How VR and AI could revolutionize language training for newcomers

2022/08/27 Leave a comment

Innovative:

Adla Hitou is shamelessly showcasing her stellar work experience as she tries to convince the interviewer to hire her.

The Syrian newcomer answers every question that’s tossed her way.

“Give me that $3-trillion job,” she says, before bursting into laughter.

The assertive and fun-loving Hitou undertaking this mock job interview in virtual reality seems like an entirely different person from the timid mother of two who normally only whispers to others in her real-world classroom.

“I don’t feel nervous speaking in English in the virtual world because I just disappear. When I talk, I’m not afraid to make mistakes anymore. I just feel more confident,” says the 51-year-old Mississaugan, a former pharmacist who resettled in Canada in 2018 via Lebanon.

Alexander called the project’s use of VR in language learning “groundbreaking,” adding the technology appears to help participants overcome the self-consciousness in communicating in their second language.

“At this point, VR is a great equalizer. When students are using VR, they seem to feel this freedom to want to be able to speak. I think part of it is, when they’re in the VR world of it, they’re less concerned about themselves and about making mistakes, where they are actually being represented by a cartoon character.”

On this sweltering Saturday, instructor Anthony Faulkner and volunteers prepared the four female and three male adult learners on how to tackle questions at a job interview.

At first glance, there’s nothing atypical about the drill, a part of the English as a Second Language curriculum to help adult immigrants learn the language for their successful integration in their adopted country.

They talked about how to make a formal introduction of themselves, highlight their accomplishments and think on their feet when faced with the unexpected.

Sitting in a circle in the lab, Hitou — in a soft and gentle voice — told classmates in the physical world about her training as a pharmacist, her work experience as a project manager with the World Health Organization’s food and vaccination programs in Syria, and the civil war that forced her exile.

“I’m good at communication. I can take your ideas, relate the information and make a good presentation,” she said, adding personal details: “I love volunteering and do handcraft. I’ve made crochets and sold them at bazaars to raise money for charities. I am a bad seller but I have a kind heart.”

After the in-class session, with help of a team of volunteers, the participants were invited to put on their headsets, lift the hand-held controllers and enter Faulkner’s virtual office resembling an executive suite — wood panelling, rows of bookshelves and a bronze chandelier.

In an instant, Hitou, in her white hijab and blue one-piece dress, transformed into an avatar in the virtual world, revealing her long silver hair and sporting a black business suit.

“How do you deal with failures and mistakes?” asked Faulkner, standing in the middle of the classroom and moving his hand-held controllers in the air to make his avatar do a “hands-open, palms-up” gesture.

Caught by the surprise question, Hitou, behind her headset and facing a whiteboard in the physical world, confidently replied: “We are all humans. We have to learn from our mistakes and understand why we made the mistakes and failed. I do not give up.”

“This is so much more fun than learning English from books and notes in the traditional classroom,” she said later. “Now, I remember every word and thing that I see and learn in the virtual world when I go back to the real world.”

The virtual job interview is just one of many thematic VR experiences covered over the eight-week course by the research team that developed the customized scenarios with help from ENGAGE, a virtual platform that simulates the way people interact in the physical world for multi-user events, collaboration, training and education. One scene includes a dinner party at a virtual highrise loft; another involves the planning of a Canadian road trip where each newcomer is assigned to research a part of the country before going to the different booths in a virtual conference hall to make a presentation to their peers about these places and activities.

Instead of just viewing some Canadian landmarks on television as peers in a regular class might, the VR participants can take virtual tours of Niagara Falls, Toronto’s Eaton Centre and St. Lawrence Market through the VR 360 videos on YouTube VR.

Oakville’s Manar Mustafa, a computer engineer who fled war in Syria and came here in 2016, said she attended a regular English program at a newcomer settlement service agency but nothing can compare to VR learning.

“This is a perfect experience. I never used VR but everything feels so real in the VR world. I have not visited the Niagara Falls but now I have. It was right in front of me in the classroom and I didn’t even get wet,” the 36-year-old mother of four said with a chuckle.

“Initially, I felt dizzy (with motion sickness), but now I really love it. I feel very comfortable with it.” 

Her classmate, Afghan journalist Abdul Mujib Ebrahimi, who only arrived in Canada last November, said he hopes to quickly translate what he has learned from the virtual world to the real world.

“The VR experience pushes you in a real situation. You are a character and you use your imagination to communicate with others. If I don’t know a word or how to say something, I just explain it in a different way for people to understand me,” said the 27-year-old from Badakhshan. 

“I’m still trying to learn English and work with English, but I am more confident when I talk to real people.” 

Alexander cautions that it’s too early to determine the effectiveness of VR in language learning.

“We have to be careful of the novelty effect of VR. Our students are enjoying the experience maybe because they’re trying VR for the first time and they can tell their friends and family about it,” he explained.

The VR class this summer is part of a series of projects that also include participants in traditional classrooms and artificial-intelligence-assisted learning in front of a computer. The AI session will be launched in winter.

