Egypt Spars With Dutch Museum Over Ancient History

2023/06/20 Leave a comment

Of interest, cultural appropriation dispute and the complexities of history and identities.

I remember I once made the mistake of telling an Egyptian diplomat that I found Egypt and Iran both the most sophisticated societies in the Mid-East, intending it as a compliment (I have lived in both) and she was horrified by the comparison:

A new Dutch museum exhibit declares, “Egypt is a part of Africa,” which might strike most people who have seen a map of the world as an uncontroversial statement.

But the show at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden goes beyond geography. It explores the tradition of Black musicians — Beyoncé, Tina Turner, Nas and others — drawing inspiration and pride from the idea that ancient Egypt was an African culture. The exhibit is framed as a useful corrective to centuries of cultural erasure of Africans.

What might sound empowering in the United States and thought-provoking in the Netherlands, however, is anathema to Egypt’s government and many of its people, who have flooded the museum’s Facebook and Google pages with complaints — occasionally racist ones — about what they see as Western appropriation of their history.

Many Egyptians do not see themselves as African at all, identifying much more closely with the predominantly Arab and Muslim nations of the Middle East and North Africa, and many look down on darker-skinned Egyptians and sub-Saharan Africans. And some feel that it is their culture and history that are being erased in the Western quest to correct historical racism.

The exhibit “attacks Egyptians’ civilization and heritage” and “distorts Egyptian identity,” a member of Parliament, Ahmed Belal, said in a speech on May 2, soon after the exhibit opened and around the time similar fireworks erupted over a Netflix docudrama portraying the ancient Greek-Egyptian queen Cleopatra as Black.

Within weeks, perhaps aware of the appeal to its nationalist supporters, Egypt’s government acted. The authority that oversees all things ancient Egypt informed the Leiden museum’s team of archaeologists, including the show’s half-Egyptian curator, that they could no longer excavate in Egypt. Until then, Dutch Egyptologists had been working in the ancient tombs of Sakkara since 1975.

“If you don’t respect our culture or our heritage, then we will not cooperate with you until you do,” said Abdul Rahim Rihan, an Egyptian archaeologist who leads a group called the Campaign to Defend Egyptian Civilization.

Suggestions that ancient Egypt is a cultural ancestor of modern-day Black people are central to some forms of Afrocentrism, a cultural and political movement that arose to push back against often racist, colonialist ideas about supposed inferiority of African civilizations to European ones. Black people, in this telling, could be proud of their roots in the ancient kingdom that built some of the world’s greatest splendors.

But for Egyptians, it all adds up to a wounded sense that, just as Westerners plundered antiquities like the Rosetta Stone from Egypt and hogged the credit for discovering them in centuries past, they are once again seizing control of ancient Egypt from Egyptians themselves.

The museum exhibit, “Kemet: Egypt in Hip-Hop, Jazz, Soul & Funk,” looks at how Afrocentrism has played out in music. Beyoncé and Rihanna have adorned themselves as Nefertiti, the ancient queen of Egypt; Nina Simone said she believed she was Nefertiti reincarnate; and Ms. Turner once sang about being Queen Hatshepsut — an ancient Egyptian pharaoh — in a past life.

The cover art for Nas’s 1999 album “I Am …” sculpts his features into King Tutankhamen’s famous golden mask. Miles Davis, Prince and Erykah Badu have all borrowed inspiration from the pharaohs for lyrics, jewelry and more.

“Kemet,” the ancient Egyptians’ word for their country, even commissioned an audio tour in Dutch, English and Arabic narrated by Typhoon, a Dutch rapper, as well as a new song by the Dutch rapper Nnelg about his connection to ancient Egypt.

Typhoon acknowledges on the tour that the musicians’ perspectives are “not the only way to think about ancient Egypt,” but he goes on to present the exhibit nonetheless as a correction of history.

“Although television programs and films in the Netherlands and in the U.S. often project only a certain image of Egypt to the public, dark-skinned people lived there as well, both in the past and the present,” he says.

The show, whose curator, Daniel Soliman, is half-Egyptian, appended a statement to the exhibit’s description online in response to the “commotion” on social media. It said it was seeking to explain “why ancient Egypt is important to these artists and musicians and from which cultural and intellectual movements the music emerged.”

Representatives for the museum declined to comment beyond the statement. But those defending the show have pointed out that most of the critics have not visited it.

For Egyptians, just how touchy this subject is became clear during the controversy over Netflix’s “Queen Cleopatra” series, when an Egyptian lawyer called for banning the streaming service in Egypt and the government dismissed the show as a “falsification of Egyptian history.”

Part of their anger may also stem from colorism: Some Egyptians tend to identify light skin with the elite, perhaps the result of age-old beauty standards that prize light skin and of centuries of rule by lighter-skinned conquerors from Europe and Turkey.

Egyptians’ fury centers in part on one Afrocentrist idea, by no means embraced by all who subscribe to Afrocentrism, that the Arabs who invaded Egypt in the seventh century displaced the true African Egyptians.

“This is an attack on the Egyptian identity,” said Dr. Rihan, the Egyptian archaeologist. “It’s not about skin color,” he added. “When you say things like that,” he said, “you’re taking the Egyptians out of their own history, against all evidence.”

Dr. Soliman began working on excavations in Egypt as a student before joining the museum. He is one of the leaders of the museum-affiliated team that normally spends weeks each year in the village of Sakkara, just south of Cairo, excavating tombs of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis.

Unlike European- or American-led archaeological digs of the past — witness the photographs of Howard Carter’s famous discovery of King Tut’s tomb — the Leiden archaeological team is careful to highlight the contributions of Egyptian workers, featuring them prominently in photographs and online diaries about each season’s excavations. Those efforts are in keeping with a growing trend in Egyptology toward giving Egyptians, once overlooked in the study of their own country’s history, more prominence in the field.

But that mattered little after word of Dr. Soliman’s exhibit spread.

The Dutch museum appeared slightly stunned by the tone of the social media criticism, noting that, while it welcomed “respectful dialogue,” racist or offensive comments would be removed.

Scholars tend to study ancient Egypt as a part of the Mediterranean world, with cultural and political links to Greece and Rome, as well as with Nubia, which roughly coincides with modern-day Sudan.

Though there is no scientific consensus on ancient Egyptians’ appearance or ethnic ancestry, many classicists say it is inappropriate to talk about race in that era at all, given that the ancients did not classify people as we do now.

Modern-day Egyptians, like the dialect they speak, descend from a family tree of many branches. Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks and Albanians all conquered Egypt centuries ago. Circassians arrived as slaves, Levantine Arabs and Western Europeans as businesspeople. Nubians still live in southern Egypt.

But it is Islam and the Arabic language that predominate now, uniting Egypt with the mostly Arab and Muslim Middle East and North Africa rather than with the rest of the continent it sits on.

“Egypt is in a category of its own,” said David Abulafia, a Cambridge University historian who studies the ancient world. “With the lumping of everyone together, nuance has often been lost in the way African history is presented, as a bloc.”

But for Typhoon, the Dutch rapper, Egyptian exceptionalism feeds on discredited European theories that were “used to determine which ancient cultures were deemed important and thus couldn’t belong to Africa,” he says in the audio tour.

Such theories, he says, “separated ancient Egypt from its African context.”

