Saunders: How the pandemic may have made government agencies better at their jobs

2022/07/11 Leave a comment

Ironic timing, given that large immigration and passport backlogs in Canada. That being said, IRCC is moving on IT and more online services.

But perhaps MPI should have accompanied this analysis with a snapshot on backlogs in all the countries surveyed:

Chaos descended on governments more than two years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of frontline public-service workers and back-office bureaucrats to abandon their offices, stop meeting with clients and managing lineups, and switch quickly to improvised digital services in departments that in many cases had barely moved beyond the fax machine.

Unsurprisingly, some departments became frozen and dysfunctional, leaving a legacy of perpetual waiting lists, undelivered projects and unanswered calls. But an unexpected consequence of the global crisis was that some branches of government actually sharply improved their quality of service, in terms of both timeliness of delivery and effectiveness of results. The virus forced transformations, in many places, that should have happened decades ago.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way governments have changed how they deal with the process of immigration, settlement and the pathway to citizenship. If you’ve ever emigrated to new country, you know it involves years of day-long waits at government offices, repeat trips to bring in the proper documents, hard-to-arrange appointments with officials, forms that must be handled in person and often years of non-optional classes in language and citizenship. Even for a middle-class immigrant with resources, it’s a complex, disruptive process that can go on for years.

But the pandemic had a striking and often overwhelmingly positive effect on the Western world’s immigration bureaucracies. That’s made apparent in a new study, “The COVID-19 Catalyst,” by Jasmijn Slootjes of the Brussels-based Migration Policy Institute Europe, in which her team looked at the immigration bureaucracies of 14 countries, including Canada’s.

Pretty much every developed country faced twin problems during the pandemic. One, restricted travel and sometimes-closed borders made it very hard to bring in the people who were needed to keep the economy rolling, especially in suddenly crucial fields such as healthcare, eldercare and food production. And two, an already undersized bureaucracy was now working from home and unable to operate service desks, offices and classrooms.

Three important things happened, according to Ms. Slootjes.

First, the entire landing, settlement, integration and naturalization process was moved online. While this created some disadvantages – immigrants often value in-person meetings and the networking opportunities that come with them – these, the researchers were surprised to find, were usually far outweighed by the benefits, which allowed more people to be reached, far more quickly and effectively, across a wider geography and with less inconvenience.

This was particularly true for immigrant women and members of vulnerable refugee communities, who, for various reasons, previously had trouble making in-person meetings during business hours but now could be reached directly, in large numbers. Some countries did this immediately: Germany spent €40-million in 2020 developing online language-oriented integration classes.

Of course, some immigrants and especially refugee claimants have trouble finding internet connections and smart devices. But the speed with which this problem was solved surprised everyone. In the Netherlands, a major new program brought tech companies together with government to give devices to more than 12,000 people. Canada’s tech-donation schemes became far more active, and Ottawa launched a popular digital-literacy program for immigrants during the pandemic.

Second, national governments were forced to work with outside organizations and local governments, who actually have more front-line knowledge. (That’s the paradox of immigration: It’s a national policy area that manifests itself almost entirely at the municipal level.) “In Canada, Finland, Flanders and France, governments were forced to reach out to colleagues in other policy areas to address newly arising issues,” Ms. Slootjes writes

Many countries decided to follow the decentralization lead of Canada, whose settlement and integration services are mostly delivered not by the federal public service but by 500 not-for-profit institutions and local-government offices whose employees and volunteers are able to work longer and more flexible hours, adapt more quickly and work in more trusted relationships with clients, at lower cost.

And third, the pandemic forced government agencies to rethink their primary missions – and sometimes, their entire purpose.

The concept of “integration,” which in Europe had often meant language and “values” education, was quickly redefined around its more important meaning: inclusion in the country’s economy, education and housing systems.

Immigration agencies, which had previously seen themselves as gatekeepers that slowly filtered in the more desirable and well-off people from lists of applicants, suddenly found “a renewed appreciation of low-skilled migrant workers in essential roles,” and often invested in chartered flights and instant naturalization invitations in order to fill the economy’s yawning gaps with such people.

Countries that undertook this rethink are, in this year of overheated recovery, typically having less difficulty with shortages and inflation than countries that stuck to their old ways. And, thanks to the wholesale reinvention of their immigration bureaucracy, they’ve been able to respond better – and with less hassle or controversy – to the millions of Ukrainian refugees they now face.

Few of them will publicly credit a deadly pandemic with making them better at their jobs. But they could.

Source: How the pandemic may have made government agencies better at their jobs

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Adams, Neuman: Canadians need to keep talking about racism [to facilitate change in social norms]

2022/07/11 Leave a comment

On the importance of social norms and how discussion and conversation needed influence social norms change:

Combatting racism is now firmly on the public agenda in Canada, reflecting an evolving acknowledgment of the systemic mistreatment of racialized people. This evolution has accelerated in response to important events, including the horrific murder of American George Floyd and the continuing discoveries of unmarked graves at former Indian Residential Schools. But progress in eradicating racism in our country has been slow and at best uneven. Many Canadians are frustrated by what they see as all talk and no action.

What is holding us back? Efforts to eradicate systemic bias in our institutions, including our local police departments, have shown little progress given how deeply it is ingrained. Many organizations have made considerable investments in diversity and inclusion training to educate people and make them aware of their unconscious biases, but studies have shown this training has not had a lasting impact. This shouldn’t be surprising, as it is next to impossible to change people’s deeply held attitudes and values, at least in the short term.

Where else can we turn? One avenue yet to be explored is in changing the social norms that allow racism to promulgate and flourish.

Social norms are widely held, yet mostly unspoken, expectations about what is, and is not, acceptable to say and do in particular situations. Such norms exert a powerful influence over how people act in public and in social situations, apart from what they may think or feel.

Social norms play a key role in the dynamics of racism and prejudice because they establish the boundaries around which people act toward those they see as “the other.” While internally held attitudes, beliefs and stereotyping are stubbornly resistant to short-term change, the way individuals choose to express themselves can be easily influenced by social pressure. Over time, norms can change – in some cases through efforts to positively shape our collective behaviour.

Take, for example, the successful campaign to change norms around tobacco use in public. Just over a generation ago, smoking in public was common, even cool. Today, the behaviour has become effectively “denormalized” as inconsiderate and self-defeating. While a significant minority of the population continues to smoke in private, few dare to do so in the presence of others because they correctly understand it would not be tolerated.

The concept of social norms is not new, but it has been missing from the scope of anti-racism initiatives in Canada and elsewhere. With this in mind, the Environics Institute recently conducted a national survey of Canadians that measured social norms in relation to common types of micro-aggressions directed at people who are Indigenous and/or Black.

Our research reveals that a significant majority of Canadians acknowledge the reality of racism in their communities and social circles. Regardless of their racial background, many of those surveyed say they have personally witnessed, or know others who have witnessed, racist behaviour directed against Indigenous or Black people. This racism has taken many forms, from insensitive jokes or racist gestures in public and private spaces, to derogatory comments on social media or even broad claims that racism simply doesn’t exist.

Most of those surveyed personally believe these types of behaviours are morally wrong. At the same time, our research demonstrated that the current social norms acting to inhibit these racist actions are not especially strong. The survey revealed that Canadians may believe such actions are morally wrong, but often feel unsure about what others around them think and whether they would also disapprove of what is going on in that situation. They may also be unclear about whether the social norms are sufficiently encouraging to support someone who steps up to intervene when witnessing a racist act in public, such as harassment on a bus.

