Diane Francis: Provinces need more say over immigration

2022/08/31 Leave a comment

Immigration is shared federal-provincial jurisdiction. So legitimate to support provincial calls for increases in the Provincial Nominee Program, less legitimate to request a Quebec deal (which, in any case, only applies to the economic class).
But Francis can’t resist the cheap shot on the current government, despite the government having dramatically increased immigration levels and largely maintained the proportion of economic immigrants at close to 60 percent of the total and thus her assertion that immigration “has been skewed toward family reunification and other politically motivated goals, not toward helping this country meet its economic goals” is false.
That being said, her praise of Ontario Minister McNaughton’s measures to improve credential recognition is well warranted:
In Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Canada, politics outweigh good policies, especially when it comes to immigration. For instance, Trudeau has ratcheted immigration goals up to 400,000 a year, but hasn’t made a dent in terms of overcoming Canada’s skilled labour shortages.
Nearly 37 per cent of all businesses say they’re facing a shortage of skilled workers. This is because our immigration system has been skewed toward family reunification and other politically motivated goals, not toward helping this country meet its economic goals.

Source: Diane Francis: Provinces need more say over immigration

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Trudel: Intelligence artificielle discriminatoire

2022/08/31 Leave a comment

Somewhat shallow analysis, as the only area that IRCC is using AI is with respect to visitor visas, not international students or other categories (unless that has changed). So Trudel’s argumentation may be based on a false understanding.

While concerns regarding AI are legitimate and need to be addressed, bias and noise are common to human decision making.

And differences in outcomes don’t necessarily reflect bias and discrimination but these differences do signal potential issues:

Les étudiants francophones internationaux subissent un traitement qui a toutes les allures de la discrimination systémique. Les Africains, surtout francophones, encaissent un nombre disproportionné de refus de permis de séjourner au Canada pour fins d’études. On met en cause des systèmes d’intelligence artificielle (IA) utilisés par les autorités fédérales en matière d’immigration pour expliquer ces biais systémiques.

Le député Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe rappelait ce mois-ci que « les universités francophones arrivent […] en tête du nombre de demandes d’études refusées. Ce ne sont pas les universités elles-mêmes qui les refusent, mais bien le gouvernement fédéral. Par exemple, les demandes d’étudiants internationaux ont été refusées à 79 % à l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières et à 58 % à l’Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. Pour ce qui est de l’Université McGill, […] on parle de 9 % ».

En février, le vice-recteur de l’Université d’Ottawa, Sanni Yaya, relevait qu’« au cours des dernières années, de nombreuses demandes de permis, traitées par Immigration, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada, ont été refusées pour des motifs souvent incompréhensibles et ont demandé des délais anormalement longs. » Il s’agit pourtant d’étudiants qui ont des bourses garanties par leur établissement et un bon dossier. Le vice-recteur se demande à juste titre s’il n’y a pas là un préjugé implicite de la part de l’agent responsable de leur évaluation, convaincu de leur intention de ne pas quitter le Canada une fois que sera expiré leur permis d’études.

En somme, il existe un faisceau d’indices donnant à conclure que les outils informatiques d’aide à la décision utilisés par les autorités fédérales amplifient la discrimination systémique à l’encontre des étudiants francophones originaires d’Afrique.

Outils faussés

Ce cafouillage doit nous interpeller à propos des préjugés amplifiés par les outils d’IA. Tout le monde est concerné, car ces technologies font partie intégrante de la vie quotidienne. Les téléphones dotés de dispositifs de reconnaissance faciale ou les assistants domestiques ou même les aspirateurs « intelligents », sans parler des dispositifs embarqués dans plusieurs véhicules, carburent à l’IA.

La professeure Karine Gentelet et l’étudiante Lily-Cannelle Mathieu expliquent, dans un article diffusé sur le site de l’Observatoire international sur les impacts sociétaux de l’IA et du numérique, que les technologies d’IA, bien que souvent présentées comme étant neutres, sont marquées par l’environnement social duquel elles sont issues. Elles tendent à reproduire et même à amplifier les préjugés et les apports de pouvoir inéquitables.

Les chercheuses rappellent que plusieurs études ont montré que, si elles ne sont pas adéquatement encadrées, ces technologies excluent des populations racisées, ou bien les surreprésentent au sein de catégories sociales considérées comme « problématiques » ou encore, fonctionnent inadéquatement lorsqu’elles sont appliquées à des individus racisés. Elles peuvent accentuer les tendances discriminatoires dans divers processus décisionnels, comme la surveillance policière, des diagnostics médicaux, des décisions de justice, des processus d’embauche ou d’admission scolaire, ou même le calcul des taux hypothécaires.

Une loi nécessaire

En juin dernier, le ministre fédéral de l’Innovation, des Sciences et de l’Industrie a présenté le projet de loi C-27 afin d’encadrer l’usage des technologies d’intelligence artificielle. Le projet de loi entend imposer des obligations de transparence et de reddition de comptes aux entreprises qui font un usage important des technologies d’IA.

Le projet propose d’interdire certaines conduites relativement aux systèmes d’IA qui peuvent causer un préjudice sérieux aux individus. Il comporte des dispositions afin de responsabiliser les entreprises qui tirent parti de ces technologies. La loi garantirait une gouvernance et un contrôle appropriés des systèmes d’IA afin de prévenir les dommages physiques ou psychologiques ou les pertes économiques infligés aux individus.

On veut aussi prévenir les résultats faussés qui établissent une distinction négative non justifiée sur un ou plusieurs des motifs de discrimination interdits par les législations sur les droits de la personne. Les utilisateurs des technologies d’IA seraient tenus à des obligations d’évaluation et d’atténuation des risques inhérents à leurs systèmes. Le projet de loi entend mettre en place des obligations de transparence pour les systèmes ayant un potentiel de conséquences importantes sur les personnes. Ceux qui rendent disponibles des systèmes d’IA seraient obligés de publier des explications claires sur leurs conditions de fonctionnement de même que sur les décisions, recommandations ou prédictions qu’ils font.

Le traitement discriminatoire que subissent plusieurs étudiants originaires de pays africains francophones illustre les biais systémiques qui doivent être repérés, analysés et supprimés. C’est un rappel que le déploiement de technologies d’IA s’accompagne d’importants risques de reconduire les tendances problématiques des processus de décision. Pour faire face à de tels risques, il faut des législations imposant aussi bien aux entreprises qu’aux autorités publiques de fortes exigences de transparence et de reddition de comptes. Il faut surtout se défaire du mythe de la prétendue « neutralité » de ces outils techniques.

Source: Intelligence artificielle discriminatoire

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Roose: We Need to Talk About How Good A.I. Is Getting

2022/08/30 Leave a comment

Of note. World is going to become more complex, and the potential for AI in many fields will continue to grow, with these tools and programs being increasing able to replace, at least in part, professionals including government workers:

For the past few days, I’ve been playing around with DALL-E 2, an app developed by the San Francisco company OpenAI that turns text descriptions into hyper-realistic images.