Source: Egypt Spars With Dutch Museum Over Ancient History

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How the U.S. Census Penalizes Arab Americans

2023/06/20 Leave a comment

Interesting history to the lack of a Middle Eastern and North Africa (MENA) category (in Canada, Arab and West Asian) and the reasons why needed:

The exact number of Middle Eastern residents in the United States is unclear, with estimates ranging from 1.8 to 3.7 million people. The uncertainty is not primarily due to undocumented immigration, poor data maintenance, or limited survey reach, but how the U.S. Census Bureau classifies individuals of Middle Eastern descent. While federal demographic databases typically include five categories (Hispanic, non-Hispanic White, African American/Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaska Native), those of Middle Eastern ancestry do not fit neatly into any of these groups. The federal government and the U.S. Census Bureau address this concern by classifying white as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.”

This categorization originated from the 19th-century wave of Arab immigration when being classified as white in the United States provided clear advantages such as access to citizenship, legislative programs, and governmental employment. Arab immigrants campaigned to avoid being categorized as Asian, and arguments were made based on Social Darwinism and Christian superiority, as the majority of the initial immigrants were Christian Arabs. They argued that if Jesus, who was from the same region, was the son of God and at the top of the social pyramid alongside Anglo-Saxons, then Lebanese and Syrian immigrants were also white.

This theory faced legal challenges in 1909 when George Shishim, a Lebanese American police officer in L.A. County, arrested the son of a prominent lawyer. The lawyer and his son argued that Shishim, due to his Asian race, was not a U.S. citizen and had no right to arrest U.S. citizens. At the time, Shishim argued, “If I am Mongolian, then so was Jesus, because we came from the same land.” Arab American community leaders rallied around Shishim and hired attorney Byron C. Hanna. In response to the argument, Judge Hutton of the Superior Court of Los Angeles ruled that Shishim was eligible for citizenship and that Lebanese and Syrians belonged to the “white race.” This classification gradually extended to all individuals of Middle Eastern and North African descent across the United States.

While this classification initially benefited Arab Americans, it presented challenges in policy formulation as the United States embraced multiculturalism. Arab individuals are not commonly viewed as white and often have different socio-cultural backgrounds. These differences have significant policy implications. For example, if policymakers or researchers wanted to study alcohol consumption prevalence among Arab residents in California, public health data would not provide specific categories for Arab and European respondents. This lack of differentiation makes crafting effective policy increasingly difficult. Sociology professor Kristine J. Ajrouch, who studies Alzheimer’s disease among Arab Americans, faces this difficulty in her research. “[The current classifications] make it very difficult to identify Middle Eastern and North African individuals or those of Arab ancestry.”

The current categorization prevents Arab Americans from accessing policy programs designed for minority groups. Minority-owned businesses often receive specific advantages in government contracts through local, state, and federal programs. Despite being a minority group, Arab-owned businesses do not benefit from these programs. Legislative actions, such as Executive Order 13769, labeled the “Muslim travel ban” by critics 0f the former Trump administration, which disproportionately impacted travel from many Arab countries, have targeted Arab communities, raising the question of whether Arab Americans are viewed and treated as white. Samer Khalaf, President of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, believes otherwise, arguing, “We’re counted as ‘white,’ but we’re not treated as ‘white.’ We have the ‘no-fly’ lists, and we’re subjected to heightened security wherever we go.”

However, there is a possibility of change in the 2030 Census, as it might include a “Middle Eastern or North African” option. During preparations for the 2020 Census, researchers concluded that a MENA category “helps respondents to more accurately report their MENA identities.” However, a lack of approval from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during the Trump administration prevented the implementation of this plan. In 2021, the Biden administration confirmed that it had reviewed the proposal. If the OMB approves a MENA classification before the finalization of the 2030 Census, it could appear on the nationwide survey for the first time in U.S. history.

Racial categorization is an ever-evolving concept in the United States, and the classification of white has often been contentious. However, beyond symbolic portrayals of group identity, this categorization has significant legislative implications. Not tracking the unique cultural, linguistic, and social patterns found in Arab communities hinders the creation of effective policy. Cities and states across the United States must act and include a Middle Eastern and North African racial option on official surveys in order to pursue effective legislation.

Source: How the U.S. Census Penalizes Arab Americans

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No One Ever Made the Case for Reparations Better Than Reagan

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

And it was under Conservative PM Mulroney that Canada also issued an official apology and payments for Japanese internment in Canada, along with the creation of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation:

Today, as Californians consider a reparations package that could reach $800 billion to pay for the harm the state has done to its African-American population on matters ranging from over-policing to housing discrimination, there’s a pro-reparations argument that needs to be revived. It’s that made by Ronald Reagan 35 years ago.

With California’s Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans getting ready to submit a draft of its report to the state legislature by late June, Reagan’s argument has become more relevant than ever. “For here we right a wrong,” Reagan declared in 1988, as his second term as president was nearing its end. Reagan spoke these words to mark his signing of a bill designed to provide restitution for the World War II internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry.

At a time when those making the case for reparations are accused of being woke, we forget the heartfelt case for payments combining restitution and reparations that Reagan made without fearing he would lose his credentials as a political conservative.

The decision to remove Japanese Americans from their homes during World War II reflected long standing anti-Asian prejudices. The Roosevelt administration contended that Japanese Americans posed a danger to the country in case of a Japanese attack on America’s West Coast. But there was no comparable treatment of German Americans or Italian Americans despite the United States also being at war with Germany and Italy.

Reagan’s speech is one that few want to recall because of the racism it calls attention to, but the speech is a lesson in how to deal with history we would like to have back. At the speech’s core lies Reagan’s belief that, while we cannot undo the wrongs of the past, we can mitigate their continuing impact.

In his address to the nation in 1988, Reagan managed to apologize for government wrongdoing and argue that his apology left America stronger. “So what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor,” Reagan declared. “We reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.”

The timing of Reagan’s speech is noteworthy. It came decades before the Supreme Court in 2018 explicitly repudiated the Roosevelt-era Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision sanctioning the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. In words that echo Reagan’s, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. described Korematsu as “morally repugnant” and “gravely wrong the day it was decided.”

Prior to 2018 the strongest legal dissent from the Korematsu decision was the “confession of error” that the Justice Department issued in 2011 when it acknowledged the misleading role the Solicitor General had played in 1944 in defending the internment of Japanese Americans.

Reagan began his 1988 speech by describing the cruelty of the internment that the government was now seeking to redress. He spoke of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry being removed from their homes and placed in makeshift internment camps solely because of their race.

The rush to internment began on February 19, 1942, 73 days after the United States entered World War II when President Franklin Roosevelt issued Order 9066. The order came with so little planning that for a time Japanese-American families were interned in the horse stables at Santa Anita race track. In his address Reagan believed it was important not to sugarcoat the emotional and economic impact of internment.

The redress for Japanese Americans interned during World War II has meant tax-free payments of $20,000 to more than 82,000 claimants as a result of the 1988 act. The total amounts to over $1.6 billion.

Reagan was not put off by the cost of restitution, which in fact falls short of the amount of money lost by the men and women interned in the 1940s when put in current dollars. At the heart of Reagan’s speech was his belief that “no payment can make up for those lost years.”

Thirteen years after Ronald Reagan’s White House speech, the National Japanese-American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II opened in Washington on June 29, 2001. Unlike the memorials on the National Mall, the National Japanese-American Memorial does not immediately draw attention to itself. The memorial sits just north of the Capitol on a small triangle of land at the intersection of New Jersey Avenue and D Street.

