Leduc and Turp: Quel conflit entre la laïcité et le patrimoine religieux ?

2022/07/13 Leave a comment

Somewhat ironic to argue that laïcité allows for financial support to religious heritage but not to the rights of those with religious symbols. That being said, understand the rationale for financial support or tax breaks for heritage properties, religious or not:

Dans un article publié le 6 juillet 2022 sous le titre « Le congé de taxes des lieux de culte remis en question », Le Devoir nous apprenait que la Commission des finances de la Ville de Montréal suggère « que, dans le contexte de la laïcité de l’État, la Ville demande au gouvernement du Québec une compensation pour les taxes qu’elle ne peut percevoir des communautés religieuses », notamment pour les lieux de culte. Elle a tort. Les problèmes de fiscalité municipale ne peuvent se régler aux dépens de la préservation du patrimoine religieux et de ce qu’il représente pour la société.

Ce faisant, la Commission souscrit aux arguments de ceux qui croient que l’État devrait s’abstenir de financer la sauvegarde du patrimoine religieux ou de lui accorder quelque traitement fiscal favorable, et ce, en vertu du principe de la séparation de l’État et des religions.

Certains se demandent en effet, puisque la plupart des organismes de bienfaisance enregistrés à caractère religieux consacreraient, dit-on, toutes leurs ressources ou presque à des activités liées à la foi et au culte, où se trouve le « bénéfice public tangible ». Un éditorial paru dans ce journal le 8 juin 2019, intitulé « Fiscalité et religion : la neutralité s’impose » posait d’ailleurs la question.

Sans ces avantages fiscaux, il faut savoir que les autorités religieuses ne pourraient tout simplement plus subvenir à l’entretien du patrimoine religieux dont elles ont toujours la charge, ce qui devrait suffire à constater un premier « bénéfice public tangible ».

De plus, il est tout de même ironique de constater que de telles objections sont soulevées à ce moment-ci, lorsque l’on sait que les organismes de défense du patrimoine proposent d’étendre de tels avantages fiscaux aux propriétaires laïques de biens patrimoniaux, qui constituent toujours une charge particulière à ceux qui doivent en assurer la préservation.

Enfin, non seulement ces objecteurs de conscience font preuve d’insensibilité au fait religieux et aux besoins spirituels de plusieurs de leurs concitoyens, mais ils ne font pas de cas de la nécessité de préserver cet héritage pour la société dans son ensemble, sachant que le meilleur moyen d’y parvenir est d’assurer la vocation religieuse et cultuelle de ce patrimoine, dont les retombées dépassent largement le seul cercle des fidèles.

Une question de cohérence

Au-delà de tous ces arguments, cependant, l’on oublie que la laïcité repose aussi sur le principe de la liberté de conscience et de religion, que l’État doit favoriser, non seulement en vertu de la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État et de la Charte des droits et libertés de la personne, mais aussi de la Loi sur la liberté des cultes, et de l’obligation du Québec de se conformer au Pacte international relatif aux droits civils et politiques.

Il faut aussi ajouter qu’aux termes de la Convention européenne des droits de l’homme, la Cour européenne a consacré la liberté des États de contribuer au financement des cultes, autorisant une différence de traitement des cultes pour des motifs objectifs, historiques et raisonnables dans une société donnée, permettant l’attribution d’un impôt ecclésial résultant d’un concordat entre l’État et une confession religieuse, reconnaissant le principe de l’autonomie ecclésiale, affirmant que le financement du culte est par ailleurs le gage de l’exercice collectif de la liberté de religion, le droit européen se montrant flexible en appliquant un principe de subsidiarité, ce qui donne lieu à des solutions diverses en la matière d’un État à l’autre.

