Maximum Canada is happening

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Rather naive in terms of minimizing the practicalities of ensuring adequate housing, healthcare and infrastructure, one of the key points that Saunders needed to be addressed in Maximum Canada. And the nation-building aspect overstated, given this gap and persistent low productivity that current policies, with few exceptions, are not addressing. Same large population fallacies:

A lot of people — at least, a lot of people who read this blog — know of Matt Yglesias’ book One Billion Americans. It’s good, you should read it. But not as many seem to know that it’s actually a riff on a book that came out three years earlier called Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough, by Doug Saunders. In fact, the books are pretty different; Saunders spends most of his time justifying the idea of a bigger Canada with appeals to the country’s history, culture, and politics, where Yglesias mostly discusses the practical details of how we’d fit the newcomers into the country. 

But what these two books share is that they’re both advocating a certain type of nation-building strategy — the idea of deliberately promoting large-scale immigration in order to expand a country’s population toward a numerical target. This isn’t something the U.S. has really done in the past. We enacted laws to make immigration more or less restrictive, but this was typically done either as an ad-hoc reaction to a wave of immigration pressure from abroad (e.g. in 1924), or out of moral and ideological concerns (e.g. in 1965). To a large extent, we didn’t really have to do this; people were almost always beating down our door to get here, and all we had to do was sit back and decide who to let in. (In the two decades after the Civil War, there was some talk of recruiting immigrants from abroad to populate the Midwest and West, but this was shelved when it turned out lots of people wanted to come of their own accord.) 

Canada, for much of its own history, was similar. But in recent years, the Canadian government has begun to set hard targets for immigration, such as last year’s target of 1.5 million more by 2025. And the country is deliberately encouraging more people to come, with one of the world’s most aggressive recruitment strategies. 

First, let’s just take a look at the results Canada is achieving. The country’s population has just passed 40 million — a 14% increase from when Doug Saunders published Maximum Canada. The national statistics agency loudly celebrated the achievement. And the country’s population growth rate has just shot up to over 3.5%, which is among the world’s fastest:

Source: Brent Donnelly

Here’s another fun graph, just from Nova Scotia:

Source: Deny Sullivan

And this is all from immigration. The country’s total fertility rate is 1.4, far below the replacement rate. Yet population is booming because Canada is recruiting from abroad.

This isn’t quite Maximum Canada yet, but it’s clearly headed in that direction. 

And Canada’s zeal for greater population inflows is matched by its determination to recruit the best and the brightest en masse. The country’s points-based immigration system, the Federal Skilled Worker Program, is well-known, as is the Provincial Nominee Program that allows individual Canadian provinces to recruit immigrant workers to specific locations. But the country keeps adding more programs for grabbing talent. Its latest idea includes an offer of permanent residency to people working in the United States on H-1B visas — basically, poaching America’s own skilled immigrants! Here are some excerpts from the announcement:

As part of Canada’s first-ever Tech Talent Strategy, Minister Fraser announced the following aggressive attraction measures:

  • the creation of an open work permit stream for H-1B specialty occupation visa holders in the US to apply for a Canadian work permit, and study or work permit options for their accompanying family members
  • the development of an Innovation Stream under to the International Mobility Program to attract highly talented individuals…
  • the promotion of Canada as a destination for digital nomads
  • the creation of a STEM-specific draw…under the Express Entry program…
  • improvements to the Start-up Visa Program

Canada also has family-based and humanitarian immigration programs like the U.S. does, but the big difference here is that they take absolutely massive numbers of skilled immigrants from all over the world.

All of this adds up to what looks to me like a nation-building strategy. Canada has a clear vision for itself as a multicultural mecca for all of the world’s smart and hard-working people. It’s a bit like Singapore, except more democratic, and without that country’s emphasis on preserving a single ethnicity’s demographic dominance. If you’re smart and you want to work and you like Canadian culture, it doesn’t matter what you look like; you’re in the club. 

What’s amazing is that the vast majority of the country’s populace appears to have signed onto this strategy. As Derek Thompson writes, immigration has not produced a big backlash in Canada, outside of some highly localized concerns (like Chinese capital flight buying up property in Vancouver). A little of this might be from the Anglophone majority’s desire to reduce the political influence of Quebec, but much of it is just that multiculturalism and immigration are deeply rooted in the country’s self-defined national identity. And on top of that, the fact that so much of Canada’s immigration is based on employment prospects and skills probably reduces social friction; immigrants are likely to make a lot of money and not commit much crime. 

There’s also one additional factor that no one talks about, but which would definitely be on my mind if I were Canadian: national security. Canada has a very large, very powerful, and occasionally politically unstable neighbor to its south. It has already defeated one invasion from that southern neighbor, and while more recently relations between the two countries have been friendlier, you never know when attitudes might shift. A country of 100 million would be a lot more capable of resisting the U.S. than a country of 40 million. 

Of course, there are major challenges for Canada’s nation-building strategy. Chief among these is NIMBYism; Canada is huge, but you can’t just scatter your population randomly across the plain (I mean, you can try, but the results are comedic). Modern knowledge-based economies harness clustering and agglomeration effects, which means Canada needs to fit those new millions into its cities. And despite very low crime rates, Canada is having a bit of trouble doing this. Unlike Japan, Canada does not have simple national zoning laws administered by a competent technocratic bureaucracy; instead, local municipalities are free to block housing as they choose. 

And block it they do. The Fraser Institute notes that Canada is not building nearly enough housing to house its massive population inflows:

And the mismatch has been getting worse over time:

Source: Fraser Institute
Source: Fraser Institute

Jean-François Perrault of Scotiabank notes that Canada has fewer housing units per 1000 people than France, Germany, Japan, the UK, or even the United States. He writes:

A key challenge is finding an approach that can overcome the political obstacles to a better supply response. Very often within city limits, measures to increase density pit current owners versus prospective residents. Municipal councillors are politically responsive to their voters given the nature of the democratic process. What may be great policy from a national perspective, like high immigration, runs into obstacles when it means finding practical solutions at the local level to increase the housing stock…

To get a sense of the main obstacles to a more elastic supply response, we have polled several of our clients in real estate and development across the country to find the cross-cutting factors they see as most limiting supply growth. To no surprise, the key impediments are in the planning and approval process. In many major cities, the entitlement process is very lengthy and unduly political. Many processes can delay or derail development applications and this can be exacerbated by under-resourced planning departments within cities.

Hmm, where have I heard this story before??

Even Canada’s commitment to multiculturalism is starting to come into conflict with its anti-housing NIMBY instincts. The government returned a plot of land in the middle of downtown Vancouver to the Squamish Nation, which promptly planned a very cool dense housing development with solarpunk aesthetics. The project is still going ahead, but urban planners are now starting to complain about the density, and local residents are trying to stop an access road to the development.

This will simply not do. If you let in tens of millions of people, you must house them; there is simply no other option, other than to let rents continue to skyrocket until the people revolt. Canadian leaders would do well to supplement Doug Saunders’ book with Matt Yglesias’ pragmatic tome. If Canada can’t figure out how to beat its entrenched NIMBY instincts and replace its old ideal of quiet pastoral low-rise cities with one of dense, bustling, efficiently functioning metropolises, it will never achieve Maximum Canada. 

In the meantime, though, we Americans to the south need to take a hard look at what Canada is doing, and ask ourselves why we can’t do something similar. Like Canada, the U.S. is a highly diverse nation of immigrants. Like Canada, our fertility is below replacement (though not quite as bad), and we rely on immigration for population growth. Like Canada, we face the inherent economic disadvantage of being located far from the world population supercluster in Asia, and thus we will always be fighting an uphill battle to get high-value industries to want to locate here. So like Canada, we should be importing huge numbers of skilled immigrants — especially because our software and finance and biotech industry clusters, and our world-beating research universities, make it easier for us to attract skilled immigrants in the first place. We should be playing to our strengths. 

