus public et bloqué la route parce qu’une femme conduisait ; le service national d’urgences médicales et de catastrophes a, pour la première fois, séparé les hommes des femmes pendant la partie théorique de la formation paramédicale entreprise pour répondre à une exigence du service national israélien.

Rappelons que lorsqu’il y a ségrégation basée sur le sexe, pour répondre aux souhaits des ultraorthodoxes, les femmes soit sont assises à l’arrière, soit ont accès à moins de financement, soit ont un choix de carrière limité. Les défenseurs des droits des femmes s’inquiètent également des efforts que fait le gouvernement israélien pour affaiblir la Cour suprême, qui, elle, a soutenu l’égalité des droits pour les femmes dans plusieurs domaines.

Le mouvement iranien « Femme, vie, liberté », commencé en septembre 2022 à la suite de la mort d’une jeune Iranienne de 22 ans, Mahsa Amini, dans le cadre de son arrestation par la police des moeurs pour « avoir mal porté son voile », a permis de mettre en relief les affronts aux droits des femmes perpétrés par la République islamique d’Iran.

Sa constitution même part du principe que la femme est une citoyenne de seconde zone, est légalement la propriété de l’homme et doit se conformer à une multitude d’interdits sous peine de sanction allant jusqu’à la mort. Interdits économiques, interdits d’aller et venir, interdits empêchant chacune d’elles de disposer d’elle-même. Selon le Code criminel iranien, la valeur d’une femme est égale à la moitié de celle d’un homme lorsqu’il est question de dédommagement pour un meurtre, lors de la séparation d’un héritage familial ou encore lorsqu’il est question du poids à accorder aux témoignages dans un cadre judiciaire ou dans un contexte de divorce. De plus, la République islamique d’Iran impose une ségrégation systémique entre les sexes dans les écoles, les hôpitaux, les transports, les sports et autres.

En 2022, aux États-Unis, les fondamentalistes chrétiens, très influents auprès de la droite américaine, obtenaient l’invalidation par la Cour suprême de l’arrêt Roe v. Wade, qui protégeait le droit à l’avortement à l’échelle nationale. Selon le juge dissident Stephen Breyer, cette décision aura pour conséquence de restreindre les droits des femmes et leur statut de citoyennes libres et égales.

Entré en vigueur en 2021 en Pologne, un arrêt de la Cour constitutionnelle, contrôlée par le parti conservateur nationaliste et catholique au pouvoir Droit et justice (PiS), interdit tout avortement sauf en cas de danger pour la vie ou la santé de la femme enceinte ou si la grossesse découle d’un viol. Dans la pratique, il semble cependant impossible d’obtenir un avortement, même légal. La Pologne devient ainsi l’un des pays européens les plus restrictifs en matière de droit à l’avortement.

Ici aussi

Le Canada n’est pas en reste concernant les dangers de l’intégrisme religieux. CBC News révélait, en juin 2023, l’existence d’un document stratégique de la Liberty Coalition Canada selon lequel elle veut recruter 10 000 nouveaux candidats politiques chrétiens afin de pouvoir aligner les lois canadiennes sur les « principes bibliques ». Or, le droit à l’avortement, qui fait consensus au sein de la population canadienne, fait partie de ses cibles. Après le succès obtenu par les lobbys religieux aux États-Unis, la vigilance est de mise ici aussi, au Canada, à l’égard du respect du droit des femmes à l’égalité.

Comme le disait si bien Simone de Beauvoir : « N’oubliez jamais qu’il suffira d’une crise politique, économique ou religieuse pour que les droits des femmes soient remis en question. Ces droits ne sont jamais acquis. Vous devrez rester vigilantes votre vie durant. »

Source: L’intégrisme religieux, une menace aux droits des femmes

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Di Matteo: More immigration will make Canada wealthier – we just need to do it right

2023/09/19 Leave a comment

Poorly argued. No understanding or acknowledgement of the different time and context between higher levels of immigration during the early 20th century and the settling of the West, or the post-World War II economic boom.