The 33,000 square-foot park and plaza that hold the memorial invite contemplation. Designed by Washington, D.C. architect Davis Buckley, the memorial, like Reagan’s speech, makes a point of being direct and elegiac about the injustices it addresses. On one of its walls are the names of the 10 internment camps where Japanese Americans were held during World War II, and at the center of the memorial is a bronze sculpture, “The Golden Cranes,” by Nina Akamu, whose grandfather died in an internment camp. Her sculpture consists of two cranes struggling to break free of the barbed wire that entangles them.

“The burden of righting a historic wrong sanctioned by the government does not simply fall on those responsible for the wrong at the time it was committed.”

Ronald Reagan was not able to attend the opening of the Japanese-American Memorial, but he is present there. Words from his 1988 speech are inscribed on the edge of the memorial pool.

Reagan concluded his speech by recalling the time he attended a 1945 medal ceremony in Orange County, California, at which World War II General Joe Stillwell honored a Japanese-American military hero of the war in Europe with a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross. Reagan’s role at the 1945 medal ceremony, like that of the other celebrities there, was a minor one, but decades later, he saw his presence at the ceremony worth addressing.

In doing so, Reagan was not just personalizing his speech. He was making clear a lesson in continuity that is easy to forget: the burden of righting a historic wrong sanctioned by the government does not simply fall on those responsible for the wrong at the time it was committed. It falls on a state or nation owning up to its past.

Nicolaus Mills is author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America. He is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College.

Source: No One Ever Made the Case for Reparations Better Than Reagan

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As Juneteenth Goes National, We Must Preserve the Local

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

Interesting commentary, noting that “something’s lost, but something’s gained” in the creation of a national holiday:

It’s been two years since Juneteenth became a federal holiday, one we can celebrate together as a nation. The signing of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law in 2021 was an expression of real progress in the collective understanding of Black struggle that reinforced our national ideals of liberty and dignity. But I confess my ambivalence. I am worried about what official national recognition might do to what has always been a community-based holiday.

My own memories of Juneteenth, like those of so many others, are distinctly local. They are rooted in a sense of place.

When I was young, that place was Eden Park, high on the hills along the Ohio River in Cincinnati, where I would spend the day contentedly with my mother and the many other families who attended. Years later, after I formed a family of my own with my spouse (who is not Black or Midwestern, but Native American from Montana), discovering where Juneteenth events were held, who organized them and who turned out was like holding a black light to the invisible-inked map of the present and past African American community.

When we moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., to start jobs at the university there, we kept an eye out for the flyers popping up on market bulletin boards and wooden street posts. Following these notices like a marked trail, we wound up at a park in a neighborhood near the Huron River and railroad tracks. The celebration we found there was small and free of charge, with clusters of families gathered to cook out, listen to music on boomboxes and enjoy the summer day outdoors. We felt welcome and accepted.

The location of this small event, it turned out, was an old Black neighborhood that was changing over time as residents from different racial backgrounds and income levels moved in for the river views. But even amid this demographic flux, the area retained its historic character. It was here that Black University of Michigan students who faced housing discrimination near campus in the late 1800s and early 1900s could rent rooms in boardinghouses and where older Black homeowners still had vast lots where they cultivated thick gardens full of emerald collard green rows. If it had not been for that Juneteenth event, my husband and I would have missed the historic and communal character of this neighborhood, the place where we went on to buy our first home in the city two years later and rock our infant twins to sleep.

Juneteenth festivities have long represented tucked-away spaces, deeply local, somewhat surprising and fitted to the variances of Black life in America. They have supported micro-cultures of Black crafts and local economies of neighborhood enterprise, fostering the kind of community exchange that will be most sustainable in the future. Whether they are rural or urban, their local specificity, and their hiddenness from those who would misunderstand their gravity, have made Juneteenth events special and enduring.

The best-known Juneteenth locale and origin story is the one that has given the holiday its name, originating in Galveston, Texas, with Major General Gordon Granger’s June 19, 1865, announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, issued two years earlier. His announcement informed enslaved people, who had been denied information as well as their rights, that freedom had come. In other parts of the country, Black communities celebrated what they called Emancipation Day, keyed to a different historical timestamp. Most often, this day commemorated the end of slavery in the West Indies in 1833 (effective August 1834).

Many Black communities along the Atlantic seaboard celebrated Emancipation Day. Among them was Boston’s longstanding, politically active population, which, the historian Jacqueline Jones has shown in her new book, “No Right to an Honest Living,” was made up of free families extending back to the end of slavery in Massachusetts in the 1780s, freedom-seekers and recent refugees from the South and immigrants from the Caribbean. Boston’s Emancipation Day tradition has re-emerged under the banner of Juneteenth as local organizations like the Museum of African American History celebrate the holiday in the heart of the historic Black community situated around the African Meeting House on the narrow lanes of Beacon Hill.

On the island of Nantucket, a petite slip of fog-dipped land beyond Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, M.A.A.H. is extending this Juneteenth observance. There, Juneteenth will be celebrated in the historic building of another African Meeting House, which will have a bicentennial anniversary in 2025. A Black and Wampanoag whaling community built the structure as a multipurpose church and school in a neighborhood called New Guinea in the 1820s. As one of the oldest buildings constructed by a free Black community in this country, Nantucket’s African Meeting House has just been awarded a capital project grant from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The celebration of Juneteenth on Nantucket will highlight the precious history of a place where people of African and Indigenous descent joined together as families and made a living off the bounty of the sea.

Two thousand-plus miles west of Massachusetts, Montanans will also observe a refashioned Juneteenth holiday this year. Perhaps like Nantucket and the Massachusetts Cape and Islands, Montana is largely imagined by the rest of the country as a white place (with only a glancing acknowledgment of the significant Indigenous populations and histories there). But Montana also has a long and complex Black history, which has only recently been reconstructed through a multimedia project of the Montana Historical Society.

A handful of Black fur traders crossed into the Rocky Mountain West in the mid-19th century, but most African Americans migrated to Montana after the Civil War. In the 1870s and 1880s, Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth and 10th Cavalry Regiments and the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments moved west to man forts. Black women sometimes accompanied their soldiering husbands and at other times arrived with white officers or white families to work as domestics. As the Black population grew in Montana in the late 19th century and early 20th century, tens of thousands of people formed communities in or near cities such as Havre, Great Falls, Butte and Helena. There they followed the demonstrated pattern of African American priorities, erecting schools and churches and developing practices of mutual aid. Some of these Black newcomers married into Indigenous families, navigating dual and triple allegiances. As the historian Anthony Wood has detailed in his 2021 book “Black Montana,” African American residents in the city of Butte celebrated Emancipation Day with a pilgrimage by train into the snow-peaked mountains, where they enjoyed picnics, fun and frivolities.

In the Great Plains states of Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota and Wyoming, Black residents gathered to observe Emancipation Day, too. These were people who had moved from the cotton-belt and rice-field South to form rural settlements on acreage opened through the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862 (a law that distributed ill-gotten Native lands). As shown in a research project led by Richard Edwards at the University of Nebraska Center for Great Plains Studies, African Americans in the region ritualized emancipation as a communal act of remembrance.

