New research shows Bill 21 having ‘devastating’ impact on religious minorities in Quebec [particularly Muslim women]

2022/08/11 Leave a comment

Would be interesting to see the breakdown between Montreal and the rest of Quebec, where immigration is low as is the number of visible and religious minorities:

New research shows that three years after Quebec’s secularism law — commonly known as Bill 21 — was adopted, religious minorities in the province are feeling increasingly alienated and hopeless.  

“Religious minority communities are encountering — at levels that are disturbing — a reflection of disdain, hate, mistrust and aggression,” Miriam Taylor, lead researcher and the director of publications and partnerships at the Association for Canadian Studies, told CBC in an interview.

“We even saw threats and physical violence,” Taylor said.

Bill 21, which passed in 2019, bars public school teachers, police officers, judges and government lawyers, among other civil servants in positions of authority, from wearing religious symbols — such as hijabs, crucifixes or turbans — while at work.

Taylor and her colleagues at the association worked with polling firm Leger to gather a unique portrait of attitudes toward Bill 21 in Quebec.

The association surveyed members of certain religious minority communities including 632 Muslims, 165 Jews and 56 Sikhs.

Those results were folded into a Leger survey of the Quebec population as whole, and then weighted to ensure the sample was representative of the entire population.

That allowed Taylor to compare and contrast the attitudes toward Bill 21 of Quebecers who are religious minorities with the attitudes of Quebecers as a whole.

In total 1,828 people were questioned in the online survey.

Taylor shared an advance copy of her final report, which is being released today, with CBC.

Muslim women most affected

Although all three religious minority groups surveyed said they’ve experienced negative impacts due to Bill 21, the effects are being most acutely felt by Muslims and, in particular, Muslim women.

“We saw severe social stigmatisation of Muslim women, marginalization of Muslim women and very disturbing declines in their sense of well-being, their ability to fulfil their aspirations, sense of safety, but also hope for the future,”  Taylor said.

Of the Muslim women surveyed, 78 per cent said their feeling of being accepted as a full-fledged member of Quebec society had worsened over the last three years.

Fifty-three per cent said they’d heard prejudicial remarks about Muslims from family, friends or colleagues.

People surveyed were given the opportunity to share examples of comments they’d heard or behaviours they’d experienced.

One reported hearing: ”These Muslim women with rags on their heads, if they are not able to integrate, let them return to their country.”

Forty-seven per cent of Muslim women said they’d been treated unfairly by a person in a position of authority. 

One person reported being called a “dirty immigrant” by a police officer in Quebec City.  Another reported that a teacher told disparaging anecdotes about Islam in class.

Two thirds of Muslim women said they’d been a victim of and/or a witness to a hate crime. Seventy-three per cent said their feeling of being safe in public had worsened.

Taylor found that nearly three quarters of Muslim women surveyed felt their comfort about safety in public had worsened in the three years since Bill 21 was adopted. (Association for Canadian Studies)

People surveyed offered examples ranging from racist remarks to death threats, having hijabs ripped off and being spat on. One person reported that a man deliberately tried to run over them and their three-year-old daughter with a pickup truck.

A majority of Muslims also reported feeling less hopeful, less free to express themselves in public and less likely to participate in social and political life.

“For a law that’s supposed to be very moderate and only touch a very small number of people, we were shocked at the responses,” Taylor said.

She said the response she found most upsetting was that 83 per cent of Muslim women surveyed said their confidence in their children’s future had worsened since Bill 21 passed.

Taylor said the figure that most upset her was the lack of hope Quebec Muslims have for their children’s future. (Association for Canadian Studies)

“It’s one thing to say: ‘you know what, I’m experiencing a lot of unfair treatment because I’m not understood,'” Taylor said. “It’s another thing to project forward and have no hope for your children.”

Law reinforces existing prejudices

Taylor believes Bill 21 alone isn’t responsible for the feelings of alienation and insecurity Quebec Muslims and other religious minorities feel.

She said prejudicial attitudes have been gestating in Quebec for nearly 20 years, when the debate over so-called “reasonable accommodations” for religious minorities first took hold.

“Malaise, fear and anxieties get provoked over time,” Taylor said.

She said often those anxieties are based on ignorance.

“By their own admission, Quebecers in general have very little contact with members of religious minorities,” Taylor said. “All of these negative opinions are based on lack of knowledge.”

Taylor said Bill 21 has enabled those prejudices — rooted in ignorance — to become the norm.

“We end up with a situation where the malaise of the observer trumps the deep convictions of the person actually wearing the religious symbols,” Taylor said.

“We’re validating and reinforcing those opinions, and then we’re politicizing the symbols. Those symbols are lightning rods,” she said.

“And so we end up dehumanizing the people wearing the symbols,” Taylor said.

Women generally less supportive of Bill 21

Taylor said that Bill 21 has consistently maintained the support of about two thirds of Quebecers since it was adopted, with a dip last January after the high-profile case of a hijab-wearing teacher in Chelsea who was removed from the classroom and reassigned.

But she said that support is nuanced and full of contradictions.

Women in Quebec, for example, are generally less supportive of Bill 21 than men. Sixty-eight per cent of men support the law compared to 58 per cent of women.

Taylor said the research showed that women, and in particular young women, are less supportive of Bill 21 than men. (Association for Canadian Studies)

And the younger women are, the less likely they are to support the law.  Just 31 per cent of women aged 18-24 support Bill 21.

Taylor said that raised questions for her.

“It’s touted as a feminist law by the people who support it. So why is it that particularly the younger women of Quebec are so much less in favour of it when one would expect the reverse proportion?” she said.

Support for the law but not for enforcement

Another statistic that surprised Taylor: even Quebecers who support the law don’t necessarily want to see it enforced.

Only 40 per cent of people surveyed believe a public servant who does not comply with the law should lose their job. 

“The law is supported and liked by Quebecers. But they seem much less keen to see it actually applied,” Taylor said.

“I think that we’re a human society and we care about people. We all need income to survive and I think people are aware of what a heavy price that would be to pay,” she said.

