Jamie Sarkonak: The Liberal state always wins

2026/04/20 Leave a comment

Arguing for purges and inspired by Orban and Trump. Countering one set of excesses by a reverse set of excesses not helpful:

…It can be overcome, but that starts close to home, with provincial governments actively taking back what is rightfully theirs and installing onside allies — not thoughtless centrist donors who fear alienation from their Liberal-voting friends more than they want to win. It takes a careful and concerted effort to take back professional schools, not by defunding them, but by funding academic chairs to break the monoculture, provide role models to onside students, and provide alternative experts to lean on during contentious policy debates. The federal party can’t do much of this, but it can certainly build relationships with onside provinces to make it happen — or hammer them for failing to live up to their responsibility.

It means firing every activist and replacing every Liberal appointee at the top of any public department, every member of a public board, and abolishing those that exist only to prop up Liberal ideology. That means abandoning gender and anti-racism initiatives, something that even Alberta and Ontario struggle to do.

At this point, defund-everything libertarianism is a gambling strategy: it puts all the movement’s eggs into the basket that is the party’s election platform, and takes a crisis in the Liberal party to have any viability at all. In the off-chance it does result in victory, it is incapable of perpetuating itself.

Aimless tax and budget cuts don’t build movements or develop the careers of up-and-comers; they actually impede your future performance by depriving you of the necessary pipeline of manpower required to run complex institutions for years to come. “Just go to the private sector” doesn’t work, by the way, when the major corporations and companies have some kind of Liberal dependency, which is true for all the major consulting firms, law firms, pipeline companies and banks.

The wisdom that institutional control is the easy path to victory was internalized by the Liberals long ago. It’s time Conservatives started thinking the same way. It won’t deliver overnight, but that’s what it’s going to take to build a machine that can win in the absence of a catastrophic Liberal mistake. Anything less is just rolling the dice.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: The Liberal state always wins

The right should not shy away from doing this when they regain power, which is hopefully a matter of when, not if. A government that refuses to stack the deck with its own people is effectively subsidizing a sort of Viet Cong within the state it supposedly heads. As the Americans learned painfully in the Vietnam War, merely shrinking the size of the Viet Cong with napalm did not eliminate the threat. Familiar or friendly and trusted people can be empowered a great deal within the bounds of the law.

Allies should be rewarded, and parallel institutions should supplant or compete with those that already exist. For example, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper made the mistake of not doing more to support the Sun News Network, which might have blossomed into a true conservative institution in the private sector.

§source: Geoff Russ: Orbán gave Conservatives a blueprint for capturing institutions

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Job cuts at Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada will cause asylum delays and backlogs, union charges

2026/04/20 Leave a comment

May well be true but cannot expect a union to argue otherwise:

The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada is cutting 53 jobs as part of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s push to reduce government spending, said the union representing the largest independent tribunal in the country.

The board, responsible for adjudicating asylum claims, finalized 79,462 such claims last year, and it currently has 295,522 outstanding cases in the system awaiting a decision. At this rate, it would take more than three and a half years just to clear the backlog.

These cuts — part of the federal “realignment and reallocation plan” — are happening despite significant delays in refugee and asylum claim processing times, and are going to make a bad situation worse, warned the Canada Employment and Immigration Union….

Source: Job cuts at Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada will cause asylum delays and backlogs, union charges

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Montreal’s largest school service centre loses more than 100 support staff due to new secularism law

2026/04/20 Leave a comment

Not surprising:

Montreal’s largest school board has lost more than 100 support staff because they refused to remove religious symbols to comply with the province’s new secularism law. 

The law, known as Bill 94, expanded a ban on wearing religious symbols, like crosses and hijabs, to include support staff workers in schools — lunchroom monitors and special education technicians, for example. 

Several school service centres told Radio-Canada in February that dozens of staff had already been fired, suspended or decided to resign because of Bill 94. 

Now, the Centre de services scolaire de Montréal (CSSDM), says it, too, has had to let staff go. 

A spokesperson for the CSSDM told Radio-Canada that the service centre had recently informed staff members that they were at risk of losing their jobs if they didn’t remove a religious symbol to comply with the new law. 

Many decided to comply with the law, according to the spokesperson — meaning that they agreed to remove a religious symbol. 

But approximately 150 did not….

Source: Montreal’s largest school service centre loses more than 100 support staff due to new secularism law

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2025 Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey

2026/04/20 Leave a comment

Ironic timing, released at the same time as the Fox ethics scandal:

…Fairness

In 2025, more than three quarters (76%) of employees agreed that the process of selecting a person for a position is done fairly, consistent with 2023 (77%).

