Jolin-Barrette tend la main à la France pour défendre la langue française

2022/06/27 Leave a comment

The usual wilful or unwilful mischaracterization of multiculturalism as not being about integration in Canada:

Il y avait longtemps qu’un ministre du Québec n’avait pas prononcé un tel discours en France. À l’heure où les relations entre la France et le Québec se déclinent le plus souvent au rythme des échanges économiques, le ministre de la Justice et de la Langue française avait choisi de donner à sa communication un contenu nettement politique.

Pour Simon Jolin-Barrette, il est temps que la France et le Québec unissent leurs forces pour défendre le français non seulement dans leur pays respectif, mais partout dans le monde.

« Le Québec vous tend la main, a-t-il déclaré. Il vous convie à une union des forces entre nos deux nations, basée sur la certitude que le français n’est pas une cause du passé, mais un ferment d’avenir. Un moteur de résistance et de renaissance. »

Dans la grande salle des séances de l’Académie française, le ministre qui n’était pas venu à Paris depuis l’âge de ses 18 ans s’est adressé à une centaine de personnes, dont une douzaine d’académiciens. Visiblement ému de se retrouver en ce lieu fondé par Richelieu à l’époque où naissait la Nouvelle-France, il s’est présenté comme le « descendant de Jean Jolin, un modeste meunier ». C’est la gorge nouée qu’il a déclaré : « Je n’ai ni votre plume ni votre épée. Mais c’est inspiré par toute la fougue du peuple québécois que je prends la parole, en ces murs. »

Le « rouleau compresseur anglo-américain »

Comparant la loi 101 à l’ordonnance Villers-Cotterêt qui, en 1539, établit la primauté du français dans tous les actes publics du Royaume de France, il a brossé un tableau d’ensemble de l’histoire et de l’évolution du français au Québec. Sans oublier d’expliquer en détail les raisons de la nouvelle loi 96, destinée, a-t-il dit, à combattre les « nouveaux périls [qui] guettent la langue française ».

Devant une salle conquise, le ministre en a surtout appelé à « notre devoir de vigilance à l’égard de la langue française » ne manquant pas d’écorcher au détour « le multiculturalisme canadien […] qui combat, dit-il, les prétentions du Québec à se constituer en nation distincte ». Il n’a pas oublié non plus « la révolution numérique des GAFAM », ce « rouleau compresseur anglo-américain, qui bouscule l’écosystème de notre langue et de notre culture ».

Évoquant « des articles diffamatoires contre le Québec […] publiés […] dans des journaux américains et canadiens anglais », le ministre a rappelé avec aplomb que « la langue française n’a jamais été un fait ethnique. Elle a toujours été un fait de culture et de civilisation. »

Avec des mots qu’on n’avait pas entendus depuis longtemps à Paris, le ministre n’a pas hésité d’en appeler directement à la France. « Rien ne serait plus naturel, dit-il, que la France, dans ce monde nouveau, se fasse le porte-parole de la diversité des cultures et de la dignité des nations. Il ne s’agit pas, vous m’avez bien compris, de s’opposer à la révolution de notre temps, mais d’y participer pleinement en y faisant respecter ce que nous sommes. »

Cette invitation de l’Académie française s’inscrit dans le sursaut qui a récemment secoué les Immortels dans la défense de la langue française, nous a expliqué l’académicien et poète Michael Edwards. Depuis un an, l’Académie et son secrétaire perpétuel, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, n’ont pas hésité à intervenir publiquement pour critiquer le bilinguisme qui a envahi certains milieux en France. Ils ont notamment demandé au gouvernement la suppression de la nouvelle carte d’identité entièrement bilingue (anglais-français). L’Académie a aussi publié un important rapport sur l’influence de l’anglais dans la communication institutionnelle. Elle y dénonce l’anglomanie qui s’est particulièrement répandue depuis l’élection d’Emmanuel Macron.

Une invitation « historique »

« Nous faisons cause commune. […] Merci de nous insuffler un peu de votre détermination », a déclaré le chancelier de l’Institut de France, Xavier Darcos. Présent à la séance, l’écrivain haïtien et québécois Dany Laferrière n’a pas hésité à qualifier d’« historique » cette invitation, puisque peu de représentants politiques québécois ont eu l’honneur de s’adresser ainsi directement aux Immortels.