Celebrations across the Great Plains and in Montana most likely commemorated not the well-known Galveston, Texas, moment, or even the British West Indies moment, but instead a closer, regional history: August of 1865, later formalized in the Treaty of 1866, when African-descended people owned by Native Americans of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in nearby Indian Territory (present-day eastern Oklahoma) were freed from bondage.

In 2023, for the second year in a row, the Montana Historical Society, in partnership with the Holter Museum of Art and the Myrna Loy theater, will host a free Juneteenth festival, drawing on a local history of diversity and perseverance. Based in Helena, these activities include a trolley ride (reminiscent of those Butte train rides more than a century ago), a tour of Black historic sites, a documentary film about an 1897 cross-country journey by Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry to test whether bikes could replace horses, a dance, food and a teenage art workshop.

Juneteenth celebrations mounted by groups on the ground grow out of these rich histories, help us to recognize them and illuminate pathways toward greater understanding and connection where people live, work and visit.

But the day’s new national recognition has brought a level of commercialization that threatens to eclipse these local celebrations, in all their wondrous specificity. Today we can find Juneteenth T-shirts aplenty at Walmart, a Juneteenth makeup sale courtesy of an online boutique and apparel on Etsy boasting the ironic claim “Culture Not for Sale” in Kwanzaa colors. In just two years, we’ve already seen examples of how this kind of rapid commercialization can go awry. In 2021 Target had to admit that a Juneteenth display of hot sauce, Kool-Aid and watermelon “missed the mark,” and Walmart apologized in 2022 for making and marketing Juneteenth ice cream.

When we allow corporations and distant event planners to hijack Juneteenth, we lose the texture of these various places and their particular commemorations. We share the responsibility to prevent that.

In the middle of the Civil War, in October of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln inaugurated Thanksgiving Day (in a proclamation written by Secretary of State William Henry Seward, after long-term lobbying by the writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale). We know this Thanksgiving vision was exclusionary, advancing what the historian David Silverman has described as a false narrative about Indigenous and English settler relations. But over time, the practice of the holiday has had the unifying impact of bringing people of diverse heritages together around a shared identity and a meal, creating a sense of both commonality and intimacy. Resisting homogenization and commodification, Thanksgiving gatherings orient toward relationships. Families, friends and neighbors converge in homes, churches, community centers and shelters for unhoused people to break bread and express gratitude, a ritual of connection.

With care and concerted effort, the Juneteenth holiday might rival Thanksgiving as a new communal ritual, highlighting the value of shared freedoms as our workweek tempo slows and personal rhythms align, even as we notice and cherish the treasure of each distinct celebration. In these right-size gatherings in parks, on blocks, at town greens and city squares, we can gain so much more than kitschy displays and logo T-shirts — loneliness dispelled, neighborhoods sustained and a torn national fabric slowly darned from the inside out.

For the sake of our history and maybe our country, we should let a thousand Juneteenths bloom.

Source: As Juneteenth Goes National, We Must Preserve the Local

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GOLDSTEIN: Ex-spy chief warned of China’s interference in 2010 — he was almost fired

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

Remember the controversy well during my time at the multiculturalism program and agree with Goldstein that his warning was prescient:

Thirteen years ago, the then newly-appointed director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service warned Canadians about the growing threat of interference by China.

It almost ended Richard Fadden’s career. It’s also why he would be an excellent choice to head a public inquiry into foreign interference today.

In 2010, he warned us that politicians and public servants were under the influence of Beijing, that China was exerting influence on Canadians of Chinese origin and that academic relationships between Canadian universities and China were another source of interference.

Based on what we now know, what Fadden said was mild. He focused mainly on attempts by China to interfere through gestures of so-called friendship, rather than threats.

But back then, few wanted to listen.

Not the majority of MPs or in the media, who condemned Fadden for everything from raising the issue without clearing it with the government, to fomenting hatred against Canadians of Chinese origin.

Today, it is the Chinese diaspora community in Canada who are at the forefront of calls for a public inquiry because they have been the primary targets and victims of Beijing’s interference.

Fadden initially commented publicly about foreign interference in response to a question after a speech he gave in March 2010 at Toronto’s Royal Canadian Military Institute to police, military and intelligence and security officials.

“There are several municipal politicians in British Columbia and in at least two provinces there are ministers of the Crown whom we think are under at least the general influence of a foreign government,” Fadden said. “They have no idea. It’s just a long-standing relationship. “You develop friendships, it’s what I do, in reverse and they’re very good at it.”

Very few people would ever have heard Fadden’s comment if CSIS hadn’t filmed his entire speech and given it to the CBC for an upcoming feature on CSIS’ 25th anniversary.

When that documentary aired three months later in June, the CBC’s Brian Stewart asked Fadden to elaborate on foreign interference.

Fadden expanded his prior comments to include attempts by some countries to establish influence programs with universities and social clubs by donating money to them, pressuring members of their diaspora communities using everything from friendly gestures to threats to toe the government line abroad, to warnings of deportation of visiting university students if they publicly criticized their homelands.

The CBC did a follow-up interview with Fadden the next day, where he confirmed to an incredulous Peter Mansbridge that he was mainly talking about China and that its attempted influence was municipal and provincial at that point, not federal.

After that, all hell broke loose with a Commons committee controlled by the opposition parties in the then minority Conservative government, demanding PM Stephen Harper, who appointed Fadden, condemn his remarks and fire him for, among other things, not pre-clearing his comments with the government.

Fadden survived and went on to become Harper’s national security advisor before retiring after the Liberals won the 2015 election.

But what had happened set back any serious public conversation about combatting foreign interference in the Harper and Trudeau governments until Sam Cooper, formerly of Global News, now with thebureau.news, and Robert Fife and Steven Chase of the Globe and Mail began breaking stories beginning in November 2022, based on sources, that the federal government was downplaying warnings about interference

We should have listened to Fadden 13 years ago. Today, he supports a public inquiry.

Source: GOLDSTEIN: Ex-spy chief warned of China’s interference in 2010 — he was almost fired

Filed under foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

Of note:

In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.

They viewed the power shift and diversity as a symbolic but meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric that was a central theme of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

‘It’s brought us together’: at Ramadan, American Muslims on life in the age of Trump

This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.

Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.

In a tense monologue before the vote, Councilmember Mohammed Hassan shouted his justification at LGBTQ+ supporters: “I’m working for the people, what the majority of the people like.”

While Hamtramck is still viewed as a bastion of multiculturalism, the difficulties of local governance and living among neighbors with different cultural values quickly set in following the 2015 election. Some leaders and residents are now bitter political enemies engaged in a series of often vicious battles over the city’s direction, and the Pride flag controversy represents a crescendo in tension.

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

For about a century, Polish and Ukrainian Catholics dominated politics in Hamtramck, a city of 28,000 surrounded by Detroit. By 2013, largely Muslim Bangladeshi and Yemeni immigrants supplanted the white eastern Europeans, though the city remains home to significant populations of those groups, as well as African Americans, whites and Bosnian and Albanian Americans. According to the 2020 census some 30% to 38% of Hamtramck’s residents are of Yemeni descent, and 24% are of Asian descent, largely Bangladeshi.

After several years of diversity on the council, some see irony in an all-male, Muslim elected government that does not reflect the city’s makeup.

The resolution, which also prohibits the display of flags with ethnic, racist and political views, comes at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under assault worldwide, and other US cities have passed similar bans, with the vast majority driven by often white politically conservative Americans.