Tout cela devrait relancer la question de la nationalisation du patrimoine religieux du Québec. Si notre Loi sur la laïcité de l’État s’inspire du modèle français, il nous faudrait être cohérent, car ce modèle, depuis la Loi du 9 décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des Églises et de l’État, a confié la responsabilité des cathédrales à l’État et celle des églises paroissiales aux communes, conférant ainsi aux autorités civiles la responsabilité du patrimoine religieux français, la France nous devançant en effet tant en ce qui a trait à la gestion de son patrimoine religieux qu’en matière de laïcité, ayant démontré que ces deux notions n’étaient pas incompatibles.

Ce n’est donc pas vers moins de responsabilité à l’égard du patrimoine religieux que devraient tendre les municipalités, mais plutôt à en faire davantage, comme la Loi sur le patrimoine culturel les y invite depuis les dernières modifications à cette loi entrées en vigueur en 2021.

Au demeurant, la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État ne contient aucune interdiction au financement des cultes ni d’exception en ce qui a trait au financement et au traitement fiscal du patrimoine religieux.

La proposition de la Commission des finances de la Ville de Montréal, si elle était adoptée par la Ville de Montréal et le gouvernement du Québec, constituerait une violation flagrante des droits fondamentaux entourant l’exercice collectif de la liberté de religion et de leurs propres obligations à cet égard. Elle est irrecevable. En cela, nous saluons la dissidence à cette proposition d’Alan De Sousa et de Laurent Desbois, respectivement maires des arrondissements de Saint-Laurent et d’Outremont. Ainsi que l’écrivait l’honorable Clément Gascon dans l’arrêt Mouvement laïque québécois c. Saguenay (Ville) de la Cour suprême du Canada, « […] le devoir de neutralité de l’État ne l’oblige pas à s’interdire de célébrer et de préserver son patrimoine religieux ».

Source: Quel conflit entre la laïcité et le patrimoine religieux ?

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Feds aiming to clear passport backlog in next ‘4 to 6 weeks’: minister

2022/07/13 Leave a comment

Or after the summer travel season! But realistic:

Ottawa is acknowledging it underestimated the demand for passports amid relaxed COVID-19 restrictions, and is aiming to clear backlogs by the end of the summer.

Speaking in Vancouver Monday, Families, Children and Social Development Minister Karina Gould described the long waits and uncertainty Canadians seeking the travel documents have faced for months as “totally unacceptable.”

“Where we want to be is people getting their passports well ahead of time when they apply, and that’s what we’re working towards in the next four to six weeks,” she said.

Throughout the spring and early summer, Canadians seeking to renew their passports have faced long, sometimes multi-day lines at Service Canada offices. Many who have mailed in their documentation have reported poor communication and lack of clarity about when their documents will arrive.

In both cases, some applicants have faced processing times of months, sometimes threatening scheduled flights or planned travel.

On Monday, Gould said the federal government had anticipated an uptick in demand when restrictions were relaxed, but not the scale of applications or the way people chose to apply.

Prior to COVID-19, she said 80 per cent of people applied for passports in-person, with 20 per cent applying by mail. This year, that distribution flipped, she said.

“What we didn’t anticipate was the level of surge we were going to receive,” she said.

“Quite frankly the mail system was not sufficiently staffed to deal with that. That is something we are fixing right now.”

Between April and June this year, Canadians submitted more than 808,000 passport applications, 166,000 more than during the same period in 2019.

That’s pushed the volume of applications for this fiscal year to 4.3 million, up from 2.4 million last year, and left federal public servants clocking about 6,000 hours of overtime a week.

Ottawa has hired 600 additional passport workers, but only about 100 of them have completed training, which takes 12 to 15 weeks.

The remaining workers should be coming on the job within the next month, Gould said.

Despite the uncertainty and extreme delays for some, Gould said the majority of Canadians are getting their passports on time. She said those who are approaching their travel dates with not documentation should go to a Service Canada site, where people with urgent need are being prioritized.

Source: Feds aiming to clear passport backlog in next ‘4 to 6 weeks’: minister

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Lost in translation: Patients more likely to die, have serious outcomes when their physicians don’t speak their preferred language

2022/07/12 Leave a comment

Serious study and implications. During my experience as a cancer patient, I often reflected on how hard it must be for patients with weaker language skills, education and income:

Patients treated by physicians who speak their own language are healthier and less likely to die while in hospital, according to a new study led by Ottawa researchers.

