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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Are you waiting for the confirmation of your extended work permits? It may be in a stranger’s inbox

2022/08/08 Leave a comment

Perfect juxtaposition with the future oriented Accenture article, highlighting yet another operational issue in the present:

Do you know of a Sehajpreet Singh Aulakh or Yelim Lee? How about Patricia Kaye Mendoza Castrence or Gurinder Singh?

If so, please let them know the immigration department has finally approved their work permit extensions. However, their confirmation letters — and personal information such as mailing addresses and as well as client and application numbers — are in someone else’s hands.

As officials are rushing to renew more than 93,000 expired and expiring work permits by the end of this year, some applicants are shocked to find in their email and immigration accounts the documents that belong to someone they don’t know.

What’s more, the department has explicitly warned in the letter and on its website to “not email us to ask questions” to avoid penalties. So some are resorting to social media to find the real owners of the documents.

“I’m confused and worried at the same time because my document could be sent to another person by mistake and I would never know,” said Dennis Dominique Maniquez of Toronto, who got an attached letter Wednesday addressed to a Gurinder Singh in Surrey, B.C.

“I know how Mr. Singh is feeling now. We all know how stressful it is. We have all been waiting for this work permit extension for a long time.”

Due to skyrocketing backlogs that have reached 2.7 million applications during the COVID-19 pandemic, officials suspended the intake of some skilled immigration programs until last month.

This has left many skilled international students — who would otherwise have been able to apply for permanent residence — with no status and expired work permits.

On Tuesday, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser finally rolled out interim measuresto allow international students who have been caught up in this immigration limbo to stay and work legally in this country.

The special policy covers former international students with expired or expiring post-graduation work permits, and those who applied under the “temporary resident to permanent resident pathway” last year but have either run out or are running out of work authorization — while waiting for updated status from Sept. 20, 2021, to Dec. 31, 2022. Their work permits will be extended for up to 18 months.

However, within a day of the Aug. 2 launch, posts started popping up in social media groups by shocked — and frustrated — applicants looking for help to return the documents to their rightful owners.

“If you are or know anybody having the same name, PM me: Name: SEHAJPREET SINGH AULAKH,” said one post on Facebook that also included the person’s partially redacted client and application numbers.

Another read: “Hi guys if you know the person! Pls let his (sic)/her know! Applicant name: YELIM LEE.”

A third, attached with a copy of the government letter, said, “Looking for Patricia Kaye Mendoza Castrence. I got your OWP (open work permit) extension letter.”

The immigration department said it was made aware of the privacy breach on Aug. 3 and is investigating. Once all affected people have been identified, they will be sent an email with the correct information.

“A separate email will be sent to affected clients informing them of the privacy breach. We are advising clients NOT to share the incorrect email with others and to delete the email from their inbox,” a department spokesperson told the Star in an email.

Vaibhavi Gaur, a graduate from Sheridan College, was thrilled when she got an email Wednesday from Immigration with an attached confirmation of work permit extension. Only when her partner spotted the name on the document did she realize it was intended for a woman from Iran.

Gaur, originally from India, said she was very surprised because the name, application and client numbers of the person were not even close to hers.

And there’s a line at the bottom of the document that said, “If you email this address for any reason, you will be automatically removed from our list of applicants who are eligible to be mailed a new work permit. This will ensure that we can provide new work permits as fast as possible.”

(The special policy’s webpage initially also stated: “Do not email us to ask questions. If you email us for any reason, you’ll be removed from our list of applicants who are eligible to be mailed a new work permit in round 1.” The line has since been removed.)

So instead of jeopardizing her own case, Gaur, who works in advertising, took it upon herself to search for and contact a person with the same unique name on Instagram.

“Immigration explicitly mentioned that you cannot contact us or we’ll remove you from the automatic (work permit) renewal system. I’m in this dilemma. What am I supposed to do?” asked the Toronto woman, who has yet to get a response from the person she contacted.