There are about 80 newcomers waiting to get in the program, according to Marwa Khobieh, executive director of the Syrian Canadian Foundation, which has been running a joint English tutoring program for newcomers with volunteers from U of T since 2017.

She concedes that VR language learning is expensive, with the required infrastructure and equipment in its infancy, but if it succeeds, there’s a huge potential to use it to accelerate the learning and ultimately the integration of new immigrants.

“If we’re able to help newcomers learn and improve their language skills in two years instead of four, it’s worth the investment,” noted Khobieh. “Technology is our future and this can change the future of language training for newcomers.”

Source: How VR and AI could revolutionize language training for newcomers

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Chambers: Accusations of systemic racism on campus aren’t proof it exists

2022/08/27 Leave a comment

Anecdotes do not equal evidence although they can point the way to more detailed study. Wider surveys and studies are more helpful in understanding the extent and forms of discrimination and bias.
Public service employment equity reports and surveys, now with disaggregated data, are good examples (although in my experience, are unlikely to convince many activists):
Accusations of systemic racism have become increasingly commonplace on university campuses, led primarily by anti-racist activists. With the return to classes in September we can expect more of this.
The activists consider racism not only to be a serious campus problem, but insist that university administrators publicly support this position. For example, at the University of Ottawa, activists have pressured administrators to address the issue on two notable occasions.

Source: Chambers: Accusations of systemic racism on campus aren’t proof it exists

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International students waiting for visas from Ottawa at risk of missing start of classes

2022/08/27 Leave a comment

An unfortunate additional example at IRCC. Given this and other examples, perhaps time for the government to scale back to program capacity, rather than failing to meet service standards and expectations:

Delays in processing student visas have put a large number of international students at risk of missing the start of fall classes this year, as the federal Immigration Department struggles to keep up with what it describes as a surge in applications.

The issue has sparked a complaint from the Indian High Commission in Ottawa, which said in a statement that it has received a number of petitions from Indian students frustrated with lengthy wait times for visa processing.

India is Canada’s largest source country for international postsecondary students. Students from outside Canada pay tuition fees that are often more than two or three times higher than those paid by domestic students, and that money has become a crucial source of funding to universities and colleges across the country.

According to the Immigration Department, the number of student visa applications is growing. Canada received more than 123,000 applications for student visas from India in the first five months of this year, an increase of 55 per cent over 2019, according to Aidan Strickland, a spokesperson for Immigration Minister Sean Fraser. So far this year, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has processed more than 360,000 student visas, a 17-per-cent increase over the same period in 2021.

Students apply for the study permits only after they have been accepted to Canadian universities. Until their visa applications are processed they aren’t allowed to enter Canada to study – and that is true even if they have already paid tuition, or taken out student loans.

Ms. Strickland added in a statement that IRCC is still struggling with the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its operations around the world. She said the government is prioritizing applications from students aiming to begin their studies in September, but that not all applications will be processed in time for fall 2022.

“IRCC has seen an unprecedented volume of applications received for both initial study permits and extensions in 2022, not just from citizens of India but on a global scale,” Ms. Strickland said.

The number of students affected is not clear, but Canada’s diplomatic mission in India said in a tweet last week that a “large number” had experienced long wait times or not received visa decisions.

Federal data show that, as of the end of July, 34 per cent of pending international student visa applications were taking longer to process than government standards dictate.

Indian students contribute more than $4-billion in tuition fees to Canada’s postsecondary system, according to the statement from the Indian High Commission. More than 230,000 Indian students are enrolled at Canadian schools, the statement said.

At the University of Toronto, the number of students contacting registrars with study permit concerns is higher than usual, the university said in a statement. The university said it has been in constant contact with IRCC, and with the Minister’s office directly, to advocate for timely processing of study permit applications and to explain the impact of the delays on students. The statement added that any students unable to enter the country because of the delays can seek deferrals if they are eligible.

Gautham Kolluri, an international-student recruiter and immigration consultant based in Waterloo, Ont., said the number of students affected is likely in the thousands.

He said these are students who have accepted places offered to them at Canadian universities or colleges and expected to have their student visas approved in a matter of weeks. Instead, the process is taking months.

One client of his waited six months to get a study permit, he said.

Mr. Kolluri said he is advising some clients that they are unlikely to receive approval from IRCC before classes begin. At this point, he said, he’s recommending they defer until the next available intake, which can mean a delay until January, or in some cases until next September.

“They’re devastated. For them it’s their studies, but also their future career and opportunities in Canada that are affected,” Mr. Kolluri said. “We are losing these kind of good students who could make a contribution to Canada.”

Most students in India take out education loans in their home countries before coming to Canada. Mr. Kolluri said the interest on those loans starts accumulating even if the students haven’t been able to begin their studies, adding to the pressure they feel if there are problems with their study permits.