And he completely ignores the larger numbers of temporary workers and international students:

Increased immigration can be justified as a solution to aging populations and labour shortages but there are other benefits. There are benefits to a larger economy and internal market size as well as increased clout in a more global world. Moreover, the diversity of a larger population can be a key ingredient in fostering more innovation and trade growth.

But those outcomes are not assured given our productivity lag. Canadians are only about 70 per cent as productive as Americans. This is the crux of the issue. There is a role for government here in either helping facilitate the solutions or getting out of the way of those who can get things done.

Evidence suggests that immigration often has a negligible effect on a country’s prosperity in per capita income terms. Increases in labour force size are a source of overall economic growth, though this output is divided among a greater population. Output must rise faster than population for per capita income to rise, and the key to that is productivity.

In order for larger populations to have positive economic effects, increases in labour force size need to be accompanied by increases in firm-specific plants, machinery and equipment as well as physical infrastructure in transportation and communication – not to mention housing.

In other words, the solution here is more business investment to raise productivity.

This is a big endeavour, but it can be done. Indeed, it has been done before.

An immigrant to Canada in 1912 arrived during a national development and construction boom that developed the Western wheat economy and featured a soaring national investment-output ratio at upwards of 30 per cent of GDP.

There was investment not only in transcontinental railways but also in manufacturing capacity and urban infrastructure as cities expanded. As a result, while population from 1900 to 1914 grew nearly 50 per cent, the total size of the economy after inflation doubled, and real per capita income soared.

Our current immigration boom pales in comparison to that which occurred during the first decade of the 20th century. Annual immigration now represents just 1.5 per cent of Canada’s population compared to the peak years 1912 and 1913 at 5.1 and 5.3 per cent. The equivalent today would mean nearly two million immigrants a year and we are nowhere near that amount.

Moreover, back then we had nowhere near the technology of today, and arguably our productivity was even lower.

If in the early 20th century a country with eight million people could accommodate 400,000 immigrants a year and boost productivity and economic growth, then surely at 40 million this industrialized country can do better.

The country that put in place three transcontinental railroads during the relatively larger migration boom of pre-First World War should be able to parallel that infrastructure performance for a much more modest population boom.

Canada would also need to make non-economic investments to accommodate that larger population, such as increased spending on national security and additional efforts to address regional anxieties and tensions that more immigration may cause.

This will not come cheaply, but it will be worth the investment. With the highest ever immigration that in 2023 may exceed 500,000 people, Canada’s population is growing rapidly, and the long-term benefits considerably outweigh the transition costs.

Livio Di Matteo is professor of economics at Lakehead University.

Source: Opinion: More immigration will make Canada wealthier – we just … – The Globe and Mail

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Canada must better protect immigrants, refugees from foreign intimidation, report says

2023/09/19 Leave a comment

Yes indeed:

A new report by human-rights lawyers, released ahead of the public inquiry on foreign interference, says Canada must be prepared to take forceful action to protect those who are often the targets of these attacks: immigrants and refugees.

It says Canada is breaking its obligations under international law to protect those who start a new life in this country but often face intimidation and pressure from authoritarian governments they left behind in their homeland.

“Canada is legally obligated to protect people within its borders against certain human-rights violations arising from incidents of transnational repression, and there are legal frameworks and mechanisms available to Canada at the international and domestic levels to combat such incidents,” the report said.

“Despite this, the Canadian government has yet to sufficiently respond,” it added.

In order to combat this repression, the report urges Ottawa to cancel a long-standing treaty with China that obliges it to co-operate with Beijing on police and criminal investigations.

As Western intelligence agencies, including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, have warned, Beijing has a history of using what are ostensibly anti-corruption campaigns, such as Operation Fox Hunt, to instead find and punish dissidents who have fled to other countries. Last fall, it was reported that China ran a network of illegal police stations in Canada and around the world.

Canada should end its 1994 treaty with China on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, the authors say, referring to an agreement that allows Chinese or Canadian prosecutors to call upon investigators in each other’s country to help obtain evidence.

On Monday, Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Marie-Josée Hogue begins her term as commissioner of a public inquiry into foreign interference by China and other hostile states.