And yet in the U.S., immigration of any kind is now at the center of a vicious culture war. The political right may occasionally claim that they only oppose illegal immigration, or that they want skilled immigration, but when it comes time for actual policy proposals, what they want is just to decrease all types of immigration. The days of pro-immigration Republicans like George W. Bush are gone. In fact, various hard-right figures have specifically railed against immigration from India, which is America’s most important source of skilled immigrants. 

Meanwhile, American progressives, unlike their Canadian counterparts, seem generally unenthusiastic about the idea of mass recruitment of high-skilled foreign workers; my suspicion is that they fear the competition the children of these immigrants will provide for their own children in the academic system. Instead, in recent years, some progressives have begun to lean toward the idea that immigration should be viewed as a form of reparations for colonialism, rather than a strategy for nation-building. Naturally, that absurd idea just triggers the right even more. 

This is a terrible political equilibrium. Survey after survey finds that Americans very strongly support high-skilled immigration, but because it’s a political football, only centrists like Biden seem interested in doing anything about it. Without a popular political mandate, any nation-building strategy like Canada’s is doomed. 

I wish Americans could tell themselves a positive narrative like Canada’s — of immigration as the way to build a multicultural nation. Many of us have tried to tell that narrative, and have foundered on the rocks of America’s age of division. As John Higham wrote, when America is underconfident — when we start to doubt who we are as a people and a nation — we instinctively think about closing the door. Right now, America definitely doesn’t know who we are, as a people and as a nation. Maybe next decade we’ll remember.

Canada, however, does know who they are. And good for them. Now all they have to do is build a bunch of housing, and they’ll be golden. 

Source: Maximum Canada is happening

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , ,

Many Finns Party ministers have pointed to replacement theory

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Of note:

A HANDFUL of the Finns Party’s ministers have made overt and less overt references to the predominantly white far-right conspiracy theory known as the great replacement or replacement theory.

Helsingin Sanomat on Monday reported that Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Ville Tavio (PS) has pointed to the conspiracy theory in a number of statements in the session hall of the Finnish Parliament.

The theory alleges that left-leaning domestic or international elites are trying to replace the white population with non-white immigrants, enabling non-white majorities to take control of key institutions, destroy cultures and traditions, and ultimately eliminate white populations. The theory has also found its way into, for example, the rhetoric of the Republican Party in the US.The Finnish name for the theory is ‘väestönvaihto,’ which translates directly into population replacement.

Tavio has spoken about “population replacement,” a “population change process,” “foreignisation of the population” and “artificial” population growth through immigration, listed Helsingin Sanomat.

In 2021, he linked the conspiracy theory to the government’s policy toward the EU: “The Finnish population won’t get back its own free land because it has been handed over as a playground for the EU. We’re being depleted and the basis of our population is being changed supposedly in the name of wonderful multiculturalism.”

“The socialist government is advocating its own agendas with no regard for the means and won’t stop until our country has been depleted in the name of climate change and our population has been replaced in line with multicultural ideals,” he stated later during the same session.

Tavio viewed a year earlier that immigration is on track to result in a demographic change that can be likened to population replacement.

“Population growth rests on immigration and the birth rate among immigrants. If this continues, the outcome is a change in demographics. You could also talk about the so-called population replacement,” he remarked according to the newspaper.

Minister of the Interior Mari Rantanen (PS) in February used a hashtag related to the replacement theory when sharing a tweet concerning demographic changes in Espoo, Southern Finland, according to YLE.

Two years earlier she appeared to nod at the theory when commenting on a newspaper article about population growth in Africa: “At this rate, Europe will become part of Africa unless the tone and politics change. But some may genuinely want that.”

YLE also reported that her website was recently updated to remove a sentence that played on the Finnish word ‘sinisilmäinen,’ which translates literally to blue-eyed and figuratively to gullible and naive.

“We mustn’t be so blue-eyed that soon we won’t be blue-eyed,” the removed part read according to the public broadcaster.

Minister of Justice Leena Meri (PS) in February stated on YLE A-studio that the National Coalition’s readiness to double the number of work permits granted to non-EU citizens indicates a readiness to replace the population.

Minister of Finance Riikka Purra (PS) argued on Facebook in 2019 that talk about population replacement is not an exaggeration, pointing to a projection about the share of native-born population in Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

“I haven’t acquainted myself with conspiracy theories of the far right that deal with population replacement, and I’m not planning on doing so,” she wrote. “When I talk about an increase in the number of immigrants and foreigners, about population change, turnover, replacement, variation and the kind, I’m referring to a fact depicted in this graph, for example.”

Purra was at the time the first deputy chairperson of the Finns Party.

Meri, Purra and Rantanen on Sunday all tweeted that they do not believe in conspiracy theories. “I’ll state this to be clear: I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I also don’t believe in the replacement theory,” wrote Rantanen.

Her response seemed to leave it open to interpretation whether she believes the replacement theory to be a conspiracy theory.

Niko Pyrhönen, a researcher who has specialised in populism and conspiracy theories at the University of Helsinki, on Sunday told YLE that Rantanen has probably employed the term deliberately.

“She chooses and specifically employs the term ‘väestönvaihto,’ which is one of the few that are linked to conspiracy theories and serve as a dog whistle,” he stated.

The Finnish Security Intelligence Service (Supo) has noted that the great replacement is associated with ethnic nationalism, an ideology rooted in the notion of preserving the ethnic uniformity of society. Supo highlighted in its yearbook for 2020 that the theory has been one of the most noteworthy ideological drivers of far-right terrorists.

“This conspiracy theory framework rests on the idea that immigration and multiculturalism pose a fundamental threat to the western white population,” it wrote.

Source: Many Finns Party ministers have pointed to replacement theory

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

She came to Canada for an education. Desperate for a place to live, she had to rent a room with no door

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Housing example of lack of planning for impact of immigration:

Parul Yadav saw Canada as a pathway to her future.

The 23-year-old, who arrived in Toronto alone but bright-eyed in late 2021, had pored over post-secondary programs around the world from her home in Delhi, India, carefully selecting a public relations course at Humber College for its hands-on learning opportunities. Toronto, she was told, was a multicultural city — one where newcomers like her would be welcomed.

What she didn’t expect was a housing crisis, one that would become an ever-present stressor as she began her studies.

She struggled, during those first days in a Mississauga hotel, to even book an apartment viewing without local references who could vouch for her. Even studio apartments were too expensive. Feeling desperate as the first day of classes approached, she signed on for several months of renting a den without a door in a shared apartment.

Today, she has a single room in a basement where two other students rent rooms on the same floor, while their landlord lives upstairs. She counts herself lucky, given how many other international students she’s met who’ve fared worse in Toronto’s housing market.

“I know so may international students who are living in miserable, miserable conditions,” Yadav said, describing groups of two or even three students who she’s known to split single rented bedrooms.

It’s a problem she believes the country needs to reckon with — especially as it aims to boost immigration rates. If Canada and its post-secondary schools are attracting promising young learners, especially to campuses in major cities such as Toronto that are facing rental crunches, how can officials ensure the kind of housing opportunities students need to thrive?

The question of whether Toronto has adequate housing for its international students is, of course, a microcosm of an even broader question: Are we prepared to house all the new immigrants that officials see as vital for Canada’s future? A report from Desjardins Securities recently suggested the answer is no — noting that homebuilding will have to increase by at least 50 per cent nationally through 2024, or a difference of about 100,000 more units starting construction in each of the two years, to keep pace with the expected rate of population growth.