While the situation in Hamtramck largely evolved on its own local dynamics, some outside rightwing agitators connected to national Republican groups have been pushing for the ban on Hamtramck’s social media pages and voiced support for it at Tuesday’s meeting. They are from nearby Dearborn where they were part of an effort last year to ban books with LGBTQ+ themes.

Their talking points mirror those made elsewhere: some Hamtramck Muslims say they simply want to protect children, and gay people should “keep it in their home”.

But that sentiment is “an erasure of the queer community and an attempt to shove queer people back in the closet”, said Gracie Cadieux, a queer Hamtramck resident who is part of the Anti-Transphobic Action group.

Mayor Amer Ghalib, 43, who was elected in 2021 with 67% of the vote to become the nation’s first Yemeni American mayor, told the Guardian on Thursday he tries to govern fairly for everyone, but said LGBTQ+ supporters had stoked tension by “forcing their agendas on others”.

“There is an overreaction to the situation, and some people are not willing to accept the fact that they lost,” he said, referring to Majewski and recent elections that resulted in full control of the council by Muslim politicians.

Though the city’s Muslims are not a monolith and some privately told the Guardian they were “frustrated” with council, the only leader to publicly question it was the former city council member Amanda Jaczkowski, a Polish American who converted to Islam.

In a statement, she raised concerns about the move’s legality: “There are far too many questions to pass this today with any semblance of responsibility.”

On one level, the discord that has flared between Muslim and non-Muslim populations in recent years has its root in a culture clash that is unique to a partly liberal small US city now under conservative Muslim leadership, residents say. Last year, the council approved an ordinance allowing backyard animal sacrifices, shocking some non-Muslim residents even though animal sacrifice is protected under the first amendment in the US as a form of religious expression.

When Michigan legalized marijuana, it gave municipalities a late 2020 deadline to enact a prohibition of dispensaries. Hamtramck council missed the deadline and a dispensary opened, drawing outrage from conservative Muslims who demanded city leadership shut it down. That ignited counterprotests from many liberal residents, and the council only relented when it became clear it had no legal recourse.

At other times, the issues are not unique to Hamtramck. In the realm of local politics, personal fights among neighbors, warring factions and dirty politics are a common part of the democratic process across the US.

“I don’t know that we’re really all that different from other cities in most ways,” Majewski said.

However, race and religion add more fraught layers to Hamtramck’s issues. Islamophobia exists here, and some Muslims say they saw bigotry in local voter fraud investigations, and in LGBTQ+ supporters not respecting their religion.

But Majewski said the majority is now disrespecting the minority. She noted that a white, Christian-majority city council in 2005 created an ordinance to allow the Muslim call to prayer to be broadcast from the city’s mosques five times daily. It did so over objections of white city residents, and Majewski said she didn’t see the same reciprocity with roles reversed.

Ghalib disagreed, and labeled the prayer broadcast a “first amendment issue” while noting no one was asking for city hall to broadcast the calls.

Moreover, the white majority council was not always hospitable to Muslim residents who have previously faced overt racism. And with a majority-Muslim council in place, more Muslims had been appointed to boards and commissions, and hired in city hall. So had some LGBTQ+ residents, Ghalib added.

Despite the political clashes, he thinks there is hope for Hamtramck to live up to its multicultural ideals.

“We can get along and people are not violent here,” he said.

Cadieux agreed peaceful coexistence was possible.

“We aren’t in the business of excluding people from our society and I’m not going to exclude socially conservative Muslims – they have a place at the table just like everyone else,” she said. “However, they cannot, and will not, shove another community out of the way.”

Source: ‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

With new “talent visas,” other countries lure workers trained at U.S. universities

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

Of note and good overview:

When Cansu (pronounced “Johnsu”) Deniz Bayrak was deciding where to emigrate from her native Turkey, she first considered San Francisco.

Only in her 20s, she had already co-created an e-commerce website that rose to the top of its category in her home country, gotten snatched up by a tech company, then been poached by another tech firm. But she saw more opportunity in the United States, where there is a projected demand for more than 160,000 new software developers and related specialists per year, and where tech companies said in a survey that recruiting them is their biggest business challenge.

Bayrak quickly learned, however, that to come to the United States, she’d need an employer sponsor. Even then, she’d have to enter a lottery for an H-1B visa, with only one-in-four odds of being approved. If she was laid off, she’d have 60 days to find a new job, or she’d likely have to leave.

Source: Highly skilled workers thwarted by the U.S. immigration system find …

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Clark: The mandate letter Trudeau’s ministers must have received

2023/06/17 Leave a comment

On the lighter side, good pointed satire:

Dec. 31, 2021

Dear ministers,

From the beginning, our government has been seized with its responsibility to act on important information brought to the attention of ministers. However, too much information is being brought to the attention of ministers, making them appear responsible for acting on it.

At the outset of our third term I am issuing this supplementary mandate letter to ministers regarding the handling of documents and information.

Previous protocols have proven inadequate, as noted when the Ombudsman of the Department of National Defence attempted to present written allegations of sexual misconduct by the then-chief of the defence staff to the former minister of defence, Harjit Sajjan.

Although Mr. Sajjan’s instincts were correct, his response on that occasion – shouting “No” and walking away – left the impression that he could have taken more responsibility. Mr. Sajjan will now take on new functions, but, lessons learned, he was careful not to read too many e-mails in his remaining time as defence minister, even when Afghanistan was falling to the Taliban.

Moving forward, ministers are reminded of their duty to ensure proper information flow.

Briefing notes and e-mails are regularly sent to ministerial offices and must be triaged by staff to ensure only appropriate material is forwarded to busy ministers.

This is particularly the case for ministers responsible for autonomous entities in sensitive areas, such as new Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, whose portfolio includes intelligence, police and corrections agencies.

A Public Safety Minister who receives written advice from police would find it more difficult to speak publicly about the advice he or she did not receive verbally. Several organizations in the portfolio have the potential to inform the Minister of inconvenient situations, such as the transfer of a notorious murderer to medium-security prison.

Staff should ensure that e-mails and memos in the three “no-no” categories – nothing we can do, nothing we want to do, and nothing we want to know about – are kept from the Minister’s eyes.

Staff who receive such e-mails will have ample time to prepare talking points for the Minister expressing her or his shock at the news, with a promise to review the process for the future.

Intelligence matters are of the utmost importance and secret information must be managed carefully to ensure the wrong kind is not presented to the Minister. Intelligence memos are to be categorized as either “for action” or “for awareness.”

“For action” reports are, by their nature, never to be presented to ministers. They should instead forwarded to the appropriate intelligence-review officer’s desk (see org. chart fig. 8) for assignment to the responsible official, if any.

“For awareness” reports are critical in the intelligence-information system, and though their contents can be known, it cannot be known if the Minister is aware of them.

Such memos circulate information to intelligence consumers in a way that implies appropriate action has or will be taken without indicating how or by whom, increasing the number of people not responsible for not doing anything.

In limited cases, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service will determine when a specific item must be presented to the Minister of Public Safety in an issues-management note – a document that must be managed so it does not become an issue for the Minister.

This is done via a protocol established by former public safety minister Bill Blair, based conceptually on drawings of staircases by the artist M.C. Escher.

Under this protocol, CSIS “shares” highly-sensitive alerts, such as warnings about hostile states targeting members of Parliament, by transmitting notes for the Minister by a secure electronic-messaging system to which the Minister does not have access. Officials print such materials for the attention of the Minister but the Minister never lets the material be “shared” with him.