It’s not known how many of the extended work permit confirmations have been sent to the wrong people or how it happened, but migrants advocate Vilma Pagaduan has already received four such inquiries this week from members of her Facebook group.

She said they included intended recipients in British Columbia, Ontario and Saskatchewan through email or direct delivery into people’s secured personal accounts with the immigration department. Applicants who contacted her were scared of being taken off the automatic renewal system if they informed immigration officials about it.

“It’s a threat. And it’s very derogatory and discriminatory. It’s like, ‘Hey, I don’t want to see your face. I don’t want to hear any complaints from you.’ This didn’t come from a friend. It’s on the government website and in its letter,” said Pagaduan.

“My concern is, to clear the backlog, the immigration department keeps opening new public policies but they’re not addressing the issue. The issue is permanent residency for everybody. I have people waiting for PR since 2015 and they are still waiting for approval. To solve the problem, they open yet another program.”

Vancouver East MP Jenny Kwan, the NDP’s immigration critic, said what happened is a serious privacy breach and the government should know these errors have seriously consequences.

“Despite the immigration minister’s claim that the system is working, the department continues to be in complete chaos,” said Kwan. “They are putting people in perpetual distress. I can’t believe that the government has resorted to this kind of scare tactics.

“With this kind of communication, they are telling people that they are unimportant and they are not welcomed. The Liberals are completely forgetting that immigration services can impact someone for the rest of their lives. They are putting Canada’s reputation in jeopardy.”

Immigration officials said the department established a process for clients to contact IRCC at the email address provided in the correspondence, only if they were opting out of receiving a work permit. The dedicated email address help create a list of eligible candidates, so new work permits can be delivered quickly.

“The intent of the line, that has since been deleted, was to ensure that clients did not accidentally opt out of getting a new work permit. It was removed in response to client concerns,” said the immigration department spokesperson.

Source: Are you waiting for the confirmation of your extended work permits? It may be in a stranger’s inbox

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Accenture: A digital transformation can make Canada’s immigration system world-class

2022/08/08 Leave a comment

Although by one of the companies likely vying for contracts under the various modernization initiatives, valid high level arguments. But the article is largely silent on the policy and program simplification and streamlining necessary to success of digital transformation, the harder aspect given the various stakeholder interests involved, both in and outside government.

Also less convinced of the need for “faster” policy development. Think better policy development and operational implementation is the greater issue.

Worked with Accenture and other consultants at Service Canada 2004-7 and was impressed with their competence and expertise and how they were able to provide a different and needed perspective to some of the issues we were dealing with:

A digitally empowered, efficient, strategic and fair immigration system will be essential for Canada to meet its ambitious immigration target of 1.2 million new residents between 2021 and 2023.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is well on its way to making that happen. It was one of the first federal departments to work with the Canadian Digital Service (CDS) and to express enthusiasm for digital transformation. The COVID pandemic was a catalyst to move faster and address backlogs while responding to new travel and entry requirements.

In recognition of the department’s ongoing work internally and with partner organizations such as the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), IRCC has been recognized as a winner of the Canadian digital government community awards 2022, including excellence in innovation for its online citizenship test; excellence in open government for its digital application status trackers; and excellence in product management for its permanent residence digital intake portal.

However, ongoing travel and border restrictions and other global concerns have slowed momentum. The federal government is investing hundreds of millions to modernize IRCC’s IT infrastructure to ensure those targets can be met in the face of these new realities.

Finland, the United States and Australia have all had success modernizing their immigration systems. Canada could look to their example for inspiration.

Finland: Ten years ago, the Finnish Immigration Service was experiencing process inefficiencies and significant backlogs, inspiring the start of its transformation journey. The service decided to develop a modern case-management tool to meet its demands. The result was the end-to-end electronic immigration case-management system.

The system integrates every process within the immigration, citizenship and asylum workflow. It moves from digital electronic submission through processing and communication to electronic archiving. There are 15,000 potential users based in Finnish government locations and offices across the globe. Authorities consider this project a best-in-class immigration management system.