What the research tells us, in essence, is that racist behaviour persists, despite growing disapproval, in large part because Canada’s social norms – the unspoken rules about what is and is not acceptable in public – governing respectful treatment of racialized people are not strong enough to discourage transgressors.

What does this mean for tackling racism? The research tells us that a major obstacle to reducing racism is the absence of social pressures that are strong enough to compel us to treat others with respect (even when we harbour prejudicial opinions about them) and to speak up when transgressions occur. Many Canadians are caught in a form of limbo when confronted with someone acting in a racist manner, not knowing if others around them recognize what is taking place or agree about what it means and what to do about it.

This is why it is so important that we keep talking about racism. The more public conversations we have on this subject, the more people may recognize a shared understanding of what is acceptable and what is no longer tolerated. Each of us needs to think individually about racism and take responsibility for our own behaviour, but this is not enough. We need to engage with others on this issue, in order to create a shared understanding of what we expect from each other in how we live together and treat one another.

Canadian institutions also need to demonstrate leadership in establishing social norms and expectations, and in cultivating spaces that prioritize respect for all. Social norms are often well entrenched but can and do change. Here lies a new opportunity to focus our efforts and realize a more just society.

Keith Neuman is a senior associate with the non-profit Environics Institute for Survey Research. Michael Adams is the institute’s founder and president.

Source: Canadians need to keep talking about racism

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

Confucius Institutes reappear under new names – Report

2022/07/11 Leave a comment

Not that surprising, unfortunately:

Chinese government-funded language and culture centres known as Confucius Institutes have rapidly closed down across the United States over the past four years amid pressure from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US Department of State, the US Congress, and state legislatures, concerned about China’s influence on universities. 

Of 118 Confucius Institutes that existed in the US, 104 closed by the end of 2021 or are in the process of doing so. 

Many institutions were forced to refund money to the Chinese government – sometimes in excess of US$1 million – according to a new wide-ranging report on Confucius Institutes (CIs) in the US by the National Association of Scholars, which was among the first to call for the closure of all Confucius Institutes on US campusesbefore the US Senate in 2019 called for greater transparency or closure.

However, “many once-defunct Confucius Institutes have since reappeared in other forms”, according to the association’s just-released report, After Confucius Institutes: China’s enduring influence on American higher education. It adds: “The single most popular reason institutions give when they close a CI is to replace it with a new Chinese partnership programme.”

US institutions “have entered new sister university agreements with Chinese universities, established ‘new’ centres closely modelled on defunct Confucius Institutes, and even continued to receive funding from the same Chinese government agencies that funded the Confucius Institutes,” it said. 

“In no cases (out of the 104 institutions) are we sufficiently confident to classify any university as having fully closed its Confucius Institute.” 

Rebranding and replacing

“Overall, we find that the Chinese government has carefully courted American colleges and universities, seeking to persuade them to keep their Confucius Institutes or, failing that, to reopen similar programmes under other names,” the report said.

American colleges and universities, too, appear eager to replace their Confucius Institutes with other forms of engagement with China, “frequently in ways that mimic the major problems with Confucius Institutes,” the report said. “Among its most successful tactics has been the effort to rebrand Confucius Institute-like programmes under other names.”

Some 28 institutions have replaced (and 12 have sought to replace) their closed Confucius Institute with a similar programme. Around 58 have maintained (and five may have maintained) close relationships with their former CI partner. About five have (and three may have) transferred their Confucius Institute to a new host, “thereby keeping the CI alive”.

Hanban, the Chinese government agency that launched Confucius Institutes, renamed itself the Ministry of Education Center for Language Education and Cooperation (CLEC) and spun off a separate organisation, the Chinese International Education Foundation (CIEF), that now funds and oversees Confucius Institutes and many of their replacements as part of a rebranding exercise in July 2020, designed to counter negative perceptions about CIs abroad. 

“In reality, the line between the Chinese government and its offshoot organisations is paper-thin. CIEF is under the supervision of the Chinese Ministry of Education and is funded by the Chinese government,” the report noted. 

Many CI staff migrated to CI-replacement programmes at the same university, according to the report which scrutinised a large number of contracts between CIs and US universities. It added that some CI textbooks and materials remain on the campuses of institutions that closed CIs.

The Chinese government has reacted by defending Confucius Institutes outright, but the report notes it has also “relied on the art of subterfuge, rebranding Confucius Institutes under different names and massaging their outlines to be less obvious to the public, and better camouflaged within the university”.

Three types of action were identified in the report: replacing the CI, maintaining a partnership in some way with the CI, or transferring the CI to a new home. 

Replacing the CI

Many universities are eager to ditch the now-toxic name ‘Confucius Institute’ but retain funding and close relationships with Chinese institutions, the report noted. 

“At least 28 universities replaced their Confucius Institute with a similar programme, and another 12 may have done so. Sometimes these replacement programmes are so closely modelled on CIs that we are tempted to call them renamed Confucius Institutes.”

Replacing the CI means the US institution “retained, on its own campus and as part of its own programming, substantial pieces of its Confucius Institute under a different name. This includes institutions that formed new replacement programmes with the Chinese university that had partnered in the Confucius Institute,” the report said. 

It also includes institutions that formed new China-focused centres that took on Confucius Institute staff, Confucius Institute programmes, or funding from the CLEC or CIEF, the successors to Hanban.

For example, the University of Michigan, among others, sought to retain Hanban funding even after the closure of the Confucius Institute. Federal disclosures cited by the report show the university received more than US$300,000 from Hanban in May and June 2019, just as the Confucius Institute was closing in June 2019, though the report notes these disclosures have since been deleted from the Department of Education’s website.

Maintaining a partnership

While some Chinese partners reacted with shock at the notification to close the CI, and even threatened to sever all other connection between them and the US university host, setting up a new partnership with a Chinese institution is the single most frequently cited reason given by US institutions for closing a Confucius Institute, the report found.

Forty of 104 institutions (38%) say they are replacing the Confucius Institute with a new partnership, often one that is quite similar to the Confucius Institute. “Many others do in practice arrange for alternative engagement with China, even if they do not say this in the same statement in which they announce the closure of the Confucius Institute,” the report said. 

The Chinese government often encouraged US universities, when they applied for a Confucius Institute, to first establish a sister university relationship with a Chinese university. For example, Arizona State University (ASU) became sister universities with Sichuan University, “having been led to believe that doing so would aid its bid to host a CI,” the report noted, adding that ASU did in fact establish a CI with Sichuan University, and the sister university relationship has survived the CI closure.

Upon closing a Confucius Institute, some US universities developed new partnerships with their Chinese partner universities, or maintained pre-existing partnerships outside the CI. Others transferred the CI to another institution, ensuring that the Confucius Institute did not really close but changed locations. Some universities engaged in several of these strategies at once.

The report tracked information for 75 of the 104 CIs that closed in the US. Of the 75, 28 replaced the CI with a similar programme, and another 12 sought to replace it, while 58 maintained relationships with their Chinese partner universities.

Many created something substantially similar to a Confucius Institute under a different name, as did Georgia State University, the College of William and Mary, Michigan State University and Northern State University.

The College of William and Mary replaced its CI with the W&M-BNU Collaborative Partnership in partnership with Beijing Normal University, its former CI partner. One day after the CI closed on 30 June 2021, the two universities signed a new ‘sister university’ agreement establishing the programme. 

Chinese universities have also proposed programmes similar to Confucius Institutes but funded by the Chinese university itself. For example, Jinlin Li, president of South-Central University for Nationalities (SCUN), wrote to University of Wisconsin-Platteville Chancellor Dennis J Shields, suggesting that “we work together on a university level to continue to offer Chinese language credit courses and Chinese Kungfu programmes”. He added that “SCUN will gladly continue funding this operation”. 