The study, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, showed significant differences in outcomes among frail, older patients who were treated by a physician in their own language, compared to those who were not.

Francophones treated by a French-speaking physician had a 24 per cent lower chance of death than those who received care from a non-French-speaking doctor, according to the study. They also had shorter hospital stays and had a 36 per cent lower chance of adverse events, such as falls, while in hospital.

For patients whose first language was neither English nor French, known as allophones, the impact was stark. This group had a 54 per cent lower chance of death when treated by a physician in their own language and a 74 per cent lower chance of hospital-related harms, according to the research.

But fewer than two per cent of allophones and fewer than half of the Francophones in the study received physician care in their own language.

Co-author Dr. Peter Tanuseputro, a physician-scientist at The Ottawa Hospital, Institute du Savior Montfort, Bruyere Research Institute and The Ottawa Hospital, called the findings staggering.

“It’s clearly easier to convey important information about your health in your primary language. Regardless, the more than doubling in odds of serious harms, including death, for patients receiving care in a different language is eye-opening.”

Tanuseputro said the research underscores why it is important for hospitals to pay attention to the language patients speak as well as the languages physicians and other health workers speak.

The findings are likely to resonate in Ottawa and Eastern Ontario, where the Franco-Ontarian community rallied to save Montfort hospital after the Ontario government announced plans to close it in 1997. The battle, won after five years of political activism and legal fights, galvanized the community. Today, Montfort is a Francophone university health institution that provides care in both languages and has a research institute.

Still, Tanuseputro noted that the majority of Franco-Ontarians studied did not get health services in French.

The study’s lead author, Emily Seale, a medical student at the University of Ottawa and Institut du Savoir Montfort, said more must be done to make sure patients are heard and understood by referring them to physicians who speak the same language or by using interpreter services.

“This is not only good patient-centred care, but our research shows that there are grave health consequences when it doesn’t happen.”

Dr. Sharon Johnston, scientific director and associate VP research at the Institut du Savoir Montfort said the study is important because: “(it) helps us quantify the risk of greater harm faced by patients who cannot receive medical care in their preferred language. Understanding and addressing this issue, particularly for our francophone community in Eastern Ottawa and Ontario, is a key part of the mission of Hôpital Montfort and l’Institut du Savoir Montfort.”

The researchers relied partly on data from home care services, which keeps track of patients’ first languages.

They studied more than 189,000 adult home care recipients who had been admitted to hospital between April 2010 and March 2018. They compared patients who received care from a physician in their primary language and those who received care in a different language.

Most of the home care recipients in the study spoke English. Thirteen per cent spoke French and 2.7 per cent spoke another language.

Just over half of the physicians in the study spoke only English and the remainder were multilingual. While 44 per cent of Francophones received care primarily from French-speaking physicians, only 1.6 per cent of allophones received most of their care from physicians who spoke their primary language or one they could understand.

Tanuseputro said, in his own experience, making attempts to find a physician who can provide care in a patient’s language, or translation services, is not always a priority in a busy hospital.

“I am guilty of this too. What our study shows is that there are risks and consequences if you don’t do that.”

Among other suggestions, Tanuseputro said teams of physicians should consider a patient’s language and find someone better able to communicate with the patient. And translation services should be used, even if it takes time.

He also said hospitals should assess patients to understand how well they understand English. If they can’t, hospitals should have interpretive services or multi-lingual family available.

While the study looked at home care patients who were in hospital between 2010 and 2018, Tanuseputro said the situation may well have worsened during periods of the pandemic when family members were generally kept out of the hospital and unable to help interpret.