Quebecers care about what courts say about Bill 21

Taylor was also surprised that the survey showed that Quebecers care deeply about what courts have to say about Bill 21.

When drafting the law, the Quebec government, recognizing that it would likely violate both the Canadian and the Quebec charters of rights, pre-emptively invoked the constitutional notwithstanding clause, and altered the Quebec charter to try to shut down court challenges.

But those challenges came anyway, and now both the government and groups that oppose the bill are challenging a 2021 Quebec Superior Court ruling that upheld most of the law before the Quebec Court of Appeal.

It’s widely expected the law will eventually be challenged in the Supreme Court of Canada.

The bill’s architect, Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette, has argued that it’s up to elected politicians in the National Assembly — and not the courts — to decide how they want to organize relations between the state and religion.

But Quebecers seem to feel differently.

Sixty-four per cent, roughly the same percentage that support the bill, also feel it’s important for the Supreme Court to issue an opinion on whether Bill 21 is discriminatory.

And if the courts were to confirm the law is discriminatory, support for the bill would plummet.

Only 46 per cent of people surveyed — less than half — said they would continue to support the law if the courts confirmed it violates the Charter of Rights.

Debate not over

Jolin-Barrette has portrayed Quebecers as united in support of the bill, and has accused detractors of trying to divide Quebecers.

But Taylor’s survey shows that a majority of Quebecers — 56 per cent — believe the law itself is divisive.

When Bill 21 was adopted, Jolin-Barrette said it would “permit a harmonious transition toward secularism” for Quebec.

Taylor said that clearly hasn’t been the case.

“The debate is very far from closed,” she said. “Bill 21 is having devastating impacts on citizens in our province. It’s tearing apart our social fabric and I think it’s undermining our democracy.”

“If national unity is achieved at the expense of labelling minorities as in some way harmful or a threat, these are signs of the degeneration of democracy,” she said. 

Taylor said as a Quebecer, she finds this distressing.

“We live in a very distinct province. We’re different. It’s an experiment that on some level should never have succeeded: a thriving French society on an English continent,” she said.

“In all my years, I associate that distinct nature with a humanity, with understanding how important identity is,” Taylor said.

She said Bill 21 threatens that.

“I feel like we’re doing major harm to those values that we hold dear and that make us special,” Taylor said.

Source: New research shows Bill 21 having ‘devastating’ impact on religious minorities in Quebec

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , , ,

USA: Board Diversity Is Sacrificed When Companies Underperform, Study Finds

2022/08/11 Leave a comment

Of note but not particularly surprising:

Companies that are underperforming in comparison to their competitors or to their goals are more likely to experience a decrease in racial and gender diversity rates on their boards, a newly released study has found.

Researchers at Imperial College Business School in London tracked data from more than 700 U.S. firms from 1996 to 2013 to make the assessment.

Dr. HeeJung Jung, Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Imperial College Business School, and lead researcher of the study, tells TIME that this phenomenon is not deliberate, but rather a result of the pressure firms face to better adapt and begin performing well. Leaders search for a quick solution, but boards can become less inclusive as executives minimize their boards, or unconsciously seek directors that have similar ascriptive backgrounds.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“The board deliberately seeks new expertise and new perspectives among a variety of industries and backgrounds in the belief that it might rescue the company. But while this expertise came from a range of sectors, that’s as far as the diversity goes, in terms of race and gender,” Jung says.

Despite ongoing conversations about racial equity becoming more prevalent across the U.S., particularly after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, when companies made public pledges to better address racial inequality, Jung says that there is still a lot of fluctuation when looking at racial and gender diversity rates across corporate America.

In 2021, women comprised just 27% of board seats among the 3,000 largest publicly traded companies incorporated in the U.S., and only 6% of those seats were held by women of color, according to a report by the Women Business Collaborative. Men of color held 9% of board seats in the same year. Black board membership increased by nearly a third in 2021, but accounted for only 6.4% of directors overall.

Jung notes that companies will always experience periods of growth and decline, making more consistent strides for diversity and inclusion among the workforce difficult. The problem is, diversity is not a priority for companies when profits decrease, Jung says. “In their view, diversity efforts or DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] matters last, it becomes a second matter or a second goal.”

Some countries in Europe have safeguards in place that would prevent progress on board diversity being rolled back. Gender diversity quotas are common in nations like France, Norway, Spain and Iceland, where women must make up at least 40% of boards at publicly traded companies, according to the Harvard Business Review.

While research about the benefits of gender-based diversity in the U.S. has shown mixed results, Jung says this may be because, despite great strides in female leadership, American corporate culture has not yet normalized it. One of the roadblocks to progress that female CEOs often face is pushback from teams, including constant cross-checking of their decisions to verify that they are acting “correctly,” Jung says.

“That causes an efficiency problem, and in a time of crisis where speed is important for any corporation, having this is a delay in decisions [and] makes directors [from underrepresented backgrounds] doubt their leadership too,” Jung told TIME.

Diversity efforts in corporate America

Currently, the U.S. has no federal policy that mandates inclusivity, though that has not stopped local governments from attempting to implement changes. States like Washington, for instance, require at least a quarter of a public company’s board to be women. In California, a law, passed in 2020, requiring public companies to have greater racial and gender diversity on their boards, was struck down in April, according to the New York Times, but the state still has a 2018 law in effect that forces companies to have at least one woman on their board.

In some cases, business leaders have created their own solutions. Last year, Nasdaq secured regulatory approval for plans to require listed companies to share diversity data about their boards of directors. Companies without at least two diverse directors, including one who self-identifies as a woman and one who identifies as an underrepresented minority or LGBTQ+, are required to explain their lack of diversity.

Having executives from underrepresented backgrounds in positions of leadership helps too. Jung’s study found that when board member chairs come from underrepresented groups, they are less likely to sacrifice the gender and racial diversity of their board in response to a downturn.

But, as Jung states, retaining diverse talent requires companies to take the important first step of creating corporate norms that recognize the value of having diverse teams. “It’s not only about bringing [diverse candidates] in but also making them play an important role in the board and change the norms,” she says. “There’s a lot of positive benefits and corporations have to be very sensitive about and must pay attention to make a better strategy for their boardroom structures and who they are going to appoint.”