Replacing with another university programme

On being informed of CI closures, responses from Hanban “were initially characterised by shock and indignation, then by mere regret, and finally by well-coordinated efforts to woo colleges and universities into new partnerships”, the report said. 

Richard Benson, president of the University of Texas at Dallas, wrote in a letter cited by the report: “We will be arranging a new bilateral agreement with Southeast University to continue our mutually beneficial engagements.”

Benson went on to describe the “newly created UT Dallas Centre for Chinese Studies” which would house many of the programmes the Confucius Institute once ran – the former director of the Confucius Institute heads this new centre. 

Twenty-three universities said they would replace the Confucius Institute with their own, in-house programmes. However, 13 of these also said the CI would be replaced by a new partnership with a Chinese entity.

Ten of the 23 institutions announced plans to develop their own replacement programmes. Yet, at least four – University of Idaho, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Montana and Purdue University – did in fact operate these programmes in partnership with their former CI partner. 

Six universities–- Pfeiffer University, San Diego State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Arizona, the University of Washington and Western Kentucky University – said they intended to find a new home for the CI by transferring it elsewhere.

Reasons for winding down CIs

Most of the criticisms surrounding Confucius Institutes involve threats to national security, infringements of academic freedom, and the problem of censorship. But these are rarely the reasons colleges and universities give when they announce plans to close a Confucius Institute. The report found the most frequently cited reasons are the development of alternative partnerships with China, and changes in US public policy.

Only five of 104 institutions cited concerns regarding the Chinese government’s relationship to Confucius Institutes ¬– and two of these five proclaimed that all national alarm was due to the mismanagement of Confucius Institutes by other universities.

Citing letters that the institutions sent to the Chinese government or their Chinese partner university; letters sent to a US government body, internal announcements to the staff, faculty and campus community; and statements published on the institutions’ own websites or published by the media, the report found that replacing the Confucius Institute with a new Chinese partnership was the most popular reason given for closure, while the second most popular was US policy. Many gave no reason whatsoever. 

Of the 33 colleges and universities that cite public policy as a reason for the Confucius Institute’s closure, 19 cite the potential loss of federal funds, and 11 specifically cite the National Defense Authorization Act, which barred certain grants from the Department of Defense to colleges and universities with Confucius Institutes. Three universities cited warnings they received from the US State Department. 

Despite widespread public concern about the Chinese government’s ulterior motives for supporting Confucius Institutes, only five universities referenced these concerns. Two laid out possible problems with Chinese government interference but concluded this had not been the case at their university.

University of Wisconsin-Platteville Chancellor Dennis J Shields in a letter to CLEC and CIEF said: “Over the past two years, the United States of America and its Department of State have raised serious concerns as to the scope of the People’s Republic of China and Beijing’s influence over higher education institutions, both nationally and globally…

“Unfortunately, due to these recent and continued concerns raised by the United States federal government and public officials as well as the recently enacted legislation, I have reached the difficult decision to end the UW-Platteville Confucius Institute.” 

Shields stressed though, that the University of Wisconsin had good experiences with Hanban.

Seven institutions said the Confucius Institute attracted too few students and others cited scarcity of funds as reasons for closure.

Source: Confucius Institutes reappear under new names – Report

Filed under foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Quebec judge says Crown failed to prove Nazism led to Holocaust in hate speech trial

2022/07/11 Leave a comment

Odd, to say the least, given that this is settled history:

The prosecution in the trial of a Montreal man accused of fomenting hatred against Jews failed to establish that the murder of Jews by the regime of Adolf Hitler was a consequence of Nazi ideology, a Quebec court judge said Friday.

The case involves Gabriel Sohier Chaput, 35, who faces one count of wilfully promoting hatred in connection with an article he has admitted to writing that was published in 2017 on the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer. The blog post included racist images and comments about Jews throughout, and the website displayed photos of Hitler and other images associated with Nazism.

Prosecutor Patrick Lafrenière said it was common knowledge that the Daily Stormer is a far-right website and that Nazi ideology led directly to the murder of millions of Jews.

But Judge Manlio Del Negro wasn’t satisfied. “You (Mr.) Lafrenière, did not present an expert opinion,” the judge said.

“The Crown is asking a lot,” Del Negro said. “You are making arguments that have not been put into evidence (…) I am not convinced that doing what you are asking me to do does not prejudice the accused.”

Sohier Chaput’s defence lawyer, Hélène Poussard, jumped into the discussion, telling the judge that, “today, Nazism is used to describe everything. We mix the Holocaust with Nazism.”

Poussard added that, “it’s not because Jews were exterminated that it was part of the ideology.” She then suggested that Jews were killed in Nazi concentration camps “to save money.”

The judge rebuked her: “You have crossed the line!” he said.

Then the judge turned to Lafrenière. “You see, (Mr.) Lafrenière, it’s your fault. It would have been easy to prove that the Daily Stormer was a far-right site. It would have been easy to bring a historian to prove that Nazism was behind the extermination of the Jews.”

The two sides agreed to return to court on Aug. 29 to fix a date for a debate as to whether it is common knowledge that the Daily Stormer is a far-right website and that Nazism did indeed lead to the Holocaust.

Earlier on Friday, Lafrenière delivered his closing arguments, attempting to demonstrate that the text written by Sohier Chaput and the context in which it was published were hateful. The article said 2017 would be the year of “non-stop Nazism, everywhere.”

“You have to take the context into account,” Lafrenière said. “Nazism is the largest manifestation of hate toward the Jews.”

The article’s degrading comments, its aggressive tone and its description of Jews as “our enemies,” the lawyer said, “are likely to promote hatred” against the Jewish community.

Poussard delivered her closing arguments in March, stating that her client was being ironic and was trying to make his readers laugh.

Sohier Chaput, meanwhile, testified during the trial that the Daily Stormer was a “parody site.”

Lafrenière said Friday that the site is by all appearances a serious website and not intended to be a joke.

Sohier Chaput, who wrote under the pen name Zeiger, published around 1,000 articles on The Daily Stormer, making him one of the site’s most prolific contributors.

Lafrenière said the accused wrote the entirety of the article and that certain derogatory terms used toward Jewish people were not added by an editor, as Sohier Chaput has claimed.

About 40 demonstrators identifying with the anti-fascist movement were in front of the Montreal courthouse to express their lack of confidence in the judicial system “to combat the influence of the far-right and the fascist threat.”

Source: Quebec judge says Crown failed to prove Nazism led to Holocaust in hate speech trial

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Diversité et inclusion: malaise au sein de CBC/Radio-Canada

2022/07/11 Leave a comment

Of note, and the difference between Radio Canada and CBC:

L’hésitation de CBC/Radio-Canada à se prononcer sur la récente décision du CRTC concernant le mot en n s’inscrit dans un contexte de transformations plus profondes au sein de l’institution. Sous l’impulsion de la présidente-directrice générale Catherine Tait, la société d’État a accéléré depuis 2018 son virage diversité et inclusion. Mais dans la salle de rédaction du service français, certains dénoncent « l’obsession » de la haute direction pour les questions identitaires.

« C’est comme si on voulait nous imposer le contexte sociopolitique de Toronto à Montréal. À Toronto, le multiculturalisme, c’est une réalité. Alors qu’au Québec, je regrette, mais ce n’est pas un concept politique qui est partagé par tout le monde. C’est un concept qui fait débat et il faut rendre compte de cette réalité », résume une personnalité bien connue de Radio-Canada qui tient à garder l’anonymat par crainte de représailles.

