On Peter Street, a community steps up for asylum seekers abandoned to sleep on the sidewalk

2023/07/19 Leave a comment

Ongoing crisis and scandal:

As asylum seekers continued to sleep on a downtown Toronto sidewalk waiting on government to sort out a funding dispute, community leaders and business owners stepped in to help.

Some asylum seekers were relocated Monday night, an advocate said.

Lorraine Lam, an outreach worker who has spoken out about the situation at 129 Peter St., said a “coalition of groups” worked to arrange a bus and space for individuals at temporary church shelters. 

Some people went to the church while others chose to stay behind, Lam said.

The growing camp of refugee claimants and asylum seekers downtown is the result of a tug-of-war between all levels of government over who should foot the bill when it comes to housing refugees in Canada. A new city policy, which Deputy Mayor Jennifer McKelvie framed as a hard decision, means asylum seekers looking for emergency beds in the city’s non-refugee-specific shelters would be redirected to the federal government.

Mayor Olivia Chow said all hands on deck are required to solve the crisis.

“When senior staff meet on Tuesday, my expectation is tangible solutions from all three levels of government that we can implement right away,” Chow said on Monday.

On Monday morning, Paramount Fine Foods CEO Mohamad Fakih pledged to donate $20,000 and raise more money to pay for temporary housing. 

There are “good people in the government. They want to do the right thing, but it’s taking long and they have to move,” Fakih said. “This is wrong on all of us and we have to change it.” 

He’s asking other business leaders to open their hearts and their pockets if they are able to help. 

One man who the Star agreed not to name has been at 129 Peter St. for 10 days. He said that while they are grateful to get food, what they really need is shelter. 

“We have food in our own countries. But we came here because of security. And now security means that we have to have a place that is enclosed, where we put our heads (to rest),” the man said.

Meanwhile, 32 housing advocates and outreach workers sent an open letter to the head of Toronto’s shelter and housing system, Gord Tanner, calling for his resignation or for Chow to fire him over what they call “repeated mismanagement of the shelter system.”

While the collapse of the shelter system “is not solely the General Manager (of Toronto’s Shelter Support and Housing Administration) responsibility — it lies with City Council — your key decisions have resulted in immeasurable harm and have further exacerbated the crisis,” the letter states. 

The letter cites several “key decisions” advocates say have resulted in “immeasurable harm,” including the city denying shelter to refugees and changing shelter death reporting from monthly to biannually. 

In a statement shared with the Star, city manager Paul Johnson acknowledged the letter, adding the voices of homeless, shelter and refugee advocates matter and they play a critical role in providing supports and advocacy work, as well as City staff.

“I have every confidence in the individual mentioned in the letter and in my team who has been working diligently and on an ongoing basis, in partnership with many other experts and community leaders, some of whom are signatories of the letter,” Johnson wrote.

Johnson said urgent funding is needed from other levels of government to support the surge of people arriving in Canada as the city grapples with a shelter system that does not have extra space or means to expand the shelter system to keep up with demand.

“A lot of political figures respond to public pressure and it’s not looking very good on them right now. So I would say that maybe that little bit of pressure might jog some more quick rapid-response movement,” Lam said.

Lam took to Twitter this weekend to encourage community members who want to help to be mindful of what they are donating.

“What we started to see over the weekend, for instance, was there was so much food because everybody wanted to bring food on the weekend and on Friday night, because that’s when people are free,” Lam said. The result was extra food being thrown away or sitting next to people as they tried to sleep.

Lam and fellow outreach worker Diana McNally have started a GoFundMe to go toward water, meals, and store gift cards as well as requested items like camping chairs and sleeping bags. The campaign has raised $59,985 as of Monday afternoon. 

Brampton non-profit groups Help A Girl Out and Rescue the Youth were also in front of 129 Peter St. on Monday with pink drawstring bags full of soap, sanitizer, toothbrushes, wash clothes and sanitary pads. 

“I can’t imagine having your period on the streets,” said Andria Barrett, chair of Help a Girl Out. 

“Every non-profit, church, charity, mosque, religious institution needs to come together and donate — donate money, donate time, donate food, donate products. This is not how we need to be treating each other,” Barrett said, gesturing to the dozens of people sitting outside 129 Peter St. under tents with suitcases and garbage bags filled with belongings around them. 

Don Mills resident Vickie Williams was rolling a suitcase around the site on Monday and told the Star she dropped off used jackets, a sleeping bag, new socks and other clothing she stayed up gathering until 3 a.m.

“What is going on is not right. Our government’s got to be the example. And as far as I can see, they are not the example. They need to smarten up. They need to treat everybody equally and fairly,” Williams said.

Source: On Peter Street, a community steps up for asylum seekers abandoned to sleep on the sidewalk

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , , , ,

The Hindus fighting against ‘caste consciousness’

2023/07/19 Leave a comment

Of note (California a trendsetter…):

The first-ever Caste Con, an event dedicated to “dissolving caste consciousness,” held in Fremont, California, on Sunday (July 16), may sound to the uninitiated as if its point was to oppose discrimination based on India’s social hierarchy that places Brahmins at the top of the social order and Dalits at the bottom.

In fact, the gathering brought together a group of activists who warn that recent efforts to outlaw caste discrimination in the United States only serve to reaffirm caste differences in a way that could negatively affect the U.S. Hindu community and stigmatize Indian Americans in politics, at school and in the courts. Many of the attendees are outspoken opponents of SB 403, a bill headed for a vote in the California State Assembly that would single out caste bias as a violation of the state’s anti-discrimination statute.

Richa Gautam, a data analyst who organized the event, portrays caste awareness as a version of American identity politics that left-leaning politicians use to force presumptions about caste on Indian immigrants such as her, she told Religion News Service in the days before Caste Con.