The inquiry follows months of reporting on Chinese foreign interferenceincluding revelations in The Globe and Mail on May 1 that Beijing targeted Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong and his relatives in Hong Kong in the lead-up to the 2021 election. The disclosure of this meddling prompted Ottawa to expel Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei later that month.

The new report, Combatting Transnational Repression and Foreign Interference in Canada, was authored by international human-rights lawyers Sarah Teich, David Matas and Hannah Taylor.

It’s published by Human Rights Action Group as well as the Council for a Secure Canada. The report is endorsed by nine groups representing diaspora communities that fight transnational repression from countries including China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia, Eritrea and others.

The report says that the various agencies and departments of the federal government need to work together to effectively combat transnational repression.

Canada needs not only a registry of foreign agents to track efforts to influence this country, it says, but also a commissioner of foreign influence to receive and investigate complaints: including alleged violations by foreign embassies and consulates.

The authors say Canada needs a dedicated hotline where targets of intimidation can call for help in order to co-ordinate a response and keep track of these repressions.

Canada should criminalize the offence of “refugee espionage” where foreign governments spy on those who have fled their homeland to settle in this country, they say. And, it should create a civil cause of action – a basis to seek judicial relief – specific to transnational repression so that diaspora groups have easier standing to sue foreign governments or agents in Canada working for them.

Ottawa should also train law-enforcement officers and campus security at universities to recognize and address cases of transnational repression, the report said.

In addition, it should commit to slapping targeted sanctions on foreign officials or entities found to be engaging in transnational repression, the report said.

Canada has a poor global reputation right now for tackling this form of foreign interference, the authors say. They noted that a report from Freedom House, a Washington-based advocacy group for civil liberties, concluded that mechanisms available to report incidents of transnational repression in Canada are inadequate, and that victims are often “disappointed by the lack of response from law enforcement.”

The authors of the new report say Canada is failing its obligations to protect people in this country from foreign-based repression, including under the 1954 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Most of the rights it’s obliged to protect are also listed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These rights include the right to life; the right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; the right to liberty and security.

The report calls on Ottawa to create a specialized fund to provide physical, psychological and financial support for victims of transnational repression that can be used for needs such as emergency housing, physical and mental health treatment and new phones or laptops for those whose devices are hacked.

Source: Canada must better protect immigrants, refugees from foreign intimidation, report says

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Ottawa faces class action alleging rules around migrant workers are discriminatory

2023/09/19 Leave a comment

We shall see (all immigration policy is inherently discriminatory, the question revolves around whether it is for legitimate reasons or not).

It seems like a bit of a stretch to argue that:

“There were now increasing numbers of persons of colour. These schemes were justified on the basis that the immigrants of certain races, colours, or ethnic or national origins were considered unable to assimilate to Canada’s climate and society and to be better-suited for ‘unfree’ and low-skilled work.”

Whe Canada was also abolishing race-based restrictions on permanent residents.

As a child, he would get postcards from his aunt in Canada and dream to see the country and live here one day.

In 2014, as a 22-year-old, he reached out to a compatriot from Guatemala and scraped together $3,000 to pay for a job offer in poultry catching from the man’s employer in Quebec.

He would end up spending most of his next nine years in Canada as a migrant worker — on six separate closed work permits, which only allowed him to work for his sponsoring employers despite what he described as abusive and exploitative conditions and treatment.

Identified in court documents only as A.B., the young man is leading a class-action lawsuit initiated against the Canadian government for violating migrant domestic workers’ and farm workers’ Charter Rights under the closed work permit regime.

“What we’re trying to do is challenge all the provisions of the immigration regulations that allow the federal government to bind these workers and to restrict their rights to change employers,” said Eugénie Depatie-Pelletier, executive director of the Association for the Rights of Household and Farm Workers, which filed the court case on behalf of closed work permit holders.

“It’s time to put an end to nonfree work, a system that treats the worker as the quasi-property of her employer.”

The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the provisions of the immigration law that allow such practice unconstitutional, and to award damages to migrant workers who have been subjected to “employer-tying measures” on or after April 17, 1982, when the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms took effect.