It was subsequently expanded through the implementation of “EnterFinland” – an online self-service portal, designed for both residence permits and citizenship cases.

EnterFinland is a testament to cross-government collaboration, with solutions that have introduced supplementary chatbots and artificial intelligence applications into workflows across departments. Importantly, many departments had to come on board with the new system for it to be successful.

The United States: United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has been on a mission to become fully digital. Several programs were put in place to achieve that goal: the end-user experience design (EUXD) program and “myUSCIS” program. The EUXD program puts application users at the centre of design efforts. Working with the community helped enhance user experience, define proper project requirements and increase user adoption and satisfaction.

The myUSCIS program transforms the immigration process with a digital portal and digitized forms for paperless processing. The driving goal was to allow users to track progress during their immigration journey.

A recurring theme of each digital transformation was understanding that it would take more than a single technology or going paperless. It required a business transformation and cultural shift within the organization.

Accordingly, in Canada, by framing digital transformation efforts in terms of people, process and policy, IRCC will optimize its own transformation efforts.

Australia: Australia has kept its annual immigration target intake steady at more than 160,000 per year for a number of years. A decade ago, it embarked on a modernization effort. The “seamless traveler” vision was created in response to an increase in citizenship and online visa applications, increased processing times, resource challenges and security threats.

What officials learned was that digitizing processes weren’t enough to achieve operational efficiencies. New processes needed to be intuitive, and human-centred to empower the workforce. In October 2020, Australia introduced its reusable permissions capability, a platform that provides consistent processing, approvals and decision-making for departments who issue visas, permits, accreditation, licences and registrations.

The Australian Department of Home Affairs streamlined processes at the border by digitizing existing Incoming passenger cards. This included collecting additional health-related declarations and passenger contact information to support the national COVID response and speed up processing times.

There are three keys to success in Canada – people, process and policy.

People

Starting with the experience of the end user is essential. Technology adoption must be about meeting the applicants’ needs from their vantage point – pivoting existing processes to user-centric digital experiences, and then adopting the latest technologies that can deliver on those goals.

When thinking about a world-class immigration system from the perspective of those wishing to become Canadian, a system must be fast and efficient with information that is timely, and each step of the process well thought-out. It should be easy to use, with services and processes that are intuitive and accessible, and it should be able to understand and accommodate the needs of the applicant. The processes should also be fair and transparent, so applicants know the status of their file as it progresses.

Also, the right stakeholder groups must be included. The countries that had the greatest successes valued co-ordination.

Grouping and classifying cases that are related – such as various categories relating to families – will mean that they can be processed more efficiently and will potentially address any biases. Government can then respond with digital systems that take into consideration variables including diversity, equity and inclusion, among others.

Process 

To realize a user-first vision, the government must fully embrace digital culture, tools and capabilities. This is no longer just an IT exercise. Every directorate and organization must become a digital organization for a workforce that is seamless in adopting new approaches and sharing information. As workforces become increasingly hybrid in nature, building the right digital culture and skills in the end-to-end organization will be essential.

Policy

Even if we fix technologies and create the best digital experience, none of that is useful unless the policy supports it. Given the transformative and disruptive nature of digital transformation, flexible policy is paramount to capture and respond to input from competing and changing priorities.

In Canada, we need to find a faster way to update policy. For instance, in the U.K., the government’s open innovation teamfollows a “policy at pace” style to actively engage citizen users.

Canada has a strong foundation and clear will to improve the ways it manages immigration and delivers user-centric digital experiences to newcomers as they navigate each step of their immigration journey. By considering lessons from around the globe, we can achieve a truly modern, innovative and world-class immigration system.