Employees who perceived the selection process as unfair were asked to describe how. The main reasons cited were a perception that appointments in their work unit are not transparent, that they are based on “who you know” and that some appointees have benefitted from nepotism or favoritism.

Expanding on the perceptions of fairness in staffing processes, a new question on non-advertised appointments was introduced in 2025. Overall, 71% of employees agreed that non-advertised appointments are done fairly. The main reasons cited by respondents who perceived non-advertised appointments as unfair were that non-advertised appointments depend on who you know (74%) and that they are not transparent (70%).

Statements related to fairness20232025
Process of selecting a person for a position is done fairly77%76%
Non-advertised appointments are done fairlyn/a71%
Reasons2025
Non-advertised appointments depend on who you know74%
Non-advertised appointments are not transparent70%
Non-advertised appointments are not based on merit48%
Non-advertised appointments are never fair30%
Non-advertised appointments are not inclusive28%
Other12%

Employment equity and equity-seeking groups’ perceptions on fairness

With the exception of women, all employment equity groups expressed less positive perceptions than their respective comparator groups.

Employees identifying as two-spirit and intersex had less positive perceptions of both statements related to fairness compared to all other identities

Employees identifying as another gender had the least positive perceptions of fairness in the staffing process of all groups

Members of visible minorities, Indigenous Peoples and persons with disabilities had less positive perceptions of fairness in the staffing process than their respective comparator groups

Members of religious communities had less positive perceptions of fairness in the staffing process compared with employees who are not members of religious communities

Employees who are separated, divorced or widowed had less positive perceptions of fairness in the staffing process compared with employees who are married, living common-law or single

Employees identifying as asexual and pansexual had less positive perceptions of fairness compared with all other sexual orientations

Source: 2025 Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey

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Kay: The Tragedy of Murdered Indigenous Women is Real. So How Did Activists Turn It Into a Punch Line?

2026/04/17 Leave a comment

More on Gazan’s alphabet soup combining MMIWG and LGTBQ acronyms:

…And yet for all the report’s heft, its authors never got around to any systematic analysis of who was killing Indigenous women, possibly because the answer turned out to be off-message: A Statistics Canada analysis of court outcomes in homicides of Indigenous women and girls, from 2009 to 2021, determined that “most Indigenous women and girls were killed by someone that they knew (81%), including an intimate partner (35%), acquaintance (24%), or family member (22%).”

What’s more—and this was the disclosure that really made many Canadians wonder why we’d spent CA$53 million on the Inquiry—it turned out that in 86 percent of known cases, the person accused of the homicide was also Indigenous.

It goes without saying that a woman’s death is no less (or more) tragic when she shares the killer’s ethnic background. Moreover, even in cases where an Indigenous man kills an Indigenous woman, it is entirely possible that racism—and, yes, “colonialism”—are at play. Indigenous people have been treated in all sorts of appalling ways in Canada, and the dark legacy of past policies hangs heavily over the lives of many Indigenous communities. No reasonable person would dispute that such historical realities should be considered by any inquiry mandated to investigate the problem of MMIWG. But to pretend that Canada is prosecuting an ongoing nationwide “genocide” against its female Indigenous population is nonsensical.

But there’s more, unfortunately—and here we get to the reason why the tragedy of “MMIWG” recently became something of a punch line among non-Canadian meme merchants who have no idea what the letters even signify….

Source: Kay: The Tragedy of Murdered Indigenous Women is Real. So How Did Activists Turn It Into a Punch Line?

Source: The Tragedy of Murdered Indigenous Women is Real. So How Did Activists Turn It Into a Punch Line?

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Yakabuski: A deputy minister’s ethics violation will further sap morale in the Canadian public service

2026/04/17 Leave a comment

Time to accept the inevitable. Hard to see how she can avoid resigning or retiring given the clear judgement, arrogance and obliviousness to MP concerns, impact on public service morale and overall credibility of deputies:

…Participants expressed that there appear to be few, if any, consequences for senior leaders who act in contravention of values and ethics, as compared to consequences imposed upon employees, particularly those who are members of racialized groups,” it found. 

To remedy the problem, the task team recommended that “deputy ministers ensure that obligations under the Values and Ethics Code, and departmental codes of conduct, are clear and are upheld with consequences for violations regardless of level or position.”

That recommendation has suddenly taken on new resonance in the wake of the federal Ethics Commissioner’s finding that Christiane Fox, one of the deputy ministers who made up the task team, violated the Conflict of Interest Act by using her position to influence a departmental decision to hire an acquaintance who was unqualified for the job.