Just weeks ago, the country’s population hit 40 million people for the first time. In Toronto, the provincial Ministry of Finance has forecast the population will surpass 3.3 million people by 2031 and 3.6 million by 2041. International migration is the primary driver of net population gains, city hall housing secretariat director Valesa Faria wrote in a statement to the Star — though city reports have also noted Toronto’s rapidly aging population as a key demographic shift in the years to come.

The federal government hopes to bring in 465,000 permanent residents this year, Faria said, rising to 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025. International student study permits were also on the rise, she said, adding that the 550,150 permits issued last year represented a 75 per cent jump from five years earlier. These newcomers will bring skills and abilities that Toronto needs to sustain its “economic and social vibrancy,” she wrote. But it’s a reality that demands more housing.

“Toronto looks forward to supporting federal targets, however, it is imperative that these go hand-in-hand with new investments in affordable housing so that newcomers can find safe, secure and affordable homes to live successfully,” she wrote.

While being accepted for study in Canada does not guarantee a pathway to permanent residency, it is a common trajectory taken. The prospect of life in this country is a key lure of Canada’s international education strategy — which has uplifted the economy, created a steady immigration pipeline and offered a boost to the country’s colleges and universities amid declining public funding and domestic enrolment.

While schools have eyed increased enrolment in recent years, Faria sees student housing creation as failing to keep pace. Now, institutions such as Toronto Metropolitan University are putting new residence plans on ice, she said, directing blame on rising construction costs.

Student residences did not qualify for affordable housing funds, Faria added, and were therefore offered at market rent rates — which could be prohibitive for cash-strapped students. (Yadav, too, noted the cost of purpose-built residences often ruled them out as an option for her.)

The challenges of home affordability aren’t limited to international students, as students of all origins, in Toronto and beyond, often scramble to find affordable homes — like so many individuals and families with limited incomes. But city hall staff have noted newcomers at its colleges and universities are often making do with the lousiest living conditions, attributed in a recent city housing plan to “significantly” higher tuition and limits on their ability to work.

For Yadav, the doorless den she leased in late 2021 — after days of fruitlessly scouring Kijiji and messaging landlords — made her feel like she was walking on eggshells, with virtually zero privacy between her and her roommate. She tried to be out of the apartment as much as possible, and it wore on her mental health. “I remember I was always so stressed and always so low on energy that my friends would say, ‘Hey, is anything wrong with you?’” she recalled.

“It really does affect the relationships around you, the way you work, the way you study.”

After five months, she decided to test her luck again, with a budget that topped out at $1,500 per month, though she was hoping to keep closer to $1,000. But in Toronto, even studio units were going for higher rates. In the end, she found her single room in the basement of a house, which came with a $700 price tag and two other tenants sharing the floor. Yadav is grateful to have it — she said her landlord upstairs was kind, and really tried to offer students who’d newly arrived in Canada a “homey family environment.”

Many others she knew weren’t so fortunate.

Faria, the housing secretariat director, said international students, especially, can often be in the dark about their rights as a tenant — citing the findings of an ongoing working group tasked with probing student housing problems. “This presents a safety concern, as international students may be more vulnerable to predatory landlords and poor living conditions.”

One particular housing arrangement that has worried Toronto colleges and universities is the unregulated rooming house sector — an area where major changes are looming.

In December, council voted — after many years of debate — to legalize and license rooming houses citywide as of March 2024. This kind of rental, where tenants lease single bedrooms with shared kitchens and washrooms, often come with lower price tags than any other private market option and have long existed across the city. But they were illegal in Scarborough, East York and North York, and could be unlicensed in the old Metro Toronto and Etobicoke.

The idea of legalization, as staff proposed it, was to ensure rooming houses were safer and more regulated. In reports, staff pointed to devastating outcomes in the unlicensed market, with roughly 10 per cent of Toronto’s residential fire deaths from 2010 to 2020 in rooming houses — a grim count that would include the death of 18-year-old Helen Guo, an international student who’d just finished her first year of business management at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus. Of the 18 rooming houses where fires caused death or serious injury, 16 were unlicensed. And along with seniors on fixed incomes and low-income households, immigrants and students were seen as the most likely rooming house tenants.

“Students, post-secondary institutions and community members all expressed safety concerns for students living in overcrowded and unsafe living conditions,” the staff report recommending cross-city legalization and licensing read, while also noting that some areas of Toronto located near college and university campuses had seen a particular concentration of student-aimed rooming houses “due to the lack of alternative affordable rental housing options.”

Faria, in her statement, noted that city staff have been asked to develop a post-secondary-specific housing strategy alongside academic institutions. The vision had to go beyond residences, she suggested, noting the city hoped to convince schools to plan new affordable housing for students, staff and faculty on land they own. “It is critical that the post-secondary institutions themselves commit to building new housing as part of their long-term strategic plans in order to attract top students and faculty, and to maintain a global advantage,” she wrote.

Looking back to when she first arrived, Yadav said she wished there was more transparency from schools in their recruitment materials for international students, making sure they knew not only what kind of rental market they would face, but potential traps and pitfalls to look out for when searching for a place to stay. She’d seen people fall for rental scams, having sent money from overseas for a house or room that didn’t exist.

That same openness about the housing reality could apply to officials in Canada’s immigration process, she suggested. “Just be more open and clearer about the crisis that’s going on.”

Yadav is now nearing the end of her two-year program at Humber — a time in which she immersed herself in a student union and found a part-time job with a PR agency that excites her about her future. She hopes to make the jump to a full-time role, and carve out a life for herself in the city. “I’m hoping my salary will be increased enough to sustain myself renting a studio. I’m not even thinking about a one-bedroom right now,” she told the Star one recent afternoon.

She’s seen too many of her fellow international students pack up and leave, not simply because they struggled to find their footing right away, but because — like so many other individuals and families citywide — they felt their long-term housing hopes were simply unattainable in Toronto.

“I know so many people that are moving out of Toronto or Ontario after living here for five, six years because they cannot afford a house. They’re going to Calgary, they’re going to places like Saskatchewan,” Yadav said. “So many people are moving out — even out of Canada and going back home to their countries. Everything comes down to the housing conditions.”

It’s the kind of conclusion she hopes officials take heed of as immigration continues to flow.

“They’re just inviting people in — and they don’t have the right resources to support them.”

Source: She came to Canada for an education. Desperate for a place to live, she had to rent a room with no door

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Laying down routes: Here’s what transit in the GTA needs to keep up with Canada’s population boom

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Another example of the disfunctionality in immigration, not planning and implementing for the effects of the large number of immigrants and temporary residents:

Like most immigrants to Canada, when Srikeit Tadepalli first came to Toronto from Mumbai, India, in February, he had a laundry list of things to do to get settled: get his social insurance number and his permanent residency card, apply for OHIP, look for a job and a place to live, and get to know the city.

Arriving in Toronto in the middle of winter without a car, Tadepalli was grateful for Toronto’s well-connected and accessible transit system. But particularly in the beginning, he had trouble navigating it.

“For such a developed transit system, there is very little communication directed towards newcomers about how to get around using transit in the city,” Tadepalli said. “Basic stuff, like: What is a PRESTO card? Where do I get a PRESTO card? … Even to this day, I sometimes struggle with it.”

Tadepalli is just one of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who come to Canada each year, a number that continues to grow, with the federal government pledging last year to welcome 1.5 million more people by 2025. If trends continue, most of these people will settle in Toronto and surrounding municipalities, where immigrants already make up around half of the population.

Even with all of its challenges, Toronto’s transit system is among the best in the world, with several big projects underway promising to make the GTA even more connected. Still, new immigrants and transportation experts say there is more the city can be doing to help newcomers get around: from small tweaks, like better communication targeted at newcomers, to expanding surface transit with a focus on the suburbs. Also crucial to support a growing population will be shoring up the TTC’s finances, with current shortfalls threatening the transit system’s ability to operate with adequate service and maintain a state of good repair.