OpenAI invited me to test DALL-E 2 (the name is a play on Pixar’s WALL-E and the artist Salvador Dalí) during its beta period, and I quickly got obsessed. I spent hours thinking up weird, funny and abstract prompts to feed the A.I. — “a 3-D rendering of a suburban home shaped like a croissant,” “an 1850s daguerreotype portrait of Kermit the Frog,” “a charcoal sketch of two penguins drinking wine in a Parisian bistro.” Within seconds, DALL-E 2 would spit out a handful of images depicting my request — often with jaw-dropping realism.

Here, for example, is one of the images DALL-E 2 produced when I typed in “black-and-white vintage photograph of a 1920s mobster taking a selfie.” And how it rendered my request for a high-quality photograph of “a sailboat knitted out of blue yarn.”

DALL-E 2 can also go more abstract. The illustration at the top of this article, for example, is what it generated when I asked for a rendering of “infinite joy.” (I liked this one so much I’m going to have it printed and framed for my wall.)

What’s impressive about DALL-E 2 isn’t just the art it generates. It’s how it generates art. These aren’t composites made out of existing internet images — they’re wholly new creations made through a complex A.I. process known as “diffusion,” which starts with a random series of pixels and refines it repeatedly until it matches a given text description. And it’s improving quickly — DALL-E 2’s images are four times as detailed as the images generated by the original DALL-E, which was introduced only last year.

DALL-E 2 got a lot of attention when it was announced this year, and rightfully so. It’s an impressive piece of technology with big implications for anyone who makes a living working with images — illustrators, graphic designers, photographers and so on. It also raises important questions about what all of this A.I.-generated art will be used for, and whether we need to worry about a surge in synthetic propaganda, hyper-realistic deepfakes or even nonconsensual pornography.

But art is not the only area where artificial intelligence has been making major strides.

Over the past 10 years — a period some A.I. researchers have begun referring to as a “golden decade” — there’s been a wave of progress in many areas of A.I. research, fueled by the rise of techniques like deep learning and the advent of specialized hardware for running huge, computationally intensive A.I. models.

Some of that progress has been slow and steady — bigger models with more data and processing power behind them yielding slightly better results.

But other times, it feels more like the flick of a switch — impossible acts of magic suddenly becoming possible.

Just five years ago, for example, the biggest story in the A.I. world was AlphaGo, a deep learning model built by Google’s DeepMind that could beat the best humans in the world at the board game Go. Training an A.I. to win Go tournaments was a fun party trick, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of progress most people care about.

But last year, DeepMind’s AlphaFold — an A.I. system descended from the Go-playing one — did something truly profound. Using a deep neural network trained to predict the three-dimensional structures of proteins from their one-dimensional amino acid sequences, it essentially solved what’s known as the “protein-folding problem,” which had vexed molecular biologists for decades.

This summer, DeepMind announced that AlphaFold had made predictions for nearly all of the 200 million proteins known to exist — producing a treasure trove of data that will help medical researchers develop new drugs and vaccines for years to come. Last year, the journal Science recognized AlphaFold’s importance, naming it the biggest scientific breakthrough of the year.

Or look at what’s happening with A.I.-generated text.

Only a few years ago, A.I. chatbots struggled even with rudimentary conversations — to say nothing of more difficult language-based tasks.

But now, large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 are being used to write screenplays, compose marketing emails and develop video games. (I even used GPT-3 to write a book review for this paper last year — and, had I not clued in my editors beforehand, I doubt they would have suspected anything.)

A.I. is writing code, too — more than a million people have signed up to use GitHub’s Copilot, a tool released last year that helps programmers work faster by automatically finishing their code snippets.

Then there’s Google’s LaMDA, an A.I. model that made headlines a couple of months ago when Blake Lemoine, a senior Google engineer, was fired after claiming that it had become sentient.

Google disputed Mr. Lemoine’s claims, and lots of A.I. researchers have quibbled with his conclusions. But take out the sentience part, and a weaker version of his argument — that LaMDA and other state-of-the-art language models are becoming eerily good at having humanlike text conversations — would not have raised nearly as many eyebrows.

In fact, many experts will tell you that A.I. is getting better at lots of things these days — even in areas, such as language and reasoning, where it once seemed that humans had the upper hand.

“It feels like we’re going from spring to summer,” said Jack Clark, a co-chair of Stanford University’s annual A.I. Index Report. “In spring, you have these vague suggestions of progress, and little green shoots everywhere. Now, everything’s in bloom.”

In the past, A.I. progress was mostly obvious only to insiders who kept up with the latest research papers and conference presentations. But recently, Mr. Clark said, even laypeople can sense the difference.

“You used to look at A.I.-generated language and say, ‘Wow, it kind of wrote a sentence,’” Mr. Clark said. “And now you’re looking at stuff that’s A.I.-generated and saying, ‘This is really funny, I’m enjoying reading this,’ or ‘I had no idea this was even generated by A.I.’”

There is still plenty of bad, broken A.I. out there, from racist chatbots to faulty automated driving systems that result in crashes and injury. And even when A.I. improves quickly, it often takes a while to filter down into products and services that people actually use. An A.I. breakthrough at Google or OpenAI today doesn’t mean that your Roomba will be able to write novels tomorrow.

But the best A.I. systems are now so capable — and improving at such fast rates — that the conversation in Silicon Valley is starting to shift. Fewer experts are confidently predicting that we have years or even decades to prepare for a wave of world-changing A.I.; many now believe that major changes are right around the corner, for better or worse.

Ajeya Cotra, a senior analyst with Open Philanthropy who studies A.I. risk, estimated two years ago that there was a 15 percent chance of “transformational A.I.” — which she and others have defined as A.I. that is good enough to usher in large-scale economic and societal changes, such as eliminating most white-collar knowledge jobs — emerging by 2036.

But in a recent post, Ms. Cotra raised that to a 35 percent chance, citing the rapid improvement of systems like GPT-3.

“A.I. systems can go from adorable and useless toys to very powerful products in a surprisingly short period of time,” Ms. Cotra told me. “People should take more seriously that A.I. could change things soon, and that could be really scary.”

There are, to be fair, plenty of skeptics who say claims of A.I. progress are overblown. They’ll tell you that A.I. is still nowhere close to becoming sentient, or replacing humans in a wide variety of jobs. They’ll say that models like GPT-3 and LaMDA are just glorified parrots, blindly regurgitating their training data, and that we’re still decades away from creating true A.G.I. — artificial general intelligence — that is capable of “thinking” for itself.

There are also tech optimists who believe that A.I. progress is accelerating, and who want it to accelerate faster. Speeding A.I.’s rate of improvement, they believe, will give us new tools to cure diseases, colonize space and avert ecological disaster.

I’m not asking you to take a side in this debate. All I’m saying is: You should be paying closer attention to the real, tangible developments that are fueling it.

After all, A.I. that works doesn’t stay in a lab. It gets built into the social media apps we use every day, in the form of Facebook feed-ranking algorithms, YouTube recommendations and TikTok “For You” pages. It makes its way into weapons used by the military and software used by children in their classrooms. Banks use A.I. to determine who’s eligible for loans, and police departments use it to investigate crimes.