“Any seepage of identity politics is against multiculturalism,” said Gautam. “It is against progress, it is against even spiritualism, you know, the whole concept of Hinduism.”

Caste differences, a fact of life in India and other South Asian communities around the globe, has caused increasing controversy in the U.S. South Asian immigrant community since colleges and universities began adding caste to their list of differences, along with race and sexuality and gender identity, that were protected against bias. Brandeis University banned caste discrimination over complaintsfrom some Hindus in 2019; the California State University system added caste to their nondiscrimination policy in early 2022.

Gautam was inspired to join the fight against these measures in 2020, as California was prosecuting the most prominent legal case of alleged caste discrimination involving the computer giant CISCO Systems. An anonymous CISCO employee, a Dalit, accused two of his managers, Ramana Kompella and Sundar Iyer, of passing him over for a promotion. California’s civil rights department sued the two defendants in a years-long case that ended just this month, when it was dismissed due to lack of evidence.

Iyer made a surprise appearance at Sunday’s Caste Con, claiming that the state prosecutors decided he was a high-caste Hindu based on his last name, even though he identifies as non-religious.

“Ramana and I are the state of California’s best and only example of caste litigation,” said Iyer. “The CRD is supposed to protect civil rights, yet deliberately violated my religious liberty.”

More recently, 12 of the complainants in a 2021 lawsuit that alleged forced labor among “lower-caste” workers on the BAPS Swaminarayan Temple of Robbinsville, New Jersey, retracted their claims, saying they were coerced into making false allegations of caste discrimination.

Yet an often cited report on caste bias released in 2018 by Equality Labs, a Dalit civil rights organization and a co-sponsor of the California bill, found that two-thirds of respondents said they suffered discrimination at work; one-third reported that they had faced discrimination in education.

In an article on Caste Files, Gautam’s website tracking the issue, she characterizes the report as “fake and unscientific.” Other Hindu organizations, including the Ambedkar Phule Network of American Dalits and Bahujans, representing traditionally lower-caste groups, have also criticized Equality Labs’ findings.

“Any survey or any bill that is made without us is looking to butcher our cultural existence,” Sandeep Dedge, a volunteer at APNADB, told the Caste Con audience. “The people with little experience are trying to oppress the contributions of the Dalits and Bahujans.”

Those who reject the need for provisions against caste discrimination say not only that such laws have no place in the United States, but they also deny that caste is primarily a feature of Hinduism. Instead they claim that caste was imposed by British colonizers of India, who fastened on varna — a spiritual term dictating one’s inner nature — and jati — a description of a distinctive social group — and conflated both with caste as a way of ordering Indian society under their rule. It should be removed from American consciousness altogether, they say.

Sudha Jagannathan, a board member of the Coalition of Hindus of North America and longtime California resident, says she never experienced discussions of caste before coming to the United States. She began referring to herself as Bahujan only after caste became a talking point in recent years. To her, caste is a “slur against Hindus” that is already covered under the existing anti-discrimination laws.

“The caste discrimination ban is broadcasting caste consciousness into America in big ways,” said Jagannathan. “The Americans who did not know this, whenever they see a Hindu now, the first question they ask is, ‘What is your caste?’”

California, where a vast number of Indian immigrants live, has long been the center of the discourse about caste in America. In 2006, the Hindu Education Foundation, along with the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu American Foundation, fought in California courts to erase mentions of the caste system, among other stereotypes about the Hindu religion, from the state’s school textbooks. The litigation ended in settlements, with repeated text changes.

Source: The Hindus fighting against ‘caste consciousness’

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John Ivison: The Liberals are too eager to erode the singular power of the citizenship oath

2023/07/18 Leave a comment

Powerful commentary against the proposed change permitting self-administration of the citizenship oath:

I have vivid memories of taking the oath of Canadian citizenship 18 years ago, a humbling, life-changing experience.

The day before the ceremony, I was looking down on the House of Commons from the press gallery with vaguely anthropological interest in a curious but distantly related species.

The day after being welcomed to the Canadian family with a roomful of wide-eyed new arrivals, the sense of detachment was gone, replaced by a common purpose, summed up in the citizenship certificate that bound me to uphold “the principles of democracy, freedom and compassion which are the foundations of a strong and united Canada.”

That is the experience that the government wants to deny to a future generation of Canadians, who will be asked to take the oath of citizenship by clicking a box online in order to save a few bucks.

In January, Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Minister Sean Fraser said his department would begin making the necessary changes to allow self-administration of the oath. This would replace the requirement to take the oath in person before a citizenship judge, along with a room full of other new Canadians, which has been the law since 1947.

The reason, according to the government’s explanation in the Canada Gazette, is that citizenship applications have doubled in recent years to around 243,000 in 2021/22, and are set to keep rising as we move towards the Liberal immigration target of 500,000 newcomers in 2025. During the pandemic, citizenship tests migrated online, which, in the second half of last year, accounted for around 90 per cent of all ceremonies. In April, Fraser said his department was holding 350 virtual ceremonies a month.

The government has been delighted by the time and cost savings and says self-administration will save people roughly three months between taking their citizenship test and officially becoming Canadian.

The Liberals say that they will always maintain in-person ceremonies. The government says it doesn’t track how many people asked for an in-person ceremony and didn’t get one. But if self-administration of the oath is adopted, it says it expects fewer people to attend a ceremony and for there to be fewer ceremonies overall.

Andrew Griffith, a former director general at IRCC, said the anticipated savings of $5 million is only a small portion of the cost of administering the oath. Much greater savings in time and money could be made by focusing on administration and processing efficiencies prior to the citizenship ceremonies. “This actually does matter,” he said of “the rare positive celebratory moment in the immigration journey.”