« Je suis particulièrement sensible à la façon dont, au Québec comme en France, le français peut servir à cimenter l’adhésion des nouveaux arrivants », nous a déclaré l’académicien, romancier, diplomate et médecin Jean-Christophe Rufin. « Il n’y a pas d’opposition entre la tradition et l’ouverture. »

Jeudi, Simon Jolin-Barrette a aussi rencontré la toute nouvelle ministre française de la Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, à qui il a aussi fait valoir l’importance que le Québec et la France défendent leur langue en commun. Dans ses interventions, le ministre évoque aussi la solidarité qui unit la France et le Québec sur la question de la laïcité.

« J’ai reçu un accueil très positif de la part du gouvernement français et on m’a indiqué que le président Macron était très sensible à la question de la langue française, dit-il. […] pour nous il s’agit d’une main tendue afin de construire ensemble des alliances qui vont permettre d’être sensibilisé à la défense de la langue française. Si l’État français se mobilise aussi fort que le fait l’État québécois présentement, c’est une lutte qu’on va pouvoir mener ensemble. »

En ce 24 juin, Simon Jolin-Barrette participera aux célébrations de la Fête nationale à la Délégation générale du Québec à Paris. En terminant, le ministre a promis de ne pas attendre aussi longtemps que la dernière fois avant de revenir en France.

Source: Jolin-Barrette tend la main à la France pour défendre la langue française

Article in English, with Premier Legault comments:

In a rare speech before France’s Academie Française — the body charged with protecting the French language in its home country — one of Quebec’s top ministers said that Canadian multiculturalism is a thorn in Quebec’s side.

People are failing to see that Quebec’s controversial recent laws, both language law Bill 96 and even securalism law Bill 21, are themselves about protecting a fragile culture, said Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette.

We’re in a time when the “diversity of cultures is becoming just as threatened as the diversity of fauna and flora,” he said in the Thursday speech — referring to Quebec’s French-speaking culture.

Jolin-Barrette is Quebec’s minister of justice and also its minister for the French language, making him deeply involved in both pieces of legislation.In the lengthy speech, he went over the history of Quebec, from its founding as a French colony to the Quiet Revolution and beyond.

But one thing is a particular problem, he said: ensuring that newcomers to Quebec learn to live in French.

“One of our greatest challenges is to involve immigrants in our national project,” he said.

“We are the neighbours of a great power, the United States, and we operate within a federation with an anglophone majority. The continental and global linguistic dynamic favors English in every way.”

He heaped criticism on Canadian federal law that protects individual rights, calling this emphasis on the individual “nearly absolute,” to the detriment of Quebec’s collective rights.

“Although our project is thwarted by Canadian multiculturalism, which finds an equivalent in what you call communitarianism and which combats the claims of Quebec to constitute itself as a distinct nation,” Jolin-Barrette continued, “the French language must really become the language of use of all Quebecers.”

Despite earlier laws forcing all children of immigrants to attend school in French, he said it hasn’t been enough, leading the current government to clamp down on English in post-secondary colleges by stemming their growth with enrollment caps.

“Upon graduating from high school… an alarming proportion of students, especially those whose first language is neither English nor French, rush into the anglophone network to pursue their studies,” he said.

He also explicitly linked Bill 21 with the same struggle. Arguably the current government’s most controversial bill of their four years in power, it banned certain public servants, including teachers and police, from wearing religious symbols at work.

In practice, it affected female Muslim teachers most heavily, preventing school boards from hiring or promoting any hijab-wearing teachers. Challenges to it are still before the courts and are expected to end up at Canada’s Supreme Court.

“Law 96 on the French language does not come alone,” said Jolin-Barrette.

“It was adopted after Law 21 on secularism, which I also had the honor of piloting, always with the same idea of strengthening the autonomy and personality of the State of Quebec.”

LEGAULT SAYS ALL CULTURES NOT ‘ON THE SAME LEVEL’

When asked about Minister Jolin-Barrette’s comments in Paris today, Premier François Legault said he is opposed to putting “all cultures on the same level” and stressed the importance of having a “culture of integration” above all else.