Before the pandemic, he said, visa approvals often came through in two to three weeks, and in some cases as quickly as 48 hours. Now, IRCC’s website says it takes up to 12 weeks on average for a study permit application from India to be approved. The target is eight weeks, according to the department.

Ms. Strickland said Mr. Fraser has announced that he expects to hire an additional 1,250 officers by the end of fall to tackle application backlogs and processing delays, paid in part with $85-million in additional funds directed to the department in the government’s 2021 fiscal update.

Source: International students waiting for visas from Ottawa at risk of missing start of classes

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Black August uplifted as alternative Black History Month

2022/08/27 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see if picked up by Canadian activists, just as BIPOC was, as another US import  rather than focussing on Canadian specificity and history:

For Jonathan Peter Jackson, a direct relative of two prominent members of the Black Panther Party, revolutionary thought and family history have always been intertwined, particularly in August.

That’s the month in 1971 when his uncle, the famed Panther George Jackson, was killed during an uprising at San Quentin State Prison in California. A revolutionary whose words resonated inside and out of the prison walls, he was a published author, activist and radical thought leader.

To many, February is the month dedicated to celebrating Black Americans’ contributions to a country where they were once enslaved. But Black History Monthhas an alternative: It’s called Black August.

First celebrated in 1979, Black August was created to commemorate Jackson’s fight for Black liberation. Fifty-one years since his death, Black August is now a monthlong awareness campaign and celebration dedicated to Black freedom fighters, revolutionaries, radicals and political prisoners, both living and deceased.

The annual commemorations have been embraced by activists in the global Black Lives Matter movement, many of whom draw inspiration from freedom fighters like Jackson and his contemporaries.

“It’s important to do this now because a lot of people who were on the radical scene during that time period, relatives and non-relatives, who are like blood relatives, are entering their golden years,” said Jonathan Jackson, 51, of Fair Hill, Maryland.

George Jackson was 18 when he was arrested for robbing a gas station in Los Angeles in 1960. He was convicted and given an indeterminate sentence of one year to life and spent the next decade at California’s Soledad and San Quentin prisons, much of it in solitary confinement.

While incarcerated, Jackson began studying the words of revolutionary theoreticians such as Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, who advocated class awareness, challenging institutions and overturning capitalism through revolution. Founding leaders of the Panthers, including Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, were also inspired by Marx, Lenin and Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung.

Jackson became a leader in the prisoner rights movement. His letters from prison to loved ones and supporters were compiled in the bestselling books “Soledad Brother” and “Blood in My Eye.”

Inspired by his words and frustrated with his situation, George’s younger brother, Jonathan, initiated a takeover at the Marin County Superior Court in California in 1970. He freed three inmates and held several courthouse staff hostage, in an attempt to demand the release of his brother and two other inmates, known as the Soledad Brothers, who were accused of killing a correctional officer. Jonathan was killed as he tried to escape, although it’s disputed whether he was killed in a courtroom shootout or fatally shot while driving away with hostages.

George was killed on Aug. 21, 1971, during a prison uprising. Inmates at San Quentin prison began formally commemorating his death in 1979, and from there, Black August was born.

“I certainly wish that more people knew about George’s writings (and) knew about my father’s sacrifice on that fateful day in August,” said Jonathan Jackson, who wrote the foreword to “Soledad Brother” in the early ’90s, shortly after graduating from college.

Monifa Bandele, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, a national coalition of BLM groups, says Black August is about learning the vast history of Black revolutionary leaders. That includes figures such as Nat Turner, who is famous for leading a slave rebellion on a southern Virginia plantation in August 1831, and Marcus Garvey, the leader of the Pan-Africanism movement and born in August 1887. It includes events such as the Haitian Revolution in 1791 and the March on Washington in 1963, both taking place in the month of August.

“This idea that there was this one narrow way that Black people resisted oppression is really a myth that is dispelled by Black August,” said Bandele, who is also a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a group that raises awareness of political prisoners.

“And what we saw happen after the 1970s is that it grew outside of the (prison) walls because, as people who were incarcerated came home to their families and communities, they began to do community celebrations of Black August,” she added.

The ways of honoring this month also come in various forms and have evolved over the years. Some take part in fasting, while others use this time to study the ways of their predecessors. Weekly event series are also common during Black August, from reading groups to open mic nights.

Sankofa, a Black-owned cultural center and coffee shop in Washington that has served the D.C. community for nearly 25 years, wraps up a weekly open mic night in honor of Black August on Friday. The event has drawn local residents of all ages, many who have shared stories, read poetry and performed songs with the theme of rebellion.

“This month is all about resistance and celebrating our political prisoners and using all of the faculties that we have to free people who are in prison, let me say, unjustly,” emcee Ayinde Sekou said to the crowd during a recent event at Sankofa.

Jonathan Jackson, George’s nephew, also believes that there are largely systemic reasons as to why Black August, and his family history specifically, are not widely taught.

“It’s difficult sometimes for radicals who were not assassinated, per se, to enter into the popular discourse,” he said. “George and Jonathan were never victims. They took action, and they were killed taking that action, and sometimes that’s very difficult to understand for people who will accept a political assassination.”