There are some things that transcend bureaucratic efficiencies, and the citizenship ceremony is one of them. It is about a sense of participation and belonging, the culmination of a long and often difficult immigration process.

The minister’s press secretary said in an email that the intention is to make public ceremonies available for those who request them. “Those who choose to do an online attestation will still have an opportunity to attend an IRCC organized citizenship ceremony,” said Bahoz Dara Aziz.

But it is clear that the government would be happy to let the ceremonies wither on the vine.

The minister and his department are starting to get a sense of a backlash as prominent Canadians, including former governor general Adrienne Clarkson, ex-Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi and former Liberal immigration minister Sergio Marchi, have argued that the government is robbing future citizens of a deeply meaningful moment. Nenshi said the reasons are “bureaucratic and puerile.”

The public comments during the consultation process, which were overwhelmingly hostile, suggest many Canadians agree. “This proposal takes what should be one of the most meaningful things a person will ever do in their lives and equates it with ordering a new pair of underwear from Amazon,” wrote one person (commenters’ names were removed before the feedback was made public).

A petition has been launched in Parliament (petition e-4511), where people can sign up and urge the government to support the in-person ceremony as a unifying bond for Canadians.

The petition urges the government to reverse the trend of moving the oath online by limiting virtual ceremonies to 10 per cent of all citizenship events.

Fraser can hardly be immune to the power of the argument in favour of in-person ceremonies. He swore in nine new Canadians on Canada Day in front of 41,813 baseball fans at a Toronto Blue Jays game at the Rogers Centre this year, with the crowd joining in a noisy rendition of the national anthem.

There is a magic to the tradition that goes beyond a pledge of allegiance to the King and the Constitution.

Before becoming a citizen, I remember feeling it was vaguely treasonable to forsake the land of my fathers and adopt the common sympathies of another nation.

Yet, it was strangely comforting to be in a room with 50 or so others from all over the world, who were, in all likelihood, wrestling with their own doubts.

Qualms quickly turned to elation on being called to receive my citizenship certification in front of friends and family.

There was something extraordinary about watching all those newcomers experience true patriot love for the first time as citizens by singing O Canada.

I feel sorry for my future countrymen and women if that time-honoured tradition is replaced by the click of a mouse.

Source: John Ivison: The Liberals are too eager to erode the singular power of the citizenship oath

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , , , ,

As immigration debate rages on, new report makes the case for more newcomers

2023/07/18 Leave a comment

Odd report, at odds with most labour economists in terms of impact on per capita GDP:

At a time when skeptics are questioning Canada’s plan to ramp up immigration, a new report argues the country needs to welcome a lot more newcomers to counter-balance its aging demographic.

A Desjardins report released Monday analyzes how much population growth among working-age Canadians is necessary to maintain the old-age dependency ratio, which refers to the ratio between 15 to 64-year-olds and those aged 65 and older.

It finds that the working-age population would have to grow by 2.2 per cent per year through 2040 to maintain the same ratio that existed in 2022.

And if the country wanted to go back to the average old-age dependency ratio it had between 1990 and 2015, that group of Canadians would have to grow by 4.5 per cent annually.

“I feel like the discussion around immigration levels in Canada, by and large, focuses on the immediate impact on the Canadian housing market,” said Randall Bartlett, Desjardins’ senior director of Canadian economics.

“And so what I wanted to do was sort of zoom out and provide some broader economic context around immigration and why immigration to Canada is important.”

The prospective ramp-up of immigration levels has sparked debate on whether the country can handle higher flows of newcomers amid a housing crisis, and what the total economic impact of having more people in the country would be.

Canada’s population grew by more than one million people last year, a record for the country. Its total population grew by 2.7 per cent, the fastest rate since 1957.

The strong population growth comes as the Liberal government eyes higher annual immigration targets, which would see the country welcome 500,000 immigrants per year by 2025.

Proponents of higher immigration argue that the labour market is able to absorb more workers, and the country needs more working-age Canadians to support the tax base as more people retire.

“We need immigration at a relatively high rate, actually, in order to offset the economic impacts of aging — to be able to pay for the health care that Canadian seniors are going to need,” Bartlett said.

A recent Desjardins analysis finds Canada’s plan to increase immigration could boost gross domestic product per capita if newcomers continue to have the same success getting work that they’ve enjoyed recently.

GDP per capita is the size of a country’s economy divided by its population. Many consider it to be a better measure of a country’s living standards than the overall GDP figure.

The employment outcomes of recent immigrants, particularly those brought in through the economic stream, have improved compared to those of previous cohorts. That’s in part because of changes to federal immigration policy.

In 2018, the median wage of economic immigrant principal applicants surpassed that of the Canadian population by the time they had been in the country for one year, according to Statistics Canada.

“We’re bringing in very, very talented people,” Bartlett said. They are able to find jobs and “generate earnings very quickly that are outpacing the Canadian average,” he added.

But critics argue that relying on immigration to supply workers for the economy can also serve as a disincentive for businesses to invest in technology that would boost labour productivity and reduce dependency on workers.

Bartlett said the federal government could modulate the flow of temporary foreign workers so as to encourage such investments.

But he conceded that housing serves as a major hurdle.

Desjardins estimates the country would need to build 100,000 more units every year to offset upward price pressures caused by having a higher number of permanent residents in the country.

A recent analysis by BMO found that for every one per cent of population growth, housing prices typically increase by three per cent.

The influx of newcomers into the country is already having an effect on the housing market, which rebounded this year despite interest rates being at their highest level in decades.

At its last interest rate decision, the Bank of Canada flagged population growth’s effect on housing prices as one of the factors feeding into inflation.

“Strong population growth from immigration is adding both demand and supply to the economy: newcomers are helping to ease the shortage of workers while also boosting consumer spending and adding to demand for housing,” the central bank said in a press release on its latest rate hike.