None of the claims have been proven in court.

As opposed to an “open” work permit, foreign workers on a “closed” or “employer-specific” work permit can only work here according to the specific conditions on the work permit, such as working for the named employer. Migrant workers in low-wage, low-skill jobs are generally issued a closed work permit.

The lawsuit alleged that “employer-tying measures” were rooted in direct discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin and colour.

“The development of these schemes coincided with a shift in the demographics of the immigrants entering Canada to work in these occupations. They had previously included predominantly ‘white’ immigrants,” said the 55-page court application filed on Thursday.

“There were now increasing numbers of persons of colour. These schemes were justified on the basis that the immigrants of certain races, colours, or ethnic or national origins were considered unable to assimilate to Canada’s climate and society and to be better-suited for ‘unfree’ and low-skilled work.”

When migrants on closed work permits are terminated, they lose legal status in Canada and must secure another employer with authorization by Employment and Social Development Canada to hire foreign workers.

That process can be “lengthy, difficult, costly, and most importantly highly unpredictable” as the person may risk being denied a new work permit, the lawsuit claims. It can result in the worker being prohibited from working and making a living for an indeterminate period of time.

The plaintiffs said the harmful impacts of those measures are widely known and well-documented, including:

Restricting workers’ capacity to resign and make choices concerning their work and livelihood in Canada;

Limiting their freedom of movement;

Impeding their ability to assert their rights and access help.

“The employer-tied workers’ inability to change employers creates a striking power imbalance in favour of the employer, making migrant workers uniquely vulnerable,” the lawsuit argues.

“These harmful impacts are compounded when temporary foreign workers work in remote locations, reside in employer-provided accommodation or live in their employer’s own home.”

In the lead case, the Guatemalan man obtained his first “closed” work permit valid from 2014 to 2016. The lawsuit claims he had to work between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., Monday to Friday, with only three 10-minute breaks per night, and was required to catch up to 40,000 chickens per shift, at a rate of five in each hand for every catch.

A.B. would get $3.75 per thousand chickens and $12 for the same number of turkeys. His Canadian co-workers, however, would be paid double these rates, the lawsuit alleges.

A.B. would go to bed with rips and tears on the skin of his hands and with sore muscles. When he woke up, he was often unable to extend his hands, which would remain contracted and curled in a “catching” position.

“As a result of his ‘closed’ work permit, A.B. had no choice but to endure this treatment,” he said in his claim. “He feared that complaining could lead to being fired, threatening his status in Canada, his ability to obtain a renewal of his permit.”

After a work injury in 2015, A.B. required leave from work. His contract was not renewed and he returned to Guatemala, where he underwent an MRI and found out he suffered a herniated disc.

He found another job at a family dairy farm in Quebec in 2017 and worked there until 2019, on three yearly closed work permits.

There, he claimed he was paid late, sometimes by weeks, and subjected to the employer’s “aggressive behaviour, homophobic and racial slurs, rants against the incompetence of migrant workers, and humiliating and degrading comments.” An accident in 2019 aggravated his previous work injury, and he was dismissed.

From 2020 to 2022, A.B. worked for another dairy farm — on two more “closed” permits, where he claimed he suffered similar abuse.

“The Government of Canada has not ceased to resort to employer-tying measures. It has instead continued to subject a growing number of temporary foreign workers to those measures — and it still continues to do so today,” the lawsuit said.

“The Government of Canada’s failure to put an end to those measures evidences its continued clear disregard for the employer-tied migrant workers’ Charter rights and human dignity.”

Source: Ottawa faces class action alleging rules around migrant workers are discriminatory

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Colby Cosh: Ontario math case is mirror-image racism disguised as racial sensitivity

2023/09/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Canadian Constitution Foundation announced in a press release on Thursday that it has been granted intervenor status in an appeal, approved a year ago but not yet scheduled, that will concern Ontario’s famous racist math test for teacher candidates. In 2018, as you might recall, the Ontario government, concerned about sluggish student math performance, introduced a new math proficiency test (MPT) that teachers would have to pass before being admitted to the profession.