Source: A digital transformation can make Canada’s immigration system world-class

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Computational analysis of 140 years of US political speeches reveals more positive but increasingly polarized framing of immigration | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

2022/08/06 Leave a comment

Really interesting analysis on the shifts over time, both general and partisan, along with group specific attitudes. A comparable Canadian study would likely show some historical parallels, with less political polarization than in the USA, with a focus on different groups (e.g., contrasting Mexican and Chinese immigration makes sense for the USA while for Canada early attitudes towards Chinese immigration paralleled USA attitudes, a better comparator for later attitudes would be Middle Eastern immigrants):
Immigration is one of the most important and divisive topics in American public life. From the rise of vocal antiimmigrant politicians in recent years, it is tempting to conclude that attitudes toward immigration are more negative—or at least more polarized—than ever before. However, resistance to newcomers has always been a central part of our public discourse about immigration. From anti-Chinese fearmongering in the 1880s to concerns about Southern and Eastern European immigrants in the 1920s to the antiimmigration rhetoric of the Trump administration (2017 to 2020), claims that certain types of immigrants can never truly join American society have been a perennial part of our discourse. For example, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, an architect of antiimmigrant legislation, declared a century ago, “[Immigration] is bringing to the country people whom it is very difficult to assimilate” (1, p. 35) because immigrants are from “races most alien to the body of the American people” (1, p. 32).
We seek to move beyond individual anecdotes to ask, how have attitudes toward immigrants in the United States changed over the past century? How does recent political debate over immigration compare to the long sweep of US history? This question is a challenge because public opinion polls that asked about attitudes toward immigration only began in the 1960s and were then only asked about immigration sporadically until recent years. We instead turn to the Congressional Record and other sources of political speech, using quantitative text analysis methods to systematically investigate the language used in congressional and presidential speeches about immigration over the past 140 y.
Our paper considers the full corpus of more than 17 million congressional speeches from 1880 to the present, of which we identify ∼200,000 speeches relevant to the topic of immigration. We also incorporate presidential communications from the same time period, making this a comprehensive quantitative analysis of American political speech about immigration at the federal level, covering the entire time period from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the present day.
Numerous studies have analyzed the political history of US immigration using qualitative approaches and historical archives (2–7); quantitative work on immigration has also used data such as migration and census records (8, 9). Rhetorical aspects of immigration debates have been studied qualitatively—especially the use of dehumanizing language and metaphors such as “vermin” and “cargo” (10–13)—but these authors have not rigorously quantified how common such language is over time. Last, other scholars have applied computational methods from natural language processing to study coverage of immigration in news media and Congress (14–18), but none have used these tools to investigate such a long time span or comprehensive corpus of speeches about US immigration with a consistent methodology.
Our analysis is based on a combination of methods. To identify relevant speeches, along with a corresponding tone (proimmigration, antiimmigration, or neutral), we make use of automated text classification based on extensive human annotations. Using a semiautomated process, we also curate and apply a set of lexicons for analyzing relevant frames (i.e., ways of characterizing immigrants and immigration). Finally, to quantify implicit dehumanizing metaphors in speeches, we develop an approach using neural contextual embedding models to measure if references to immigrants are suggestive of various metaphorical categories (Materials and Methods).
We find that political speeches about immigration today are far more likely to be positive than in the past, with the shift from negative to positive mostly taking place between World War II (WWII) and the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and being net positive on average in nearly all sessions of Congress since the early 1950s. Extending this analysis to presidential communications, we find President Trump to be a stark exception, as the first president in modern American history to express sentiment toward immigration that is more negative than the average member of his own party. As with many political issues, the two parties have become increasingly polarized over time, and we find a linear increase in polarization on immigration, beginning in the late 1970s under President Carter. Today, Democrats are unprecedentedly positive about immigration, whereas Republicans are as negative as the average legislator was in the 1920s during the push for strict immigration quotas. This divergence is clearly part of a broader trend toward polarization on many issues (Discussion); for immigration specifically, our analysis reveals the beginnings of this, predating the rise in generic political polarization observed in Gentzkow et al. (19) by more than a decade.
Along with the polarization by party, nationality of immigrants continues to matter greatly, with speeches mentioning Mexican immigration being consistently more negative than the average (dramatically so in comparison to European groups). Moreover, there is a striking similarity between how Mexican immigrants are framed today and how Chinese immigrants were framed during the period of Chinese exclusion in the 19th century: more negative in tone; greater explicit emphasis on frames such as “crime,” “labor,” and “legality”; and significantly greater use of implicit dehumanizing metaphors, in comparison to European groups.
Thus, while far more members of Congress today express favorable attitudes toward immigration than in the past, there remains a strong and growing strain of antiimmigration speech, especially among Republicans, along with perennial references to threats, legality, and crime. Despite the elimination of country-specific immigration quotas in the 1960s, expressed opinions toward immigrants still vary greatly by country of origin, and enduring rhetorical strategies continue to be deployed against more marginalized groups.