The study can be found at: https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.212155

Source: Lost in translation: Patients more likely to die, have serious outcomes when their physicians don’t speak their preferred language

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Coy: Why So Many Children of Immigrants Rise to the Top

2022/07/12 Leave a comment

More commentary on Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success, by Ran Abramitzky of Stanford and Leah Boustan of Princeton:

The lack of a shared set of facts about immigration makes it easy for accusatory and often false messages to echo loudly in the run-up to the midterm elections. J.D. Vance, a leading Republican candidate for Ohio’s open Senate seat, claimed in a recent advertisement that “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona has describedimmigration as “full scale invasion.” Tucker Carlson of Fox News told a guest on his show in 2017: “Go to Lowell, Mass., or Lewiston, Maine, or any place where large numbers of immigrants have been moved into a poor community, and it hasn’t become richer. It’s become poorer. That’s real.”

A new book, “Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success,” by two economists, Ran Abramitzky of Stanford and Leah Boustan of Princeton, should undercut some of the fearmongering. They linked census records to pull together what they call “the first set of truly big data about immigration.”

Using the data set, Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan were able to compare the income trajectories of immigrants’ children with those of people whose parents were born in the United States. The economists found that on average, the children of immigrants were exceptionally good at moving up the economic ladder.

Immigrants and their children are assimilating into the United States as quickly now as in the past, the economists found. That’s in line with recent research into the effects of immigration. While “first-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born,” according to a 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the “second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S.”

Second-generation-immigrant success stories have long been a part of America’s history. Looking at census records from 1880, the researchers found that men whose fathers were low-income immigrants made more money as adults than the sons of low-income men born in the United States. (They focused on sons because it was harder to track women from one census to the next, since so many adopted their husbands’ names at marriage.) Because of privacy restrictions, they had access to individual data only through the 1940 census. They used other sources for subsequent years.

Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan observed the same pattern a century later. Children born around 1980 to men from Mexico, India, Brazil and almost every other country outearned the children of U.S.-born men.

“America really does have golden streets that allow immigrants to quickly make more than they could have earned at home,” they write. But, they add, “moving up the economic ladder in America — and catching up to the U.S.-born — takes time.”

Once Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan found abundant evidence of second-generation immigrants’ upward mobility, they tried to figure out why those children did so well.

They arrived at two answers. First, the children had an easy time outdoing parents whose careers were inhibited by poor language skills or a lack of professional credentials. The classic example is an immigrant doctor who winds up driving a cab in the United States.

Second, immigrants tended to settle in parts of the country experiencing strong job growth. That gave them an edge over native-born Americans who were firmly rooted in places with faltering economies. Immigrants are good at doing something difficult: leaving behind relatives, friends and the familiarity of home in search of prosperity. The economists found that native-born Americans who do what immigrants do — move toward opportunity — have children who are just as upwardly mobile as the children of immigrants.

Looking at maps of where immigrants have settled at different points in time, it’s clear that those regions were also areas of productivity and economic growth. In 1910, European immigrants went to work in the factories of the Midwest and New England. In 1980, immigrants from elsewhere in the Americas filled jobs in rapidly growing parts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Florida.

If immigrants are so upwardly mobile, why doesn’t it seem that way? One reason is that there are more newcomers than there have been in decades and most haven’t had time yet to get ahead. The share of foreign-born people in the United States is back to the levels of the first two decades of the 20th century.

Another reason is that most immigrants are arriving well below native-born Americans socioeconomically. They are more likely, Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan found, than immigrants of the past to come from countries that are significantly poorer than the United States, including El Salvador, India and Vietnam. But it’s those immigrants who start at the bottom who ascend the most. In contrast, affluent, educated immigrants tend to be the least upwardly mobile, simply because they’re already at or near the top.

Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan dispute the argument that immigrants frequently take jobs from native-born Americans. Less skilled immigrants gravitate toward jobs for which there is relatively little competition from native-born Americans, such as picking crops, while highly skilled immigrants often create more jobs for native-born Americans by starting businesses and inventing things, they write.

The research of Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan has made headlines before, but in their new book they broaden and deepen the narrative with excerpts from diaries and oral histories of immigrants. Signe Tornbloom, 18, a daughter of hardscrabble Swedish farmers, immigrated alone in 1916 after receiving a letter that said, more or less: “Well, you’d better come over here. Everything is much better than it is at home.”