Jackson hopes to honor his father’s and uncle’s legacy through documenting the knowledge of elders from that era, as a means of continuing the fight.

“We need to get those testimonies. … We need to understand what happened, so that we can improve on what they did. I think now is as good a time as any to get that done,” he said.

Source: Black August uplifted as alternative Black History Month

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Workplace diversity programmes often fail, or backfire

2022/08/26 Leave a comment

Important studies, noting that cultural-inclusion training, targeted recruitment, mentor programmes, and cross-training between groups, underpinned by the business case for diversity were more effective:

Diversity and anti-harassment training is a booming industry. International company surveys suggests the number of people hired for jobs with “diversity” or “inclusion” in the title has more than quadrupled since 2010. Attempts to reduce discrimination and harassment in the workplace are laudable, and make good business sense. But only if they work. Listen to this story.

Unfortunately, the consensus now emerging among academics is that many anti-discrimination policies have no effect. What is worse, they often backfire. Some among them suspect the reason many interventions nevertheless remain popular is a hidden motive: that they are used not to reduce discrimination, but to shield against litigation. 

Successful anti-discrimination programmes should, for instance, help make firms’ management less male and pale. For a forthcoming book, Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev tested this proposition. They collected data on anti-discrimination training programmes and targeted grievance procedures at 829 American companies implemented from 1971 to 2002, and how they affected the representation of ethnic groups and genders in management up to 2015. They found that most did the opposite of what one might expect. On average, 20 years after these interventions were introduced, the group that benefited most were white men. https://infographics.economist.com/2022/20220827_GDC101/

What about the short-term? One large experiment compared the effects of eight one-time interventions to reduce unintentional biases, such as reading a vivid story with a black hero and a white villain. Among 6,321 non-black Americans, all reduced implicit bias favouring white over black people immediately after. But when retested one to five days later, the effects of all interventions had faded. Statistically speaking, the effects of all but one were nil.

Yet some programmes worked well. Mr Dobbin and Ms Kalev found that cultural-inclusion training, with an emphasis on how managers could increase their teams’ productivity with a more varied crew, was linked with greater diversity among higher-ups later on. Targeted recruitment, mentor programmes, and cross-training between groups, were also found to help. 

This is in line with a recent study by Oriane Georgeac and Aneeta Rattan, who found that atypical candidates feel less likely to be included when given a company statement with a business case for diversity instead of one with a simpler acknowledgment of its importance. They suggest explicit rationales make some suspect they will be judged based on stereotypes—rather than how they do their job.https://infographics.economist.com/2022/20220827_GDC102/

You can forgive firms their initial eagerness to implement programmes of unproven effectiveness. In global surveys, 75% of them now say diversity is a stated value or priority. But if they mean what they say, such firms should now be shifting resources, away from programmes that do not work (or worse) and towards those that do. 

But it could be, at least in America, that the courts will need to move first. Many employers may be motivated to institute diversity policies less by productivity or morality than by legal liability. In a study of 1,188 federal civil-rights opinions decided between 1965 and 2014, Lauren Edelman, a researcher, found that judges increasingly considered such practices evidence of compliance with civil-rights laws, regardless of effectiveness. If judges start paying more attention to which programmes work, it may force firms to do so too.■

Sources: “Getting to diversity”, by F. Dobbin and A. Kalev, Harvard University Press, 2022; “Reducing implicit racial preferences”, by C.K. Lai et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2016; ZoomInfo

Source: Workplace diversity programmes often fail, or backfire

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Google Finds ‘Inoculating’ People Against Misinformation Helps Blunt Its Power

2022/08/26 Leave a comment

Interesting. Worth checking out the videos:

In the fight against online misinformation, falsehoods have key advantages: They crop up fast and spread at the speed of electrons, and there is a lag period before fact checkers can debunk them.

So researchers at Google, the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol tested a different approach that tries to undermine misinformation before people see it. They call it “pre-bunking.”

The researchers found that psychologically “inoculating” internet users against lies and conspiracy theories — by pre-emptively showing them videos about the tactics behind misinformation — made people more skeptical of falsehoods afterward, according to an academic paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday. But effective educational tools still may not be enough to reach people with hardened political beliefs, the researchers found.

Since Russia spread disinformation on Facebook during the 2016 election, major technology companies have struggled to balance concerns about censorship with fighting online lies and conspiracy theories. Despite an array of attempts by the companies to address the problem, it is still largely up to users to differentiate between fact and fiction.

The strategies and tools being deployed during the midterm vote in the United States this year by Facebook, TikTok and other companies often resemble tactics developed to deal with misinformation in past elections: partnerships with fact-checking groups, warning labels, portals with vetted explainers as well as post removal and user bans.

Social media platforms have made attempts to pre-bunk before, though those efforts have done little to slow the spread of false information. Most have also not been as detailed — or as entertaining — as the videos used in the studies by the researchers.