Results

Tone of Immigration Speeches.

Starting with the complete record of 17 million congressional speeches from 1880 to 2020 (Data), we collected human annotations and trained machine learning classifiers to identify speeches relevant to immigration, along with an accompanying tone (proimmigration, antiimmigration, or neutral; Classification). Both panels of Fig. 1 show the average tone (percent proimmigration minus percent antiimmigration) expressed in congressional speeches over this time period (black line).* The trends for congressional speeches by Democrats and Republicans are also shown in Fig. 1, Top. A comparable time series for presidents is shown in Fig. 1, Bottom, by applying the same models to all presidential communications collected by the American Presidency Project (20). For alternative models, validity checks, and variation within parties, refer to SI Appendix.
Fig. 1.
Evolution of attitudes toward immigration expressed in congressional speeches and presidential communications. Average tone is computed as the percentage of proimmigration speeches minus the percentage of antiimmigration speeches, where proimmigration means valuing immigrants and favoring less restricted immigration and vice versa. Top and Bottom show the overall tone using all congressional speeches about immigration (black dashed line, with bands showing plus or minus two SDs based on the estimated proportions and number of speeches). Top also shows separate plots for speeches by Democrats and Republicans in Congress. (Due to limitations of the data, about 15% of speeches do not have a named speaker or party affiliation.) Bottom shows the corresponding estimates for each president, showing the overall average for a president’s tenure when there are insufficient data to show annual variation. Note that most modern presidents have been more favorable toward immigration than the average member of Congress. By contrast, Donald Trump appears to be the most antiimmigration president in nearly a century. Similarly, congressional Republicans over the past decade have framed immigration approximately as negatively as the average member of Congress did a century earlier.
OPEN IN VIEWEROPEN IN VIEWER
We begin by documenting a number of findings about political speech related to immigration. First, average sentiment toward immigration in Congress and the executive branch is negative throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) through the advent of strict immigration quotas in the 1920s. The pervasiveness of negative sentiment can help make sense of the political context that gave rise to a suite of increasingly restrictive immigration regulations. It is particularly noteworthy that we do not find a rise in negative speeches leading up to the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Rather, we find that political sentiment in Congress was staunchly antiimmigration for more than 4 decades, which is consistent with the political history that has recounted the many congressional attempts to pass antiimmigration legislation, all of which were struck down by the president, in the years before the successful passage of quotas (21). Second, attitudes toward immigration became more positive around the start of WWII, rising steadily from 1940 until the end of the Johnson administration (1969). The average tone in Congress has essentially been proimmigration since the beginning of the Eisenhower administration (1953), consistent with efforts by postwar presidents to reframe the public understanding of immigration as positive for the country.
Third, beginning about a decade after the reopening of the border with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, there has been a growing partisan divide, larger year-to-year variations, and an overall decline in sentiment toward immigration among Republicans. Democrats, by contrast, have grown more positive about immigration over time, especially under Presidents Obama and Trump, with the exception of a temporary bipartisan drop in proimmigration speeches in the early 1990s, coinciding with the end of the Cold War and the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). By contrast, Republican legislators are now approximately as overtly antiimmigration in their speeches as the average legislator was during the Age of Mass Migration from Europe and the 1920s quota periods.
The trends for presidential attitudes toward immigration should be treated more cautiously as there is less text available from presidents overall and because these estimates involve a slight domain shift (from congressional speeches, on which our models were trained, to more varied types of presidential communications). Nevertheless, we document a similar pattern, whereby early presidents were more antiimmigration than modern presidents. In recent years, presidents have been uniformly more proimmigration than the average member of Congress, including both Republicans like Ronald Reagan and Democrats like Jimmy Carter. In historical comparison, President Trump was a stark exception: by his utterances, he was the most antiimmigration president to sit in office over the past 140 y, relative to the average attitude of the time expressed in Congress.
Although the difference in tone between the parties today is larger than at any point in the past, tone also varies dramatically depending on which groups of immigrants are being discussed. Fig. 2 shows the average tone when considering only those speeches that mention each of the three most commonly mentioned nationalities in immigration speeches—Mexican, Chinese, and Italian (Identifying Groups).
Fig. 2.
Average tone of immigration speeches when considering only those speeches that mention the country or nationality for each of the three most frequently mentioned nationalities (Top) and the percent of the US foreign-born population from each of these countries over time (Bottom). Despite the midcentury increase in proimmigration attitudes applying to all groups, a gap in tone by group persists to the present day, with Mexican immigrants being consistently framed more negatively than others and Italian immigrants being framed especially positively. These trends are mirrored in broader regional patterns for Europe, Asia, and Latin American and the Caribbean (SI Appendix).
…