“So that’s why we oppose multiculturalism. We prefer to concentrate on what we call ‘inter-culturalism’ where you have one culture, the Quebec culture, where we try to integrate the newcomers, but we want to add to this culture,” the premier said.

“I think new people coming to Quebec — they add to our culture. But it’s important to have a culture where we integrate, especially to our language.”

Legault also argued this is in direct opposition to the Canadian model of multiculturalism.

“I see that Mr. Trudeau is pushing for multiculturalism, so he doesn’t want us to have a culture and a language where we integrate newcomers,” the premier said.

MEDIA CRITIQUES OF BILL 96 ARE ‘LAZY,’ JOLIN-BARRETTE SAYS

In his speech, Jolin-Barrette addressed criticism that embracing English and bilingualism is a way of being open to the world, whether you see it as the language of Shakespeare or “Silicon Valley.”

But that’s a misplaced idea, the minister argued.

“What is presented as an openness to the world too often masks acculturation, which comes with a significant loss of memory and identity,” he said.

He said gone are the times when people can request to be served in English or French in Quebec, as in a “self-service business.”

And Jolin-Barrette made a special point of attacking English Canadian media’s coverage of Bill 96.

“Recently, defamatory articles against Quebec have been published with too much complacency in American and English Canadian newspapers,” he said.

“Lazy authors depict our fight from the most denigrating and insulting angle, trying to pass it off as a rearguard fight, a form of authoritarianism.”

“Our fight for the French language is just, it is a universal fight, that of a nation which has peacefully resisted the will to power of the strongest.”

For a large portion of the speech, Jolin-Barrette spoke of the time before the Quiet Revolution, when, he said, French itself was being lost in Quebec.

“A vulnerable proletariat was born, whose contaminated language quickly switched to Franglais,” he said.

“The English-speaking oligarchy, heir to British power, imposed its language and its imagination….in the 1950s, French-Canadians lived in towns where commercial signage was often in English.”

At another point, he called French the greatest of the Western languages, with the biggest literary influence.

In those decades, however, “French Canada was one of the very few places in the world where the French language was a sign of social inferiority,” he said.

Source: Quebec is ‘thwarted’ by Canadian multiculturalism, minister says in France speech

Filed under Interculturalisme, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Ontario 2022 Election MPP Diversity

2022/06/27 Leave a comment

Had some time to do a quick review on the diversity of Ontario MPPs elected in 2022. Citizen percentages are from the 2016 census with the percentage of visible minorities likely to increase by a few percentage points in the 2021 census.

  • Percentage of women MPPs has declined from 39.5 percent
  • Percentage of visible minority MPPs has increased from 21 percent.
  • Percentage of Indigenous MPPs has from 7.5 percent.

The declines in the percentage of women and Indigenous peoples reflect the PCs picking up a number of NDP seats.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Prime Minister announces new task force to improve government services for Canadians: When in doubt, appoint a task force…

2022/06/27 Leave a comment

Hard to know whether to laugh and cry.

Given that IRCC is responsible for both immigration and citizenship backlogs, and has the policy and program responsibility for the passport program with Service Canada providing in-person service and processing, hard to see this as anything else but communications spin.

PCO could simply have weekly meetings at the DM or ADM level with IRCC and Service Canada to monitor and keep the pressure on. Happened during my time over 20 years ago at PCO on certain high profile issues and unlikely that this approach has changed drastically.

Cabinet task forces mean more time preparing for meetings and briefings and less time on the concrete operational changes needed to address backlogs.

The government ended its “deliverology” unit in PCO in 2020 but its focus was more on government priorities and commitments than existing programs (covered by departmental reports and TBS).

And as others have noted, perhaps a pause in policy initiatives and expanded immigration levels until the backlogs are sorted out:

Canadians deserve high-quality and efficient government services that are accessible, timely, and make their lives easier. The delays in immigration application and passport processing are unacceptable and the Government of Canada is urgently working to resolve them as soon as possible.

The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced the creation of a new task force to improve government services, with a focus on reducing wait times for Canadians. The task force, a Committee of Cabinet ministers, will review service delivery, identify gaps and areas for improvement, and make recommendations to ensure Canadians from coast to coast to coast receive the highest quality of service.