Bartlett warned the erosion of housing affordability amid record population growth could damage public support for immigration and warrants swift action from government.

“There’s a risk Canadians could become less open and less positive… toward immigration,” Bartlett said.

“If that leads to scaling back immigration in a meaningful way, then that means Canadians are gonna be facing a significant bill going forward to meet the the aging costs of older Canadians.”

Source: As immigration debate rages on, new report makes the case for more newcomers

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

She’s a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. How can she be so oblivious?

2023/07/18 Leave a comment

Good question, echoed in Globe editorial:

The plight of the “Two Michaels” might seem a distant memory for most Canadians.

Yet barely two years after China released these two high-profile hostages from prison, Canadians have reason to fear a repetition of Beijing’s strong-arm tactics — through the heavy hand of Hong Kong.

Where once Canadian citizens on the mainland were considered fair game for domestic hostage-taking — notably Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor — now it is Hong Kong dissidents seeking sanctuary in Canada who are being targeted for bounties both exorbitant and extraterritorial.

For a reward of $1 million in local currency (about $170,000 in Canadian funds), Hong Kong has put a rapacious price on the heads of those who dare to defy its will — and that of its mainland masters. Once a colonial outpost of the British crown, handed back to Beijing in 1997 with a promise of autonomy and democratization, this port city has since reincarnated itself as a vassal of the old Middle Kingdom.

Hong Kong’s chief executive, John Lee, boasted that these activists will be “pursued for life,” presumably to the death. In Beijing, where the draconian and anti-democratic National Security Law was first conceived and imposed from a distance, spokesperson Mao Ning accused Canada and other Western nations of “meddling” by “providing a safe haven for fugitives.”

Beijing once protested bitterly over the arrest of accused Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the Vancouver airport, per the terms of an extradition treaty with the U.S. Back then, China lambasted the arrest as an exercise in extraterritoriality, only to use its own territory for the incarceration of our two citizens as leverage for Meng’s eventual release.

Ottawa has already repudiated Hong Kong’s hostile act, saying it was “gravely concerned.” But there is more Canada can do.

And there is even more that one especially high-profile Canadian should do to help.

As a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverley McLachlin is known as the “Right Honourable” — an honorific reserved for those who serve at the very highest levels. Upon her retirement in 2017 from Canada’s highest court, she leapfrogged across the Pacific to an appointment to Hong Kong’s highest court, the Court of Final Appeal.

Even at the time, it struck me as a curious cross-pollination of Canadian jurisprudence with Hong Kong’s intolerance. When I spoke briefly with McLachlin — after she accepted one of the innumerable awards conferred upon her for a distinguished career on the bench — she seemed unfazed by my prediction that she would soon find herself in an impossible position.

I told her I had covered Hong Kong’s struggling democracy movement for seven years, and later watched the narrowing margin of manoeuvre as Beijing went back on its written promises. Did she know what she was getting into?

McLachlin gave me a polite hearing, but she had already reached a career decision. Her verdict was not open to appeal.

The subsequent unravelling of Hong Kong’s system of law could not have been worse. What began as a crackdown followed by a suffocation has become an eradication of democracy.

Yet all these years later, McLachlin serves indefatigably — if not faithfully — on Hong Kong’s highest court, insisting that she is doing her duty to law and order even after the law has been weaponized and distorted into a tool of disorder and repression. Our retired chief justice argues she is a bulwark against arbitrary rule, yet in reality she is a fig leaf for autocracy.

Two other foreign judges recruited to a similar role on the high court have long since bailed out, concluding that the system was broken beyond repair. The two British judges resigned in early 2022 when the writing was on the wall.

McLachlin resisted, persisting in her view that “The court is completely independent and functioning in the way I am used (to) in Canada the courts functioning.”

That seems an awfully obtuse, legalistic and sophistic view of the reality of democracy inside and outside the courtroom. McLachlin seems oblivious to the way in which China and Hong Kong use the prestige of her position to camouflage their malfeasance on the streets of their territory — while imposing extraterritoriality on her home country of Canada.

Ottawa has traditionally opposed foreign overreach on our soil, and should single out this brazen overreach — which encourages bounty hunters to apprehend people on our territory. Other Western nations went further by singling out the “transnational” abuse of authority.

A more fitting riposte to such extraterritoriality would be to renounce extradition to Hong Kong once and for all. Canada suspended its extradition treaty when the national security crackdown began, but it should go further by abolishing it entirely.

There cannot be any pretence of legal co-operation with Hong Kong when there are such flagrant abuses of legal norms at home and abroad. Not when there is a lifetime bounty on Hong Kong’s expatriate democracy dissidents if they can be caught here, so soon after the “Two Michaels” were incarcerated by those who call the shots in Beijing.

That conclusion should be self-evident to Canada’s foreign ministry. That reality should also provoke self-reflection by Canada’s freelancing former chief justice.

Source: She’s a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. How can she be so oblivious?

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Why Canada’s ‘citizenship on a click’ is proving controversial

2023/07/17 Leave a comment

Star coverage of the petition opposing self-administration of the citizenship oath:

Andrew Griffith says he used to drop by a citizenship ceremony whenever he felt depressed or frustrated at work.

The former director general at the federal immigration department says seeing new citizens walking the stage, being greeted by a uniformed RCMP officer and congratulated by a citizenship judge, reminded him of the importance of his work at the citizenship and multiculturalism branch.

“This is the one time that you actually get recognition for all that hard work and all that patience. Most people remember their citizenship ceremony,” he said.

“It’s like graduating from high school or university or other such moments. I think it really helps people have a sense of belonging and attachment to Canada.”