Source: Computational analysis of 140 years of US political speeches reveals more positive but increasingly polarized framing of immigration | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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Hospital staff shortages: Immigration backlog leaves professionals on sidelines

2022/08/06 Leave a comment

Of note, appears that the bottleneck more immigration-related than credential recognition delays:

As hospitals across the country struggle under the weight of major staffing shortages, an immigration backlog described by lawyers as the worst they have ever seen is leaving qualified health professionals sitting on the sidelines.

In Februrary 2021, Sharlene Ullani applied for a permanent resident card after years spent working in Canada as a caregiver for children. Eighteen months later, the internationally trained nurse with more than seven years experience hasn’t heard anything from Immigration Canada about her application status.

Online, the government estimates the processing time for new permanent residence cards is 2.6 months, or 81 days, as of Aug. 2.

“I’ve been sending emails two times a month and the answer is always the same: ‘You have to wait, thank you for your patience. We have this pandemic’,” she told CTV National News.

Ullani currently holds a temporary work permit, but it does not allow her to switch jobs — even from a caregiver for children to a caregiver for adults — without losing status. In the months since she filled an application for permanent residency, Ullani has written exams and completed the paperwork necessary to get her foreign credentials translated into a valid licence to work in Ontario as a registered practical nurse.

“It is heartbreaking to see nurses working so hard and we are here, willing to help,” she said. “We are willing to help, but we cannot do so because of our status.”

The Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario said there are roughly 26,000 nurses “ready and waiting” to work in Ontario, 14,000 of those are registered nurses. CEO Doris Grinspun says the great majority of those people are waiting for their international qualifications to get approved by the college, but thousands have already passed their exams and are waiting for their immigration status to change so they can work.

“The big impact of the backlog for patients is that they are either being short changed in the quality of care or they are not getting care all together,” she said. “If you look at home care, they are likely not getting care all together. If you look at ICU or ER that are closing down or shrinking, even in an emergency, it is desperation.”

Recently, Grinspun worked with the federal government to approve the immigration applications of 26 nurses. Given the health care staffing crisis across the country, Grinspun said the government should prioritize applications filed on behalf of applicants with backgrounds in health care, especially nurses.

“Having internationally trained nurses, RPN … able to join the workforce when they are ready to work in Ontario, and especially those who have already passed their exams and are just waiting on work permits by the feds, move them on. Move them on because nurses and patients need them desperately,” she said.

Speaking at a press conference in Ottawa on Thursday, NDP leader Jagmeet SIngh echoed Grinspun’s calls, saying he has called on Ottawa to implement a fast track immigration system for qualified health-care workers. Singh said he does not know why Ottawa has not yet followed through.