The shared-not-shared nexus is augmented by circulating the material to deputy ministers on vacation but, for security reasons, destroying it before their return. This ensures more people are not responsible for not getting the memo.

In keeping with the protocols above, ministers should ensure this letter is not shared with them, just as it has not been shared with me. Further guidance for appearances before parliamentary committees on such issues can be obtained by consulting the handbook for ministers entitled, “Not that I recall at this time.”

Signed,

[REDACTED] for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

Source: The mandate letter Trudeau’s ministers must have received

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Canada’s immigration system is overwhelmed with information requests. Ottawa was warned – but did nothing

2023/06/17 Leave a comment

Well worth reading given depth of analysis and extent of problem:

A few months into his job, Michael Olsen realized he had a problem.

As director-general of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s access to information division from 2014 to 2018, he was in charge of the teams collecting public servants’ e-mails, reports, presentations, memos and other documents in response to access requests. It was delicate work. Mr. Olsen likes to joke he was the most hated man in the entire department.

A worrying trend had emerged: The number of access requests to IRCC was growing – and that growth was accelerating. “Volumes were always higher,” Mr. Olsen said. “They were never coming down.”

Under the federal Access to Information Act, people can force the government to disclose records that would otherwise be inaccessible. This legal mechanism is intended to promote transparency and act as a check on power. In practice, using it means filling out an online form, paying a $5 fee, then waiting for documents to arrive. (In other jurisdictions, these are often called freedom of information requests.)

Roughly a decade ago, lawyers, consultants and individuals realized they could better navigate the immigration system by using access legislation. IRCC ordinarily provides immigration applicants with minimal information during the process; if their cases run into problems, they often have no easy way of finding out why. But the department is required to respond to access requests, and its answers can reveal why cases have been rejected or become stuck in abeyance.

This meant Mr. Olsen’s office was gradually being turned into an immigration case file retrieval-and-delivery operation.

He began warning his superiors. Each year, he gave presentations to senior management – the deputy minister, as well as their associates and assistants, who together make up the top public servants overseeing Canada’s immigration system – showing the blistering pace at which access requests were being filed.

“It looks like we’re going to hit a wall in three years,” he cautioned them in 2015. (That year, IRCC received 34,066 access requests.) A year later: “It looks like we’re going to hit a wall in two years.” (41,660 requests.) Twelve months later: “We’re going to hit a wall next year.” (50,728.) “I didn’t beat my shoe on the table or anything like that,” Mr. Olsen recalled. “I did say, ‘You can see the projections as well as I can.’” But changes that might have addressed the torrent of requests never came.

Eventually, IRCC hit that wall.

Over a decade, IRCC has seen a 763-per-cent increase in access requests, from roughly 20,000 in the fiscal year ending March, 2012, to about 177,000 in the 2022 fiscal year. The influx of filings has become so overwhelming that IRCC now accounts for 80 per cent of all access requests made to the federal government.

That onslaught will only worsen. Last year, the government announced it was aiming to admit a record 500,000 new permanent residents a year by 2025. (To put that number in perspective, in 2019 Canada admitted 341,000 permanent residents.) This would be in addition to the millions of permits, visas and authorizations issued each year to workers, students and visitors.

As IRCC strives to meet its aggressive new targets, critics and insiders say the department first needs to tame how it interacts with the access to information system, a relationship that has morphed into something beyond its control – bogging down its internal processes, costing taxpayers money and giving rise to a cottage industry of experts who flood the system with requests.

The volume of requests the department receives has also begun affecting areas outside immigration. IRCC’s ever-increasing appetite for access staff is straining an already limited pool of experts within the government, and a majority of federal access disputes handled by the Office of the Information Commissioner are now related to immigration requests. Other departments involved in immigration matters, such as the federal border agency, are also now facing higher request volumes.

In effect, the federal access to information system, which is supposed to hold the entire government to account, has been hijacked by the immigration system. Faced with an unending stream of requests, IRCC’s leadership – including several successive immigration ministers – have been slow to address the root causes of the deluge now threatening Canada’s immigration and access systems, according to internal government records obtained through access requests and interviews with more than 20 experts.

This is made all the more puzzling by the fact that IRCC has known of a potential solution for years, one that has been championed by many current and former public servants: Give applicants as much of their case files as possible without requiring access requests.

“I think you could say that there was a problem,” said Mr. Olsen, who retired in late 2018. “It was identified. Sadly, not enough has been done yet to address that problem.”

In a statement, IRCC spokesperson Rémi Larivière said the department “is striving to implement initiatives that will address the root causes of the increase in access requests and corresponding complaints.”

During any immigration process, applicants submit forms and supporting documentation, which are then reviewed by case officers. Often, those officers will need additional information, such as a security assessment from a different government department or additional banking information, before a case can proceed. This can put an application on hold for months – or years. In other instances, officers may not be satisfied by an applicant’s submission, and may issue a formal refusal letter.

IRCC’s communications with applicants are brief. If a file is on hold, there could be no correspondence whatsoever; if a file is rejected, the refusal letter may only include a sentence or two about why the application did not succeed.

In nearly every access request made to the department, the same database is searched: the Global Case Management System, IRCC’s bespoke immigration software. GCMS is the beating heart of Canadian immigration. The system stores submitted documents, tracks correspondence between IRCC and applicants and logs case officers’ comments.

These “GCMS notes,” as experts call them, are all drearily similar. They’re a lengthy list of application details, as if all the fields on a government form were unceremoniously dumped, line after line, into a document dozens of pages long. The most important information usually lies in the cryptic write-ups from case officers, which note status updates and issues with applications, such as missing documents.

GCMS, painstakingly built over many years to streamline operations, wasn’t designed to give people direct access to their case files. Applicants, lawyers and consultants, hungry for any information that would tell them what they needed to know to get a file moving again – or explain in detail why an application was rejected – realized these files were subject to federal access law. The requests poured in.

In 2021, 99 per cent of all the requests IRCC received were for immigration case files, according to an internal memo to Immigration Minister Sean Fraser. (The other 1 per cent of requests were for what the department refers to as “corporate records,” such as internal correspondence, communications, presentations – policy-oriented documents often requested by researchers, businesses and the media.)

To Robert Orr, assistant deputy minister of operations at IRCC from 2012 to 2017 and the person ultimately responsible for immigration processing, the department’s hands appeared to be tied as the number of immigration applications grew.

“Once we got into big volumes of applications, we had a choice: We either communicate with applicants about what’s happening, or we get on and process applications,” he said. “And so we were choosing the latter.”

“It had taken so long to develop GCMS that I was a bit reluctant from an operations point of view to start over, doing something that was new,” Mr. Orr continued. “We recognized the importance of giving as much information to people as we could, but we were struggling with the best way to do it.”

As director-general of access to information at IRCC, Mr. Olsen did not have the power to do anything about how much information was pre-emptively shared with prospective immigrants. Instead, he focused on wringing as much efficiency out of IRCC’s access process as he could. But those measures only went so far.

Access work at IRCC can be gruelling. In 2022, when the department received about 177,000 access requests, it had the equivalent of 122 full-time access employees, according to data from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. That’s roughly 1,460 files per person.