In a 35-page report released last week, Ethics Commissioner Konrad von Finckenstein concluded that as deputy minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada in 2023, Ms. Fox used her authority to give an “old acquaintance” from university “preferential treatment, by ensuring he met with departmental officials quickly, seeking updates about his hiring, giving him internal information, and pushing for a higher job classification.”…

Merit-based hiring remains the bedrock of a professional public service. Ms. Fox appears to have lost sight of that principle. Her bosses must not. 

Source: A deputy minister’s ethics violation will further sap morale in the Canadian public service

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Visa Trend Tracker

2026/04/17 Leave a comment

Neat and useful website, covering range of visas. Sample view below:

Processing times aren’t just operational, they affect Canada’s competitiveness and our ability to grow tourism, trade, and investment. 

The Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC) records and regularly updates publicly available visa and permit processing time information from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

The tool provides the tourism sector with a clear picture of visa system performance over time, and data to support policy reforms that improve efficient, predictable, and secure travel.

Source: Visa Trend Tracker

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Canada’s Immigration Gains Were Driven by Selection – Maintaining Them Is Now the Challenge

2026/04/17 Leave a comment

Good report and analysis by Skuterud and his collaborators as usual. Government unfortunately continues in reverse direction:

In “Selection Matters: Lessons from Two Decades of Immigrant Earnings,” Mikal Skuterud and Ruiwen Zhang examine employment and earnings outcomes of immigrants and non-permanent residents from 2005 to 2024. The study finds that immigrants admitted after the introduction of Express Entry in 2015 experienced higher earnings at landing and strong earnings growth among highly educated immigrants, with recent male cohorts approaching parity with Canadian-born workers within five years.

“Stronger selection policies improved the economic outcomes of new immigrants, particularly among the university-educated,” says Skuterud. “These gains show that immigration can support economic growth when selection is aligned with long-run earnings potential.”

The report finds that improvements are concentrated among highly educated immigrants, especially men, consistent with the design of Express Entry. The system prioritizes candidates with strong human capital – including factors such as age, education, and work experience – and expected earnings. These gains were not accompanied by lower employment rates or weaker earnings growth, suggesting a durable improvement in immigrant outcomes.

However, the study also identifies a sharp deterioration in earnings among non-permanent resident men between 2020 and 2024, with average hourly earnings falling significantly relative to Canadian-born workers. The decline is most pronounced among college-educated workers and is consistent with changes in the composition of the temporary resident population, including shifts toward lower-earning subgroups.

The report highlights that recent policy changes, including the introduction of category-based selection and the growing role of non-permanent residents in the immigration system, may shift selection away from candidates with the highest expected earnings, potentially weakening the link between immigration and long-term economic performance.

To preserve and build on recent gains, the authors recommend returning to exclusive reliance on the Comprehensive Ranking System, while enhancing it with additional criteria such as field of study and prior Canadian earnings.

“Canada’s experience shows that selection matters,” says Skuterud. “Sustaining strong outcomes will require policies that prioritize long-term economic integration, not just short-term labour market needs.”

Read the Full Report

Source: Canada’s Immigration Gains Were Driven by Selection – Maintaining Them Is Now the Challenge

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Birthright Citizenship and Youth Crime

2026/04/17 2 Comments

Interesting German study. Likely transferable to other countries but would need to carry out similar analysis for the USA to assess their suggestion that same would apply:

This paper studies the impact of birthright citizenship on youth crime. We leverage a German reform which automatically granted birthright citizenship to eligible immigrant children born in Germany after January 1, 2000 and administrative crime data from three federal states. We find that immigrant youth who acquired citizenship at birth are substantially less likely to engage in criminal activity, with estimates indicating a 70% reduction in crime. These results are particularly relevant in light of ongoing debates in the U.S. about abolishing birthright citizenship. Our findings suggest that inclusive citizenship policies can reduce crime and its associated costs, which in turn could strengthen social cohesion.

Source: Birthright Citizenship and Youth Crime

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IRCC orders asylum claimants who crossed U.S. border irregularly to leave or face deportation

2026/04/16 Leave a comment

Implementation:

Asylum seekers who crossed the border from the United States irregularly and claimed asylum are being ordered by the immigration department to leave Canada as soon as possible or face being deported, after the passing of a new law tightening up asylum rules. 

Immigration lawyers have expressed fears that many foreign nationals receiving warning letters from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada will now cross back into the U.S. and be detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and deported. 

The immigration lawyers are also raising concerns that the letters don’t adequately inform asylum seekers that they may be eligible to remain in the country despite the new restrictions. The new law limits who can receive a hearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, or IRB, potentially putting many asylum seekers on a fast-track to deportation.

The IRCC warning letters were sent to refugee claimants within days of the new law, known as Bill C-12, receiving royal assent last month. …

Source: IRCC orders asylum claimants who crossed U.S. border irregularly to leave or face deportation

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