It’s why Griffith says he finds it troubling that the federal government is going to allow new citizens to take their citizenship oath online and on their own with a click on the keyboard rather than having to declare their loyalty to Canada before a citizenship judge.

In February, the federal government published the proposed change in the Canada Gazette. It is part of the modernization and digitalization of immigration processing in this country.

It said the online self-administration of the oath is expected to reduce the current citizenship processing time by three months and make it more accessible, because ceremonies are currently scheduled mainly on weekdays during working hours. According to the immigration department website, there are currently 308,000 citizenship applications in the system and the processing time stands at 19 months.

A chorus of prominent Canadian leaders, including former governor general Adrienne Clarkson, former Liberal immigration minister Sergio Marchi and former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi have voiced their opposition to the plan.

It has also prompted Griffith to start a petition to the Parliament, sponsored by Conservative immigration critic Tom Kmiec, demanding the government abandon the proposed change permitting what he calls “citizenship on a click.”

“There’s something meaningful about becoming a citizen. Citizenship is more than just sort of the paper process of having a Canadian passport and all the rights and responsibilities of Canadians,” he said. “It actually matters to the country. It matters to social inclusion, and I think it matters to all immigrants.”

During the pandemic, citizenship processing time doubled from the prior 12-month service standard. Officials brought in virtual citizenship ceremonies as of April 2020.

Since then, more than 15,290 of the ceremonies have been held online in front of an authorized official, generally a citizenship judge.

Kmiec, MP for the Calgary Shepard riding, said the government is trying to eliminate the backlog, but doing it at all costs.

“You click a button and you click your terms of reference the way you do it on your iPhone or on your Samsung. There’ll be no application that would be delayed, right? That’s why they’re doing it,” said Kmiec, who came to Canada from Poland with his family in 1985 and became a Canadian citizen in 1989.

“Why should these new citizens who pass their test and have all the time be robbed of having a special symbolic ceremony that’s required under the Citizenship Act?”

If the goal of the change is really to improve flexibility and accessibility for new citizens, Kmiec said, immigration officials should consider holding more citizenship ceremonies after hours or on weekends. An in-person ceremony should be made the default option, and virtual ceremonies are used only as a last resort, he added.

“You only get to swear an oath once in your life to Canada. That should be done in person. It should be a special ceremony. The government should honour you in this way,” said Kmiec. “I’ve never had anyone complain to me that they had to appear at a citizenship ceremony to become a citizen of Canada. Never.”

More than 700 comments were left on the notice of the citizenship change published in the Canada Gazette during the consultation period that ended in March.

Jenny Kwan, immigration critic for the NDP, says she, too, recognizes the significance of the in-person ceremonies but said people should have the option to do it online and that the proposed change would strike a balance.

An immigrant from Hong Kong, Kwan came to Canada with her family in the 1970s when she was nine. While she recalled the family’s excitement at their citizenship ceremony, she also saw the stresses her working-class parents experienced to make it to the event.

“They had to take time off work and we were a low-income family. For them to have missed work, it meant that they lost a day of income. And for a family of eight who’s struggling to survive, and for my parents to put food on the table, that was a big deal,” said Kwan, whose mother worked as a dishwasher and father did multiple part-time shift jobs to support the family.

“In offering alternatives for people to have their citizenship oath taken, I think this is an important consideration. I think that should be offered for new Canadians so that they can choose what is the best option for them.”

However, both Griffith and Kmiec say they fear many new citizens would simply opt for the self-attestation option given the convenience to do so.

“Of course, that’s the easiest thing to do. If they told you you’re going to have to wait maybe a few weeks and we’ll send you a paper copy, before you accept it, you’d say, ‘No, give me the digital,’” said Kmiec.

“You’re not going to pay much attention to it. You’ll just click the button and you’ll carry on.”

The online petition is open until Oct. 10 and must collect at least 500 signatures during that period. The Clerk of Petition would then validate the signatures and issue a certificate so it can be presented in the House. The government must then respond to the demand within 45 days.

“Depending on the quality of the response, I’m going to follow up with the minister. I’m not going to let this go,” Kmiec said.

Source: Why Canada’s ‘citizenship on a click’ is proving controversial

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , , , ,

The Gatekeepers of Knowledge Don’t Want Us to See What They Know

2023/07/17 Leave a comment

Meanwhile, the Conservative focus solely on Canadian gatekeepers:

We are living through an information revolution. The traditional gatekeepers of knowledge — librarians, journalists and government officials — have largely been replaced by technological gatekeepers — search engines, artificial intelligence chatbots and social media feeds.

Whatever their flaws, the old gatekeepers were, at least on paper, beholden to the public. The new gatekeepers are fundamentally beholden only to profit and to their shareholders.

That is about to change, thanks to a bold experiment by the European Union.

With key provisions going into effect on Aug. 25, an ambitious package of E.U. rules, the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, is the most extensive effort toward checking the power of Big Tech (beyond the outright bans in places like China and India). For the first time, tech platforms will have to be responsive to the public in myriad ways, including giving users the right to appeal when their content is removed, providing a choice of algorithms and banning the microtargeting of children and of adults based upon sensitive data such as religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The reforms also require large tech platforms to audit their algorithms to determine how they affect democracy, human rights and the physical and mental health of minors and other users.

This will be the first time that companies will be required to identify and address the harms that their platforms enable. To hold them accountable, the law also requires large tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter to provide researchers with access to real-time data from their platforms. But there is a crucial element that has yet to be decided by the European Union: whether journalists will get access to any of that data.

Journalists have traditionally been at the front lines of enforcement, pointing out harms that researchers can expand on and regulators can act upon. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which we learned how consultants for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign exploited the Facebook data of millions of users without their permission, was revealed by The New York Times and The Observer of London. BuzzFeed News reported on the offensive posts that detailed Facebook’s role in enabling the massacre of Rohingyas. My team when I worked at ProPublica uncovered how Facebook allows advertisers to discriminate in employment andhousing ads.