Even if the skeptics are right, and A.I. doesn’t achieve human-level sentience for many years, it’s easy to see how systems like GPT-3, LaMDA and DALL-E 2 could become a powerful force in society. In a few years, the vast majority of the photos, videos and text we encounter on the internet could be A.I.-generated. Our online interactions could become stranger and more fraught, as we struggle to figure out which of our conversational partners are human and which are convincing bots. And tech-savvy propagandists could use the technology to churn out targeted misinformation on a vast scale, distorting the political process in ways we won’t see coming.

It’s a cliché, in the A.I. world, to say things like “we need to have a societal conversation about A.I. risk.” There are already plenty of Davos panels, TED talks, think tanks and A.I. ethics committees out there, sketching out contingency plans for a dystopian future.

What’s missing is a shared, value-neutral way of talking about what today’s A.I. systems are actually capable of doing, and what specific risks and opportunities those capabilities present.

I think three things could help here.

First, regulators and politicians need to get up to speed.

Because of how new many of these A.I. systems are, few public officials have any firsthand experience with tools like GPT-3 or DALL-E 2, nor do they grasp how quickly progress is happening at the A.I. frontier.

We’ve seen a few efforts to close the gap — Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence recently held a three-day “A.I. boot camp” for congressional staff members, for example — but we need more politicians and regulators to take an interest in the technology. (And I don’t mean that they need to start stoking fears of an A.I. apocalypse, Andrew Yang-style. Even reading a book like Brian Christian’s “The Alignment Problem” or understanding a few basic details about how a model like GPT-3 works would represent enormous progress.)

Otherwise, we could end up with a repeat of what happened with social media companies after the 2016 election — a collision of Silicon Valley power and Washington ignorance, which resulted in nothing but gridlock and testy hearings.

Second, big tech companies investing billions in A.I. development — the Googles, Metas and OpenAIs of the world — need to do a better job of explaining what they’re working on, without sugarcoating or soft-pedaling the risks. Right now, many of the biggest A.I. models are developed behind closed doors, using private data sets and tested only by internal teams. When information about them is made public, it’s often either watered down by corporate P.R. or buried in inscrutable scientific papers.

Downplaying A.I. risks to avoid backlash may be a smart short-term strategy, but tech companies won’t survive long term if they’re seen as having a hidden A.I. agenda that’s at odds with the public interest. And if these companies won’t open up voluntarily, A.I. engineers should go around their bosses and talk directly to policymakers and journalists themselves.

Third, the news media needs to do a better job of explaining A.I. progress to nonexperts. Too often, journalists — and I admit I’ve been a guilty party here — rely on outdated sci-fi shorthand to translate what’s happening in A.I. to a general audience. We sometimes compare large language models to Skynet and HAL 9000, and flatten promising machine learning breakthroughs to panicky “The robots are coming!” headlines that we think will resonate with readers. Occasionally, we betray our ignorance by illustrating articles about software-based A.I. models with photos of hardware-based factory robots — an error that is as inexplicable as slapping a photo of a BMW on a story about bicycles.

In a broad sense, most people think about A.I. narrowly as it relates to us — Will it take my job? Is it better or worse than me at Skill X or Task Y? — rather than trying to understand all of the ways A.I. is evolving, and what that might mean for our future.

I’ll do my part, by writing about A.I. in all its complexity and weirdness without resorting to hyperbole or Hollywood tropes. But we all need to start adjusting our mental models to make space for the new, incredible machines in our midst.

Source: We Need to Talk About How Good A.I. Is Getting

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Burton: Ottawa has continued its mysterious deference to China. What happened to the promised ‘reset’?

2022/08/30 Leave a comment

Valid questions regarding another policy and delivery failure:

As we mark the six-month anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraineand on world order, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced the creation of a special team in Canada to counter the Kremlin’s raging disinformation campaign.

There is a real need to address this threat to the concept of truth, which is the basis of democracy and human rights. But why limit the team’s mandate to the lies of just one offender? This essentially tells China that Ottawa will not be responding to the more richly funded propaganda scheme being run out of Chinese embassies and consulates across Canada. 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping touts this initiative as one of the Chinese Communist Party’s “magic weapons” of domestic and global manipulation. It has been used to sabotage World Health Organization research into the origins of COVID-19; suppress truth surrounding genocide against Uyghurs; and dissuade influential Canadians from promoting measures that threaten Beijing’s espionage efforts, including Canada’s security and technology partnerships with our allies. 

The propaganda campaign, which includes conspiracy theories promulgated by pro-Beijing Chinese language media in Canada, threatens our democracy. It already cost Canadian MPs of Chinese heritage their seats in the last election, and because we do nothing about it, we can expect more in the next election. The Chinese-language media’s hate-mongering includes accusations of pervasive racism against everybody in Canada with Chinese ancestry. Readers of China’s WeChat and other platforms are implored to respond by identifying with the Motherland and becoming loyal to the Chinese Communist Party.

The disinformation campaign also maligns Canadian citizens of Chinese origin — like Xiao Jianhua, Huseyin Celil and 300,000 or so Canadians resident in Hong Kong — as “Chinese-Canadian passport holders,” implying some lesser Canadian citizenship than European-Canadian passport holders who are simply Canadians, with no hyphenated modifiers. 

Ottawa’s refusal to confront this harassment of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong and Chinese democracy activists in Canada is shameful. In 2020, then foreign minister François-Philippe Champagne promised to take action, but nothing happened. Last year Rob Oliphant, parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs, said Canada was “actively considering” a registry of foreign agents (similar to U.S. and Australian measures) to counter China’s malign activities in Canada. But this was evidently a hollow promise to appease Canadians’ resentment over China’s subversive operations here.

Canada seems incapable of doing anything about China, due to the incompatibility of the Ottawa doctrine that we must maintain close relations with Beijing regardless of public opinion. When China’s ambassador in Ottawa threatened Canada about crossing a “red line” on Taiwan, warning officials to draw lessons from the past (read: hostage diplomacy) if our MPs set foot in Taiwan, our prime minister didn’t even condemn the remarks, but simply urged MPs to reflect on the “consequences” of such a visit.

The government seems in similar paralysis over naming a new ambassador to China, a position that has been unfilled throughout 2022. Whoever is appointed will inherit the dark shadow of our last two ambassadors — John McCallum and Dominic Barton — who have personal business connections in China and were perceived as promoting Beijing’s interests over Canada’s. When it comes to Chinese diplomacy, Canadians increasingly assume that conflict of interest will prevail over Canada’s national interests and moral integrity. 

Last June, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly announced the formation of Canada’s Indo-Pacific Advisory Committee. After five years of promising a China policy reset, informed sources say the government’s China policy supporters on this committee are debating how to exclude any mention of China whatsoever in our Indo-Pacific policy declaration. 

As this theatre of the absurd drags on, Canada’s lack of a principled China policy is debasing any confidence the U.S. and other allies have in Ottawa’s competence.

Sadly, based on the performance so far, there is no sign of any meaningful China “reset” coming out of Ottawa before the next federal election.

Source: Ottawa has continued its mysterious deference to China. What happened to the promised ‘reset’?