Le Devoir a pu s’entretenir dans les derniers jours avec cinq employés de la société d’État qui s’interrogent sur certaines initiatives de la haute direction pour promouvoir la diversité et l’inclusion. Certains sont plus critiques que d’autres, mais ils s’entendent sur une chose : CBC/Radio-Canada doit absolument faire appel de la décision du CRTC, qui a blâmé la semaine dernière le diffuseur public pour un segment dans lequel le chroniqueur Simon Jodoin et l’animatrice Annie Desrochers ont cité à quatre reprises le titre du livre Nègres blancs d’Amérique, de Pierre Vallières. Le CRTC oblige entre autres Radio-Canada à s’excuser.

« Je ne me fais pas d’illusions. Je vois mal comment la haute direction de Catherine Tait pourrait faire appel de la décision du CRTC après ce qui s’est passé avec Wendy Mesley », anticipe l’une des personnes qui ont accepté de parler au Devoir.

Wendy Mesley, c’est cette animatrice vedette de CBC qui avait été suspendue pour avoir cité le nom du livre de Pierre Vallières lors d’une réunion de travail. Cette journaliste d’expérience avait dû s’excuser à la suite de cet épisode, avant d’annoncer sa retraite l’an dernier. « L’histoire de Wendy Mesley nous a marqués. Ça a beaucoup choqué à Montréal, et il y a comme une incompréhension. Bien sûr, on en parle entre nous, mais pas trop fort. Car veut, veut pas, il y a un climat de suspicion qui s’est installé depuis cette histoire », ajoute notre source.

Prioritaire pour la haute direction

Pour certains, l’affaire Wendy Mesley est le point de départ d’un malaise qui n’a cessé de prendre de l’ampleur depuis.

L’année dernière, une formation obligatoire sur les privilèges et les biais inconscients a soulevé l’ire dans la salle de rédaction du service français. On y disait notamment qu’il était stigmatisant de décrire un secteur comme un quartier chaud parce qu’il a un fort taux de criminalité. Un exercice « infantilisant », « digne d’un cours de pastorale », s’insurge une autre employée qui a suivi la formation.

« C’est un objectif très louable de vouloir plus de diversité, et effectivement, il faut plus de diversité à Radio-Canada. Mais le problème, c’est la manière dont on s’y prend », nuance-t-elle.

Certaines déclarations de la p.-d.g. de la société d’État, Catherine Tait, ont aussi fait sourciller dans les dernières années. Après la découverte de potentielles tombes anonymes sur le site de l’ancien pensionnat de Kamloops, cette dernière avait envoyé un mémo aux employés pour les inviter à observer un moment de silence de 215 secondes, une seconde correspondant à chaque enfant autochtone disparu.

À la suite du prononcé de culpabilité d’un policier pour le meurtre de George Floyd à Minneapolis, elle a aussi reconnu explicitement le concept de « racisme systémique » dans une lettre signée par quatre directeurs et conseillers sur les programmes de diversité et inclusion. « Le racisme systémique existe toujours au Canada et au sein de plusieurs de ses institutions, y compris son diffuseur public », écrivait Catherine Tait, qui a fait toute sa carrière au Canada anglais.

Est-ce le rôle de la dirigeante de CBC/Radio-Canada de prendre parti dans des événements qui font l’actualité et que les journalistes de la boîte sont censés traiter ensuite de la manière la plus objective possible ? Pour certains, les prises de position de la haute direction n’affectent pas la manière de couvrir l’information. Mais d’autres sont d’avis que la politique officielle de l’entreprise empiète sur la sacro-sainte objectivité journalistique.

« Sur le concept de racisme systémique, par exemple, il y a un malaise. On peut être pour ou contre, mais ce n’est pas à une entreprise de presse de reconnaître quelque chose que le gouvernement du Québec refuse de reconnaître », illustre une personne qui évolue au sein de Radio-Canada.

Inclusif ou objectif ?

Ce principe d’objectivité journalistique a d’ailleurs été revu du côté anglophone. En juin 2020, dans la foulée de l’assassinat de George Floyd, le rédacteur en chef de CBC a proposé d’ouvrir le débat sur les Normes et pratiques journalistiques dans l’optique d’offrir une couverture plus inclusive. « Nos définitions de l’objectivité, de l’équilibre, de l’équité et de l’impartialité — et notre insistance pour que les journalistes n’expriment pas d’opinions personnelles sur les histoires que nous couvrons — vont-elles à l’encontre de nos objectifs d’inclusion et de faire partie de la communauté et du pays que nous servons ? » s’interrogeait Brodie Fenlon dans son blogue sur le site de CBC.

Côté francophone, ce raisonnement suscite beaucoup d’appréhensions. Des voix se sont fait entendre à l’interne pour implorer Radio-Canada de ne pas suivre la même voie que CBC.

Deux ans plus tard, les normes journalistiques n’ont finalement pas changé en soi, indique Chuck Thompson, chef des relations publiques de CBC, mais leur interprétation, oui. L’exercice en cours pour rendre les pratiques journalistiques plus inclusives porte « sur la façon dont nous interprétons ces principes, et sur l’identification des obstacles qui limitent notre journalisme en excluant des perspectives, des points de vue ou des expériences vécues », confirme M. Thompson. « Ce travail couvre toute une gamme d’actions, des stratégies d’embauche et de promotion aux meilleures pratiques pour couvrir la criminalité et la police, en passant par de la formation sur les préjugés inconscients et l’inclusion. »

Deux solitudes

À l’automne 2020, l’affaire Lieutenant-Duval à l’Université d’Ottawa a aussi mis en évidence des visions divergentes entre Radio-Canada et CBC quant à l’usage du mot en n. Lors d’une rencontre de la haute direction le 14 octobre, Catherine Tait a demandé pourquoi une émission sur le mot en n avait été proposée sur une plateforme de CBC plutôt qu’en français à Radio-Canada, une discussion qui aurait provoqué de vives tensions.

Interrogé à ce sujet il y a plusieurs mois, le bureau de Mme Tait a précisé au Devoir une partie des propos de Catherine Tait pendant cette rencontre : « Je me suis demandé pourquoi cette émission était produite en anglais et non en français puisque [les personnes qui l’animent sont francophones]. Et elles m’ont répondu que l’émission aurait été différente en français, que la conversation sur le racisme n’est pas aussi avancée au Québec. Ce que je veux vous dire aujourd’hui, c’est que c’est notre moment à Radio-Canada, c’est une occasion en or, pour nous, en tant que diffuseur public de vraiment servir tous les Canadiens et d’assurer notre pertinence pour l’avenir », aurait-elle déclaré.

À l’heure de mettre sous presse, le bureau de Catherine Tait n’avait pas donné suite à nos questions. Radio-Canada pour sa part n’a pas souhaité réagir.

La promotion de la diversité fait partie des conditions imposées à la société d’État par le CRTC, l’organisme responsable de lui accorder une licence de diffusion, et ces exigences ont été rehaussées lors du plus récent renouvellement, en juin.

Source: Diversité et inclusion: malaise au sein de CBC/Radio-Canada

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Federally funded Canadian group used by China to spread propaganda on Uyghurs: report

2022/07/08 Leave a comment

Need for greater due diligence in funding and in all areas:

Two Canadian community organizations — one of which has received thousands of dollars in federal funding — are prime examples of how the Chinese government has tried to covertly shape opinions worldwide about human rights abuses in Xinjiang province, says a new report by Australian academics.