Source: Board Diversity Is Sacrificed When Companies Underperform, Study Finds

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

La publicité de HEC Montréal provoque une nouvelle réaction

2022/08/11 Leave a comment

Sigh… The usual over-reaction over what should be a non-issue:

Une publicité de HEC Montréal montrant une femme qui porte le hidjab et dénoncée par l’ex-politicien Jean-François Lisée a continué de susciter de nombreuses réactions mardi.

Alors que deux avocates de confession musulmane témoignaient dans nos pages de leur désaccord avec la position de M. Lisée, qui considère que la publicité présente un « signe religieux misogyne », la présidente du Rassemblement pour la laïcité, Nadia El-Mabrouk, abonde plutôt dans le sens de l’ex-politicien et dénonce la publicité.

[Montrer le voile dans la publicité], c’est un point de vue favorable à l’islam intégriste, c’est mettre de l’avant des pratiques intégristes

— Nadia El-Mabrouk

« Ce n’est pas neutre de faire ça. Ça vient avec une vision de la diversité et de la représentativité des signes religieux », plaide-t-elle en entrevue téléphonique. La Québécoise d’origine tunisienne, qui est aussi professeure au Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle à l’Université de Montréal, croit qu’« on n’a pas à représenter toutes les idées » dans des campagnes publicitaires. « [Montrer le voile dans la publicité], c’est un point de vue favorable à l’islam intégriste, c’est mettre de l’avant des pratiques intégristes, assène-t-elle. Quand les femmes disent “c’est mon choix” [de porter le voile], ça ne répond pas à la question “pourquoi c’est mon choix ?” »

En entrevue avec Le Devoir la veille, l’avocate de formation et autrice Dania Suleman a soutenu que « certaines femmes portent le hidjab par choix, et ça leur permet de se sentir beaucoup plus libres ». Elle a également estimé la position de M. Lisée « désolante », jugeant qu’elle « continue à aliéner les femmes qui portent le voile ».

Mme El-Mabrouk, autrice du livre Notre laïcité, paru en 2019, est fortement en désaccord. « On ne peut pas prendre un symbole clair de l’islamisme et prétendre que ça dit exactement le contraire », soutient-elle.

Sur les réseaux sociaux

De nombreux citoyens se sont indignés du tweet de Jean-François Lisée, tandis que plusieurs lui ont apporté leur appui, dont notamment Ensaf Haidar, ex-candidate du Bloc québécois dans Sherbrooke et femme du blogueur Raif Badawi. « En tant que musulmane pacifique, j’insiste sur le fait que le voile ne vient pas de l’Islam et qu’il est un symbole de l’esclavage et de l’oppression des femmes. Arrêtez d’abuser des femmes avec des publicités aussi stupides », a-t-elle écrit sur Twitter.

Le député néodémocrate de Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, Alexandre Boulerice, s’est néanmoins montré très critique de la position de M. Lisée. « Donc science et islam seraient incompatibles ? Alors que science et pas de signe religieux apparent de christianisme serait correct ? » a-t-il questionné. M. Lisée a répondu : « Tu crois que le Coran est fondé sur la science? La Bible? La Torah? Qu’une institution de haut savoir scientifique doit promouvoir leurs symboles ? »

Par courriel, la conseillère principale en relation avec les médias de HEC Montréal, Émilie Novales, a confirmé que la femme dans la publicité est une « étudiante au parcours international » et que l’institution accueille « un nombre croissant d’étudiants internationaux » chaque année. « Nous tenons à ce que tous les membres de notre communauté étudiante puissent être mis en valeur sur nos plateformes, reflétant toute notre diversité », ajoute-t-elle.

Source: La publicité de HEC Montréal provoque une nouvelle réaction

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Canada opens new PR pathway for overseas family members of air disasters

2022/08/11 Leave a comment

Yet another pathway. Could this not be better handled by H&C rather than adding further complexity and multiplicity of pathways when IRCC has large backlogs?

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has created a new permanent residency program for families of the Canadian victims of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752.

The new permanent residency pathway applies to those who wish to come to Canada to settle and support members of their family who lost their spouse, common-law partner or parent, according to a government media release.

To ensure that extended family members have close ties to the surviving family member, the family member who is in Canada will need to provide a statutory declaration. There is a limit of two extended family members per family unit.

The victim of the air disasters must have been a Canadian citizen, permanent resident, or foreign national who had been approved for permanent residence. In the Ethiopia Airlines crash, 22 victims were Canadian, and the Ukraine International Airlines aircraft had 85 victims who were Canadian citizens or permanent residents.

This new measure follows IRCC’s May 2021 policy, which offered a pathway to permanent residence for family members of these air disaster victims who were already in Canada. That policy ended on May 11, 2022. Eligible immediate and extended family members can now apply even if they are outside Canada.

The public policy for families outside Canada is in effect from August 3, 2022, until August 2, 2023.

Eligibility criteria

To be eligible to apply, you must be outside Canada. You and your family members must also not be inadmissible to Canada.

You must be related to either a Canadian victim or their spouse or common-law partner who passed away on flights Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 or Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752. You must provide a complete and signed statutory declaration (IMM 0171) from a surviving family member in Canada. Family members can only sign a statutory declaration for a maximum of two principal applicants.

You can also be related to a person who got permanent residence under the Temporary public policy to facilitate permanent residence for in-Canada families of Canadian victims of recent air disasters, if you were either declared as a non-accompanying family member on their application, or are a child of theirs and were born after your parent became a permanent resident.

Eligible relatives of the victim include the following:

  • spouse or common-law partner
  • child (of any age)
  • parent
  • grandparent
  • grandchild
  • sibling (including half siblings)
  • aunt or uncle (their mother or father’s sibling)
  • nephew or niece (the child of their sibling)

Eligible relatives of a victims’ spouse or common-law partner include:

  • child
  • parent
  • grandparent
  • grandchild
  • sibling (including half-siblings)
  • aunt or uncle (the sibling of a victim’s parent)
  • nephew or niece (the child of a victim’s sibling)

You can include members of your family in your application if they meet all the admissibility requirements to become Canadian permanent residents.