Twitter said this month that it would try to “enable healthy civic conversation” during the midterm elections in part by reviving pop-up warnings, which it used during the 2020 election. Warnings, written in multiple languages, will appear as prompts placed atop users’ feeds and in searches for certain topics.

The new paper details seven experiments with almost 30,000 total participants. The researchers bought YouTube ad space to show users in the United States 90-second animated videos aiming to teach them about propaganda tropes and manipulation techniques. A million adults watched one of the ads for 30 seconds or longer.

The users were taught about tactics such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence, or the use of conflicting explanations to assert that something is true, so that they could spot lies. Researchers tested some participants within 24 hours of seeing a pre-bunk video and found a 5 percent increase in their ability to recognize misinformation techniques.

One video opens with a mournful piano tune and a little girl grasping a teddy bear, as a narrator says, “What happens next will make you tear up.” Then the narrator explains that emotional content compels people to pay more attention than they otherwise would, and that fear-mongering and appeals to outrage are keys to spreading moral and political ideas on social media.

The video offers examples, such as headlines that describe a “horrific” accident instead of a “serious” one, before reminding viewers that if something they see makes them angry, “someone may be pulling your strings.”

Beth Goldberg, one of the paper’s authors and the head of research and development at Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google, said in an interview that pre-bunking leaned into people’s innate desire to not be duped.

“This is one of the few misinformation interventions that I’ve seen at least that has worked not just across the conspiratorial spectrum but across the political spectrum,” Ms. Goldberg said.

Jigsaw will start a pre-bunking ad campaign on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok at the end of August for users in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, meant to head off fear-mongering about Ukrainian refugees who entered those countries after Russia invaded Ukraine. It will be done in concert with local fact checkers, academics and disinformation experts.

The researchers don’t have plans for similar pre-bunking videos ahead of the midterm elections in the United States, but they are hoping other tech companies and civil groups will use their research as a template for addressing misinformation.

However, pre-bunking is not a silver bullet. The tactic was not effective on people with extreme views, such as white supremacists, Ms. Goldberg said. She added that elections were tricky to pre-bunk because people had such entrenched beliefs. The effects of pre-bunking last for only between a few days and a month.

Groups focused on information literacy and fact-checking have employed various pre-bunking strategies, such as a misinformation-identifying curriculum delivered over two weeks of texts, or lists of bullet points with tips such as “identify the author” and “check your biases.” Online games with names like Cranky Uncle, Harmony Square, Troll Factory and Go Viral try to build players’ cognitive resistance to bot armies, emotional manipulation, science denial and vaccine falsehoods.

A study conducted in 2020 by researchers at the University of Cambridge and at Uppsala University in Sweden found that people who played the online game Bad News learned to recognize common misinformation strategies across cultures. Players in the simulation were tasked with amassing as many followers as possible and maintaining credibility while they spread fake news.

The researchers wrote that pre-bunking worked like medical immunization: “Pre-emptively warning and exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation can cultivate ‘mental antibodies’ against fake news.”

Tech companies, academics and nongovernmental organizations fighting misinformation have the disadvantage of never knowing what lie will spread next. But Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky from the University of Bristol, a co-author of Wednesday’s paper, said propaganda and lies were predictable, nearly always created from the same playbook.

“Fact checkers can only rebut a fraction of the falsehoods circulating online,” Mr. Lewandowsky said in a statement. “We need to teach people to recognize the misinformation playbook, so they understand when they are being misled.”

Source: Google Finds ‘Inoculating’ People Against Misinformation Helps Blunt Its Power

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Nicolas: La haine, tranquille

2022/08/26 Leave a comment

Of note. Good thought experiment:

La dernière péripétie de la course à la chefferie du Parti conservateur du Canada est particulièrement surréelle. Pierre Poilievre, bien en tête dans les intentions de vote, a serré la main à un partisan le week-end dernier, lors d’un événement de campagne. Le partisan en question s’est avéré être Jeremy Mackenzie, fondateur du Diagolon — un homme et un groupe associés à « l’extrémisme violent » par le Centre intégré d’évaluation du terrorisme (CIET), l’organisme fédéral chargé de repérer les menaces à la sécurité nationale.

On comprend que dans un bain de foule, un politicien ne connaît pas nécessairement l’identité de toutes les personnes auxquelles il serre la main. Mais depuis, l’identité du personnage est devenue publique. Le candidat à la chefferie conservatrice, Jean Charest, et le chef du NPD, Jagmeet Singh, ont tous deux demandé à Pierre Poilievre de dénoncer l’individu. Pour le moment, c’est le silence radio du côté de Poilievre. Et ce silence ne semble pas affecter particulièrement la campagne du candidat.