Tadepalli said basic instructional videos targeted at newcomers about how to use the TTC would have gone a long way when he first arrived. In his first few days in the city, Tadepalli said he got on the streetcar assuming he could pay for his fare on board, then was told he had to come back with exact change or a loaded PRESTO card. He ended up relying on independent YouTubers to show him the ropes.

The TTC is always looking to improve, spokesperson Stuart Green said in a statement, adding the transit agency is creating an “enhanced wayfinding strategy” to make navigating the system simpler. On maps and signage, the TTC uses words, symbols, colours and numbers to help all customers, Green added. The TTC’s website also has a Google translate function which can translate to over 100 languages.

Transportation is one of the most critical aspects of Canada’s infrastructure for newcomers. It serves as a gateway for economic participation, getting people to school or work, gives immigrants access to important services such as health care and language lessons, and allows people to travel to enjoy different aspects of city life.

Already people in Canada’s densest city are finding it harder than ever to get around, especially in a downtown core paralyzed by construction. Toronto’s traffic congestion ranks among the worst in the world. It’s taking almost as long to travel by car as it did before the pandemic, even with fewer vehicles on the road, according to city data.

Meanwhile, the city cut TTC service and hiked fares this year to make up for lagging ridership on the transit system, which faces a $366-million operating shortfall this year. Unless the provincial and federal governments step up, the TTC will not have enough money to run the system at current levels or replace aging trains and buses.

When newcomers first come to Canada, they are more likely to rely on public transit, cycling and walking than established immigrants and Canadian-born people, said Valerie Preston, professor of urban social geography at York University. That means that expanding and investing in the TTC and regional transit, as well as building walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods, will be essential for supporting more immigration.

“If we’re going to have half a million people arrive every year, and we’re also trying to meet our climate goals, those people need to be able to live in places where they can either use transit, and it’s efficient to use transit, or they can walk to and from work,” Preston said.

It’s not all bad. Toronto is beginning to invest in public transit after several decades of neglect. The 15.5-kilometre Ontario Line subway, when complete in about a decade, will run from Exhibition Place to the Ontario Science Centre through the heart of downtown, bringing 227,500 more people within walking distance to transit, according to Metrolinx, the provincial agency overseeing the project.

While locals are quick to complain about the TTC, which can be unreliable and crowded, many who come here marvel at the efficiency of the system.

“The connection, from buses, to GO trains, to trams, everything is very, I would say, flawless,” said Akbar Siddiqui, who came to the city one month ago from Mumbai and lives with his wife in Etobicoke. “I come from a country where the transportation network is a little flawed. There are a lot of delays. Everything is very congested primarily because in India, back in Mumbai, there are a lot of people, in a relatively small area.”

Still, Toronto is not where it needs to be to move a growing population, said longtime transit watcher and blogger Steve Munro.

“We have to stop assuming that building a couple of subway lines will solve our transportation problems.” As the city becomes more populated, and living downtown becomes less affordable, people are increasingly being pushed further from the city, meaning the demand for transit is becoming more diffuse, Munro said.

In 2021, the distant suburbs (30 minutes or more from downtown) of Canada’s three biggest cities — Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal — grew at a faster rate than the urban fringe or suburbs closer to the core, according to StatCan.

Newly elected mayor Olivia Chow has promised to invest in transit and active transportation, including by reversing recent TTC cuts and creating a dedicated busway in Scarborough. But the TTC is facing a significant money crunch that cannot be solved at the city level alone. The TTC relies on the farebox to fund about two-thirds of its operating costs, and ridership is currently just 74 per cent of what it was before the pandemic. On top of this year’s $366-million deficit, the transit agency anticipates an “operating pressure” next year as high as $600 million, according to a recent CEO report to city council.

The TTC is also short on money to maintain, and invest in, capital. The TTC recently cancelled a Request for Proposals for new subway trains because it did not get the funding it needed from the provincial and federal governments. The trains it had intended to replace are currently between 24 and 27 years old, with an intended life of 30 years.

“The combined operating and capital investments required to sustain the level and quality of transit service required to support Canada’s largest city cannot be supported solely through expenditure reductions, or revenue streams currently available to the TTC,” the recent CEO report warned. Ottawa announced in April that it would chip in $349 million to help the TTC buy more electric buses, but no new money to help run them.

“We need to really think about how we’re going to move hundreds of thousands more people with the same amount of road space,” said Steve Farber, transportation geographer and spatial analyst at the University of Toronto. Farber and Munro agree that the best way to accommodate a growing population over the short term is to invest in the city’s bus network, and to give those buses the right of way, so that more people can move more efficiently.

“We have to think about making transit a more desirable option for a much larger number of potential trips,” Farber said. “So, in the short run, get buses moving faster and more frequent everywhere. I think that will move the needle quite a lot.”

Tadepalli said even with its shortcomings, the TTC has been a lifeline for him since he got to the city, and continuing to invest in it will be crucial for future immigrants to thrive.

“Without affordable, accessible and clear information about transit, a lot of immigrants tend to not engage with the city and to stay home.”

Source: Laying down routes: Here’s what transit in the GTA needs to keep up with Canada’s population boom

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

How we can right-size Canada’s health system as the population grows

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

Good illustration of the impact of current and planned high levels of permanent and temporary immigration, offering little hope in the near and medium-term:

Last year, while knocking on doors during her campaign to be mayor of Whitby, Elizabeth Roy got a firsthand feel for the community’s top concerns.

The town of 150,000, on the shore of Lake Ontario about 50 kilometres east of Toronto, is among the fastest-growing communities in the country.

As she fielded questions about building new roads, preserving green space and upgrading infrastructure, Roy also heard resident after resident describe how difficult it was to get much-needed medical care, with many saying they feared the situation would get even worse amid Whitby’s population boom.

“Whether it was a young family needing a doctor for their newborn or a senior who just had their doctor retire and was left stranded, about one out of every five residents expressed concern about some type of medical care that they required,” says Roy, who is serving her first term as mayor after 17 years as a member of council.

“It’s clear we have gaps in our health-care system, and they need to be dealt with now, today. We need to start being proactive.”

The population of Durham Region, which includes Oshawa, Ajax and Pickering as well as Whitby, is likewise swelling rapidly. It’s expected to almost double over the next 20 years, surging from about 697,000 in 2021 to 1.2 million by 2041.

Municipal and health-care leaders worry its health system, straining to meet the community’s needs even now, won’t be able to cope with the influx of new residents.

Already, Durham faces an escalating family doctor shortage. Figures from the Ontario College of Family Physicians reveal more than 44,000 Durham residents don’t have a family doctor, though a recent report from the Town of Whitby puts the number much higher, citing estimates that suggest a third of the region’s population — some 230,000 residents — lack a family physician who practises in Durham.

Lakeridge Health, the region’s medical network, is unable to keep up with demand. Its four acute-care hospitals typically operate above capacity and wait times in its ERs continue to be “higher than usual,” according to a June alert to the community. The hospital system, Roy notes, will need 1,793 beds by 2041 — more than double its current count.

Noting that it’s primarily a provincial responsibility, Roy says “One would think that at the municipal level health care wouldn’t be a concern for us to be advocating for. It’s actually far from that. It’s actually the reverse. Daily, I hear about the health care needs in our community.”

With Canada’s population recently hitting 40 million — a milestone that arrived faster than expected — and the country set to welcome 500,000 people a year by 2025, health policy experts are warning that bolstering our fragile system, still recovering from years of pandemic pressures, has never been more important.

Across Ontario, where the head count is racing toward 16 million, communities face struggles similar to Whitby’s. More than 2.2 million people do not have access to a family doctor or a nurse practitioner, which puts their long-term health at risk and makes them more likely to visit the ER, placing further strain on the system.