Even if your family members do not plan to come to Canada, you must declare them on your application. Otherwise, you will not be able to sponsor them later.

Source: Canada opens new PR pathway for overseas family members of air disasters

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ICYMI: Iranian-Canadians feel like ‘2nd-class citizens’ as many continue to be stopped while travelling to the U.S.

2022/08/11 Leave a comment

For better or worse (as in these cases), all countries exercise sovereignty over who is admitted and who is not. Not “offloading responsibility” to the USA, just a reflection of reality:

Amir Abolhassani sold his house in Saskatoon when his U.S.-based employer asked him to relocate to North Carolina. But at the Calgary airport this January, his family was not allowed to cross the border.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer told Abolhassani, who is a Canadian citizen, that it was because of time he spent as a conscript in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) more than a decade ago. The family was subjected to a secondary screening involving a long interview and an extensive search of their belongings, cellphones and social media.

“It’s like we are not Canadians and our lives, our suffering is not important to anyone,” Abolhassani said.

“Am I not Canadian enough? The stress to be linked to a terrorist organization is the worst thing.”

The Trump administration labelled the IRGC as a terrorist organization in 2019. Abolhassani said all men in Iran above the age of 18 have to do mandatory service with one of the arms of the military.

“One in every three Iranians will be assigned to IRGC because it is one of the biggest branches of the military.”

Abolhassani said refusing conscription would prevent a man from getting a passport or accessing civic amenities, and can sometimes lead to further punishment.

“I know around 500 cases, almost 150 are Iranian-Canadians and others are Iranians that are facing the same situation.”

CBC News spoke with 15 Iranian-Canadians, all of them Canadian citizens, who continue to be stopped and detained while crossing into other countries due to their names being flagged as people who have helped a terrorist organization. All say they feel they are treated as second-class citizens.

“The officer said my wife can’t go to the U.S. either because she may have received military training from me. It’s disastrous,” Abolhassani said. “In two months of training, I held a weapon for three days. I have just fired four bullets in my life. A typical American teenager may have fired more.”

‘We’re not real Canadians yet’

Worried about losing his job, the 41-year-old applied for a visa to the U.S., but he is worried because he knows some people have been waiting for U.S. visas since 2019.

“We’re not real Canadians yet. Once you are flagged at the U.S. border, your name enters a list that when you are travelling to or from Canada and any other ally of the U.S., you will be flagged,” he said.

Maryam Ghasemi, a research assistant professor at the University of Waterloo, was supposed to begin a new research position at Augusta University in Georgia on Aug. 1. When Ghasemi went to the Rainbow Bridge border office in Niagara Falls, Ont., in May to apply for a TN Visa, she was denied.

Ghasemi said officers from Homeland Security searched through her family’s social media then escorted them to their car without giving any reasons.

“A CBP officer told me having a passport of the country doesn’t give me the nationality. She said my background is something else and that I’m not Canadian. That was really rude,” she said.

The family was given a letter of inadmissibility to the U.S. with no further explanation and was asked to consult the consulate in Toronto to get approved. An officer later told her it was because her husband had served in the IRGC.

“The university has decided to postpone my position until next semester. But if the visa process doesn’t work out, I will lose the position. The future is not clear to us.”

Canada offloading responsibility to the U.S.

Ghasemi, like many others, contacted members of Parliament and the Prime Minister’s Office, only to be told that it is not Canada’s responsibility.

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) told CBC News in an email statement that though it is aware of instances of Iranian-Canadians being denied entry to the U.S. and other countries, there is not an internal mechanism for tracking them.

“The CBSA does not possess any power or authority to intervene in the immigration decisions made by other nations,” the statement said.

Global Affairs Canada shared a similar response.

“As a sovereign state, the U.S. retains the prerogative to determine the admissibility and the screening procedures for the entry of foreign nationals,” a spokesperson said.

But Iranian-Canadians like Abolhassani and Ghasemi say it is very much a Canadian problem.

“We feel we are second-class citizens. I thought Canada would support us, but we are not very important. This is shameful,” Ghasemi said.

“We want the government to stand up for us because they can solve it if they want to as they did with the Muslim ban. No one is taking action.”

CBC News reached out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and CBP for a comment, but did not receive a response before publication.

4S on boarding pass

Iranian-Canadians with past conscription with IRGC often receive a “4S” designation, which stands for Secondary Security Screening Selection, on their boarding passes.

Javad Mokhtarzadeh, a business owner in Montreal, said that on a recent trip to Europe his family was screened upon arrival and when they returned to Canada, their boarding passes had 4S on them.

“Officers talk to us as if we aren’t Canadian citizens. You granted me citizenship [and] my daughter was born here. I told my five-year-old daughter, it’s part of the game when passing airports,”  Mokhtarzadeh said.

“It was so frustrating and infuriating they asked my little girl to raise hands for body inspection and remove her shoes. In my own country, I’m treated this way and asked whether I have something to hide.”

Calgary resident Kamran Farzamfar said the problem affects even Canadian-Iranians, those born in Canada but of Iranian descent.

Farzamfar’s family of four visited the U.S. multiple times before 2019, for both leisure and work. But when they went to the airport for their first vacation since the pandemic this past February, they were denied entry.

“I tried to ask the officer if they can let my sons go for holiday at least, but [they] refused us entry that day,” Farzamfar said.

A few days later, the family tried again to have their sons allowed in for the trip.

“My son, who was born here, was denied entry. This issue is not only affecting Iranian-Canadians but also Canadian-Iranians,” he said.

On another occasion, when coming back from Frankfurt, a friend accompanying Farzamfar was also given a 4S designation, as they were on the same booking reference.

‘Zero rights as a Canadian’

Toronto resident Samin Kalhor tried to drive into the U.S. with his girlfriend, who had newly obtained Canadian citizenship, her mother and two little dogs. They were planning on celebrating Thanksgiving with family.