But getting data from platforms is becoming harder and harder. Facebook has been particularly aggressive, shutting down the accounts of researchers at New York University in 2021 for “unauthorized means” of accessing Facebook ads. That year, it also legally threatened a European research group, AlgorithmWatch, forcing it to shut down its Instagram monitoring project. And earlier this month, Twitter began limiting all its users’ ability to view tweets in what the company described as an attempt to blockautomated collection of information from Twitter’s website by A.I. chatbots as well as bots, spammers and other “bad actors.”

Meanwhile, the tech companies have also been shutting down authorized access to their platforms. In 2021, Facebook disbanded the team that oversaw the analytics tool CrowdTangle, which many researchers used to analyze trends. This year, Twitter replaced its free researcher tools with a paid version that is prohibitively expensive and unreliable. As a result, the public has less visibility than ever into how our global information gatekeepers are behaving.

Last month, the U.S. senator Chris Coons introduced the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, legislation that would require social media companies to share more data with researchers and provide immunity to journalists collecting data in the public interest with reasonable privacy protections.

But as it stands, the European Union’s transparency efforts rest on European academics who will apply to a regulatory body for access to data from the platforms and then, hopefully, issue research reports.

That is not enough. To truly hold the platforms accountable, we must support the journalists who are on the front lines of chronicling how despots, trolls, spies, marketers and hate mobs are weaponizing tech platforms or being enabled by them.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa runs Rappler, a news outlet in the Philippines that has been at the forefront of analyzing how Filipino leaders have used social media to spread disinformation, hijack social media hashtags, manipulate public opinion and attack independent journalism.

Last year, for instance, Rappler revealed that the majority of Twitter accounts using certain hashtags in support of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who was then a presidential candidate, had been created in a one-month period, making it likely that many of them were fake accounts. With the Twitter research feed that Rappler used now shuttered, and the platforms cracking down on data access, it’s not clear how Ms. Ressa and her colleagues can keep doing this type of important accountability journalism.

Ms. Ressa asked the European Commission, in public comments filed in May, to provide journalists with “access to real-time data” so they can provide “a macro view of patterns and trends that these technology companies create and the real-world harms they enable.” (I also filed comments to the European Commission, along with more than a dozen journalists, asking the commission to support access to platform data for journalists.)

As Daphne Keller, the director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, argues in her comments to the European Union, allowing journalists and researchers to use automated tools to collect publicly available data from platforms is one of the best ways to ensure transparency because it “is a rare form of transparency that does not depend on the very platforms who are being studied to generate information or act as gatekeepers.”

Of course, the tech platforms often push back against transparency requests by claiming that they must protect the privacy of their users. Which is hilarious, given that their business models are based on mining and monetizing their users’ personal data. But putting that aside, the privacy interests of users are not being implicated here: The data that journalists need is already public for anyone who has an account on these services.

What journalists lack is access to large quantities of public data from tech platforms in order to understand whether an event is an anomaly or representative of a larger trend. Without that access, we will continue to have what we have now: a lot of anecdotes about this piece of content or that user being banned, but no real sense of whether these stories are statistically significant.

Journalists write the first draft of history. If we can’t see what is happening on the biggest speech platforms in the globe, that history will be written for the benefit of platforms — not the public.

Source: The Gatekeepers of Knowledge Don’t Want Us to See What They Know

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Opinion For proof of the U.S. immigration system’s dysfunction, look to Canada

2023/07/17 Leave a comment

Interesting take and further illustration of dysfunction (which largely works to Canada’s advantage):

To attract talented tech workers, Canada will soon offer 10,000 work permits to foreigners who are now in the United States on H-1B visas. This might be the first time any country has created an immigration program that hinges entirely on another country’s system.

This suggests that the Canadian government holds two opinions of U.S. H-1B visas: That they are good at attracting the world’s most talented immigrants. And that the ultimate value proposition to prospective immigrants is so weak long-term, that, given the option, many H-1B visa holders will head north to Canada.

The H-1B visa’s weakness lies in the way it is tied to employment. When jobs disappear, the workers have no path toward permanent residency. If they cannot find another H-1B job within 60 days, they have to leave the country.

Finding a job that can sponsor an H-1B visa within 60 days is not easy, even under normal circumstances. When U.S. companies laid off more than 310,000 workers in 2022 and 2023, it became harder still, especially for tech workers. Last November, Meta alone laid off 11,000 workers. More than 15 percent of Meta’s workers have H-1B visas.

About 50,000 people had their H-1B visas revoked due to loss of employmentbetween October 2022 and April 2023, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and, among them, about 12,500 did not transfer their visas to some other legal status. In other words, they either left the United States or remained without documents.

This is a population of immigrants that the United States should want to keep. Most work in computer-related jobs. Others work in jobs that require specialized skills, such as doctors, professors, accountants and managers.

A bachelor’s degree or its equivalent is required to get an H-1B visa, making visa workers more educated than the U.S. population in general.

The exodus of H-1B workers did not start with the recent layoffs. Living as an H-1B worker has long been unstable and risky, especially for those born in India, who make up more than 70 percent of H-1B visa recipients every year. Because of America’s country-based green card quota system, Indians on H-1B visas have almost no path to permanent residency even after years of studying and workingin the United States. A change of president, an economic slowdown, or sudden layoffs can push them to abandon lives they have been building for years.

Both U.S. political parties have tried and failed to remove the country-based green card quota. As a short-term fix, many lawmakers and industry advocateshave urged the USCIS to extend the 60-day grace period after loss of employment to 120 days. But the agency says it would take more than a year to go through the required rulemaking process — too long to benefit immigrants who are already at risk of losing their legal status.