The notion that immigrants have become a permanent underclass, isolated from the American mainstream, is popular among immigration restrictionists — as well as among some pro-immigration groups that say immigrants need more help to break out of poverty. The truth is that today’s immigrants are advancing just as swiftly as those of the past. “The American dream,” Mr. Abramitzky said in an interview, “is just as alive now as it was a century ago.”

Source: Why So Many Children of Immigrants Rise to the Top

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B.C. scholar with expired Chinese passport says renewing it could put personal safety at risk

2022/07/12 Leave a comment

Reasonable assessment of risk:

A prominent Chinese human rights scholar working in Vancouver says her career and personal safety are at risk because of an expired passport and delays in Canada’s immigration system.

Guldana Salimjan is a postdoctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University, who also directs the University of British Columbia’s Xinjiang Documentation Project, a federally-funded program documenting the internment of ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region. The project has been referenced during debates in Parliament.

Salimjan has a job pending at Indiana University in the U.S. — but no paperwork to cross the Canada-U.S. border.

Source: B.C. scholar with expired Chinese passport says renewing it could put personal safety at risk

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Refugee sponsor groups accuse Ottawa of ‘breach of agreement’ as families wait to reunite

2022/07/12 Leave a comment

Another example of IRCC operational difficulties? The Mennonites are one of the easiest and most reasonable groups to work with:

More than 100 groups across Canada that have formal agreements with Ottawa to privately sponsor refugees are accusing the federal government of breaching their agreements, leaving them unable to help vulnerable people.

These groups, known as Sponsorship Agreement Holders (SAHs), are religious, humanitarian, or community organizations that assume the full financial, legal and logistical obligations related to settling refugees in Canada. They often work with smaller community groups that handle the fundraising and arrange, among other things, housing, schools, and jobs.

Every year, SAHs are each allotted a certain number of refugees — for a combined total of roughly 10,000 to 12,000 — for whom they can submit applications to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which then carries out interviews, medical check-ups, and security clearance.

The Canadian Refugee Sponsorship Agreement Holders Association (SAH Council) wrote a letter to the federal minister, Shawn Fraser, on June 20 to complain that Ottawa still hasn’t given its members their annual allotment of sponsorship spaces, which it says is “a breach of the Sponsorship Agreement.” It’s calling for the immediate release of 2022 allocations.

“SAH’s are facing a quickly diminishing window of time to submit new sponsorship applications within this calendar year,” the Council said, adding that it’s difficult to plan or confirm support to vulnerable refugee families.

“It’s frustrating,” said Mark Bigland-Pritchard, a migration and resettlement coordinator for the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a faith-based agency that’s had a sponsorship agreement with Ottawa for about 40 years.

“The bulk of our allocation, we just cannot submit until the time comes that they permit us to.”

These delays endanger thousands of people who are facing persecution or living in dangerous places, he said.

Families separated, refugees at risk

Three applications that are still sitting on his desk, ready to be submitted, belong to nine-year-old Adnan Kharsa’s parents and sister. As CBC News reported in April, the Syrian boy has been separated from his family, who are in Turkey, for five years. He made it to Saskatoon with his grandmother and uncle as a privately-sponsored refugee last year.

Adnan’s aunt, Doha Kharsa, who lives in Saskatoon, formed a sponsorship group in the community and raised $40,000 to privately sponsor Adnan’s parents and sister. Then, she teamed up with MCC, as the sponsorship agreement holder, to submit their applications as part of its 2022 allotment.

Bigland-Pritchard says MCC is normally allotted about 400 spaces a year, and those numbers are usually confirmed in February. That didn’t happen this year. In May, the federal government allowed each sponsorship agreement holder in Canada to submit 25 applications.

Kharsa was disappointed to learn Ottawa hasn’t accepted more applications, including hers.

“It’s shocking,” she said. “I don’t know how to tell my mom, or even Adnan, or even my brother in Turkey about this.”