All three were stopped at the Buffalo border.

“They took my phone, credit cards, searched the car thoroughly and even the dogs. For five hours, they collected biometrics, fingerprints, retina scans and copied all the data from my phone including social media,” he said.

“My girlfriend, who I’d known for two months, was also denied entry.”

The couple met the same fate when travelling to Mexico for the new year holiday.

Kalhor said he was interrogated for seven hours in Cancun, in a room with glass walls with other “bad guys.”

“All the passengers passing by could see me sitting there as if I did something wrong. They asked questions about my religion, sexuality, and everything you can imagine,” he said. “It was probably one of the worst days of my life. I’m a very self-confident person but it crushed me.”

Kalhor said he came to Canada to make a better life for himself, but feels stuck. He said the issue will affect more Iranian-Canadians as travel picks up.

“If I want to plan my honeymoon, where should I go? Wherever I’ll go, I’ll get flagged. This is forever,” Kalhor said.

“I have zero rights as a Canadian. If other countries put IRGC on their lists, we’re doomed.”

Source: Iranian-Canadians feel like ‘2nd-class citizens’ as many continue to be stopped while travelling to the U.S.

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Could robots take your job? How automation is changing the future of work

2022/08/10 Leave a comment

A reminder that immigration levels and mix should factor in trends in automation. Current high levels do not do so, nor do relaxed requirements for Temporary Foreign Workers. Neither approach will improve productivity and GDP per capita, nor will these approaches encourage Canadian firms to invest more in technology and automation:

A precursor to our automated future sits inconspicuously off Baldwin Street in Toronto’s busy Kensington Market.

The RC Coffee Robo Cafe, which juts out slightly from the brick wall by the sidewalk, bills itself as Canada’s first robotic café.

As opposed to a vending-machine brew that dispenses coffee from hand-filled urns, the robotic barista makes each cup of coffee, espresso, latte and more by request, ready in just a few moments.

For Jasmine Arnold, visiting Toronto from Providence, R.I., the iced matcha prepared at RC Coffee topped drinks dispensed by a vending machine and was on par with coffee served at a chain.

While the drink went down smooth, she told Global News the experience was unique if a little jarring.

“I have mixed feelings about a robot, from a jobs perspective,” she said, expressing some discomfort about what this means for the prospects of human baristas.

After trying his own robo-poured beverage, Arnold’s partner Eric echoed her sentiments but noted that with the pandemic changing our expectations of what work can be done from where, it seemed to align with recent shifts in work.

“I think this is kind of where we’re going as a society,” he said.

Workforce shifts driven by a tight labour market and the COVID-19 pandemicare opening the door to a faster adoption of automated solutions, but at least one expert is warning that Canada might not be prepared for how quickly robotic workers are set to transform the economy.

Robots in demand in tight labour markets

Statistics Canada said Friday that though Canada shed some 31,000 jobs in July, the country’s unemployment rate remained at its lowest ever at 4.9 per cent last month. The labour market is even hotter in the U.S., with unemployment falling to 3.5 per cent in July.

This tight North American job market is driving up interest in automated solutions, says Brad Ford, vice-president of sales for KioCafé in Canada, the company that operates RC Coffee.

The company had just one RC Coffee kiosk in Toronto in the fall of 2020, which it had launched as an “experiment,” he recalls. But in the past two and a half years, it’s scaled up to five locations across the Greater Toronto Area with three more on the way.

Most storefront locations are in high-traffic neighbourhoods, but there’s also a standalone RC Coffee kiosk in the Toronto General Hospital.

Hospitals, universities and airports have been among Kio Cafe’s most interested customers, Ford says, as these locations have been unable to staff their coffee shops quickly enough to accommodate the surge in demand from the pandemic recovery.

“People have been knocking at our door trying to buy the equipment from us, especially in the U.S., where they just cannot get the staff to open up the locations,” he says.

Companies in other sectors are also increasingly embracing automation. Beyond just installing self-checkout systems, grocers like Loblaw and Sobeys are turning to robotics to speed up fulfilment. The company announced plans in June to open an automated distribution centre in the GTA by early 2024.

The Association for Advancing Automation said that U.S. workplace orders for robots were up 40 per cent in the first quarter of 2022. That followed a record 2021 that saw a 28 per cent jump in orders fueled by non-automotive sectors.

Pandemic accelerated automated future

While it was “coincidental” that RC Coffee offered a touch-free experience just as the pandemic was getting underway, Ford notes this has also been an in-demand upside.

The pace of automation has only been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, says Dan Ciuriak, senior fellow with the Center for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ont.

He points to the 2020 Beijing Olympics (held in 2021), when China ramped up development of contactless services to reduce opportunities for COVID transmission, as a hint at what to expect our post-pandemic realities to become.

Looking at hospitals specifically, Ciuriak says there’s an opportunity to automate work beyond just the food court.

Amid a widely reported health-care staffing shortage, more than one in five Canadian nurses worked paid overtime shifts in July, Statistics Canada reported Friday. Some 11.2 per cent of nurses were meanwhile off sick for part of the week when the labour force survey was conducted.

Ciuriak says that there’s an opportunity for increasingly intelligent robots to support or even replace some nursing jobs as Canada’s ageing population threatens to overwhelm an already stressed health system.

“That is going to be a great boon and will enable us to actually get through this demographic transition,” he says.

This is largely what futurists — Ciuriak included, he notes — had long expected our automated future to look like: robots working side-by-side with humans, streamlining simple tasks and making us more productive.

But developments in artificial intelligence are seeing more powerful chips accelerate the pace of automation, he says. Each time a machine surpasses a human in a knowledge-based field, such as Google’s DeepMind AI mastering chess, Ciuriak says we should consider the implications for work we long assumed was solely meant for humans.

“You’re seeing just tremendous scaling up of the power of these networks. And that is being reflected in how many artificial intelligence systems are breaking through human benchmarks. This is now a regular phenomenon,” he says.

“We’re at the dawn of a new era, and that’s going to have massive implications for the labour market.”