Hospital emergency departments continue to overflow; the most-recent data from Ontario Health shows that patients admitted to the hospital from the ER wait an average of 19 hours before getting a bed.

And despite efforts to strengthen the health-care workforce, ongoing shortages are triggering temporary closures — and in a recent case in Minden, the permanent shuttering — of some of the province’s hospital emergency departments. 

“We are in an extremely difficult moment in our health system in Ontario,” says Dr. Jane Philpott, former politician and dean of Queen’s Health Sciences and director of its medical school.

“It’s probably in a more critical state than at any other point in the four decades that I’ve been involved in health care. The only thing that makes me hopeful is that it’s reached such a state of crisis that there is a broad public and political imperative to find solutions and to do the things that we should have done long ago.”

Among the first steps to propping up the system in the near term — and preparing it for future demand — is to ensure everyone in the province is connected to a family doctor or nurse practitioner.

“It’s the only way we’re going to be able to cope,” Philpott says. “We need to get a very firm commitment from all orders of government to establish a primary-care-for-all system.”

Across the country, calls are growing for targeted reforms to primary care, including the expansion of team-based care, which connects patients to interdisciplinary groups made up of pharmacists, social workers, dietitians and other health-care professionals, in addition to nurses and physicians. Evidence suggests such teams improve patient outcomes.

Health leaders also want to see primary care shift to a geographic model to ensure every resident has access to a family doctor within a 30-minute drive of where they live or work. As well, there is a push to allow patients in a team-based environment have a non-physician health professional co-ordinate their care. 

Such reforms are necessary given the scale of primary-care needs in the province, says Dr. Rick Glazier, scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Health Services and Policy Research. 

Even as the need grows for more family doctors to fill the gaps, research shows about 17 per cent of Ontarians are attached to a physician over the age of 65 who is nearing retirement. Glazier says there aren’t enough MDs graduating medical school to replace the aging workforce.

“We don’t have the generation coming behind those people who are retiring,” says Glazier, a family doctor at St. Michael’s Hospital, a part of Unity Health Toronto.

“We will need these interprofessional teams for primary care. We will not be able to do this with doctors alone.”

Dr. Andrew Boozary, a primary-care physician and founding executive director of the Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine at Toronto’s University Health Network, agrees governments must firmly commit to primary-care expansion and reform.

Finding new ways to connect people to a family doctor or nurse practitioner will be key, not only in anticipation of the growing population but also because of the country’s aging demographics, as older patients typically have greater health care needs.

Boozary sees an expanded role for community health workers in primary care, noting that they played a crucial part during the pandemic by bringing health services including COVID-19 vaccines into neighbourhoods, building trust with residents who wouldn’t otherwise have easy access to health care.

“Through the pandemic, community health workers supported people in apartment buildings, in parks and basketball courts, in religious settings,” Boozary says. “They brokered the trust. They had the lived experience and understanding of the needs of their communities.”

Including such workers in primary-care delivery would lead to more equitable access and could mean helping patients connect with social supports, accompanying them to medical appointments, helping with medication (including adherence to prescription renewals), and working closely with a nurse practitioner. 

This kind of model could be especially important in marginalized communities, Boozary says, including refugee and newcomer populations.

“We can’t say we have a universal health-care system when millions of people don’t have access to primary care,” Boozary says. “This mirage of universality was exposed during the pandemic and has been further eroded.”

In his role at CIHR, Glazier is leading an initiative that’s mobilizing research teams to better understand the country’s health-care workforce. That data, he says, will be used for “evidence-based planning” to help Canada meet its future health-care needs.

Ivy Bourgeault, a professor of sociology at the University of Ottawa and lead of the Canadian Health Workforce Network, says when political and health leaders talk about capacity within the health system, they are primarily talking about its workers.

“This is a labour-intensive industry,” she says. “Three-quarters of the costs of the health system are related to the workforce, which means that health system responsiveness — in wait times, in backlogs — it’s the workforce that’s the rate-limiting factor.

“Primary care issues. Long-term-care issues. These are workforce issues.”

Boosting nursing numbers is among the top priorities, Bourgeault says. This includes finding ways to retain nurses working in the system, bring back those who left (through retirement or a profession change or dropping to part-time), and strategically recruit new nurses to fill gaps in the system.

All of this, though, is to only solve the crisis at hand, she says. Preparing for the more-populous future will require understanding the gaps in the system, collecting and analyzing workforce data and studying and evaluating new models of care.

“We need to build a culture of planning,” Bourgeault says. “The most expensive situation is continuing to do what we do now: Not plan. Not retain. Just constantly trying to recruit to fill a system that is like a sieve.”

Sara Allin, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, says Canada doesn’t track health-workforce numbers thoroughly enough. Data that is available is often fragmented, inconsistent between regions and not easily available to policymakers.

And while having a view of regional and professional gaps in the workforce is key, Allin says it’s also imperative to collect data on patients’ medical needs to help inform planning. For example, she says, an aging population, the rise in chronic disease, such as diabetes, and social risk factors, including food insecurity and unsafe housing, all play into population health. 

“We need to project and model our future medical needs and map those against future capacity,” Allin says, adding that there is currently a “mismatch” between the two. “Good data is fundamental to both exercises. And we’re not able to accurately and effectively measure these things right now.”

Given the health system’s current “precarious” state it will be difficult to meet the needs of the growing population, she says. This sentiment is shared by Farah Ahmad, an associate professor in York University’s School of Health Policy and Management, who agrees solutions must be found to the workforce challenges ahead of the country’s projected population growth. 

“We are going to have a lot of newcomers, which is great for our overall economic development,” she says. “But if we are not preparing our health system, who will take care of them?”

Ahmad points to the most recent figures from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that show Canada has only 2.8 physicians for every 1,000 residents, a rate well below other countries. In the 2021 OECD data, Canada also graduates far fewer physicians than other countries, ranking 33rd out of 36.

While Canada’s immigration goals provide a partial solution to the country’s worker shortage by bringing in internationally trained professionals, Ahmed worries too much burden is being placed on newcomers. “The answers, they cannot all come from new immigrants.”

Philpott, a family physician and a former federal health minister, says the country should be able to build and train its own health-care workforce even as it removes barriers to let internationally educated professionals work here, also an important strategy.

She points to a unique initiative from Queen’s University and Lakeridge Health, designed to train and graduate family physicians, as one type of solution. In September this program will see 20 medical students interested in family medicine train in Durham, with the goal of having them graduate and set up their practice in the region. 

Eight months into her term as mayor, Roy says advocating for more health-care services gets pushed higher and higher on Whitby Council’s list of priorities.

Last month, council approved funding to help support the Queen’s-Lakeridge Health MD Family Physician Training Program as well as a plan to establish an incentive program to recruit and retain family doctors to the region. And Roy herself is advocating for the province to approve a $3-million planning grant for a new hospital in Whitby, the location recommended by an independent task force. 

She notes a provincial task force in 2015 recommended a new acute-care hospital for somewhere in Durham. Eight years later, and with the region’s population ballooning faster than ever, that plan remains stalled.

“This crisis is one that’s here today,” says Roy. “Lakeridge Health Oshawa is operating at one and a half times what it was first built for, and it will take at least 10 years after approval for that hospital — anywhere in Durham — to open its doors.”

Roy fears that as time passes, and the population grows, the health-care gap in the community, already stark, will continue to widen, putting residents health even further at risk.

“I’m really concerned,” she says. “We have to have a community that provides all the health-care supports. But if we don’t have them in place, we may end up having residents whose ailments are further along, their cancer diagnosis not diagnosed at an earlier stage, that it takes longer for treatments or medications to be prescribed.

“We know early intervention is key. And that may be at risk.”