“I don’t understand why. The money is there. The applications are ready to go. So why the delay?”

In the letter to Fraser, the SAH Council said it “acknowledged the tremendous pressure IRCC currently faces in its response to multiple global crises.” It said IRCC had indicated to SAH Council that the delay is, in part, due to what it called “processing challenges” at the Resettlement Operations Centre in Ottawa.

In a statement to CBC News, IRCC did not offer an explanation for the delays.

“The Department is actively working to release the remaining 2022 allocations to SAHs,” said the statement attributed to a spokesperson for Fraser.

“We can confirm that we received a letter from the Canadian Refugee Sponsorship Agreement Holders (SAH) Association and will be responding directly to address their concerns. We look forward to continuing our working relationship with the Canadian Refugee Sponsorship Agreement Holders.”

2-3 year wait after application goes in

Bigland-Pritchard said it’s critical to resume steady sponsorship submissions because getting the application into the system is only the first step.

After that, the processing time for MCC’s privately-sponsored refugees is about two to three years. For example, MCC is still waiting for half of the refugees they applied for in 2019 to arrive in Canada, and most of the people they applied for in 2020 haven’t arrived.

Source: Refugee sponsor groups accuse Ottawa of ‘breach of agreement’ as families wait to reunite

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Chouinard: Demandeurs d’asile largués [childcare subsidies]

2022/07/12 Leave a comment

Of note:

La décision de Québec de porter en appel un jugement qui redonnait enfin aux demandeurs d’asile le droit aux garderies subventionnées, et ce, après quatre ans d’interdit, traduit une politique migratoire insensible à la vulnérabilité des citoyens en attente d’un statut. Les organismes de défense des droits de ces demandeurs, qui ont un permis de travail mais ne peuvent l’utiliser faute de moyens, ont raison d’être exaspérés.

Ce dossier à la fois complexe et d’une simplicité désarmante nourrit les manchettes depuis quatre ans. En avril 2018, le gouvernement libéral de Philippe Couillard a décidé sans crier gare de réinterpréter l’article 3 du Règlement sur la contribution gratuite de la Loi sur les services de garde éducatifs à l’enfance. Alors que cet article donnait jusque-là accès aux garderies à 8,70 $ par jour à tout titulaire d’un « permis de travail et [qui] séjourne au Québec principalement afin d’y travailler », une nouvelle lecture de cet article a exclu les demandeurs d’asile, qu’on a jugés présents au Québec pas « principalement » pour travailler. Du jour au lendemain, cette catégorie de migrants s’est donc retrouvée privée d’accès aux services de garde subventionnés, et ce, malgré le fait qu’ils détenaient un permis de travail.

En prenant le pouvoir en 2018, la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) n’a pas jugé bon d’annuler la décision du précédent gouvernement, qui avait soulevé l’ire de tous les groupes de défense des droits des réfugiés et des demandeurs d’asile. L’accès à la garderie subventionnée revêt une importance capitale dans la vie de personnes nouvellement arrivées au Québec et qui désirent s’intégrer, travailler et apprendre le français. Pour les enfants, cet accès est capital. Même les arguments économiques ne tiennent pas la route pour justifier cet entêtement obscur de Québec à exclure ce groupe de citoyens de l’accès à la garderie, car, faute de moyens financiers, plusieurs mères doivent renoncer à travailler, et ce, même si elles détiennent un permis de travail. En pleine pénurie de main-d’oeuvre, c’est d’une absurdité sans nom.

Les médias ont rapporté nombre d’histoires invraisemblables : des mères célibataires forcées de se rabattre sur l’aide sociale et de refuser nombre d’offres d’emploi, car le prix d’une garderie privée — environ 50 $ par jour, contre 8,70 $ dans les garderies soutenues par Québec — équivalait littéralement au montant mensuel de leur loyer. Alors que les pénuries de main-d’oeuvre dans nombre de secteurs cruciaux sont en train de créer un Québec vivant sur le mode gruyère, avec des trous béants dans son offre de services essentiels, on tournerait le dos à un groupe de travailleurs prêts à s’intégrer dans la société québécoise par le truchement du travail ?