Service-sector jobs at risk

The services sector in particular is rife for disruption, Ciuriak says, and it’s not just entry-level positions at risk.

He argues, for example, that skills a person might gain from years of investment and studying toward a law degree could be largely replicated — and mass-produced — on a computer chip within the next decade.

When these services, typically constrained by human limits, become scaled up through automation, the implications for income generation and distribution will be immense. The owners of these machines would become new centres for wealth concentration, he argues, warranting a shift in thinking about how we tax the products of this work.

“We are embarking into a new type of economy that we’re not prepared to regulate or manage,” Ciuriak says.

While he doesn’t believe that RC Coffee Robo Cafes will ever replace the traditional barista or communal feel of the local coffee shop, Ford does acknowledge some “front-line” jobs could be at risk in our automated future.

He argues, however, that the machines themselves are “job creators.” Each cafe requires an extensive development and maintenance team behind them, and the machines themselves require the same material inputs as your typical Starbucks or Tim Hortons.

By enabling more coffee shop locations to open today rather than shuttering due to staff shortages, Ford argues that java producers are able to keep their businesses running and maintain employment throughout the coffee supply chain.

“The more that we can roll these things out and get great coffee out there, I think it’s great for everybody.”

Source: Could robots take your job? How automation is changing the future of work

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Kaczorowski: Real public service reform requires an independent examination. It can’t be left to government ‘insiders’

2022/08/10 Leave a comment

My experience over a comparable period has been much less negative than that of Kaczorowski. And underlying his viewpoint is a certain arrogance within the public service, one that I learned to confront when working on citizenship and multiculturalism issues under the Conservatives and then Minister Kenney, as they forced me to become more aware of my biases and assumptions.
To a certain extent, some “institutional timidity” is necessary for the public service, given its stewardship role and the risks involved in change. Service Canada offered the potential of citizen-centred service in the mid-2000s but such a major transformation was deemed to be too risky and thus its objectives became more modest.
That being said, a deeper outside look of the public service than yet another internal review has merit:
Real public service reform requires an independent examination. It can’t be left to government ‘insiders’
In his recent Ottawa Citizen essay, Kevin Lynch provides a blunt but necessary critique of the federal public service. The time for root-and-branch reform is long overdue to save the public service from itself.In recent months, we have had ample evidence of a public service seemingly floundering and failing at its most basic task: providing professional, timely and accurate service to Canadians. Stories of airport and passport office chaos abound. The legacy of the Phoenix pay system fiasco remains with us to this day. Whether it is procurement or IT services, the federal government appears incapable of delivering goods and services on time and on budget.

As Lynch notes, some of the problems are of the current government’s own making. Rather than focusing on a few core initiatives, the Trudeau government has too often sought to be all things to all people, trying to appease every constituency seeking attention and resources. As a consequence, the government has too often appeared scattered and unfocused, offering myriad initiatives while failing at implementation and follow-up.

Other issues, such as the predominant role of the Prime Minister’s Office and the influence — not to mention interference — of political staff in departmental business are longstanding problems that predate the current administration but that have grown worse over time. The primary concern of political staffers is optics: how will this or that initiative play to party supporters? How can I position my minister to maximum political effect?  Political staffers are seldom, if ever, substantive experts, and are naturally resented by professional public servants who have spent years in a particular policy field.

Policy expertise, however, is not an excuse for complacency, and here the public service of today is found wanting. I began my own public service career as a university summer student in 1983. I fully subscribed to the ideal of public service as a noble vocation. I had hopes of following in the footsteps of the great public servants of the past, such as Gordon Robertson. After 30 years of toil, I retired from the public service in 2018, exhausted and dispirited. I left not because I had to, but because I simply could not continue shouting into the wind.

Over the years, I witnessed a public service in which innovative thinking gave way to institutional timidity and a culture where contrary thinking was too often deemed unhelpful and unwelcome. This is how public service goes from being an honourable calling to a debilitating grind.

I saw a number of public service “renewal” exercises come and go. Yet each of these — whether it was La Releve in the 1990s, Public Service 2000 or Beyond 2020 — suffered from the same fatal flaw. They were all internal reviews led by the senior managers most invested in the status quo and therefore highly unlikely to challenge that status quo. These “in-house” initiatives produced little that was new or innovative on key issues such as recruitment, the loss of corporate memory, the political-public service relationship, accountability, or the role of the public service as a generator of innovative policy initiatives and advice.

Favouring the familiar over the new breeds inertia and decay.Take the single issue of remote work. I well remember the roadblocks, not to mention the paperwork, senior managers put before staff when it came to what we then called “teleworking.” Too many managers came with the mindset that they could not be seen as effective unless their “minions” were within easy reach. The COVID-19 pandemic put an end to the excuses associated with remote work, as well as the idea that public servants would not be working as hard as in the office. Indeed, public servants working remotely have had to juggle work and family responsibilities, all the while labouring under the assumption that they are available around the clock.

Remote working was a success, yet we already see efforts under the guise of federal “Return to Work” directives which imply a desperate effort to put public servants back in their cubicles.

In the first instance, the “return to work” moniker is insulting. Public servants have not been on holiday during the pandemic. They have been working harder and longer, in makeshift offices (a kitchen counter, a spare bedroom) and with often-outdated and unreliable IT. The notion that pushing public servants back into the downtown core is required to “grow the economy” would be laughable if it were not so bereft of reason.

What is to be done? The federal public service has historically been the subject of royal commissions. The Royal Commission on Government Organization — known as the Glassco Commission — was appointed in 1960 and chaired by businessman J. Grant Glassco. The commission issued a five-volume report in 1962 and 1963. It recommended that government departments be managed on a decentralized basis, that the Treasury Board be reorganized, and that senior management should rotate among departments.

More far-reaching was the Royal Commission on Financial Management and Accountability, established in 1976 and which issued its final report in 1979. Known as the Lambert Commission, it was in part a response to the dire warning issued by the Auditor General of Canada in his 1975-76 Report that “Parliament — and indeed the government — has lost or is close to losing, effective control of the public purse.” The Commission, led by TD Bank Executive Allan Lambert, concluded that a breakdown had occurred in the accountability regime in government, resulting in a lack of coordination in planning, haphazard budgeting and accountability. Many might argue that the situation has not changed.