Source: How we can right-size Canada’s health system as the population grows

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , ,

What the [USA] Birthright-Citizenship Debate Is Really About

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

More on political posturing by DeSantis and Trump with relevant background:

When my Google Alerts sounded this past week, I knew that birthright citizenship was again lighting up in the news. My interest in debates over birthright is professional and abiding: I’m a historian who in 2018 published a book, Birthright Citizens, that traced this approach to national belonging from its origins in debates among Black Americans at the start of the 19th century to 1868, when the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment established that, with a few exceptions, anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen.

On Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, looking to advance his presidential campaign, promised to reverse more than a century and a half of law and policy and, as he put it in a statement, “end the idea that children of illegal aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship if they are born in the United States.” A few days later, a spokesperson for another GOP presidential candidate, Nikki Haley, said she “opposes birthright citizenship for those who enter the country illegally,” and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign said he would reform birthright by adding new citizenship requirements. Having lived through more than one such outburst in recent years—the first in 2018, when then-President Donald Trump proposed to do away with birthright—I know that any promise to transform our citizenship scheme is sure to set off a debate.

But what, we should ask, is that debate really about? Why does it keep coming up? When we talk about birthright citizenship, we are talking about democracy—its fundamental component that grants equal status to every person born in this country and affords them all the same rights of citizenship.

Let’s briefly review. Although the 1787 Constitution did not bar Black Americans from citizenship, it also did not plainly state what made any person a citizen. The result was that Black Americans received profoundly uneven treatment before the law; most authorities leaned toward the view that color, with its implied links to slave status, disqualified Black Americans from citizenship. Black activists waged a long campaign arguing that, on the face of the Constitution and as a matter of natural rights, Black people were citizens by virtue of their birth on U.S. soil.

Notoriously, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, concluded that citizenship was beyond the reach of Black Americans; their race disqualified them. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, lawmakers remedied this circumstance: first in an 1862 opinion from Attorney General Edward Bates, then in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and finally in the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which installed birthright in the Constitution, guaranteeing that Black people and all those born in the United States were citizens.

Calls today to do away with birthright citizenship are, in large part, political theater, often a way to project a tough stance on immigration. DeSantis outlined only a very loose strategy, saying he would “force the courts and Congress to finally address this failed policy.” Trump, too, was light on specifics. For all the noise that his administration generated around doing away with birthright citizenship, which he threatened to do multiple times as president, nothing came of it. The meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment as we knew it before the Trump era remains unchanged.

Campaign pledges to end birthright citizenship might get people’s attention, but lawmakers have kept this objective alive in other quarters. Less well known, for example, is how in every session of Congress from 2007 to 2021, a Republican representative introduced something called the Birthright Citizenship Act. The legislation would have redefined the meaning of a minor clause in the Fourteenth Amendment—one that limits birthright status to persons “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. In 1868, this exception excluded the children of visiting diplomats and those of Native American sovereign nations. Today, some lawmakers propose to newly expand the meaning of this clause by defining children as subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and thus birthright citizens, only when they have one parent who is a U.S. citizen or national, a permanent resident residing in the United States, or an alien on active duty in the Armed Forces. In Congress, opposition to birthright simmers on the back burner, but it demands our vigilance lest it boil over.

When politicians dispute birthright, they also open up legal questions about where the power to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment resides. Trump suggested that with his authority, as exercised through an executive order, he could reinterpret who is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and thus a birthright citizen. Members of Congress similarly have taken the view that that body can legislate the amendment’s meaning. Many legal commentators rightly argue that the U.S. Supreme Court has the final say when it comes to the meaning of the Constitution. Our recently constituted Court has not been tested on the issue of birthright, and we must allow for the possibility that it might defer to Congress or the president when it comes to interpreting its meaning.

When Trump first promised to undo birthright, I was primarily concerned about how immigrants and their U.S.-born children would be harmed by such a change. Today, this worry still figures importantly in my mind, but my concerns have grown broader. Calls to undo birthright, though couched in terms of immigration reform, ultimately aim to undo a key precept of our democracy: equitable access to citizenship. Birthright sets an even bar when it comes to being a citizen—all those born here are subject to the same threshold test, no matter whom they descended from. It ensures that, for those born in the United States, citizenship will not be conferred depending on their politics, race, faith, culture, gender, or sexuality. Birthright safeguards those born here from political leaders who would mete out citizenship as a reward or withhold it as a punishment.

The wielding of citizenship as a weapon is precisely what the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to prevent. In 1868, birthright undid the Dred Scott decision. It ensured that the right of Black Americans to belong to this nation was neither open to debate nor susceptible to shifting political whims. Since its ratification, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed the belonging of some of the most vulnerable among us, including generations of children born to immigrant parents. It has protected marginalized, despised, and unpopular people who, when born here, do not need to fear exile or banishment. Birthright citizenship has always been a solution rather than a problem, and our democracy depends on it remaining just that.

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, a professor of history, and a Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Source: What the Birthright-Citizenship Debate Is Really About

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , , ,

Canada’s citizenship numbers are rising. How many passed the test?

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

Some useful numbers on pass rates (91-92 percent). Seems largely unchanged once the initial revised version of test was revised around 2011 when the pass rates dropped significantly (language level and complexity of questions):

On Canada Day, more than a thousand people will be pledging their oath to the country as new Canadian citizens.

Ceremonies for 1,130 citizenship recipients are scheduled to take place across the country on Saturday, according to numbers Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada shared with Global News.

Passing a citizenship test is one of the requirements to officially becoming Canadian – and the majority who took the exam this year were successful, recent IRCC data shows.

Between January and May 2023, a total of 119,053 tests were completed – out of which 92 per cent passed, while the rest failed.

It was a similar story last year, with 91 per cent of the people passing among the roughly 260,000 citizenship tests that were completed.

By comparison, Canadians would be less successful, recent polling suggests.

A Leger survey of 1,512 Canadian adults found that only 23 per cent would pass the citizenship test, based on their answers to 10 randomly selected questions.

The average score of the Canadians who were surveyed was only 49 per cent – where 75 per cent is needed to pass the test.

…

Source: Canada’s citizenship numbers are rising. How many passed the test?

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with ,

With End of Affirmative Action, a Push for a New Tool: Adversity Scores

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

Of interest. Another example of using class-type criteria:

For the head of admissions at a medical school, Dr. Mark Henderson is pretty blunt when sizing up the profession.

“Mostly rich kids get to go to medical school,” he said.

In his role at the medical school at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Henderson has tried to change that, developing an unorthodox tool to evaluate applicants: the socioeconomic disadvantage scale, or S.E.D.

The scale rates every applicant from zero to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education. Admissions decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays and interviews.

The disadvantage scale has helped turn U.C. Davis into one of the most diverse medical schools in the country — notable in a state that voted in 1996 to ban affirmative action.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling last week against race-conscious admissions, the medical school offers a glimpse of how selective schools across the country might overhaul their admissions policies, as they look for alternative ways to achieve diversity without running afoul of the new law.

Last week, President Biden called adversity scores a “new standard” for achieving diversity.

Word has gotten out about the U.C. Davis scale. Dr. Henderson said that about 20 schools had recently requested more information. And there are other socioeconomic measurements, including Landscape, released in 2019 from the College Board, the nonprofit that administers the SATs. That tool allows undergraduate admissions offices to assess the socioeconomic backgrounds of individual students.

But skeptics question whether such rankings — or any kind of socioeconomic affirmative action — will be enough to replace race-conscious affirmative action. And schools that use adversity scales may also find themselves wandering into legal quagmires, with conservative groups promising to fight programs that are simply stand-ins for race.

Over the years, medical schools have made some progress in diversifying their student bodies, with numbers ticking up. But just like undergraduate admissions, wealth and connections continue to play a determining role in who is accepted. More than half of medical students come from families in the top 20 percent of income, while only 4 percent come from those in the bottom 20 percent, according to data from the American Association of Medical Colleges.