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Immigration law change leaves some newcomers struggling to prove that their marriages are genuine

2022/08/30 Leave a comment

Some good data on overall numbers as well as the explaining the impact of the change made under the Conservative government requiring both conditions “nongenuine marriage “and” entered into for immigration purposes” to be met to only one condition, changing the “and” to “or:”

Deeparani Harishkumar Dhaliwal says she ends up emotionally and financially drained every time she travels to India to visit her husband and their young son.

Sometimes she stays for two months, other times for as long as six. But she ends up having to find a new job and a new apartment each time she returns alone to Canada.

Due to her frequent trips and moves, Dhaliwal, 37, has very few belongings. The Mississauga woman has been making these journeys for a decade, since she went back to India for an arranged marriage in 2011.

It’s not her preferred lifestyle, she says. But her spousal sponsorship to let her husband join her in Canada has been refused four times on the ground that it’s not a genuine marriage.

Her appeals to a tribunal have been denied, most recently in June, and so have her appeals of those appeal decisions.

“I cannot give up. I need a good future for my child. I need a good future for my family that they can’t have in India,” said Dhaliwal, who took their Canadian-born son Sehajveer to the care of her in-laws and husband in India, due to her lack of child-care options here, when he was two months old. She only recently brought him back to Canada at age eight.

Family reunification has long been considered an important reason to let spouses come to Canada. However, some newcomers such as Dhaliwal face years of bureaucracy, culturally loaded questions about marriage and a subjective evaluation process, with their families’ future at stake.

“Bringing a child into this world is not a small thing. This is not for immigration purposes.”

Between 2016 and 2021, there were 410,546 Canadians who applied to sponsor their foreign spouses for permanent residence, including spouses already in Canada and those still abroad. Over the same period, 368,332 were approved and 27,826 were refused, a refusal rate of seven per cent. (Delays in processing account for the mathematical discrepancy.)

The top grounds for refusals were: the relationship was deemed not genuine; the spouse was inadmissible for different reasons; or the couple failed to meet cohabitation requirements, produce required documents or answer questions truthfully.

As of mid-August, the federal immigration department still has 62,772 pending spousal sponsorship applications in process, including 2,487 cases where applicants have been refused before.

“The Government of Canada recognizes that the majority of relationships are genuine and that most applications are made in good faith,” says immigration department spokesperson Rémi Larivière. “To protect the integrity of our immigration system, officers must do their due diligence to determine whether a marriage is genuine.”

Couples are often interviewed to have their credibility assessed by immigration officials, and failed applicants can appeal to the Immigration and Refugee Board, where an independent adjudicator reviews the decisions. Between 2016 and 2021, the tribunal heard 7,702 spousal sponsorship appeals.

Included in those were Dhaliwal’s efforts to sponsor her husband, Amandeep Singh Dhaliwal, 33, to Canada.

In 2010, Dhaliwal came as a permanent resident with her then-husband but the two separated the following year, she told immigration officials, due to his alleged abusive behaviour. Shortly after the separation (they’re now divorced), she met her current husband and sponsored him in 2012.

The first sponsorship was refused because her divorce in India wasn’t recognized under Canadian law so the new marriage was considered invalid.

“A person must prove that their relationship is genuine and was not entered into primarily for the purpose of acquiring any status or privilege,” said Larivière.

“She reapplied three times after that. Each time, the officer was not satisfied that the marriage was not entered into for the purpose of acquiring any status or privilege under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.”

Dhaliwal said she has been financially supporting her husband, who runs a small family farm. To pay for all the legal fees and trips, she said she has sold the gold necklace, bangle and earrings that her late mother bequeathed to her.

With her son by her side now, she is now studying to become a personal support worker while working as a security guard at Toronto’s Pearson airport. She still likes to hope that her husband could join them in Canada soon and they could buy a house and build a home here.

“We are standing by each other for a lifetime no matter what the conditions are, no matter what the (sponsorship) results are,” said Dhaliwal, who had a miscarriage earlier this year that she attributed to the stress from her legal battle.

“We have to stay in Canada because this is the only country where I can support my family and raise my child for a better future.”

The couple said it’s awfully hard to stay apart whenever Dhaliwal had to return to the cruel reality of being alone in Canada whenever she left India, where people make fun of them and taunt them about their marriage.

“Whenever we see relatives, people ask the same question. You guys have a kid together and it’s been so many years, and you still don’t have visa. It’s hard to answer people and explain to them our bond,” Amandeep Singh Dhaliwal, 33, said from India.

“In my life, my wife is God’s blessing. I am very hard working but due to limited opportunity in India, I couldn’t help her financially and most of burden of family is on her.”

While Dhaliwal made the mistake of not getting her divorce in India notarized before her first sponsorship, the second application, filed in 2014, was rejected due to doubts about the genuineness of the marriage.

The appeal tribunal concurred with the concerns raised by immigration officials, citing:

  • The couple’s compatibility in terms of age, education, marital and religious backgrounds (She is Hindu, 37, divorced and university educated; he is Sikh, 34, a high-school dropout, and it’s his first marriage);
  • The difficulty both spouses had in detailing their first conversation and the attraction they shared that led to their quick marriage a month after they met;
  • Inconsistency in their evidence with regards to their wedding, honeymoon and intimacy; and
  • Concerns that Dhaliwal’s first marriage was also a marriage of convenience.

Immigration consultant Sol Gombinsky, who is advising the couple, says spousal applicants are judged through the Canadian lens and that applicants are often stumped by the questions raised by immigration officers at interviews.

One question posed to the couple at their immigration interview was about their first sexual encounter after the marriage.

“It has always bothered me that they ask somebody abroad questions (from) thousands of miles away, with a different culture, different religion, and they ask questions that in many cultures are difficult to answer,” said Gombinsky, who worked 30 years with the immigration department, including a stint as an appeals officer.

“When something starts off bad and you get off on the wrong foot, it’s very difficult to correct it.”

In refusing the first appeal, the appeal tribunal said a variety of factors are taken into account in assessing if a relationship is genuine: the intent of the marriage; length of the relationship; amount of time spent together; conduct at the time of meeting, engagement and wedding; knowledge of each other’s relationship history; level of continuing contact and communication; financial support; sharing of child care responsibility; and knowledge about each other’s extended families and lives.

“The preponderance of the evidence support a finding that the marriage was entered into primarily for the applicant’s immigration to Canada, and is not genuine,” a tribunal concluded in 2016 in this case.

Seasoned immigration lawyer Lorne Waldman says what makes it hard to reverse a refusal in a case such as Dhaliwal’s is an amendment of the law by the former federal Conservative government.

The old regulation let officials refuse a spousal application if it was a nongenuine marriage “and” it was entered into for immigration purposes.

“But now you can refuse a sponsorship because it was entered into for immigration purposes or it’s not genuine,” explained Waldman, who represented Dhaliwal and her husband at their latest appeal this year.

“Since the change … if the case is refused at the beginning, then it’s really difficult to overcome, because that’s a finding that was made based upon what happened at the time they were married. Changes that occur afterwards don’t affect that part of the (initial) decision.”