Il y a encore quelques années, l’incident aurait semblé surréel à quiconque suit la politique de près ou de loin. On constate pourtant que le meneur de la course au Parti conservateur peut désormais serrer la main d’un extrémiste violent surveillé par les autorités antiterroristes canadiennes, tranquille, sans que cela fasse de vagues. Après tout, M. Poilievre et plusieurs de ses collègues députés n’ont aussi eu aucun problème à s’afficher avec le convoi dit « de la liberté » à Ottawa en février dernier.

Pourtant, le CIET a aussi déterminé ce convoi comme une « opportunité » de recrutement et de réseautage importants pour plusieurs mouvements extrémistes violents, selon un rapport rendu public la semaine dernière par le truchement d’une demande d’accès à l’information. Cela ne veut pas dire que tous les participants au convoi appartenaient à des groupes extrémistes violents, bien sûr. On dit plutôt que leur présence était assez importante, particulièrement au sein des organisateurs, pour qu’il soit très problématique, voire dangereux, pour des élus de s’y associer.

Ce recrutement et ce réseautage, et par ricochet donc, cette croissance des groupes violents associés à l’extrême droite depuis février dernier, sont devenus palpables. Encore il y a deux semaines, des partisans de QAnon ont attaqué des policiers de Peterborough, en Ontario, en s’imaginant procéder à leur « arrestation citoyenne ». Et plusieurs journalistes — des femmes, surtout racisées — font l’objet depuis quelques mois d’une campagne ciblée de haine.

Des courriels, écrits sur un modèle similaire, reprennent le vocabulaire et les théories haineuses des groupes d’extrême droite, tout en les ponctuant de menaces de viol et de mort. Devant la gravité de la situation, le Toronto Star, Global News, le Hill Times et l’Association canadienne des journalistes ont même dû faire une sortie conjointe pour dénoncer la situation et interpeller les services de police qui auraient failli à traiter avec assez de sérieux plusieurs plaintes reçues.

Résumons donc. Des militants d’extrême droite, dont plusieurs ont été identifiés comme des menaces terroristes, ont contribué à paralyser la capitale nationale l’hiver dernier. Depuis, ils se sont multipliés, et certains d’entre eux s’en prennent non seulement à des élus, mais aussi à des journalistes, et même à des policiers.

Imaginons un moment que ce soit le leader d’un groupe terroriste associé à l’islamisme qui serre la main de Pierre Poilievre, ou qui envoie des menaces de mort et de viol à des journalistes. Pensez-vous que l’impact sur la course à la chefferie du Parti conservateur serait la même ? Pensez-vous qu’on banaliserait autant la gravité des menaces reçues ? Imaginons qu’un regroupement autochtone décide de procéder à « l’arrestation citoyenne » d’un corps policier. La nouvelle serait-elle traitée comme de la petite routine d’actualité politique d’été ?

Poser la question, c’est y répondre. La banalisation des menaces posées par l’extrême droite au Canada est d’ailleurs déjà dénoncée depuis plusieurs années par les experts en la matière. Et bien sûr, cette montée de la haine affecte non seulement les figures publiques, mais aussi les gens ordinaires. Entre 2019 et 2021, les crimes haineux déclarés par la police ont augmenté de 72 %, selon les compilations de Statistique Canada. Là encore, imaginons une augmentation de 72 % de n’importe quel autre type de crime au Canada sur une période de deux ans. Tout le monde en parlerait.

Souvent, lorsque la menace vient de l’extrême droite, l’analyse policière et médiatique porte sur des « incidents isolés », des « loups solitaires ». Le mouvement est donc là, devant nous, et il grandit. Mais on peine encore à le voir comme un mouvement. Chaque plainte pour menace de mort ou de viol, par exemple, sera traitée isolément — si elle est même traitée.

On se garde, le plus souvent, de se pencher sur les réseaux auxquels appartient l’individu qui déverse sa haine. Pour cesser de banaliser le phénomène, il faudrait enfin comprendre que, même lorsqu’on a affaire à un homme seul derrière son clavier, cet homme appartient à un contexte social bien précis.

Source: La haine, tranquille

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

More than 1.3 million immigration applications still in backlog

2022/08/26 Leave a comment

Will see what the data shows in coming months, as well as the various media coverage of specific cases. Usual approach of throwing money and people rather than fundamental policy and program changes.

In one sense, almost the “citizenshipization” of immigration programs, as the citizenship program has a history of growing backlogs that are addressed, when too politically embarrassing, by an injection of funds (happened under Liberal Minister Volpe and Conservative Minister Alexander):

Canada’s immigration minister now projects it will only take a few months longer than originally hoped to get application wait times back on track, even though the crisis in Ukraine and other “external” events have worsened the backlogs.

In January, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser vowed to eliminate backlogs caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by the end of the year. That was before Canada launched a major response to the refugee crisis sparked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and approved hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and their families to come to Canada temporarily to escape the war.

Those efforts, combined with updates to the government’s aging technology, have led to longer waits for people who want to come to Canada, Fraser said.

As of the end of July, approximately 1.3 million immigration applications in the system have taken longer to process than the government’s service standards dictate they should. That’s about 54 per cent of all the pending applications in the system.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Fraser said the department may need a few extra months before all immigration streams are back to normal processing times.