A profile of the Xinjiang Association of Canada and the Ontario-based Council of Newcomer Organizations — which was co-founded by a former Liberal MP — forms one of four case studies in the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Cultivating Friendly Forces report.

The two groups and their leaders have consistently promoted Beijing’s talking points on the region in the face of growing evidence of mass human rights abuses against Xinjiang’s Muslim populations, says the working paper by James Leibold, a professor at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, and Lin Li.

The groups have been supported by China’s diplomatic missions in Canada, while at least two of their directors were invited to attend events in China as privileged “overseas Chinese” leaders, says the report, based mostly on Chinese-language media reports and other open source material from the internet.

“The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) uses these organs as conduits for the spread of propaganda about the ‘harmony, prosperity and happiness’ of people in Xinjiang while deflecting and denying international criticism of its well-documented human rights abuses in the region,” the analysis charges.

Such groups “can sow distrust and fear in the community, mislead politicians, journalists and the public, influence government policies, cloud our assessment of the situation in Xinjiang and disguise the CCP’s interference in foreign countries.”

The report urges more efforts by the media, academia and government to expose the Chinese government’s global interference, including with the use of effective foreign-influence registries.

The National Post contacted leaders of the two groups and China’s Ottawa embassy for comment on the report but had not received a response by deadline.

The report came as no surprise to Mehmet Tohti, head of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project.

The Chinese influence campaign against the Uyghur diaspora has several facets, including intimidation of community members and “hostage taking” like the 2006 imprisonment of Canadian activist Huseyin Celil, as well as “disseminating disinformation and fake narratives,” he said by email.

“We may see more vigorous moves from China by awakening its sleeper cells in Canada and around the world to promote its narrative on Uyghur genocide and forced labour,” Tohti added.

Human rights organizations, media outlets and the United Nations have revealed large-scale repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang, including forced labour, mass sterilization and re-education camps believed to hold more than a million people.

The Canadian parliament, the U.S. and other countries have accused China of genocide, though Beijing denies the charges and insists it is simply bringing peace to a region afflicted by unrest and terrorism.

The report documents how China is trying to counter the charges, partly through the use of local community groups that purport to represent immigrants from Xinjiang or that simply promote Beijing’s line on the issue. It says the effort is spearheaded by the United Front Work Department, a party branch dedicated to extending China’s influence abroad and greatly expanded in recent years.

The 12-year-old Xinjiang Association of Canada is a good example of ties between such groups and China’s colonizing efforts in the region, says the report.

It’s made up mostly of Han Chinese — the country’s dominant group — and its launch was attended by the consul general and other Chinese diplomats in Toronto. The group invites local politicians and consular officials to events celebrating Uyghur and Han festivals, “then uses these public events to present a harmonious picture of Xinjiang and its diasporic population,” the working paper says.

Founding president Zhu Jiang’s parents migrated to Xinjiang from China proper as part of efforts to change its ethnic make-up and he joined the People’s Liberation Army at age 15. The report includes a photograph of Zhu in PLA uniform while a player for the Xinjiang Military Command.

He immigrated to Canada in 2001 and in 2019 was invited by the United Front Work Department in Xinjiang and China’s Toronto consulate to attend the lavish celebrations of the People’s Republic’s 70th anniversary. One local news outlet quoted him as saying the event’s military parade made him realize how much he “loved the motherland,” the National Post reported at the time.

Zhu has consistently defended China’s actions in the region, with state-run China News quoting him in 2019 as criticizing the U.S. House of Representatives’ Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act.

Zhu was also for a time head of the Council of Newcomer Organizations, an umbrella group that included his Xinjiang association. As also reported previously by the Post, the council issued a statement last year decrying the House of Commons’ Xinjiang genocide motion, saying it was based on “unsubstantiated rumours.”

“The council’s statement was then reported by China’s state media to prove that members of the Chinese diaspora disagree with the Canadian parliament’s decision,” noted the report.

By last year, the council had received at least $160,000 in grants from various federal government departments, the most recent for an elder-abuse program.

Zhu was succeeded as head of the newcomer council by Han Jialing, who also has publicly documented ties to Beijing. As Zhu was at the anniversary celebrations in 2019, Han was “class captain” of a “carefully selected” group of overseas Chinese leaders invited to a seminar in China on the nation’s “great achievements” and thoughts of President Xi Jinping.

Leibold acknowledged in an interview that China is not alone in trying to shape opinion abroad. But its influence campaign differs from others in sheer scale — it has more diplomats registered in Canada than any nation other than the U.S. and more missions globally than anyone else — as well as the co-opting of community groups and the fact its efforts are largely covert, he said.

“What distinguishes it … is the tendency to operate in the shadows: the clandestine work that occurs behind the scenes, out of the public eye,” said the politics professor. “It’s … really quite different than what we see amongst free and democratic societies.”

Australian and New Zealand scholars such as Leibold have largely dominated academic attempts to investigate Beijing’s foreign influence efforts. But the work is becoming increasingly difficult as much of the information that was once freely available online is falling off the internet, he said. Indeed, the Council of Newcomer’s Organizations’ extensive website has disappeared.

And the research comes at a personal cost, said Leibold.

He said he’s been denied visas to visit China — the main subject of his research — while Li is “very worried” about possible retaliation against her friends and relatives in China.

Source: Federally funded Canadian group used by China to spread propaganda on Uyghurs: report 

Filed under disinformation, foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Germany eases path to permanent residency for migrants

2022/07/08 Leave a comment

Of note, another nail in the coffin of the guest worker approach:

Tens of thousands of migrants, who have been living in Germany for years without long-lasting permission to remain in the country, will be eligible for permanent residency after the government approved a new migration bill Wednesday.

The new regulation, endorsed by the Cabinet, applies to about 136,000 people who have lived in Germany for at least five years by Jan. 1, 2022.

Those who qualify can first apply for a one-year residency status and subsequently apply for permanent residency in Germany. They must earn enough money to make an independent living in the country, speak German and prove that they are “well integrated” into society.

Those under the age of 27 can already apply for a path to permanent residency in Germany after having lived in the country for three years.

“We want people who are well integrated to have good opportunities in our country,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told reporters. “In this way, we also put an end to bureaucracy and uncertainty for people who have already become part of our society.”

The new migration regulation will also make it easier for asylum-seekers to learn German — so far only those with a realistic chance of receiving asylum in the country were eligible for language classes — with all asylum applicants getting the chance to enroll in classes.

For skilled laborers, such as information technology specialists and others that hold professions that are desperately needed in Germany, the new regulation will allow that they can move to Germany together with their families right away, which wasn’t possible before. Family members don’t need to have any language skills before moving to the country.

“We need to attract skilled workers more quickly. We urgently need them in many sectors,” Faeser said. “We want skilled workers to come to Germany very quickly and gain a foothold here.”

The bill will also make it easier to deport criminals, includes extending detention pending deportation for certain offenders from three months to a maximum of six months. The extension is intended to give authorities more time to prepare for deportation, such as clarifying identity, obtaining missing papers and organizing a seat on an airplane, German news agency dpa reported.

“In the future, it will be easier to revoke the right of residence of criminals,” Faeser said. “For offenders, we will make it easier to order detention pending deportation, thus preventing offenders who are obliged to leave the country from going into hiding before being deported.”

Source: Germany eases path to permanent residency for migrants

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

A summer of last-minute passports from a government that was too slow in spring

2022/07/08 Leave a comment

A number of articles on the passport and other delays.