As a result, many genuine couples have also been trapped if they fail to present their cases properly the first time, Waldman said.

Dhaliwal’s third and fourth sponsorship applications were refused in 2017 and 2021, on the same grounds. In the subsequent appeals, the appeal tribunal ruled that the same issue had been decided previously, and dismissed the requests.

Despite a DNA test result confirming the paternity of Dhaliwal’s child, the second appeal panel noted 22 specific problems with the couple’s evidence at the 2016 hearing and determined that none of the new evidence addressed those findings.

“While the new evidence might be relevant vis-à-vis whether the marriage is now genuine, it was not directly probative of whether the marriage had been entered into primarily for immigration purposes,” cited the latest appeal decision released in June.

In that decision, the tribunal recognized there’s a child of the marriage and the child continues to be jointly raised by the couple, which addressed some of the concerns previously raised.

“However, it is clearly not probative of them all,” said the tribunal.

Citing case law, the Immigration Appeal Division (IAD) tribunal said the existence of a child of the marriage will favour a finding of genuineness, but it is not proof in itself.

“In this appeal, it has already been held that, despite the existence of a child, the Appellant did not establish that this is a genuine marriage or that it was not entered into primarily for immigration purposes,” said the Immigration Appeal Division.

“If it is a fraudulent immigration marriage — and the Appellant has failed to establish otherwise before the IAD and visa officers — I cannot say that the child’s best interests favour holding another IAD hearing on the matter,” wrote adjudicator Benjamin R. Dolin in his June 23, 2022 decision.

While it’s not impossible to have a child in order to facilitate immigration through a spousal sponsorship, Waldman said he has never come across such a case in his more than four decades of legal practice.

“I’ve seen quite a few other cases like this. It’s really a tragic situation because families are being separated unnecessarily. Children are growing up with only one parent and people are not able to be with their spouses,” he said.

“For a lot of people, it’s not going to be possible to go back to their country. It’s not an option for a lot of people either because the financial situation in the country is extremely difficult.”

Source: Immigration law change leaves some newcomers struggling to prove that their marriages are genuine

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Channel crossings to the UK top 25,000 so far this year

2022/08/30 Leave a comment

By way of comparison, about 20,000 irregular arrivals at Roxham Road between January and July 2022 (virtually all), compared to close to 2 million at the US Southwest land border:

More than 25,000 migrants and refugees have crossed the Channel to the UK so far this year, government figures show.

A total of 915 people were detected on Saturday in 19 small boats, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said, taking the provisional total for the year to 25,146.

There have been 8,747 crossings in August so far, including 3,733 in the past week, analysis shows.

The highest daily total on record came last Monday, 22 August, with 1,295 people crossing in 27 boats.

It has been more than four months since the home secretary, Priti Patel, unveiled plans to send refugees to Rwanda to try to deter people from crossing the Channel. Since then, 19,878 people have arrived in the UK after making the journey.

Source: Channel crossings to the UK top 25,000 so far this year

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , ,

Chinese Canadian seniors left behind as many Chinese-language newspapers stop printing

2022/08/30 Leave a comment

Of interest:

As the world came to a standstill two years ago, they sat unread on dusty newsstands in empty restaurants and grocery stores.

Chinese-language newspapers, vital to the community, became largely inaccessible during the pandemic as people were restricted from visiting the places where they were distributed.

It’s part of why Canada’s largest Chinese-language daily newspaper, Sing Tao Daily, has stopped printing across the country. After 44 years of circulating in Canada, its last publication date is on Saturday.

“The Chinese newspaper is really, really important to a lot of my members, seniors,” said Liza Chan, executive director of the Calgary Chinese Elderly Citizens’ Association. “It’s a big hit to Calgary.”

It’s a trend throughout Canada’s Chinese media landscape.

In Calgary, a number of other Chinese-language newspapers stopped printing due to impacts from the pandemic, leaving just one locally-printed newspaper to inform the Chinese community — especially seniors who don’t typically get their news online.

Pandemic changed readership patterns 

Originating in Hong Kong, Sing Tao Daily was  distributed throughout Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver. The daily newspaper stopped circulating in Calgary in 2016, but its weekly publications — Canadian City Post and Sing Tao Cosmopolitan — are also ending their physical editions on Saturday.

While some Sing Tao readership returned after restrictions were lifted, Wong says it didn’t bounce back to pre-pandemic levels, which were already declining.

“We are noticing the change of the public in consuming their daily information and news,” said Wong. “We think that it is the right timing to change and move on to a new phase.”

It’s the same situation for Trend Media, formerly known as Trend Weekly. It used to be a free weekly magazine before it stopped printing and transitioned completely to an online platform in August.

“With the pandemic, more people in some ways are relying on information online right now. So less and less people are really paying much attention to the printed copies,” said publisher Danny Chan.

Chan says the high costs of printing were also a major factor, especially with a reduction in readers. He says all of the publication’s income would go to printing.

“I think the newspaper printing business is going all the way downhill right now because we can hardly make enough money to cover the printing costs,” he said.

He was also seeing a decrease in willing advertisers — the publication’s main revenue source. Most advertisers target readers under the age of 50 and now spend their money on online promotions, says Chan.

“Most of the readers of the paper publication are elderly. They don’t have that kind of spending power.”

Both Trend Media and Sing Tao will continue to publish e-books online. 

Other local newspapers in Calgary, such as Oriental Weekly, mention on their websites that they stopped printing indefinitely during the pandemic.

Chinese seniors left behind

As much of the world shifted online during the pandemic, Wong says seniors have become more technologically savvy and can learn how to find the news online.

But Liza Chan says that isn’t the case with the seniors she works with at the Calgary Chinese Elderly Citizens’ Association.

“There’s still a lot of seniors [who are] not able to access a computer or don’t have the ability to do it,” she said.

She says routine is important for seniors, and reading the Chinese newspaper each week is a big part of their routines — namely, Sing Tao’s weekly publications and Trend Weekly. But now, those are no longer an option.

A couple of other international newspapers are still distributed in Calgary, including Vision Times and Epoch Times, but there’s now only one locally printed Chinese newspaper in Calgary that seniors can rely on.

It’s limiting for seniors, says Chan, because that one option is in higher demand.

“When you have three different kinds, you can still get one maybe out of the three. But now you might not get any,” she said.

Last locally printed Chinese newspaper

The Canadian Chinese Times was the first local Chinese-language newspaper created in Calgary, back in 1981. Now, it’s the last one standing.

“It’s sad, actually,” said Jake Louie, publisher of the Canadian Chinese Times. “We don’t mind competition at all because that will give readers and the community more choices.”

“Now, we’re the only one left. So it’s kind of a feeling of loneliness, you know, in a way.”

The weekly newspaper, published on Thursdays, is targeted toward Chinese seniors and new immigrants who want to learn about the Canadian way of life and stay informed about what’s going on in Calgary.

About 12,000 copies are printed each week and distributed to more than 60 locations throughout the city. As the last Chinese newspaper standing, Louie says demand has soared.

“Our paper is going like hotcakes,” said Louie.

He says they once considered shifting to an online-only platform due to soaring printing costs and a decrease in advertisements. But when they asked readers their thoughts, the feedback was almost unanimous.