“Based on what we’re looking at right now, we shouldn’t be too, too far off the projection of getting back to service standards for work and study permits by the end of this year, and I expect that within a few months of that the visitors visas will be back to service standards,” Fraser said.

That’s barring any new international disasters, he said.

New hiring spree to address backlog

While dealing with the backlogs and humanitarian crises, the Canadian immigration system is also fielding unprecedented demand, Fraser said.

As of July 31, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada issued more than 349,000 new work permits so far this year, compared to 199,000 in all of 2021.

At a news conference Wednesday, Fraser announced the Immigration Department is in the midst of a hiring spree to bring 1,250 new employees on board by the end of the fall to tackle the massive backlogs in processing applications and the increased demand.

Fraser said the new hires have so far allowed the government to get the waits back on track for new applicants to the express entry permanent residence program, which is the main economic stream for new permanent residents to Canada.

“In the weeks and months ahead there’s going to be a series of new measures that we’re going to be releasing that’s going to help bring workers here more quickly, make it simpler for families to be reunited with their loved ones, and to hold ourselves accountable by being transparent,” Fraser said at the news conference outside of the Vancouver Convention Centre.

The backlogs have been of growing concern since shortly after the pandemic began, when health restrictions made borders more difficult to cross and immigration slowed considerably.

At the end of last year, the government dedicated $85 million to reducing wait times. Another $187.3 million was set aside for the next five years in the 2022 budget.

In June, the prime minister announced ministers would form a task force to deal with growing delays for immigration applications and other government services.

Source: More than 1.3 million immigration applications still in backlog

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Ontario’s population will surge by 30% in just over 20 years, according to StatsCan. Experts say we’re not ready

2022/08/26 Leave a comment

No serious questioning of the assumptions behind the study and those quoted whether this growth will be beneficial or not, and that many demographers disagree with the premise that large scale immigration will materially affect an aging population.

And of course, the experience over the past number of years have shown governments woefully inadequate in addressing healthcare, infrastructure and other programs to serve a growing population:

Ontario’s population is expected to experience sustained growth over the next two decades, but the province may not have the infrastructure to support the booming — and aging — population, some experts warn. 

The number of residents in the province could climb to more than 19 million by 2043, an increase of about 30 per cent since 2021, according to new projections from Statistics Canada. 

That figure is based on a forecast of medium growth, outlined in a report released Monday, which laid out various population projections for the coming decades. The province’s population, which sits at 14.8 million as of 2021, could surpass 21.0 million by 2043. 

But Ontario is ill-prepared to handle the growth, as it lacks the housing and general infrastructure to support the growing population, especially in major urban centres like Toronto, some experts say. 

“It’s obvious: we’re not prepared,” said Phil Soper, president and CEO of Royal LePage. “We can’t even handle the population growth we’ve had over the past 20 years — as households get small, people live longer and immigration numbers rise — let alone potential growth in the two decades to come.”

The lack of affordable housing and planning for population growth in Toronto could hamper the city’s future economic potential, said Sheila Block, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. She noted livability and sustainability are top-of-mind for both residents and investors. 

“If we don’t increase the supply of affordable housing, people will be living in substandard housing,” she said. “We are going to see more people under-housed.”

The city is already living with the consequences of improper planning and a growing population, said Block, who pointed to the crisis in affordable housing. 

“We need to talk about a sustainable future, a future where we see less damage from climate change and more equity,” she said. “Those are the kinds of issues that have to be considered, and affordable housing is one piece of that pie.”

Soper believes federal and provincial governments will soon be forced to address the crisis and “move aggressively” to support the population increase.

“The growth will force mandated densification laws, where community groups won’t be allowed to hold up the creation of housing because they don’t like it,” he predicted. 

The growth of Ontario’s population, along with that of Canada, as a whole, will largely be driven by immigration, noted Patrice Dion, a demographer with Statistics Canada. In 2021, when Canada’s border largely reopened, the country accepted more than 400,000 immigrants, representing 87.4 per cent of the country’s population-growth that year. 

While Soper and Block say Ontario isn’t prepared for the growth, they also say sustained immigration is necessary to address another key concern: an aging population. 

The country will need to rely on immigration to boost its cohort of working-age Canadians, because the natural growth rate (the number of births minus deaths) continues to decrease, said Block. 

“If you look at countries like Italy or Japan, which have broken immigration systems — Japan has been a very isolated country and it’s very challenging to become a citizen and Italy isn’t that much different — they’re going to face the kind of challenges Canada will, but to a much greater extent,” said Soper.

While Statistics Canada’s population projections vary widely — the different forecasts are based on a variety of factors, including fertility rates, life expectancy and immigration numbers — one thing is almost certain: Canada is expected to experience explosive growth in its cohort of older seniors, while the proportion of children in the country is expected to decline. 