The Canadian government has been able to act faster. Indeed, it is already benefiting from U.S. visa restrictions. Since 2020, Vancouver and Toronto have seen the largest high-tech job growth in North America, outpacing Austin, Seattle and every other U.S. city. H-1B holders who move to Canada will receive open work permits for three years, allowing adequate time to find jobs without deportation worries. And rather than wait decades for a U.S. green card, skilled workers can get permanent residency in Canada in less than a year. Canada will also issue open work permits to spouses of H-1B workers; in the United States, only spouses of those who have an approved green card application are allowed to work.

The Biden administration launched a directive last year aimed at attracting immigrants trained in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But the H-1B system is holding the United States back. The loss of H-1B workers to Canada this year might not hurt the U.S. economy too much on its own, but if the immigration system for skilled workers is not fixed, the damage will accumulate and set back U.S. innovation for years to come.

Source: Opinion For proof of the U.S. immigration system’s dysfunction, look to Canada

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Vastel: Quelqu’un devra bien prendre soin des migrants de la vague qui s’en vient

2023/07/17 Leave a comment

Longer-term perspective given effects of climate change and increased migration pressures, with need for more analysis and preparation:

IIs étaient cinq cents, désespérés de rejoindre un monde meilleur par quelque moyen que ce soit. Mais le bateau qui devait les y transporter a sombré le mois dernier dans la mer Méditerranée, comme de trop nombreux autres avant lui, les laissant tous présumés disparus, possiblement par la faute de la garde côtière grecque, qui ne voulait pas d’eux, est venu révéler le Guardian. De telles tragédies se multiplient. Le taux de migration mondiale est voué à s’accroître lui aussi. Au même moment, de plus en plus de pays, voyant arriver ce flux migratoire, resserrent leurs frontières. L’incohérence est intenable et elle le demeurera.

Les dernières années ont été celles de tous les records. Plus de 108 millions de déplacés dans le monde, ce qui correspond à la plus forte hausse annuelle jamais enregistrée, nous dit le Haut-Commissariat des Nations unies pour les réfugiés. La guerre en Ukraine y a contribué (de l’ordre du tiers des 19 millions de déplacés de plus qu’en 2021), mais pas que. Les catastrophes naturelles — celles-là mêmes qui ne feront que s’amplifier — ont été responsables de plus de la moitié des déplacements internes au sein des pays frappés.

Le monde a également été le théâtre d’un nombre exceptionnel de conflits (56 en 2020), du jamais vu depuis le début des années 1990. Il ne faut pas se leurrer, ces multiples causes de migration ne feront que se perpétuer.

À ces migrants qui fuient la guerre, la persécution ou les bouleversements de la crise climatique s’ajoutent ceux qui partent en quête de perspectives économiques. Tant que des pays en manque de main-d’oeuvre leur offriront des emplois dont leurs natifs ne veulent pas (en agriculture, en restauration, en soins de santé — on peut penser aux « anges gardiens » de la pandémie), ces migrants continueront de prendre la route. Qu’on tente de la leur barrer ou non.

En Europe comme en Amérique du Nord, la tendance est à la sécurisation de la migration, et ce, par la voie d’une militarisation des interventions, du recours à la détention, de la construction de clôtures sur terre ou en mer. Les budgets de sécurité ont explosé, sans que cela freine les arrivées. Au contraire, les migrants prennent simplement des routes plus dangereuses, comme en témoignent les tragiques naufrages à répétition en Méditerranée ou la mort effroyable de migrants en pleine forêt le long de la frontière canado-américaine. Ce qui « subventionne » au passage une industrie criminelle de trafic de personnes chiffrée à 13 milliards de dollars américains l’an dernier, selon la professeure et chercheuse de l’Université de Montréal Luna Vives Gonzales.

Les déplacements ne sont bien sûr pas tous internationaux. Bien des gens tentent de trouver une vie meilleure dans une ville de proximité. Ainsi, 76 % des déplacés se sont réinstallés dans des pays à faibles ou moyens revenus l’an dernier. Des États qui n’ont souvent pas les infrastructures ni les services nécessaires pour gérer cette explosion imprévue de leur population, ce qui vient exacerber les tensions. L’iniquité avec les pays riches, qui, eux, en auraient davantage les moyens, est frappante.

L’immigration toujours croissante puise toutefois elle aussi dans ces pays des ressources, des logements ou des services, éléments qui pourraient ainsi ne pas suffire à la demande, préviennent des projections démographiques.

Ce qui inquiète les gouvernements. Et la réticence de la population locale à l’accueil d’un nombre plus généreux de migrants vient conforter ces dirigeants. Ce repli sur soi se voit surtout à droite, voire à l’extrême droite, mais la gauche est elle aussi divisée, comme en témoignent les débats internes au sein du Parti démocrate américain. Le climat actuel n’est donc pas passager. La vague migratoire ne l’est cependant pas elle non plus.

L’année 2022 devrait servir autant d’avertissement que d’exemple aux pays de la planète. Aux records migratoires s’adjoint celui des enveloppes internationales d’aide au développement, qui ont également atteint des sommets (204 milliards de dollars américains à l’échelle mondiale, une hausse de 14 %, et la quatrième d’affilée). Là encore, le soutien de nombreux pays à l’Ukraine est venu gonfler les chiffres.

La guerre dans ce pays aura montré que les pays riches sont en mesure d’adapter en temps de crise leurs seuils d’accueil et leurs budgets d’aide aux États moins nantis. Qu’est-ce qui les empêche de récidiver ? Car la solution, pour la suite, devra passer par l’un ou par l’autre.