“There is no excuse for this,” Singh said. “I can’t understand why the government is not willing to do this… We need to respond in an urgent way because these are folks who can work here and want to work here.”

In June, the immigration department said more than 2.4 million applications were in the backlog, up from 2.1 million in June. CTV News reached out to the department multiple times for updated figures, but did not hear back at the time of publishing. The department said it usually takes five business days to process and gather statistical data.

Toronto Immigration lawyer Chantal Desloges attributes the backlog to a “perfect storm” of factors related to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many embassies and consulates closed and immigration staff started working from home.

“When everyone else was doing business online, it wasn’t that easy for the government to pivot,” she said. Desloges added that when offices were closed, applications were still being submitted, but nobody was there to process them.

“All of these things happening at the same time just made a toxic soup of circumstances.”

To speed up the process, Desloges said immigration staff who can’t do 100 per cent of their job from home should be ordered back into the office. She also suggests the government could expedite the approval process by reducing the number and frequency of applicant interviews.

“It is really hard to predict how long it is going to take to sort this mess out, if ever,” she said.

On Tuesday, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) introduced new measures to speed up the processing of applications for foreign nationals with expired or expiring post-graduation work permits, and for temporary resident to permanent residence pathway applicants. Under the change, individuals in either of those cases will have their current work permits extended while their applications are being processed.

Director of Policy at CanadaVisa.com Kareem El-Assal applauded the change, but said it should have been implemented back in 2020.

“This is a solution that should have been adopted since the start of the pandemic and would have saved applicants a lot of heartache and would have actually saved the canadian government a lot of time as well,” he said.

As delays drag on, applicants like post doctoral researcher Julie Ottoy are left in llimbo, unable to leave the country or attend international conferences for work.

“It is very frustrating,” she said. “It’s been close to five months now not hearing from IRCC and interestingly, last year I submitted this application around the same time and the exact same renewal was approved in two weeks.”

Source: Hospital staff shortages: Immigration backlog leaves professionals on sidelines

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Diversity of UK senior civil service falls, rises at lower grades

2022/08/06 Leave a comment

Of note. Canadian figures by way of comparison, all visible minorities 18.9 percent, executives 12.4 percent, EX-4 10.1 percent, EX-5 9.2 percent (EX-4 and 5 likely equivalent to senior UK public servants):

The percentage of UK civil servants from an ethnic minority background is at a record high, according to the latest figures, but the proportion in top jobs has fallen for the first time since 2015.

Official figures for 2022 revealed that, of those with a known ethnicity, the percentage of government officials who are from an ethnic minority background is at a record high of 15.0% – up from 14.3% in 2021, and 9.3% a decade ago.

There was a year-on-year increase at all grades, with the exception of the senior civil service – the group of officials who run government departments or hold other top posts. In this group, there was a year-on-year decline from 10.6% in 2021 to 10.3% in 2022.

Percentage of civil servants from an ethnic minority background by grade 2012 to 2022

Civil Service Statistics 2022

The government had previously pledged to increase the percentage of senior civil servants who are from an ethnic minority year-on-year to reach 13.2% in the three year period from 2022 to 2025. However, in its Diversity and Inclusion Strategy: 2022 to 2025, published earlier this year, the government said it had stopped using targets to measure progress. “We will mainstream our success measures with our broader organisational priorities, such as Places for Growth [the plan to move officials out of London and into the regions of the UK], senior civil service workforce planning, talent schemes and recruitment priorities. Rather than relying on standalone targets, our ambitions will be embedded in these key deliverables designed to improve our delivery for citizens. Where our data indicates progress is not being made, action will be taken,” the strategy said.

The strategy made only one mention of people from ethnic minority backgrounds, stating: “We will make sure that people from minority ethnic backgrounds, those living with disabilities and those who have experienced disadvantage in their early lives can flourish in public service.”

Source: Diversity of UK senior civil service falls, rises at lower grades

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