There is also a family dynamic. Children of doctors are 24 timesmore likely to become doctors than their peers, according to the American Medical Association. It’s hard to know why the profession passes down from generation to generation, but the statistic drove the association to adopt a policy opposing legacy preferences in admissions.

“That’s a staggering economic gap between medical students and the general public,” said Dr. Henderson, who comes from a working-class upbringing and now serves as associate dean of admissions.

As a consequence, the number of Black doctors remains stubbornly low: About 6 percent of practicing doctors in the United States are Black, compared with 13.6 percent of the American population who identify as Black.

With the Supreme Court decision, “that number is likely to go down,” said Dr. James E.K. Hildreth, the president of Meharry Medical College, formed in 1876 in Nashville to train Black health care providers.

Leaders in medicine say training more Black and Hispanic doctors could help bridge the vast divides in American health care. Research shows that doctors from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups are more likely to work in primary care or in locales where doctors are scarce.

And patients have better outcomes when treated by doctors from similar backgrounds, said Dr. Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, president of the American Medical Association.

The U.C. Davis scale has drawn attention because of its ability to bring in diverse students using what the schools says are “race-neutral” socioeconomic models.

In its most recent entering class of 133 students, 14 percent were Black and 30 percent were Hispanic. Nationally, 10 percent of medical school students were Black and 12 percent were Hispanic. A vast majority of the U.C. Davis class — 84 percent — comes from disadvantaged backgrounds, and 42 percent are the first in their family to go to college.

The overall acceptance rate has been less than 2 percent.

In the Davis scale, first used in 2012, eight categories establish an adversity score for each candidate. Factors include family income, whether applicants come from an underserved area, whether they help support their nuclear families and whether their parents went to college.

The higher an applicant rates on the disadvantage scale, the bigger the boost.

There is no set formula on how to balance the scale with the academic record, Dr. Henderson said, but a simulation of the system revealed that students from underrepresented groups grew to 15.3 percent from 10.7 percent. And the share of economically disadvantaged students tripled, to 14.5 percent of the class from 4.6 percent.

At the same time, scores from the MCAT, the standardized test for medical school applications, dropped only marginally.

Still, it’s not easy to persuade medical schools to upend admissions standards, particularly anything that undermines the value of test scores and grades. Dr. Henderson said he had received pushback from his own colleagues.

“Doctors say their kids got into medical school elsewhere, and they didn’t get in here,” he said.

As the children of doctors, he said, those applicants earned an S.E.D. score of zero.

A number of scholars, including Richard D. Kahlenberg, have promoted using class-conscious preferences, which they say could address racial inequities in education without fostering the resentment often prompted by racially based diversity plans.

And President Biden said on Thursday that his administration would develop a “new standard for colleges taking into account the adversity a student has overcome.”

“The kid who faced tougher challenges has demonstrated more grit, more determination,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House, “and that should be a factor that colleges should take into account in admissions.”

He might be talking about someone like Eleanor Adams, a member of the Choctaw Nation, who said that she did not think medical school was an option for her.

“I didn’t grow up with a lot of money,” she said.

But she found mentors who encouraged her, and today she is in her third year of medical school at U.C. Davis, which is in Sacramento. She plans to become an Indian Health Service doctor in Oklahoma — fulfilling one of the school’s goals, Dr. Henderson said, which is to train doctors who will return to their communities.

At schools in other states without affirmative action, such as the University of Michigan, admissions officials have complained that enrolling more socioeconomically disadvantaged students has not significantly increased the share of Black, Hispanic and Native American students.

“Those tools certainly have utility, but they fall short of accomplishing what a race-conscious admission practice does,” said Dr. Ehrenfeld of the American Medical Association.

The socioeconomic rankings could also be legally challenged. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in his majority opinion on affirmative action, wrote that colleges could consider how race had affected an applicant’s life. But he also warned against using proxies for race.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian activist group, has already sued a selective school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., for using economic factors as stand-ins for race in admissions.

Joshua P. Thompson, a lawyer for the foundation, said the legal questions surrounding these disadvantage indexes were complex.

“I think the devil is going to be in the details,” Mr. Thompson said. “The Supreme Court was pretty clear that what can’t be done directly can’t be done indirectly.”

Should it come to that, Dr. Henderson said that his school’s disadvantage scale would be defensible in court.

“Am I worried about it? Yes,” Dr. Henderson said of a lawsuit. “Is it going to stop me? No.”

Source: With End of Affirmative Action, a Push for a New Tool: Adversity Scores

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Curry: Removing one of life’s most memorable days with a Zoom call [citizenship ceremonies]

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

Another commentary bemoaning the proposed change:

The best part of the Canada Day baseball game between the Toronto Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox was not the leadoff home run by George Springer, or, even the game itself. The Jays lost.

It was the opening ceremonies.

But not the giant Canadian flag unfurled on field, or the Canadian Armed Forces team rappelling from the rooftop to the playing field, though both were pretty spectacular.

It was the Canadian citizenship ceremony.

Nine lucky new Canadians were chosen to participate, to match the starting lineup of the Jays. All clad in the Jays’ Canada Day red jerseys, they were individually introduced to the applauding 40,000 plus fans. The looks on their faces, the body language and the sheer joy of the occasion was something to behold.

After taking the oath of allegiance, in both official languages no less, they were all invited to throw out ceremonial first pitches to their Blue Jay counterparts. Some of them even managed to get the ball to the player’s glove.

It was magnificent, and the crowd cheered them on mightily.

Compare this national spectacle (the game was broadcast on Sportsnet) to the latest brain trust decision about citizenship ceremonies.

They will no longer be in person, but virtual.

Have the Ottawa bureaucrats who came up with this notion ever been to a citizenship ceremony? If they have, shame on them for taking away a memory that will last a lifetime for new Canadians.

The Government of Canada website now says most new Canadians will be invited to a virtual Zoom citizenship ceremony, instead of an in-person event.

That should bring a tear to potential participants’ eyes.

Gather around the computer screen, family, and look at other new Canadians, whom you will never meet in person, and a citizenship judge you will never meet, and crack a bottle of Champagne. We will celebrate with our little group, not all the other new Canadians being sworn in.

I have attended only one citizenship ceremony, and it was back when Jay Aspin was our Member of Parliament. I was invited, as the then executive director of the North Bay & District Multicultural Centre, to sit with the dignitaries (who? me?) and then congratulate each new Canadian after they became citizens.

It was a Canada Day outdoor event, in front of the museum. It was sunny and warm and each new Canadian had friends and family attending. It was a joyous event, even if the Blue Jays weren’t there. The

citizenship judge, imported from southern Ontario, was resplendent in his robes and his presence added gravitas to the event.

It was a day I remember vividly, and I was born in Canada. For those that were not, and became Canadian citizens that day, it was one of the most memorable days of their lives.

A lot has been written about this foolhardy decision to go virtual. I subscribe to Andrew Griffith’s daily Multicultural Meanderings blog, and in a recent post he analyzed the feedback the February announcement by the federal government received.

The announcement was made in The Canada Gazette, rather than in the form of a news release from the minister. When governments do that, they are trying to avoid negative feedback. But it came anyway, in droves.

In the almost 700 comments in the Gazette, opposition is nearly universal among citizens and about two-thirds of immigrants. Former Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson and former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi spoke out against it in the media, among many others, including former immigration ministers and citizenship judges.

But, Griffith noted, “Interestingly, strong support comes from applicants, many of whom are frustrated with the application process and its delays. This clear divide is telling.”

The government says the move to virtual ceremonies could save three months of citizenship processing time, and people won’t have to take time off work to participate. The clear divide Griffith is referring to is the bureaucratic slowness and backlog in processing citizenship applications that is frustrating applicants.