“‘No, I don’t know how to go online and I don’t have a computer. We really need physical printing papers so that we can get the information there.'”

Tony Wong, president of the Calgary Chinese Cultural Centre, says Chinese newspapers play an important role in the community’s daily lives.

Reading the newspaper with his family every Thursday and Friday has become a ritual, he says. Not only does it help him stay informed about events in the community, but his wife searches advertisements for the best promotions and sales to share with her sisters.

That didn’t change during the pandemic. Instead, in the early days, his wife would make sure he wore gloves to pick up the newspaper. She would also spray his hands and the paper with disinfectant.

“I just pray that the Canadian Chinese Times will remain in print for many years to come. Otherwise, a lot of our lives will be in jeopardy,” he said.

Chan says she hopes the Canadian Chinese Times will consider printing more copies as demand increases so no Chinese Calgarians lose touch with the community.

Source: Chinese Canadian seniors left behind as many Chinese-language newspapers stop printing

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Why so many people mistrust science and how we can fix it

2022/08/29 Leave a comment

Some interesting thoughts on how to address mistrust:

Not since the Scopes Monkey Trial a century ago, in which a Tennessee high school science teacher was found guilty of violating the state’s law prohibiting the teaching of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, have anti-scientific attitudes been so apparent and openly embraced by political leaders in the United States. 

The denial, now decades long, of the evidence of human-induced climate change by a large segment of the population, reinforced by the rhetoric of powerful Republicans like governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, has been matched over the past two-and-a-half years by the wholesale rejection of scientific evidence about COVID-19 by many of these same politicians and much of the American population, approximately 40% of whom reject the science about both. 

Drawing on decades of marketing and psychology research, which show that it is critical to understand your target audience so that a product can be positioned properly in the market, Dr Aviva Philipp-Muller, professor at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University, and her team determined there are four different reasons why people have anti-science attitudes. 

Having anatomised the principles behind each attitude, “Why are people anti-science, and what can we do about it?”, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, proposes strategies to counter each of the four anti-science attitudes.

“Persuasion researchers have known for a little while that getting in your audience’s head and understanding where they’re coming from is step one of trying to win them over. There’s no one-size-fits-all persuasion tactic. So, if you’re not getting through to someone, you might need to reassess why they’re anti-science in the first place and try to speak directly to that basis,” says Philipp-Muller.

Reason one: Suspicions about scientists and experts

The first group Philipp-Muller and her co-authors, Professor Spike WS Lee (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto) and Social Psychology Professor Richard E Petty (Ohio State University, Columbus), discuss are suspicious of scientists and experts. 

One reason large sections of the population mistrust scientists such as Dr Anthony Fauci is because of the cynicism about elite institutions (including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the stereotyping of scientists as cold and unfeeling. This view of medical experts contrasts sharply, it is worth noting, with the avuncular characters in television soap operas and films from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. 

A further contributing factor to the mistrust of scientists harkens back to what prompted Tennessee politicians, who had strong support from their evangelical constituents, to ban the teaching of evolution: modern science’s antipathy to Christian teachings, beliefs and values.

During the COVID-19 crisis, faith in scientists has also been weakened by what many in the public saw as confusing recommendations and even backtracking about masking: from there being no need to wear masks, to saving surgical masks and N95 masks for medical workers, to everyone needing to wear an N95 mask. 

(The fact that the recommendations changed because of new information – ie because that is how science works – Philipp-Muller told University World News, is not relevant to how much of the public responded to the recommendations.)

Reason two: Social identities

Both communications professors and marketers have studied how social identities largely determine recipients’ openness to a message. It comes as no surprise that because in the past they were subjected to (often heinous) experiments without their knowledge, both American Blacks and Indigenous peoples are wary of medical scientists, for example. 

“For individuals who embrace an identity [eg evangelical Christians], scientists are members of the outgroup,” Philipp-Muller writes, and are therefore not to be believed. This can be seen in the way, in the United States and some other countries, televangelists and preachers told their flocks that taking the COVID vaccine showed a lack of faith in the efficacy of prayer.

Social identity dynamics, augmented by social media, Philipp-Muller says, play a major role in the rise of (demonstrably false) conspiracy theories, such as the claim that the COVID-19 vaccine contains microchips.

Reason three: Overturning a world view

Perhaps the most infamous example of the third basis for rejecting science – a message that overturns a world view – is the Catholic Church’s rejection of Copernicus’ discovery that the Earth orbits the sun, holding onto an erroneous view that had stood for four centuries. 

To avoid “cognitive dissonance”, individuals will hold to an erroneous view even after they are presented with evidence. This is one reason why “fake news” and misinformation are so difficult to counter, notes the study.

Reason four: Epistemic style

The final basis for anti-science thinking, Philipp-Muller and her team discern, occurs when there is a “mismatch between the delivery of the scientific message and the recipient’s epistemic style”; in other words, when information is delivered in a manner at odds with the recipient’s way of thinking. 

For example, people who are more comfortable thinking in concrete terms are more likely to dismiss issues like climate change because it is often presented in abstract terms divorced from the individual’s daily life.

One of the most interesting points Philipp-Muller and her team make is how, for large sections of the public, the rhetorical structures scientists use end up undercutting the authority of their conclusions. 

Since the science is evolving in real time, when speaking of COVID-19 or climate change, scientists “hedge their findings and avoid over-claiming certainty as they try to communicate the preliminary, inconclusive, nuanced or evolving nature of scientific evidence”. 

Partially because the public is poorly educated as to how science operates – famously summarised by the philosopher Karl Popper as working through the Falsification Principle – the rhetorical structures used by scientists lead people with low tolerance for uncertainty to reject both the information and recommendations that scientists like Fauci give. 

(The Falsification Principle holds that, as opposed to an opinion or statement of religious faith, a scientific theory must be testable and structured so that it can conceivably be proven false.)

“There are a lot of people who don’t really have tolerance for uncertainty and really need to be told things in black and white. And so there’s a mismatch between how scientists tend to communicate information and how whole segments of the population tend to process information,” says Philipp-Muller.

The limitations of science education

Improving scientific literacy, the default solution of professors, will only go so far towards solving the problem of anti-science attitudes, says Philipp-Muller, especially if such education is conceived of as teaching students a list of facts. 

“That’s not going to be helpful and, in fact, could backfire,” she told University World News. 

Further, for the four anti-science attitudes held in the general public, it is too late for science education. Accordingly, the authors propose strategies to counter each of the four anti-science biases.

To counteract the view that scientists as people are not trustworthy, the study suggests three main steps. 

The perceived “coldness” of elite scientists can be countered by recruiting more females into the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. 

Scientists should also simplify their language and write “lay summaries” that should appear alongside the ubiquitous jargon-laden abstracts. 

Because of the low level of scientific literacy among the general public, Philipp-Muller and her team say, scientists must don a teacher’s cap and “communicate to the public that substantive debate and disagreement are inherent in the scientific process” in clear and unambiguous terms, without falling into the false neutrality of what’s been dubbed “both sideism”. 