Starting with Campbell Clark of the Globe:

A month ago, the strategy to beat down Canada’s passport backlog was to get people to apply in-person, rather than by mail. Now workers at big-city passport offices triage the people standing in the long lines outside, sending those travelling in the next 48 hours on, and giving others tickets to come back another time.

The minister responsible for the passport offices, Karina Gould, has started to tell Canadians that she is angry about it, too, or something like that: She calls the situation “totally unacceptable,” and insists more will be done.

But what Ms. Gould really needs is a time machine and a bullhorn, so she can go back four months to March to wake up the slumbering government machine.

That was when the uptick in passport applications was becoming visible. The alarm bells didn’t get sounded loudly enough, quickly enough. In April, the government announced it was hiring 600 staff, but it was too little. And now that more resources are being poured in, it’s too late – or at least too late to avert a summer logjam that has made travellers livid.

“We anticipated a surge, but we didn’t anticipate just how large it would be,” Ms. Gould, the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

She said she accepts that people think the government should have seen the problem sooner, but it wasn’t easy to predict. “It doesn’t justify it by any means, because we need to do better and we’re going to do better.”

Perhaps hindsight is 20/20. But the government wasn’t just slow to see the tsunami coming, but slow to react. One problem, as the backlog mounted, was that federal public-health rules kept COVID-19 capacity limits in place at passport offices, with 40 per cent of wickets closed, till May, two months after restrictions were lifted for stores in Ontario, for example.

And more broadly, the federal government was slow to get a grip on reopening. The bureaucracy that delivered CERB cheques in a few weeks in 2020 didn’t spring into action to meet travel-surge challenges in 2022. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government didn’t put the government on alert for reopening. The passport debacle is one embarrassing result.

The government notes that people are getting their passports. But it is often at the last minute, the day before they fly. The government is leasing space next to passport offices for waiting, or sometimes putting up tents, Ms. Gould said. “This is not the solution. This is just in the interim,” she added.

How did this happen?

In the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, demand for passports pretty much halted. Passport offices were closed. The number of employees shrank. When people started applying again, the numbers rose gradually. Then there was a surge. The immigration department’s forecasts of passport demand for 2022 were low, but revised dramatically upward in January, and again in the spring.

When applications started to pour in March, and pile up in April, there was another problem. In the pandemic, most people hard started mailing applications. But a quarter of them arrived with errors such as missing documents or blank boxes, so they took longer to process. The backlog mounted.

So officials encouraged people to apply in-person instead. And then the lines at offices grew. It wasn’t just new applicants showing up in person, but folks who had mailed in applications, and were getting nervous that their mailed application hadn’t been processed.

“The Easter long weekend was a worrying long weekend for me, because there was a big rush for people who wanted to travel,” Ms. Gould said. “And I would say that in mid-May we really realized we needed to ramp up in a much bigger way than we had been because the number of applications that kept coming in were much greater than the processing capacity.”

There was hiring – 600 in the spring, 600 being hired now and 600 to be seconded from other government jobs. Some get only part of the 12- to 15-week training so they can quickly do one part of the job. Workers were reorganized.

But the backlog of roughly half a million applications isn’t shrinking yet, and it’s a scramble. The government was slow to hit the panic button months ago. And now Ms. Gould forecasts that things will be back to a “steady state” by the end of summer, when most Canadians’ vacations are over.

Source: A summer of last-minute passports from a government that was too slow in spring

Heather Scofield in the Star:

Here’s a number the federal government would like you to know.

Between February and June of this year, the amount of Canadians travelling by air shot up 280 per cent. In the United States, the increase was just 25 per cent.

The number comes from Transport Canada, and the reason federal Liberals want us all to know about it is because they argue it’s why families are camped out at Canadian airports and why police have had to intervene in unruly passport lineups that stretch around the block.

For sure, a 280 per cent spike in demand for travel is enormous, and very difficult for normal-times bureaucracy and travel industry to digest. But it didn’t materialize out of nowhere.

The lineups that have thrown the delivery of government services into disarray are egregious, but they’re also a symptom of the post-pandemic disruption that has afflicted much of the private sector too. And the sooner we address that disruption with the full force of our ingenuity and resources, the better.

“Whatever it takes” defined economic policy on our way down into pandemic recession. The recovery requires an equally concerted effort, because this is more than congestion in airports and on the sidewalks outside Passport Canada.

The erratic flow of people is running amok in our travel industry, for sure, but also our immigration system, our labour markets and our housing markets, showing up in the form of massive lineups, backlogs, erratic prices and inflation. The disruption is not going away on its own, and there are serious implications for both our political landscape and our economy.

Let’s start with the 280-per-cent spike in Canadian travellers this spring, compared to just a 25-per-cent climb in Americans. It’s huge, but not a surprise.

After a couple of years of being mainly housebound here in Canada, we were then sent back home by the sudden restrictions imposed at the end of 2021 because of Omicron. Canadians finally burst out of their homes when Omicron settled down, and they haven’t stopped moving since.

The United States, on the other hand, responded with a lighter touch both to Omicron this winter and even before then, explaining why their wanderlust is not nearly as intense as ours.

Was that kind of surge foreseeable? Probably not to the exact extent we see before us. But one thing we have learned about how the economy and the public respond to the pandemic is that it’s in fits and starts. We have lurched from open to closed with dramatic and volatile effects on how things work.

Strange consumer demands have led to runs on toilet paper and used cars, and — more seriously — a perplexing and persistent shortage of computer chips and shipping containers. Supply chains have seized up, caught between the unpredictable demands coming their way and the unpredictable disruptions in the infrastructure they use.

And the job market is going haywire. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is fond of saying it has completely recovered from the pandemic recession because more Canadians are employed now than before the pandemic. But in fact, Stage Two of the pandemic recovery is upon us, where one million jobs sit empty and too-high inflation has dug itself in for the long haul.

We have to expect, and prepare for, a certain amount of chaos.

It’s too soon to abandon the crisis footing that Ottawa and the private sector shifted to in the early days of the coronavirus, when decision-makers quickly learned that projections based on how the world worked in pre-pandemic days were not worth much.

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen some attempts to regain that footing. Transport Canada is meeting with increasing frequency with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, border officials, union officials and air navigators to detect every single inefficiency in the airport system, and shave off time and effort wherever possible.

Vaccine requirements have been scaled back and streamlined, airlines have cut flights, and now their attention has turned into the nightmare which is baggage.

It’s hard to know if there is progress, and there’s a recognition that no one was quite ready for the traffic patterns gumming up trips everywhere right now.

As for immigration, the lineups for processing have ballooned over the course of COVID-19. A parliamentary committee was told this spring that the backlog stands at two million people — almost double the pre-pandemic list — and that was considered already way too long. 

Canada’s economic growth and recovery strategy is heavily based on increasing immigration, but with backlogs like that, it’s a bumpy road.

Over in the world of passports, there’s a similar all-hands-on-deck approach that has taken on added urgency as the intractable lineups made a mockery of internal projections and erupted into a backlash on the sidewalks and in the offices of MPs.

Extra workers have been hired, senior managers are now involved in triage, new offices opened, hours extended.

But the pivot takes time, and success is hard to see.

Over on Facebook Marketplace, one enterprising Montrealer was offering to stand in line at 4 a.m. for passport-seekers for $250 just over a week ago. He has since dropped his price to $200. Is that a sign the lineups are easing?

The Liberals had better hope so, because the public patience for queuing and dysfunction in the machinery of government has worn thin.