Québec prétexte le fort afflux de migrants, les listes d’attente pour les garderies subventionnées et les délais d’attente déraisonnables imposés par le fédéral pour justifier son refus de relire avec justesse l’article 3 du Règlement ; mais la vérité est qu’il ajoute lui-même des embûches sur la route déjà tortueuse de l’intégration des migrants. En outre, et cela est une véritable disgrâce pour un gouvernement dont le slogan de la dernière campagne électorale dans le dossier d’immigration était « en prendre moins, mais en prendre soin », l’interprétation de la CAQ prend pour cible un groupe vulnérable. C’est en totale contradiction avec toutes les politiques humanitaires de soutien aux demandeurs d’asile.

Il a donc fallu se tourner vers les tribunaux pour savoir si Québec avait erré en décidant de proposer une nouvelle lecture de l’article 3. Fin mai dernier, le juge Marc St-Pierre, de la Cour supérieure, a décrété que oui. « [Le Tribunal] déclare que l’article 3 du Règlement sur la contribution réduite a été adopté sans habilitation législative et est par conséquent ultra vires et nul », a-t-il conclu, ce qui a provoqué un immense soulagement du côté des organismes qui s’agitaient depuis quatre ans pour ce revirement de situation. La victoire fut de courte durée, car le 7 juillet dernier, Québec a décidé d’en appeler de la décision. C’est navrant.

À l’approche d’un 3e Sommet de l’immigration, qui doit normalement se tenir en novembre prochain, il serait intéressant de valider la cohérence de l’ensemble des politiques d’immigration et des pratiques de terrain, car l’ensemble de l’oeuvre laisse poindre nombre de ratés et d’invraisemblances qui nuisent aux objectifs économiques et aux politiques sociales du Québec. On a fait grand cas des seuils d’immigration, résumant le dossier à une affaire de chiffres, alors que le coeur du travail se trouve dans l’intégration — ratée — de ceux qui y sont.

La souque-à-la-corde qui se joue entre Ottawa et Québec autour de ce dossier crucial ne vient d’aucune manière donner de l’air au Québec, il faut le rappeler. Ottawa est empêtré dans une lourdeur administrative et des délais qui font honte, et dont pâtit le Québec. Mais celui-ci doit honorer ses promesses envers les personnes à qui il ouvre sa porte et leur permettre d’accéder de la manière la plus rapide et la plus digne au marché de l’emploi.

Source: Demandeurs d’asile largués

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Zelensky orders PM to consider introducing exam for obtaining Ukrainian citizenship

2022/07/12 Leave a comment

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has instructed Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal to consider the issue of introducing a mandatory exam for obtaining Ukrainian citizenship.

That’s according to the electronic petitions section on the website of the head of state, Ukrinform reports.

A respective petition was registered by Vitalii Kapustian on May 23 and received 26,578 votes (out of the required 25,000). The initiator of the petition explained that since 2014, when Russia started its war against Ukraine, almost 52,000 Russians have immigrated to Ukraine. More than 19,000 of them received Ukrainian citizenship.

Since a new active phase of the war started on February 24, 2022, the flow of Russian nationals wishing to obtain Ukrainian citizenship has not decreased. Currently, candidates do not need to know the Ukrainian language, history and laws of Ukraine to obtain Ukrainian citizenship. They need to submit a small list of documents and an application for citizenship.

“Such a system, with no even basic filters, allows all candidates to obtain citizenship and, in the future, not to make any efforts to integrate into Ukrainian society,” the petition reads.

Therefore, the author of the document proposed introducing a mandatory exam for obtaining Ukrainian citizenship, which will consist of a test on the Ukrainian language, a test on the history of Ukraine, a test on knowledge of the Constitution of Ukraine, and the study of the National Anthem of Ukraine.

Source: Zelensky orders PM to consider introducing exam for obtaining Ukrainian citizenship

Filed under Multiculturalism

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

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

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 , , ,

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