Marketing and persuasion research show that being perceived as open to other points of view actually increases openness among recipients. Philipp-Muller’s team suggests “honestly acknowledging any drawbacks of their position [such as the infringement on rights by requirements to mask up because of COVID] while ultimately explaining in clear and compelling terms why their position is still the most supported or justifiable one”.

Countering the ingroup/outgroup attitude requires scientific communicators to find a shared social identity with their intended audience. 

In one town, Philipp-Muller told me, proponents did not counter resistance to a water-recycling programme by piling up the scientific evidence for the plan. Rather, more people supported the proposal when the presenter emphasised the fact that she also lived in the same region and thus shared what’s called a “superordinate identity”. 

One way to earn the trust of racialised communities that are wary of scientists is to “train marginalised individuals to be scientists working within their own communities”. In one paradigmatic project, to overcome the suspicions of the Indigenous community where the scientists were studying the human genome, researchers trained Indigenous individuals to be genome researchers.

On overcoming resistance to the scientific message itself, Philipp-Muller says: “I think science education can be a really useful tool for combating anti-science attitudes, especially with number three, which is when the scientific message’s evidence is contrary to a person’s belief. 

“If we can get in and ensure that people have good scientific reasoning skills so that when they’re presented with new scientific information, they are able to assess whether or not it’s valid, that will help ensure that they can get on board with accurate and valid scientific information and also learn what kind of evidence is shaky.”

An appeal to values

A further strategy to combat anti-science attitudes triggered by the content of the message involves appealing to recipients’ deep-seated values. 

The term Philipp-Muller and her co-authors use for this is “self-affirmation”, which has nothing New Agey about it and nothing to do with radical individualism. Rather, self-affirmation refers to a process during which people focus on the values that matter to them, such as caring for one’s family, in ways unrelated to the conflict or issue at hand. 

The finding of common ground has the effect of reducing “cognitive dissonance” experienced when presented with scientific information that is contrary to one’s ingrained way of thinking. 

Studies have shown that increasing an individual’s sense of self-integrity and security reduces the threat that dissonance poses to their sense of themselves. “Self-affirmation interventions have been used successfully,” says the article, “to reduce defensiveness and increase acceptance of scientific information regarding health behaviours and climate change.”

Philipp-Muller’s discussion of how to overcome the many mismatches between individuals’ epistemic styles and how scientists present scientific information is how the science behind marketing informs the proposals. 

After noting that large tech companies use the “fine-grained, person-specific” data to target people to change their consumer behaviour and that consumer researchers learned long ago to use rich psychological and behavioural data to segment and target consumers, they suggest that “public interest groups could adopt similar strategies and use the logic of target communications with different audiences in mind”. 

For example, abstract messages could be delivered to those who think abstractly and concrete messages for those who think concretely.

A timely intervention

Philipp-Muller and her co-authors’ analysis and prescriptions for countering anti-science attitudes could not be more timely.

I interviewed her on the morning of 27 July. A few hours later, Vic L McConought, a member of the Canadian Legislative Assembly (provincial parliament) who is running to be leader of the province’s United Conservative Party, which would make him Alberta’s next premier, tweeted about the leadership debate that evening. 

Despite the fact that 87% of Albertans are vaccinated, he primed his Twitter followers by writing: “I assume the first question is about Science … My answer is ‘Science will be held to task for its crimes if I am elected leader’.”

Source: Why so many people mistrust science and how we can fix it

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McWhorter: Lower Black and Latino Pass Rates Don’t Make a Test Racist

2022/08/29 1 Comment

Needed nuance and greater sophistication in analysis:

The Association of Social Work Boards administers tests typically required for the licensure of social workers. Apparently, this amounts to a kind of racism that must be reckoned with.

There is a Change.org petition circulating saying just that, based on the claim that the association’s clinical exam is biased because from 2018 to 2021 84 percent of white test-takers passed it the first time while only 45 percent of Black test-takers and 65 percent of Latino test-takers did. “These numbers are grossly disproportionate and demonstrate a failure in the exam’s design,” the petition states, adding that an “assertion that the problem lies with test-takers only reinforces the racism inherent to the test.” The petitioners add that the exam is administered only in English and its questions are based on survey responses from a disproportionately white pool of social workers.

But the petition doesn’t sufficiently explain why that makes the test racist. We’re just supposed to accept that it is. The petitioners want states to eliminate requirements that social workers pass the association’s tests, leaving competence for licensure to be demonstrated through degree completion and a period of supervised work.

So: It’s wrong to use a test to evaluate someone’s qualifications to be a social worker? This begins to sound plausible only if you buy into the fashionable ideology of our moment, in which we’re encouraged to think it’s somehow antiracist to excuse Black and brown people from being measured by standardized testing. There have been comparable claims these days with regard to tests for math teachers in Ontario and state bar exams, and, in the past, on behalf of applicants to the New York City Fire Department.

One of the weirdest assertions in the petition is that the social work association “is suggesting that Black, Latine/Hispanic and Indigenous social workers, by virtue of their race, are less capable of passing standardized tests.” (The first-time pass rate for Indigenous test-takers was 63 percent; for those of Asian descent it was 72 percent.) But based on the numbers, it would appear some are, absent details of just how the test is racist.

If there were clear evidence of this, presumably the petitioners would have outlined it in order to make their case. But the petition doesn’t prove the exam’s design is fatally flawed and doesn’t show which test components are out of bounds. We must address this problem more constructively.

This will mean taking a deep breath and asking why it is that in various instances, Black and Latino test-takers disproportionately have trouble with standardized tests. The reason for the deep breath is the implication ever in the air on this subject: that if the test isn’t racist, then the results might suggest that they aren’t as smart as their white peers. That’s an artificially narrowed realm of choices, however. There is more to what shapes how people handle things like standardized tests.

Broadly speaking, standardized testing has been criticized in a variety of ways. A 2021 article in NEA Today, a publication of the National Education Association, claims, “Since their inception a century ago, standardized tests have been instruments of racism and a biased system,” an observation channeling an opinion common in education circles that standardized tests measure test-taking ability rather than proficiency. But these claims miss a dynamic that sheds light on this issue.

One source I’ve always valued is a book published in 1983, “Ways With Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms,” by the linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath, who compared how language was used with children in a middle-class white community, a working-class white one and a working-class Black one. She found that in conversation, questions were wielded differently depending on the community. A key difference was that in middle-class white ones, children were often asked disembodied, information-seeking questions as a kind of exercise amid general social interaction. Heath wrote:

“Mothers continue their question-answer routines when the children begin to talk and add to them running narratives on items and events in the environment. Children are trained to act as conversation partners and information-givers.”

In the middle-class subculture Heath describes, children unconsciously incorporate into their mental tool kit a comfort with retaining and discussing facts for their own sake, as opposed to processing facts mainly as they relate to the practicalities of daily existence. The same kind of skill development that’s fostered by reading for pleasure or personal interest — as opposed to reading for school lessons — a ritual which preserves and displays information beyond the everyday.