My take is those in the system that are okay with a virtual ceremony just want to get it done, because the process is taking so long. They have never been to a live in-person ceremony, so they don’t know what they are missing.

It is important for all the new immigrants we are seeing in our city, who one day will become Canadian citizens.

Mayor Peter Chirico is quoted in a Sunday BayToday article about Canada Day, saying “We’re coming up on our 100th anniversary of the corporation of the City of North Bay in 2025. Our city is such a diverse and accepting city. The face of North Bay is changing and we’re changing with it. So, we celebrate Canada Day and what Canada means, that it is an accepting place, that it is a safe, and welcoming place.”

Can North Bay replicate what the Jays did for the new Canadians? Not likely, but it could come close.

How about a Canadian citizenship ceremony right before a Battalion home game at Memorial Gardens? It would be full of people cheering them on, and each new Canadian could each take a shot at the Battalion goalie…who would, of course, let them score. What is more Canadian than hockey?

That would be a memorable evening.

Editor’s Note: Don Curry is a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant living in North Bay, and a member of the Bay Today community advisory committee.

Source: Opinion: Removing one of life’s most memorable days with a Zoom call

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with ,

Review: The underlying philosophy of Black Lives Matter

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Of interest:

In 1923, amid a wave of lynchings, Claude McKay wrote the sonnet “If We Must Die.” He was faced with a society structured by white supremacy and anti-Blackness, a society that wanted Blacks “to die like hogs/ hunted and penned in an inglorious spot.” Confronted with this uniquely American form of death, McKay proclaimed that “we’ll face the murderous cowardly pack/ Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back.” For McKay, the nobility and humanity of Black people was forged in fighting the monsters of white supremacy.

A similar vision animates Vincent Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. For Lloyd, dignity is not something abstracted from a notion of “humanity.” It is wrested from the teeth of domination. It is asserted in the struggle against oppression. It is born the moment the slave seizes his master and throws him down. Perhaps most important for Lloyd, dignity is Black.

Much of Lloyd’s book is about looking at centers of ontological resistance to domination, such as Black love, Black family and Black magic.

Begun while he participated in protests in Ferguson, Mo., and continued in seminars and libraries, Lloyd’s book focuses on the words of generations of Black freedom fighters. To the struggle, he offers the contribution of a keen intellect articulating the underlying philosophy of Black Lives Matter. While I disagree with aspects of his book, his core argument is a profound challenge to anyone who takes seriously the struggle for human dignity, antiracism and the work of dismantling white supremacy.

Lloyd’s philosophy depends on some fundamental claims. The first is that we must understand the “depths of anti-Blackness shading America” such that anti-Blackness “is at the center of everything, for everyone.” It is not an incidental, localized or past reality. It is reality. For Lloyd, philosophy is meant to help us understand reality and, more important, to resist and overthrow that reality. Resistance to domination is not on behalf of some antecedent given of human dignity that does not say anything about actual reality. Such abstracted claims about dignity (“all lives matter”) cannot resist anti-Black reality.

Instead, dignity is “something you do, a practice, a performance, a way of engaging the world…. It necessarily means struggle against domination.” The world is oppression; dignity is the refusal of the world. It is dying but fighting back. Black dignity is found in that fighting back. Since anti-Blackness is the primary form of domination, Black dignity is the primary form of enacted dignity.

Philosophers must begin from that fighting back in order to understand reality. Thus Lloyd places a great deal of importance on the distinction between the ontic and the ontological. Generally, these terms would refer to questions about the being of a specific object (ontic) and the being of beings (ontological). You might say the former is small-picture metaphysics and the latter is big-picture. For Lloyd, both have to do with the struggle against domination. The ontic struggle has to do with specific sites of struggle, a struggle against a particular center of domination. The ontological has to do with “struggle aimed at domination” itself. As with McKay’s poem, fighting is not only specific to instances. In asserting Black dignity, one fights the whole system of domination.

Much of Lloyd’s book is about looking at centers of ontological resistance to domination, such as Black love, Black family and Black magic. Each chapter leans into the claim that racism is not just personal or even systematic; it is the being of reality. According to Lloyd, multiculturalism, liberalism and the American project are to be discarded as expressions of that ontology. Since domination is reality, abolitionism is about abolishing everything.

It is here that some of the weaknesses of the book appear. First, Lloyd seems uninterested in Black voices that differ from his more radical approach, voices that show a majority of Black Americans want serious reform of the police and criminal justice system but do not want the abolishment of either. Those voices see arguments like those for defunding of the police as a form of political colonization by urban elites. What does Lloyd think of the majority of African Americans, who agree that “Black dignity” is a non-negotiable struggle and as a consequence want more and better policing? In his book, Black conservatives go unmentioned while establishment Black liberals are depicted as the purveyors of vacuous expressions of multiculturalism.

Perhaps these Black voices belong to those who are just “dreamers” or are trapped by respectability. But then what to make of Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass or Rosa Parks? They wanted America to live up to its ideals, not abolish them. Lloyd doesn’t let these voices disturb his text. Rather, he states that “Black dignity is the philosophy of Black Americans.” But whose philosophy of Black dignity? Which vision of antiracism? For Lloyd, “One view is right, others might seem right but are wrong.” Ironically, this sentiment seems to feed into what Lloyd, in Compact magazine, has criticized as an antiracist cult that seeks to silence dialogue.

Lloyd argues we should center dignity discourse on Black dignity. He rightly recognizes other forms of intersecting oppression, but his account still centers on Black dignity as the first philosophy, such that “all philosophy must be routed through the Middle Passage” and understood in light of “domination’s chief paradigm, Blackness.” But shouldn’t we also center dignity on the Indigenous, the refugee, the unborn or the disabled? Lloyd is right that dignity is something struggled for. However, that struggle does not fabricate a dignity not already there; it brings to light the truth of dignity that is always already there.

If white supremacy is to be overcome, anti-Blackness cast down as sin and blasphemy, and Black dignity centered as fundamental reality, we will need books like Lloyd’s.Black dignity is an ethical, even ontological, preferential option for dignity. But if we hold this at the expense of intrinsic human dignity, then other voices and other ways of asserting dignity will be lost. This means we lose the grounding of natural law that Lloyd powerfully presents in his book Black Natural Law. The danger in losing this is that the struggle may devolve into centers of competing power with little orientation to a justice beyond power.

Making dignity entirely performative—and thus downplaying intrinsic dignity and natural law—is likely tied to how ontological Lloyd makes domination. Domination, as reality, is not a privation of a more original good but is instead the original and ultimate position and thus the position that is never overcome. “The object of ontological struggles is,” Lloyd tells us, “impossible to achieve.” More than 500 years of racial domination speak to the truth of this claim. But there are other stories of when people cast down domination. In this, I wish that Lloyd had been willing to be more than a philosopher by being a theologian. As King puts it: “the ringing cry of the Christian faith is that our God is able.” Believing domination can be overcome is not “a fantasy of domination itself,” as Lloyd puts it, but a conviction about God and humanity.

If white supremacy is to be overcome, anti-Blackness cast down as sin and blasphemy, and Black dignity centered as fundamental reality, we will need books like Lloyd’s. For all my criticisms, he does the work of philosophizing on behalf of Black dignity. He is right that dignity must be found and asserted in the struggle for dignity.

But there is a grace beyond assertion. Later in his life, Claude McKay converted to Catholicism, finding in it the only source of racial unity. He “turned to God for great strength to fight” while holding to “the Sacred Light.” We should, too. Starting from Black dignity and from the dignity of all who are oppressed, we may someday—by that sacred light and our efforts—find ourselves with human dignity, achieved.

Terence Sweeney is a professor in the honors program at Villanova University.

Source: Review: The underlying philosophy of Black Lives Matter

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

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