Les migrants de demain ne se résigneront pas à rester, faute d’invitation à trouver refuge ailleurs, dans une zone de conflit ou sur une terre asséchée. Les pays de la planète (les plus riches, avant tout) devront les accueillir ou alors investir dans l’adaptation climatique, la gouvernance et la stabilité économique afin de les aider à demeurer chez eux ou non loin de leur région.

Le statu quo est impossible et nous mène droit vers un mur. Seule une migration ordonnée permettra à ces déplacés de trouver une vie meilleure en toute sécurité, mais aussi, et surtout, aux gouvernements qui les accueillent de mieux gérer leur intégration et leur arrivée.

Source: Vastel: Quelqu’un devra bien prendre soin des migrants de la vague qui s’en vient

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Alberta, and the rest of Canada, are woefully unprepared for the coming immigration boom 

2023/07/17 Leave a comment

Over focus on the challenge to settlement agencies compared to the real physical and workforce challenges in housing, healthcare and infrastructure. Settlement service stats have been largely flat compared to the pre-pandemic period, suggesting less demand than stated:

There’s a long list of reasons for Canada to open its arms to newcomers from around the world – but when you invite half a million new people to the country every year, you better be prepared. And it’s looking more and more like we’re not.

It goes beyond the affordable-housing crunch and whether everyone will have access to primary health care. Now, some of the Calgary agencies that help people get settled in the country say uncertainty about funding from the federal government is leading to long waiting lists and layoffs.

“It’s always been a challenge, but I’ve never seen it like this. Never,” said Shirley Philips, interim chief executive at Immigrant Services Calgary, who has decades of experience in the sector.

ISC said they will receive less money from Ottawa – which makes up the majority of their funding – this fiscal year than last year. Contract updates from the federal government don’t reflect increased demand even as Alberta’s largest city grows by leaps and bounds, and so job vacancies won’t be filled.

Newcomers are already facing a 55-day wait to get a language proficiency assessment done, Ms. Philips said. And then four to six months to get into English classes after that. As demand continues to grow, she fears those wait times will stretch longer.

“You’ve got this talent pool that Canada says they want in their country, but we’re doing very little even at the basic level of language, employment services and housing.”

Another agency, the Centre for Newcomers, has laid off about 65 people – almost a quarter of its staff – in recent weeks. Chief program officer Kelly Ernst said the issue is a delay in contract updates with the federal government, which would provide a flow of money based on higher demand. He’s worried about some people falling through the cracks, as was the case for a newly arrived Ukrainian family he said his agency found living on the streets of Calgary last week.

“We served over 35,000 people last year, and if this continues, we’re going to break that record again this year,” Mr. Ernst said.

For its part, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said planned investment for settlement services in Alberta is increasing by 6 per cent this year, to nearly $133-million.

“These investments align with Alberta’s proportion of all permanent resident landings,” the federal department said in a statement to The Globe and Mail.

IRCC did not comment on the situation for individual agencies, but added it has “in the past, adjusted investments over the course of the year to respond to pressures, such as an influx of newcomers, and when additional funding becomes available.”

Overall, the department’s budget is being reduced beginning this fiscal year. Temporary programs are being wound down, including the commitment to resettle at least 40,000 Afghans by the end of this year, and provisions for Ukrainians making their way to Canada.

The problem is, settlement agencies say, Afghans and Ukrainians are still coming and they still need help getting acclimatized in Canada – as do many more from all around the world.

The numbers are huge. The federal government is aiming to welcome between 410,000 and 505,000 new permanent residents this year, between 430,000 and 542,500 in 2024, and between 442,500 and 550,000 in 2025. Canada is well on its way to reaching – or exceeding – those ambitious goals, with Statistics Canada saying the country welcomed 145,417 immigrants in the first quarter of 2023, the highest number for any quarter on record. (There was also a net gain of 155,300 non-permanent residents in the first quarter.)

It’s unclear whether Calgary immigration agencies are alone in their struggle for federal funding. Edmonton MP and cabinet minister Randy Boissonnault said he’s not hearing the same concerns in Alberta’s capital.

On a percentage basis, the Alberta population is growing at a rate not seen for more than a century – back to a time when prairie sod houses were a perfectly acceptable form of housing. The provincial population has increased by 200,000 in the past 12 months, standing at more than 4.7 million. The numbers are surging in part because of interprovincial migration, but mostly as a result of new arrivals from outside of Canada.

Another factor that might not be fully quantified is that many immigrants land in Ontario or Quebec, and then make their way to Alberta – often Calgary – when they find out housing is less expensive and there’s plentiful work. This “secondary migration” might not be reflected in federal funding to settlement agencies, their leaders say.

Canada is built on immigration. There is a moral imperative for the country to help those whose lives have been torn apart by war or deeply regressive governments. Climate change is likely to force the movement of millions more.

There are also economic reasons to welcome immigrants. The country badly needs workers – everyone from medical professionals to home builders to child care providers. Canada also needs younger workers, as the country’s population grows greyer.

“We actually need a million people a year. But that would definitely crack the system,” Mr. Boissonnault said.

Calgary immigration agencies are looking to increase their budgets through private donations. And the Alberta government said in its budget that it would provide an extra $7-million over three years for settlement and language supports, on top of some regular funding. That money will start to flow by year’s end.

It all might not be fast enough. It’s already a struggle to provide affordable housing for everyone. The Bank of Canada acknowledged this as it hiked interest rates again this week, in part in another desperate attempt to dampen what appears insatiable demand for real estate in the country.

And beyond finding everyone a place to live, not having basic settlement services in place to help people as they arrive on this scale is indefensible. The soaring political messaging from Ottawa on immigration needs to come with solid support for the agencies doing the on-the-ground work.

Source: Alberta, and the rest of Canada, are woefully unprepared for the coming immigration boom

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