Heath found that while the printed page is hardly alien to the working-class Black community (which she gives the pseudonym “Trackton”; her pseudonymous white working-class community is “Roadville” and her pseudonymous white middle-class community is “Maintown”), and questions themselves are certainly part of how language is used within it, particular kinds of questions about matters unconnected to daily living were relatively rare. A paperpublished in 1995 by the National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia cited Heath and notes that “the Trackton world is warm, buzzing with emotion and adult communication, an environment to which the child gradually adapts by a process of imitation and repetition.” However, it adds, “the language socialization of the Trackton child is,” in contrast to Maintown, “almost book-free.” One Trackton grandmother described part of the dynamic to Heath in this way: “We don’t talk to our chil’rn like you folks do. We don’t ask ’em ’bout colors, names ’n things.”

Yes, Heath’s book was written some time ago. Certainly, Black kids don’t grow up not knowing their colors or that things have names. But that quote does get at something in a general sense. Importantly, Heath’s study was objective and respectful. She isn’t a culture-wars partisan. Her point wasn’t that Black culture, or working-class culture, is unenlightened or that Black people or working-class white people are in any sense inarticulate. Neither she then, nor I now, say there is some flaw in Black or working-class white culture.

The issue is, rather, how we square what worked for the past with what will work for today. No culture can be faulted for lagging a bit on that. Working-class Black culture was born amid hard-working people in segregated America for whom higher education was, in many, if not most cases, a distant prospect, and language was used to operate in the here and now. Think of August Wilson’s plays.

That makes perfect sense in a working-class setting and is the way most people in the world proceed linguistically. Heath noted, though, about both the white and Black working-class communities she studied that “neither community’s ways with the written word prepares it for the school’s ways.” In that context, it’s easier to understand stubbing a proverbial toe on standardized tests at first.

I experienced this as a 1970s middle-class Black kid, coming of age just a decade or so after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., growing up in neighborhoods with lots of “post-civil rights” Black kids of various backgrounds. Middle- and upper-middle class Black families, while taking advantage of widened opportunities, could still dialogue in the way Trackton families did, and many still do. This is hardly limited to Black people. However, to the extent that we still have a wealth gap and an education gap, and that the poverty rate is disproportionately high for Black, Latino and Indigenous people, we might expect these groups, in the aggregate, to be affected by this aspect of language and its legacies.

Let’s recognize, then, that calling something like a credentialing exam racist is crude — it flies past issues more nuanced and complex. Heath’s study doesn’t have all the answers, and there are many working-class homes in which children are prepared with the conversational and analytical skills required to excel on standardized tests. But we might absorb the reality that circumstances will leave some people better poised to take tests than others, and that will mean pass rates on such tests will differ according to race at least for a while.

And let’s recognize that the pass rate on the social work association’s clinical exam goes up after successive attempts: According to the association, the eventual pass rate is 57 percent for Black test-takers, 77 percent for Latinos and 74 percent for Native Americans. Also, among social workers, Black people are overrepresented — over 20 percent as of 2017 — in relation to our proportion of the population, which hardly suggests an obstacle to Black participation in the profession.

Might there be a reason to adjust the exams? Perhaps, if, as the petition states, among the social workers surveyed in order to compose the questions, 80 percent are white people, even though Black and Latino people combined constitute 36 percent of new social workers. If nothing else, to eliminate the appearance of bias, the association ought to survey a representative group to generate test questions.

But insisting simply that it is racist, and therefore, constructively, immoral, to subject Black and Latino social workers to standardized test questions is itself a kind of immorality. It’s a squeak away from arguing that Black and Latino people just aren’t very quick on the uptake or can’t think outside of the box. What kind of antiracism is that?

Source: Lower Black and Latino Pass Rates Don’t Make a Test Racist

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

‘Powerful tools of White Supremacy’: Embattled anti-racism group speaks out to supporters

2022/08/29 Leave a comment

Their website is certainly on the extreme woke side, with no information on the board of directors or consultants (which may have been scrubbed following the justified criticism of its orientation and tweets of Marouf).

Hard to understand how their public website info didn’t raise any flags, even if Marouf’s racist tweets were not known:

The organization embroiled in a scandal after receiving a $133,000 government contract for an anti-racism project, even though one of its founders had sent a slew of bigoted tweets, has finally spoken out, issuing an email to supporters that says “online and mainstream media are powerful tools of White Supremacy.”

In the email, the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC) says it received a letter from the Department of Canadian Heritage suspending the anti-racism project for the broadcasting sector they had been working on.

It marks the first time CMAC has spoken publicly about the scandal.

The scandal first broke last week when The Canadian Press reported on a series of anti-Semitic tweets from Laith Marouf, a senior consultant with CMAC. At the time, Ahmed Hussen, the minister of diversity, inclusion and youth, said the government would “look closely at the situation involving disturbing comments made by the individual in question.”

Still, months earlier, in April 2022, when the project was announced, Hussen praised it in a press release: “In Canada, diversity is a fact, but inclusion is a choice. Our government is proud to contribute to the initiative,” Hussen said.

While Marouf’s tweets are private, The Canadian Press reported on screenshots. One such tweet said: “You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from, they will return to being low voiced bitches of thier Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters.”

Marouf’s lawyer, Stephen Ellis, asked that The Canadian Press quote Marouf’s tweets “verbatim,” and said there was a difference between Marouf’s “clear reference to ‘Jewish white supremacists,’” and Jews or Jewish people in general.

Marouf does not harbour “any animus toward the Jewish faith as a collective group,” The Canadian Press reported.

By Monday, Hussen announced the government had cut funding to the CMAC project.

“The antisemitic statements made by Laith Marouf are reprehensible and vile,” Hussen said in a statement posted to Twitter. “We call on CMAC, an organization claiming to fight racism and hate in Canada, to answer to how they came to hire Laith Marouf, and how they plan on rectifying the situation given the nature of his antisemitic and xenophobic statements.”

Then, Anthony Housefather, a Liberal member of Parliament, said he had warned Hussen about Marouf’s statements prior to the media catching wind of them.

“I said the contract had to be cancelled. I alerted him and I persistently communicated with the minister in his office, from the day I learned about it, until today, and aggressively demanded that action be taken,” Housefather told the National Post. “Action could have been taken more quickly.”

Housefather also said there needs to be a “thorough review in the department of Heritage as to how this happened” and processes need to be put in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Friday’s statement does not address the questions raised by Housefather or Hussen.

“From Turtle Island to Palestine, CMAC continues to see the need for an anti-racism strategy for broadcasting that disrupts settler-colonialism and oppression in the media,” it said.

The email also urges patience on the part of organizers for events across Canada, and said it would be suspending events for the time being while it considers how to respond to Canadian Heritage.

Marouf has a long history of edgy tweets: He has claimed Israel was the creation of “White Jews who adopted Nazism,” and said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the head of an “Apartheid” colony.

Irwin Cotler — a Jewish-Canadian and former Liberal justice minister — was called the “Grand Wizard of Zionism” and a man who “looks like a d–k without makeup.” In 2021, Marouf said “Jewish White Supremacists” deserve only a “bullet to the head.”

Source: ‘Powerful tools of White Supremacy’: Embattled anti-racism group speaks out to supporters 

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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