More than 25 per cent of the population will be 65 or older by 2068, up from 18.5 per cent in 2021. Meanwhile, the number of Canadians above 85 may increase more than threefold over that period, from 871,000 in 2021 to 3.2 million in 2068. 

Canada will need to examine how it cares for its seniors, as more people join the group, said Bonnie-Jeanne MacDonald, director of financial security research at the National Institute on aging. 

“Over the next decade, we’re going to start seeing massive numbers of people needing care,” she said. 

“There’s going be a lot more of us being asked to care for seniors. The prospects to meet that challenge are not good,” said MacDonald, who noted the supports for seniors quickly fell apart during the pandemic. 

Source: Ontario’s population will surge by 30% in just over 20 years, according to StatsCan. Experts say we’re not ready

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Urback: Ahmed Hussen demands to know how someone else let his government partner with an apparent antisemite

2022/08/25 Leave a comment

Fair comment and good advice as to how the Minister should have handled it “A reasonable response from Mr. Hussen would be for him to come out and explain that the Heritage Ministry did not do its due diligence in this case, but that it is developing specific protocols, which will soon be publicly disclosed, to vet grant recipients.”

Screw-ups happen, but bureaucratic and political-level vetting needs to improve.

Non-accountabilities, as non-apologies, that shift the blame to others undermine trust and credibility:

Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion, is demanding accountability: How could someone else have let his government pair up with a guy who spews noxious, hateful views on Twitter for an anti-racism project? What will someone else do to make it better? And how can someone else ensure that this sort of thing never happens again?

Last year, a group called the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC) received a grant of $133,800 from the Department of Canadian Heritage to develop an anti-racism strategy for Canadian broadcasting. Laith Marouf, a senior consultant with CMAC, was spearheading the project according to a news release from April, though he still found time to tweet about “loud mouthed bags of human feces aka the Jewish White Supremacists,” and why they deserve “a bullet to the head.” In other tweets, Mr. Marouf also called former justice minister Irwin Cotler the “Grand Wizard of Zionism” and former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell a “Jamaican house-slave.”

A lawyer acting for Mr. Marouf told CBC that while his client’s tweets target “Jewish White Supremacists,” the consultant does not harbour any animus toward Jews in general – which is true only if you ignore tweets such as the one where Mr. Marouf explained why he “stopped sharing the works of Jewish White people, even if anti-Zionist/anti-Imperialist.” Perhaps he’s one of those “do as I say, not as I do” diversity and inclusion lecturers.

Canadian tech blogger Mark Goldberg had been writing about Mr. Marouf’s zany interpretation of anti-racist activism for at least a year, but it wasn’t until his observations were amplified by Quillette editor and former National Post columnist Jonathan Kay that thousands of Canadians became aware of the person the Canadian government had contracted to teach others about prejudice. Yet it still took more than a week – and one false start with a vague statement from Mr. Hussen about his ministry looking to “rectify” the matter – before the government announced that CMAC’s funding would be cut and its project suspended.

In that announcement, Mr. Hussen was adamant that there would be accountability: Not from his ministry or from Canadian Heritage to explain how they vet grant recipients and/or what they will do to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again, but from CMAC, “to explain how they came to hire Laith Marouf, and how they plan on rectifying the situation given the nature of his anti-Semitic and xenophobic statements.”

“We look forward to a proper response on their next steps and clear accountability regarding this matter,” Mr. Hussen’s statement concluded, affirming that with this government, the buck stops elsewhere. “I want to assure Canadians that our government has and will continue to fight anti-Semitism and hate in all its forms.”

By this government’s telling, then, the feeble Ministry of Heritage – with its billion-dollar budget and more than 1,800 employees – was hoodwinked by an organization harbouring an antisemite right there on its public list of consultants. Maybe Google was down for the many months Mr. Marouf was working with the Heritage department, thus preventing anyone from searching his name. Or maybe they just thought Mr. Marouf’s Twitter persona was an elaborate bit because no anti-racism lecturer with any knowledge of right-wing white supremacy would seriously use the phrase “Jewish White Supremacists,” since bona fide white supremacists obviously do not consider Jewish people to be white.

For a government that has made self-flagellation a matter of routine – that declared itself complicit in Indigenous genocide and rarely shies away from an opportunity to apologize for a past injustice – its cabinet ministers seem awfully shy to take responsibility now. Perhaps that’s because this is not something that can be blamed on Canada generally, but on this government specifically – a government that accidentally gave an apparent frothing antisemite permission to lecture Canadian broadcasters on racism.

The expectations for this government are not high. A reasonable response from Mr. Hussen would be for him to come out and explain that the Heritage Ministry did not do its due diligence in this case, but that it is developing specific protocols, which will soon be publicly disclosed, to vet grant recipients. But such a response could only be expected of a government actually interested in accountability. This government is only keen on the appearance thereof – that and foisting the blame on an organization that apparently hoodwinked an entire ministry.

Source: Ahmed Hussen demands to know how someone else let his government partner with an apparent antisemite

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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