Source: On passports and airports, public patience with Liberals is running out

And lastly, Minister Gould on the reasons:

The minister responsible for Service Canada admits the government did not fully anticipate the overwhelming surge in passport applications that came with the lifting of travel restrictions and is hopeful waiting times will return to normal by the end of summer.

Families, Children and Social Development Minister Karina Gould said the federal government hired 600 new staff ahead of the anticipated increase in passport applications and renewals, but said “clearly it was not sufficient.” The surge has forced some Canadians to camp overnight outside of government offices in an attempt to obtain their passports.

“If I put myself where we were as Canadians back in February, we weren’t talking about this kind of a surge. We knew it was going to increase and that’s why we took the measures that we did. But I will concede for sure that they were insufficient for what ended up happening,” Ms. Gould said in an interview.

Service Canada issued 363,000 passports during the first year of the pandemic, from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021 – and that number jumped to more than 1.27 million the following fiscal year. The government has received 757,207 passport applications since April 1, nearly 60 per cent of the past year’s total.

Service Canada is hiring an additional 600 staff to help with the delays. Ms. Gould said training for some of the new hires is being shortened from the typical 15 weeks to one to two weeks, so that fully trained passport officers can focus on more complex applications, such as children with custody issues, while new hires will work on simpler files.

Ottawa is asking Canadians travelling within the next 45 business days to go to one of the country’s 35 dedicated passport offices for service. Waiting times topped more than six hours at some locations Monday, according to the government’s website. The government is asking those who are not travelling within the next 45 business days to apply at a Service Canada centre or by mail.

Ms. Gould said the return to normal waiting times will depend on the number of applications the government receives in the coming weeks.

“If volumes on a weekly basis continue where they are now and don’t substantially increase, we feel quite confident that we’re going to be in a much better position over the next four to six weeks and definitely by the end of summer,” she said.

The department has a service standard time of 10 business days for passport applications submitted at a passport office. Ms. Gould said 96 per cent of those passports are being issued within the standard, but the government’s website says they could still take up to two weeks.

Ms. Gould said the mail option is about “40 per cent less efficient” than in-person service. The government groups processing times for mail with the in-person option at Service Canada centres; the service standard is 20 business days, but processing can take up to nine weeks.

Raphael Girard, a retired assistant deputy minister who was responsible for Passport Canada in 1993, said the government needs to consider more creative solutions to the problem, such as extending passports for a year so officials can catch up on the backlog. He said this could be done by having Canadians bring their expired passports to a government office, where an agent could extend the document with a stamp.

However, a spokesperson for Immigration Minister Sean Fraser said simply extending expiration dates is not possible. Aidan Strickland said amending an expiry date that is not aligned with the electronic expiry date recorded in the Canadian ePassport could create further travel disruptions for the passport holder, and that the individual could also be refused boarding on a plane and denied entry to some countries.

More generally speaking, Mr. Girard argued the government has “lost the sense of operations designed to improve client service.”

“They’re layering on … controls and slowing things down, whereas 90 per cent of the workload is always routine,” he said.

Last month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau established a new task force of cabinet ministers to improve government services, such as passports, and monitor the delays causing chaos at Canada’s airports.

Conservative social development critic Laila Goodridge said Ms. Gould and Mr. Fraser, along with the task force, “continue to fumble managing the delivery and processing of passports. This is indicative of what we’ve seen with the Trudeau government that is unprepared for a predictable increase in demand for travel.” She pointed to a recent government tender for 800 chairs for people to sit on as they wait outside of passport offices.

NDP transport critic Taylor Bachrach said the continued delays for Canadians to get new or renewed passports are unacceptable, and that many people are going to their MPs for help to get their documents.

“Ultimately, the increased demand for passports was entirely predictable. But the Liberals failed to act even though they had months to prepare for travel to return. Now they need to urgently address this problem before more Canadians see their travel plans ruined, including speeding up the hiring process to clear the backlog.”

Source: Ottawa acknowledges it underestimated surge in demand for passports

Filed under Citizenship, Passports Tagged with , , ,

Historian Irving Abella said the struggle for Jewish equality changed Canada for the better

2022/07/08 Leave a comment

Worth reading:

The Canada of the first half of the last century, and particularly from the 1920s through the 1940s, was a foreboding place for Jews, as it was for most immigrants. Closed to most of the world by racist immigration laws that divided the peoples of the world into preferred and (mostly) non-preferred, Canada was a country permeated with xenophobia, nativism and antisemitism. The Jew was the pariah of Canadian society, demeaned, denounced and discriminated against.

For Canadian Jews in these years, quotas and restrictions were a way of life. According to a 1938 study by the Canadian Jewish Congress, few of the country’s teachers and none of its school principals were Jewish. The banks, insurance companies and the large industrial and commercial interests, it charged, also excluded Jews from employment. Department stores did not hire Jews as salespeople. Jewish doctors could not get hospital appointments, and when one Jewish doctor, Sam Rabinovitch, was hired as an intern at the Montreal hospital, the other interns went out on strike, along with other doctors, closing the hospital for a week until Rabinovitch was fired.

If the Jew experienced difficulty finding a job or getting an education, finding a place to live or to vacation was even harder. Increasingly, restrictive covenants were placed on various properties prohibiting their sale to Jews, and at beaches and resorts throughout the nation, signs were springing up that banned Jews. So-called swastika clubs of young hoodlums were formed to intimidate Jews and keep them away from “restricted” beaches. The threat of violence was so great that Jewish leaders took the unusual step of warning the community “not to hold large gatherings in any portion of the city where such a gathering is liable to arouse the animosity of certain classes of the non-Jewish population.”

Why was Canada so antisemitic? There are various reasons. To some extent the massive antisemitic propaganda of the Nazis had its impact. Some were taken in by it and by such American hate-mongers as Henry Ford, Father Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith and dozens of others. It was also a time of depression and the search for scapegoats invariably ended at a Jewish doorstep. Jews were also publicly seen and denounced as troublemakers. The prominence of Jewish names in the left-wing movement seduced many gullible or malevolent Canadians into believing that most Jews were communists. Obviously, many others hated Jews for religious reasons. Much of the antisemitism in Quebec and in fundamentalist areas of Western Canada originated from religious teachings. Jews had killed Christ, had refused to repent or convert to Christianity and, therefore, were damned.

What is most astonishing about this antisemitism is how few and powerless were Canadian Jews at this time. They made up just more than 1 per cent of the population and had no political or economic clout. Clearly they could be seen as a threat only by the paranoid. Equally surprising was the silence of the churches in the face of this frightful and oppressive anti-Jewish feeling.

With the onset of war, if Canadian attitudes toward Jews changed at all, it was for the worse. Fully half of the Canadian people, according to a Gallup poll in 1943, indicated that they wanted no more Jews in the country. At about the same time, Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis was campaigning through the province waving a copy of a document, which he charged showed that the federal government had made a deal with the International Zionist Brotherhood, a fictitious group, to settle 100,000 Jews in Quebec in return for campaign funds for Liberal candidates. Duplessis was decisively elected.

Even the end of the war brought no respite for Canadian Jews. Discovery of the Nazi barbarities against the Jews, and the graphic horrors of the Holocaust detailed by newspapers, magazines and newsreels in theatres across Canada did not lessen antisemitic feelings. Rather, it seemed to exacerbate them.

Nevertheless, it is clear that by 1948, attitudes in Canada were beginning to change. With most of the world’s economies still devastated, Canada was on the brink of becoming a genuine world power. All she needed was more people. Thus Canada’s immigration doors were flung open, and over the next decade, more than 1.5 million newcomers poured through, including thousands of Jews, most of them survivors of death camps.