The test was based on the kinds of questions that students in grades 3, 6 and 9 would themselves be expected to answer in a classroom, and it was checked closely for explicit indications of racial bias and sensitivity. Nevertheless, in both trials of the MPT and the first year it was given officially (2021), some groups of test-takers — notably candidates self-described as being of African, Caribbean and Indigenous descent — didn’t score quite as well as the white ones.

Yes, friends, it’s one of those “disparate impact” issues that is constantly raising the political temperature in the United States, but that we haven’t yet fought about much here. This is the struggle that has a chance of spreading the American race-panic infection when the Ontario Court of Appeal and perhaps the Supreme Court get around to hashing it out.

In late 2021, a hastily assembled “Teacher Candidates’ Council” brought an application for judicial review of the MPT on the grounds that it violated Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which forbids the state from racial discrimination. A panel of the Divisional Court, wielding novel Supreme Court doctrine on “disparate impact” cases, ruled that the MPT was discriminatory and struck down the statutory requirement for teachers to pass it.

The Divisional Court’s ruling is a truly dismal, laborious document: it exhibits a logic that the legal commentator Leonid Sirota has described as “Bonkerstown.” Section 15 says that the law cannot engage in “discrimination based on race,” and nothing in or about the test does that — except, well, that it’s a test. The court comments in the decision, as a matter of uncontested and universally recognized fact, that “Black and Latinx teacher candidates are much more likely to fail standardized teacher tests than their White peers,” and that standardized tests, perhaps by their very nature, “are biased against almost all vulnerable classes of potential teachers other than women.

Does this mean that any kind of state-administered proficiency test yielding a “disparate impact” is thereby outlawed? The ruling “disparate impact” case, Fraser v. Canada, dates only from the fall of 2020, and was written by, you guessed it, the now-retired Justice Rosalie Abella. Abella’s disparate impact doctrine, summarized helpfully at paragraph 57 of the Divisional Court ruling, says that the legislature’s intentions in writing a law are irrelevant, and that there is no need for a court to demonstrate or show how a law causes a disparate impact on racial groups. If there is any difference at all in the between-group outcomes of a law, Sec. 15 is activated.

This essentially throws disparate-impact questions in the hands of the classic Oakes test. In a given case, is there a sufficiently urgent and compelling reason for Sec. 15 to be violated? The Divisional Court agreed that the MPT was a way of addressing a “pressing and substantial objective” — improving the dismal math education in Ontario. The government’s choice to adopt the test was proportionate and rational: there is some evidence that teachers who do better on math tests themselves get better results from students. This takes us to the question of “minimal impairment,” which is the hurdle at which the MPT fell.

The Divisional Court panel acknowledged that high deference to lawmakers is required when it comes to “complex social problem(s) with many potential solutions.” As often happens, this high-flown language was a warning sign that the court wasn’t going to defer at all. The panel acknowledged that the government did what it could to mitigate the disparate effect of the test, screening it for biases and letting teacher candidates take it as often as they needed to. But the government did have alternatives to imposing the MPT at the end of teacher education. It could have added, and did consider adding, more math requirements and math courses to bachelor of education programs themselves.

The government was reluctant to do this, and preferred to have an MPT, because altering bachelor of education requirements would involve the province poking its nose into higher education and treading on the independence of universities. Moreover, there’s no real indication that this approach would necessarily be any better for education students who are bad at math exams. But simply because the MPT had been tried, and shown to yield disparate outcomes, the existence of a hypothetical alternative was enough to engage the “minimal impairment” part of the Oakes analysis in the eyes of the Divisional Court judges.

In short, you can’t say you minimally impaired the rights of racial minorities if there was anything else you could have done to uphold a training standard or a proficiency requirement. Nobody needs me to hector them about the grotesque nature of this chain of reasoning — which involves deciding that there are groups inherently bound not to cut the mustard on tests of their capability, and reading the Charter of Rights in a way that protects them from those tests. Most of you will see this as mirror-image racism disguised as racial sensitivity, and that’s just what it is.

Source: Colby Cosh: Ontario math case is mirror-image racism disguised as racial sensitivity

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