Ultimately, the issues that plague IRCC’s access unit come from outside – from a community of immigration professionals and applicants who have been unintentionally incentivized by IRCC to file access requests. Another issue is GCMS, an intricate and stubborn piece of software that is difficult to modify and more than a decade old.

There’s also a problem of political will.

“There’s immigration, and then there’s [access requests] about immigration,” Mr. Olsen said. “If a politician has to choose what to get right, what are they going to choose?”

“I think it’s fair to say that people had recognized the limitations of GCMS long before I left the department,” he continued. “But that’s a really big, really expensive item to throw at the government.”

Through his spokesperson, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser declined The Globe and Mail’s requests for an interview.

Manmeet Rai’s access to information empire began on an online forum.

In 2016, Mr. Rai, who had recently graduated from law school in the United States, was attempting to immigrate to Canada. He prepared and submitted the paperwork himself – given his legal background, he didn’t see the need to hire a lawyer or consultant. Months passed without an answer from IRCC.

Frustrated, he learned from an online immigration forum that an access request for his GCMS notes might tell him what he needed to know to get his file moving again. But there was a snag: Only citizens, permanent residents and other individuals or corporations currently in Canada are eligible to file federal access requests. Mr. Rai was none of these.

He found an online service that could serve as his proxy. It filed the request on his behalf and sent him the documents once they were available. He recalls it costing US$25, or $34, much more than the $5 fee charged by the government.

Mr. Rai, who had taken to helping others on that same forum, saw the growing demand for GCMS notes, so he created his own request-proxying service, GetGCMS.com. The site could process credit cards that weren’t enabled for international charges, which are common in India.

“This was not my full-time job,” Mr. Rai told The Globe. “I was just doing it initially as a hobby. And then it just blew up big time.”

Business was good. Within a few years, he was handling anywhere from 5,000 to 9,000 access requests annually. During one “blockbuster” year, he said, GetGCMS took in more than $150,000 in revenue, before expenses. (Mr. Rai, now a Crown prosecutor in Saskatchewan, has since stepped away from the day-to-day operations of the business. GetGCMS is run by his partner.)

GetGCMS charges $20 to obtain the basic notes stored in GCMS about an applicant. More detailed access requests cost as much as $75. In other words, at a minimum, the site is charging people four times more than what they would pay if they filed these requests themselves. And it has recently become possible for anyone – including non-citizens and non-permanent residents outside Canada – to file these requests for free, under a separate federal law called the Privacy Act.

“If you ethically ask me, should I be charging them $20 for something that they can do for free? Well, yes, they can do it for free,” Mr. Rai admitted. “But the thing is, you can file your immigration application or your visa application yourself and just pay $100, right? You don’t have to go down to a lawyer, or you don’t have to go down to a consultant and engage their services.”

In Mr. Rai’s experience, most people using the service don’t want to bother learning how to use the access system. To them, the premium charged by GetGCMS is worth it – and a pittance compared with what a lawyer or immigration consultant might charge for an access request, to say nothing of IRCC’s own filing fees. (A permanent resident application usually costs more than $1,000.)

Over the years, other businesses offering request-proxying services for immigration applicants have popped up, and these services have become a thorn in IRCC’s side. Immigration lawyers and consultants have also taken to automatically filing access requests on their clients’ behalf. (The Globe filed an access request to IRCC in September for data that could quantify the volume of filings coming from organizations like GetGCMS. The department’s reply to that request is now about eight months overdue.)

Mr. Rai said his e-mails to IRCC’s access unit would go unanswered, forcing him to file formal complaints to the Office of the Information Commissioner, the federal organization responsible for handling access disputes. “[IRCC] thought that I was just there to mint money,” he said. “I initially felt bad. I don’t feel bad now.”

Around 2018, Mr. Rai noticed requests were taking longer to be completed, and that the government was more often missing its legal deadlines. He and otherscomplained about these delays, too. A year later, he realized IRCC was claiming 90-day extensions on all new requests coming from GetGCMS. Internal IRCC e-mails Mr. Rai obtained through access requests show the department singled out him and four other so-called “bulk requesters” for these automatic extensions. The dispute was resolved only after the Office of the Information Commissioner stepped in and told the government the pre-emptive extensions were “inconsistent” with the law.

Because of all these new complaints, the commissioner’s office has found itself facing a surge of new work. In the 2022-23 fiscal year, 63 per cent of all federal access complaints were regarding IRCC.

In an ideal world, Mr. Rai said, he would be put out of business by the government. Prospective immigrants looking for information on their applications shouldn’t have to file requests, he argued. “It is a waste of time, resources, money. The government’s spending so much money on hiring people, processing these access requests,” he said. “I have maintained this position for many years.”

“We can shut down and be happy.”

The deluge of access requests at IRCC will almost certainly get worse over the next few years, in part because of a quiet policy change that threatens IRCC’s access system with collapse.

Since July, 2022, a new federal regulation has allowed anyone in the world to file a personal information request under the Privacy Act to the federal government. These requests work almost identically to access requests, but apply only to information a government body holds about the requester. Crucially, these requests carry no fees, meaning that since 2022 all immigration applicants have been able to request their own files for free. (Most aren’t aware of this, or prefer to offload the work to lawyers, consultants or businesses like GetGCMS.)

An internal IRCC memo from 2021 attempted to game out the consequences of different rates of growth in the numbers of requests under this new regime, and the increases in work for access officers that might result. The projections were alarming: The memo said that if one out of every 20 immigration applicants were to file requests, the department would receive around 332,000 filings in the fiscal year ending March, 2023. If one in five people exercised these new rights, that number would be roughly 706,000. The memo did not say whether the department considered either of these scenarios likely to occur, and IRCC has not yet disclosed its 2023 request volumes. In 2022, the department received more than 26,000 privacy requests, in addition to the roughly 177,000 requests it received under access legislation.

In the one-in-five scenario, accounting for current request growth rates, IRCC would be facing 926,000 requests a year by March, 2024. The rest of the federal government combined saw about 113,000 access and privacy requests in the 2022 fiscal year.

That amount of requests to IRCC would grind the federal access system to a halt.

The most valuable resources in any access system are the staff members who process requests. At the federal level, access units have struggled to hire and retain people, and it has become common for departments to poach each others’ workers.

During an appearance before the House of Commons access to information committee earlier this year, Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard warned that IRCC’s ravenous demand for staff would constrain the labour market for access experts. “If you’re going to give more information through access requests, you clearly need to have more people working in access units,” she said.

A sharp increase in requests would also carry more direct costs to taxpayers. According to statistics from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, IRCC spent a total of $10.9-million in 2022 to handle a combined 204,000 access and privacy requests, more than double what it spent in 2012. It also spent $475,000 on two contracts to LRO Staffing, an employment agency, between 2019 and 2022. The company handled more than 2,300 requests, according to a document tabled in the House of Commons. If IRCC’s access volumes were to swell further, itsbudget would also need to grow considerably.

While the department receives the bulk of federal requests, some of those require consultation with other government institutions, such as the Canada Border Services Agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which are now also facing surges.

Many of those requests also trigger complaints to the Office of the Information Commissioner (which adjudicates requests made under the Access to Information Act) or the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (which handles requests under the Privacy Act). If volumes increased, both offices would have to direct more staff and funds to immigration-related complaints, reducing the resources available to other requesters, including academics, activists, journalists and the general public. (The Information Commissioner is currently investigating the Canada Border Services Agency as a result of increasing immigration-related access complaints.)