By this time, the pervasive antisemitism of earlier years had receded. Obviously, the horrors of the Holocaust shocked many Canadians; others were caught up in the dramatic struggle of the Jews in Palestine to create their own state. Though official Canadian policy was to support the British attempts to forcibly blockade Jewish refugees from entering Palestine, it seemed that a large number of Canadians sympathized with the plucky struggle of the beleaguered Jews in the Holy Land.

It was at this propitious moment that Canadian Jewish leaders chose to launch an all-out offensive against discriminatory practices in Canada. This was not the first time such an attempt had been made. In the late 1930s, the Canadian Jewish Congress had set up a committee called the Joint Public Relations Committee (JPRC) with the co-operation of another Jewish communal organization, the B’nai B’rith, to deal with discrimination against Jews in employment. These early campaigns struggled, but in the late 1940s, similar efforts finally started to see some success.

As Jewish soldiers were returning from overseas, they found the same old restrictions barring their way. In a much-publicized incident, a veteran was fired from his salesman’s job in a Toronto hardware store when it was discovered he was Jewish. “I would lose customers,” the storekeeper explained. Others found that skating rinks, swimming pools, golf clubs and hotels refused them admission despite their heroic efforts on behalf of their country.

Outraged that this kind of behaviour was perfectly legal, the Canadian Jewish Congress organized a protest march of various ethnic and religious groups from City Hall to the Icelandia Skating Rink, which had refused to remove its signs restricting admission to gentiles. As a result of the march, the coverage of it by the Toronto Star, and a meeting with Congress officials, the Toronto Police Board ruled that licences of public places were subject to cancellation if the licence holder discriminated against any minority. This was the first of many victories for the Jewish Public Relations Committee (as it was called by then) and for its new partner, the aggressive Jewish Labour Committee. Its 50,000 feisty members would provide the backbone to the Congress’s political lobbying.

Members of both the JPRC and the Jewish Labour Committee were unrelenting in their lobbying. They arranged for delegations to meet Ontario premier Leslie Frost and his cabinet colleagues; they spoke at hundreds of meetings across the country, they planted articles in the press, they met editorial boards; they distributed pamphlets; they embarked on letter-writing campaigns and they arranged for talks on radio and to various service clubs of prominent speakers who supported their views. One of these, senator Wayne Morse (a Republican from Oregon), spoke so passionately and persuasively on the Trans-Canada Network of CBC Radio in favour of fair employment legislation that it had a real impact on one of his listeners, premier Frost.

By 1951 it was clear that the lobbying had made a real difference. Most Ontario newspapers were now in favour of anti-discrimination legislation, as were many city councils across the province. And so, it seemed, was premier Frost. He arranged a quick meeting with the Jewish and civil-liberties organizations and told them secretly that he would be enacting an anti-discrimination law in the next session of the House.

Three weeks later, in the Speech from the Throne, the government of Ontario announced its intention of introducing a fair employment practices act, which would bar discrimination in hiring because of race, creed, colour, nationality, ancestry or place of origin. It was a remarkable piece of legislation and the historians who have written about it (particularly James Walker, Ruth Frager and Carmela Patrias) have described it as one of the Jewish community’s great victories in this country.

Of course employment discrimination did not disappear in Ontario, but the act marked the beginning of an era in which discrimination was no longer acceptable. Both the JPRC and the Jewish Labour Committee saw the legislation as the “thin edge of the wedge.” Once the Ontario government had admitted that discrimination in employment was unjust and immoral, how could it be condoned in other areas such as housing?

Finally, in 1962, the government created the Ontario Human Rights Commission, many of whose powers were those recommended by the Canadian Jewish Congress five years before. The victory was now largely complete. Though obviously racism and discrimination would not disappear, there were now in place mechanisms and legislation to protect minorities. With both anti-discrimination statutes and human-rights commissions successfully established, not only in Ontario but in most provinces, the human-rights lobby could move onto other issues.

Thus, by the 1960s, Canada had turned the corner. For Jews, as well as for this country’s other minorities, that decade was a watershed. Before it existed the old Canada, parochial, nativist, exclusionary; beyond it, a new Canada was taking shape, a Canada of diversity, colour, vibrancy, a Canada of open minds rather than closed doors, a Canada in which Jews and other ethnic groups were quickly becoming part of the Canadian mainstream, and were seen as part of the solution rather than as part of the problem.

The decade began with Canada finally repealing its odious racist immigration laws and opening itself up to all the world’s nations, and it closed with a government commitment to implement an official policy of multiculturalism. And it was in the 1960s that all of the barriers, restrictions and quotas against Jews crumbled, one by one, sector by sector. At long last, after 200 years in the country, the Jewish community would be able to play out its dreams and become an integral part of the very same Canadian society that had excluded it for so long.

Of course the battle for human rights in Canada is not yet won. Racist, homophobic and xenophobic attitudes still manifest themselves too often, and much remains to be done. Yet who can deny that today’s Canada is a far better place, and that its minorities better integrated thanks in large part to the trail-blazing efforts by the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labour Committee.

Irving Abella, a noted scholar of Jewish history, died on July 3. This is an excerpt of a speech he gave to the Canadian Historical Association when he was the group’s president in 2000.

Source: Historian Irving Abella said the struggle for Jewish equality changed Canada for the better

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‘Kaali’ poster row: Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum says it ‘deeply regrets’ offence caused to Hindus; FIR filed

2022/07/07 Leave a comment

A classic example of the intersection between multiculturalism and religion, when the more conservative and fundamentalist elements are all too quick to take offence.

I was posted to Iran during the Rushdie Satanic Verses affair, the classic and extreme example of religious intolerance of contemporary culture:

Days after the poster of the documentary film ‘Kaali’ created an uproar in India and abroad, Aga Khan Museum where the film was screened issued a statement. The museum has said that it deeply regretted the offence caused to the members of the Hindu community. The documentary helmed by NRI film-maker Leena Manimekalai was being showcased at the museum in Toronto in the ‘Under The Tent’ section.

“The museum deeply regrets that one of the 18 short videos from ‘Under The Tent’ and its accompanying social media post have inadvertently caused an offence to the members of the Hindu and other faith communities,” read the statement that was posted on the museum’s website.

The statement further said that the Toronto Metropolitan University brought together works of students of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, each student exploring their individual sense of belonging as part of Canadian multiculturalism for the ‘Under the Tent’ project. The university’s presentation was hosted by Aga Khan Museum with a view to fostering an intercultural understanding and dialogue through arts.

FIR Against Film-maker
Meanwhile, the controversy surrounding the poster continues to rage closer to home. On Tuesday, an FIR was filed against Leena Manimekalai and others for hurting religious sentiments. The FIR was filed in Uttar Pradesh and DCP Central Lucknow, Aparna Kaushik, said that an investigation was underway.

Earlier this week, the Indian High Commission in Canada issued a statement urging the Canadian authorities to take action. The High Commission said in its statement that it has received numerous complaints from the leaders of the Hindu community in Canada.
“Our Consulate General in Toronto has conveyed these concerns to the organizers of the event. We are also informed that several Hindu groups have approached authorities in Canada to take action. We urge the Canadian authorities and the event organizers to withdraw all such provocative material,” read the release.

Filmmaker Manimekalai took to Twitter on Sunday to share a poster of her upcoming film ‘Kaali’ that depicted goddess Kali as smoking with an LGBTQ+ flag in the backdrop. The poster created an uproar on social media demanding the arrest of the NRI film-maker.

Source: ‘Kaali’ poster row: Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum says it ‘deeply regrets’ offence caused to Hindus; FIR filed

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