The common denominator in both of these royal commissions is that they were led by outsiders and so provided sweeping inquiries into key public service reform issues that cannot be done solely by those within the system. Such an independent and wide-ranging examination of the federal public service is long overdue. Indeed, it is critical in the face of institutional timidity and paralysis.

As the former clerk notes, good government is about “turning worthy intentions into reality for Canadians through effective and efficient delivery of government programs and services.” If the public service of today cannot fulfil these responsibilities, then public confidence is lost. The time for reform is now. I hope the current Clerk is listening.

Source: Kaczorowski: Real public service reform requires an independent examination. It can’t be left to government ‘insiders’

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Canadians are seeking asylum in US due to Trudeau’s Covid policies

2022/08/10 Leave a comment

Funny and sad that some think they can apply for asylum in the USA given COVID-related restrictions. At least the lawyer involved is reasonable honest about the likelihood of success (while pocketing his fees). “True” North is not exactly innocent in promoting such beliefs:

Buffalo immigration lawyer Matthew Kolken has filed asylum applications for at least half a dozen Canadians who hope to flee the country permanently due to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pandemic policies. 

In an exclusive interview with True North, Kolken, who is a former director of the Board of Governors of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, explained that his clients fear being persecuted for being unvaccinated should they return to Canada.

“If you just don’t want to go back to Canada, you actually need to fear that you will be the victim of targeted persecution by the Government of Canada or by groups within the country that the government either can’t or won’t protect you from,” said Kolken. 

“(The application) says they’ve either expressed some sort of political speech or a member of a particular social group like unvaccinated individuals that have faced persecution before either through seizing of bank accounts, or loss of employment, or forced quarantines, things of that nature.”

According to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, those seeking asylum must apply within one year of arriving in the country. Groundsfor seeking asylum include suffering persecution due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. 

An application filed by Kolken in January for one client cited the Liberal government’s crackdown on the Freedom Convoy in February. To deal with the situation, Trudeau took the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act which enabled the government to freeze the bank accounts of protesters.

Kolken stated that his clients were also “scared to death” of being singled out by the Trudeau government for speaking out against vaccine mandates or have their employment opportunities limited. 

“They’re scared to death that if they go back to Canada they will be singled out and isolated by the Government of Canada, they will be unable to travel,” said Kolken.

“They’re afraid they wouldn’t get onto a plane in Canada and they will be trapped within their own country and that their abilities to obtain employment are limited there.”

Although the Liberals lifted travel mandates which prohibited unvaccinated Canadians from boarding a plane and train domestically or abroad, public health officials have not ruled out re-introducing restrictions in the future. 

“[If] COVID-19 takes a turn for the worst and we need to readjust and go back to a different regime, maybe similar to what we might have had before, we’re ready to do that,” said Deputy Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Howard Njoo in June. “We have no idea what the long term success rate is but I counsel my clients over the phone, the applications that clearly are justifiable under the law and regulations. They set forth a bonafide non-frivolous case.”

He also warned those seeking asylum that the Safe Third Country Agreement which dictates asylum applications between Canada and the US could be used against them. 

“The Safe Third Country Agreement cannot differentiate either country’s treaty obligations to accept asylees from one of the two contracting countries. You can’t say that because of the Safe Third Country Agreement that nobody who is a Canadian citizen can’t apply for asylum in the United States.”

Source: Canadians are seeking asylum in US due to Trudeau’s Covid policies

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CILA: Expansion Of Post Graduate Work Permits for Career Colleges Not Needed

2022/08/09 Leave a comment

Agree. The sector and policies are in need of a fundamental rethink and questioning, rather than the “addiction” to the money it brings. Adding private vocational colleges is just a back-door immigration program.

CILA is one of the rare organizations that questions the current approach to international students and immigration, and raises some of the trade-offs involved between programs and applicants:

Current immigration policy and regulations allow foreign students who graduate from Canadian universities and publicly funded colleges to obtain a Post Graduate Work Permit (PGWP) upon graduation. The PGWP is pushing the boundaries of immigration even during the COVID-19 pandemic. From January to November 2021, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) issued more than 126,000 PGWPs (Government of Canada). The National Association of Career Colleges (NACC), whose members run private vocational colleges, is now putting pressure on IRCC to extend the availability of PGWP to their diploma and certificate graduates.

This expansion would raise significant concerns, due to the level of education of the graduates and it would mean exponential growth in the number of PGWPs issued annually. NACC member colleges offer courses as short as six months in anything ranging from liberal arts to public relations management. This expansion would attract a huge number of foreign students to those colleges, looking to learn something that is not challenging so they can find an entry level position and obtain permanent residence. Unlike university graduates, their goal would not be to start a career, but rather find a quick and easy way to obtain residency. Foreign students would pay a hefty price for their dream of residency.

Foreign students are often “steered” by unscrupulous agents and unlicensed consultants who receive a commission from educational institutions and misrepresent the feasibility of obtaining residency. When foreign students become aware that they are not eligible for PGWP, the agents often blame the career colleges, or a change in government policy, and let them deal with the fallout.

Even publicly funded colleges and universities pay millions of dollars in commissions to agents overseas with a flat fee per student or based on first year tuition fees. (CBC News, April 2019). “College fairs” are advertised in every country to attract foreign students. This has led close to 600,000 foreign students coming to Canada annually (Canadian Bureau for International Education,2021). This number is already too high in many study disciplines, eliminating the need for advertising or recruitment agents. The best recruiting tools are the quality of education imparted, and word of mouth from graduates who enjoyed a positive educational experience.

Even if career college students are genuinely looking to learn practical courses, this raises the question of whether the labour market can absorb them. The labour market is in short supply of skilled trades in manufacturing, construction, engineering and other professions and trades, as the older cohort of Canadian workers are retiring. Employers trying to recruit skilled workers are often faced with the difficulties posed by a tight labour market, while at the same time, receiving hundreds of resumes from unqualified individuals. There is a disconnect between the labour market and the availability of workers in many positions.