IRCC has announced plans to update GCMS, part of what it calls its “Digital Platform Modernization” project. This would give applicants a greater understanding of their place in the application queue, and more detailed refusal reasons. But those changes are years away, according to Andrew Koltun, an Ontario-based immigration lawyer at LJD Law who researches IRCC’s access to information processes.

While the department has built some public-facing services that share information about the status of an applicant’s file, Mr. Koltun said these tools aren’t very detailed. “I would say that Domino’s Pizza Tracker, when you make a delivery order, is far more detailed in tracking status than IRCC’s trackers are,” he said.

There are other ways of tracking a file’s status. If an applicant is in Canada, they can call an IRCC call centre, where agents are able to look up a GCMS file and read it over the phone. But those calls were answered only 19 per cent of the time in 2021, according to an internal memo. The department’s service standards say the answer rate should be at least 50 per cent.

Mr. Koltun believes applicants should have nearly full access to their GCMS files. “I love the idea that you should have access to your default GCMS notes,” he said. “I think there would be a lot of institutional pressure that would make sure that never happened.”

In part, this comes down to IRCC’s own risk policy, which “is very protective in saying an applicant should never learn anything about the system, because the more someone learns about how the system works, the more likely it is that someone will be able to manipulate this to gain an immigration benefit,” Mr. Koltun said.

The fact that IRCC is now receiving as many requests as it does “speaks to a lack of transparency that immigration applicants face throughout the system,” he said, “and speaks to a paternalism from IRCC that you’re not owed anything as an applicant.”

With updates to GCMS trickling in over the next several years, the department has no choice but to try to curb the demand for access requests, either by improving applicants’ access to documents, thus eliminating the need for requests, or by restricting who can file them in the first place.

In 2020, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, which is responsible for overseeing the administration of federal access law, solicited submissions from various departments as part of a review of government access policies. IRCC’s submission, disclosed by the Treasury Board in response to an access request, asked for limits on who is able to file requests, and the ability to put requests on hold indefinitely during “exceptional circumstances” (the submission noted the pandemic as an example). It also asked that the access filing fee (currently $5 across the government) be set at the discretion of institution heads, and that deadlines be calculated using business days instead of calendar days, which would give IRCC more time to respond.

In part, the submission was a direct response to the internet services filing access requests on behalf of applicants, like GetGCMS. “We would like to see the ATIA reform address the issue of representatives using the Access to Information system for their own personal benefit,” the submission said.

To Mr. Koltun, IRCC’s submission was a cry for help, but the changes it proposed would ultimately mean constraining people’s rights.

“I don’t think anyone sat back and said, ‘Okay, if this is what the system is, what does this mean from a requester perspective?,” Mr. Koltun said. “What does this do to the democratic notion of a right to access?”

In April, 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Treasury Board held a “business resumption” conference call, hoping to get stalled access units back to processing requests in a new era of remote work.

During the meeting, managers shared their approaches, according to meeting minutes released through an access request. Some organizations had begun sending documents via e-mail. Others, including IRCC, were putting requests on hold indefinitely. Audrey White, then the head of IRCC’s access unit, spoke bluntly: The department’s mandate was to process immigration files – not access requests.

Today, it is clear that access to information is as much a part of the immigration system as border agents and background checks. When the federal access to information system was established 40 years ago, legislators did not intend for this to happen – and yet it has.

In 2021, Ms. Maynard, the Information Commissioner, published a detailed investigation into IRCC’s access woes, which laid out a series of recommendations. Chief among them was the idea that applicants’ files should be available without access requests. “Imagine if you had to ask, through an access request, for information about your taxes,” Ms. Maynard told the House access committee earlier this year. “You don’t have to, because you have a portal where you can go and see your information.”

Despite a commitment to change from Marco Mendicino, who was immigration minister until 2021, the department “has yet to offer applicants any alternative methods to access the information they are seeking on their immigration files,” according to Ms. Maynard’s latest annual report, published earlier this week.

In response, Mr. Larivière, the IRCC spokesperson, said the department believes it is on track to resolve these issues, but did not provide further detail.

Even Alec Attfield, a public servant who was until recently in charge of IRCC’s citizenship program, said it is time to take pressure off the system by making case files accessible without formal access requests – and he said the federal government’s ambitious immigration targets are in jeopardy if the status quo persists.

Mr. Attfield, who was the director-general of citizenship at IRCC from 2016 to the end of 2021, said that while information is already obtainable through access to information requests, that access is slow and burdening the department.

“Clients should have access to their case files, their written notes,” he said, with exceptions for information that might affect national security. “Until you have the proper information systems in place, growing immigration volumes are going to put further pressure on access to information and our ability to respond to people’s requests for status on their files. It’s just a fundamental thing.”

It’s still unclear when – or if – IRCC will get to a point where it gives applicants all the information they need, without them having to resort to access requests. Until then, immigration will be restrained by the access to information system.

“Canada is keen to grow its immigration levels,” Mr. Attfield said. “Without a proper system, we won’t be able to achieve those targets.”

In the meantime, the current system is having real-world consequences.

Sunkar Shagambayev, a 32-year-old immigrant from Kazakhstan, came to Canada in 2019 with his wife, Sitora, and their son, Alan. They’re a strikingly handsome family, with photos proudly displayed on the walls of their home in Tillsonburg, Ont. Those pictures depict a fourth person: Sabika, their adopted daughter, whose immigration file has been stuck in bureaucratic limbo since 2020. Each time the Shagambayevs have filed for a permit that would allow Sabika, 14, to enter the country, they have been rejected.

Mr. Shagambayev is unable to get a straight answer as to why the federal government has repeatedly denied the teenager’s study permit. “They’re very vague,” he said. “They never tell you what the real reason is.” The rest of the family have had similar troubles: Their permanent residence applications, first submitted in early 2020, have yet to be approved or rejected. Deeply frustrated by the lack of information from IRCC, Mr. Shagambayev has taken to filing access requests – he’s up to nine so far.

Last week, after prodding IRCC through his lawyer, Mr. Shagambayev received a call from a case officer, who said his file had begun moving again.

The process has taken a mental toll. “I had problems with sleep,” he said. “For maybe two years, I was waking up at night and I was thinking about it, like, ‘What can I do? What can be done in order to speed up the process?’”

“We came to Canada because we thought that the Canadian immigration system was transparent, tolerant and equal,” Mr. Shagambayev said. “This really made us feel like we’re not needed in Canada, not welcomed, like nobody wants us here, even though there are all these shiny slogans about how we need immigration to fuel our work force and economy.”

“But I love this country anyway, because every time I leave Canada and come back, I feel like I’m home.”

Source: Canada’s immigration system is overwhelmed with information requests. Ottawa was warned – but did nothing

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Globe editorial: Quebec’s self-inflicted immigration woes

2023/06/17 Leave a comment

One could also write a comparable editorial about Canada’s self-inflicted immigration woes (backlogs, ATIP, diminishing productivity, adverse impact on housing, healthcare and infrastructure).

And while Quebec “needs to keep pace with the rest of the country” to maintain its demographic in the federation, that avoids the more fundamental question of whether Canadian high permanent and temporary immigration levels are appropriate:

Talking about immigration in English Canada can be fraught at times, but it’s nothing like discussing the subject in Quebec, where it is fraught all the time.

…

Source: Quebec’s self-inflicted immigration woes

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

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