Colleges and universities have become too dependent on foreign student tuition fees, which are often triple those of Canadian residents. Also, the large influx of foreign students from countries where English or French are not the languages of instruction, may have caused admission standards to be lowered and many courses to require less stringent writing ability. While foreign students may have taken the International English Language Test (IELTS) or the Test d’Évaluation de Français (TEF), many still lack the necessary language skills to function at a university level.

IRCC should prioritize foreign students pursuing studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and computer science (STEM) disciplines or apprenticeships in trades, instead of those studying business, humanities, health, arts, social science, education (BHASE) who may not have good employment prospects. There should be a discussion about the economic cost and benefit of the foreign student program,  as Canada is quickly reaching the point in which the number of foreign college student graduates in BHASE vastly outnumbers the number of college graduates in STEM (Statistics Canada, 2021). Authorities should consider whether all foreign students should obtain residency or prioritize only those students involved in STEM disciplines. Any extension of the PGWP to career college graduates would be detrimental to the overall program.

The numbers cannot continue to increase because they are crowding out other immigration streams and competing for processing resources. Consider the fate of the Express Entry Foreign Skilled Worker Program (“FSWP”) permanent resident stream, suspended since December 2020, at a time when foreign workers with experience are needed by many employers, rather than entry-level workers.  Impeding the permanent resident processing of federal skilled workers from overseas is ill-advised and penalizes some of the best and brightest foreign workers who have excellent educational credentials and worldwide experience.

Source: Expansion Of Post Graduate Work Permits for Career Colleges Not Needed

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Klein: I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message

2022/08/09 Leave a comment

Good long read on the impact of social media, harking back to McLuhan (and Innis) on how the medium and means of communications affects society:

…

It’s been revealing watching Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the browsers Mosaic and Netscape and of A16Z, a venture capital firm, incessantly tweet memes about how everyone online is obsessed with “the current thing.” Andreessen sits on the board of Meta and his firm is helping finance Elon Musk’s proposed acquisition of Twitter. He is central to the media platforms that algorithmically obsess the world with the same small collection of topics and have flattened the frictions of place and time that, in past eras, made the news in Omaha markedly different from the news in Ojai. He and his firm have been relentless in hyping crypto, which turns the “current thing” dynamics of the social web into frothing, speculative asset markets.

Behind his argument is a view of human nature, and how it does, or doesn’t, interact with technology. In an interview with Tyler Cowen, Andreessen suggests that Twitter is like “a giant X-ray machine”:

You’ve got this phenomenon, which is just fascinating, where you have all of these public figures, all of these people in positions of authority  —  in a lot of cases, great authority  —  the leading legal theorists of our time, leading politicians, all these businesspeople. And they tweet, and all of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, that’s who you actually are.”

But is it? I don’t even think this is true for Andreessen, who strikes me as very different off Twitter than on. There is no stable, unchanging self. People are capable of cruelty and altruism, farsightedness and myopia. We are who we are, in this moment, in this context, mediated in these ways. It is an abdication of responsibility for technologists to pretend that the technologies they make have no say in who we become. Where he sees an X-ray, I see a mold.

Over the past decade, the narrative has turned against Silicon Valley. Puff pieces have become hit jobs, and the visionaries inventing our future have been recast as the Machiavellians undermining our present. My frustration with these narratives, both then and now, is that they focus on people and companies, not technologies. I suspect that is because American culture remains deeply uncomfortable with technological critique. There is something akin to an immune system against it: You get called a Luddite, an alarmist. “In this sense, all Americans are Marxists,” Postman wrote, “for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.”

I think that’s true, but it coexists with an opposite truth: Americans are capitalists, and we believe nothing if not that if a choice is freely made, that grants it a presumption against critique. That is one reason it’s so hard to talk about how we are changed by the mediums we use. That conversation, on some level, demands value judgments. This was on my mind recently, when I heard Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who’s been collecting data on how social media harms teenagers, say, bluntly, “People talk about how to tweak it — oh, let’s hide the like counters. Well, Instagram tried — but let me say this very clearly: There is no way, no tweak, no architectural change that will make it OK for teenage girls to post photos of themselves, while they’re going through puberty, for strangers or others to rate publicly.”

What struck me about Haidt’s comment is how rarely I hear anything structured that way. He’s arguing three things. First, that the way Instagram works is changing how teenagers think. It is supercharging their need for approval of how they look and what they say and what they’re doing, making it both always available and never enough. Second, that it is the fault of the platform — that it is intrinsic to how Instagram is designed, not just to how it is used. And third, that it’s bad. That even if many people use it and enjoy it and make it through the gantlet just fine, it’s still bad. It is a mold we should not want our children to pass through.

Or take Twitter. As a medium, Twitter nudges its users toward ideas that can survive without context, that can travel legibly in under 280 characters. It encourages a constant awareness of what everyone else is discussing. It makes the measure of conversational success not just how others react and respond but how much response there is. It, too, is a mold, and it has acted with particular force on some of our most powerful industries — media and politics and technology. These are industries I know well, and I do not think it has changed them, or the people in them (myself included), for the better.

But what would? I’ve found myself going back to a wise, indescribable book that Jenny Odell, a visual artist, published in 2019. In “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” Odell suggests that any theory of media must first start with a theory of attention. “One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious,” she writes.

When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention — what we choose to notice and what we do not — are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention.

I think Odell frames both the question and the stakes correctly. Attention is contagious. What forms of it, as individuals and as a society, do we want to cultivate? What kinds of mediums would that cultivation require?

This is anything but an argument against technology, were such a thing even coherent. It’s an argument for taking technology as seriously as it deserves to be taken, for recognizing, as McLuhan’s friend and colleague John M. Culkin put it, “we shape our tools, and thereafter, they shape us.”

There is an optimism in that, a reminder of our own agency. And there are questions posed, ones we should spend much more time and energy trying to answer: How do we want to be shaped? Who do we want to become?

Source: I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message

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