As we recover from the pandemic and increasingly adjust to a fast-moving world where more Canadians are once again relying on government services, they have experienced delays in delivery that are far from acceptable. The task force will drive action to improve the processing of passports and immigration applications by identifying priority areas for action and outlining short- and longer-term solutions, with a focus on reducing wait times, clearing out backlogs, and improving the overall quality of services provided to Canadians. As labour shortages continue to lead to air travel delays around the world, the task force will also monitor the situation at Canadian airports.

The Government of Canada is working hard to improve the delivery of services that Canadians rely on every day.

Quote

“We know service delays, particularly in recent months, are unacceptable. We will continue to do everything we can to improve the delivery of these services in an efficient and timely manner, and this new task force will help guide the work of the government to better meet the changing needs of Canadians and continue to provide them with the high-quality services they need and deserve.”The Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada

Quick Facts

  • The members of the task force on Services to Canadians are:
    • The Hon. Marci Ien, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Youth (Co-Chair)
    • The Hon. Marc Miller, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations (Co-Chair)
    • The Hon. Randy Boissonnault, Minister of Tourism and Associate Minister of Finance
    • The Hon. Mona Fortier, President of the Treasury Board
    • The Hon. Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion
    • The Hon. Gudie Hutchings, Minister of Rural Economic Development
    • The Hon. Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities
    • The Hon. Diane Lebouthillier, Minister of National Revenue
    • The Hon. Mary Ng, Minister of International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development
    • The Hon. Harjit S. Sajjan, Minister of International Development and Minister responsible for the Pacific Economic Development Agency of Canada
  • Ministers responsible for the relevant departments, including the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, and the Minister of Transport, will be ex-officio members of the task force.
  • Other members of Cabinet may be invited to participate in task force meetings to provide advice and recommendations on issues related to their respective portfolios.

Source: https://pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2022/06/25/prime-minister-announces-new-task-force-improve-government-services

Filed under Immigration, Passports Tagged with , ,

Beijing may have tried to discourage Canadians from voting Conservative: federal unit

2022/06/25 Leave a comment

Not surprising:

A federal research unit detected what might be a Chinese Communist Party information operation that aimed to discourage Canadians of Chinese heritage from voting for the Conservatives in the last federal election.

The Sept. 13, 2021, analysis by Rapid Response Mechanism Canada, which tracks foreign interference, says researchers observed Communist Party media accounts on Chinese social media platform Douyin widely sharing a narrative that the Conservatives would all but sever diplomatic relations with Beijing.

The report, obtained by The Canadian Press through the Access to Information Act, was prepared just a week before Canadians went to the polls.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals emerged from the Sept. 20 national ballot with a renewed minority mandate, while the Conservatives, led by Erin O’Toole, formed the official Opposition.

O’Toole, who is no longer leader, claimed on a podcast recorded this month that the Conservatives lost eight or nine seats to foreign interference from China.

Rapid Response Mechanism Canada, based at Global Affairs Canada, produces open data analysis to chart trends, strategies and tactics in foreign interference.

Its work supports the G7 RRM, an initiative to strengthen co-ordination to identify and respond to threats to the major industrial democracies.

The analysis of messaging about the Conservative party was part of RRM Canada’s effort to monitor the digital information environment for signs of foreign state-sponsored information manipulation in the general election.

Conservative MP Michael Chong, the party’s foreign affairs critic, said in an interview the analysis is “another piece of evidence that the Communist leadership in Beijing interfered in the last general election by spreading disinformation.”

RRM Canada says it manually reviewed Chinese social media platforms including WeChat, Douyin, Weibo, Xigua and Bilibili, and conducted open-source forensic digital analysis using website archives, social listening tools, and cross-platform social media ranking tools.

The analysts first noticed the narrative about the Conservatives in two articles published Sept. 8 by the Global Times, a state-owned media tabloid.

RRM Canada believes the Global Times coverage was prompted by a story in the Ottawa-based Hill Times newspaper that examined Canadian parties’ positions on Canada-China relations. The analysis says it is likely that the Global Times was the first Chinese publication to pick up on the Ottawa publication’s content, with its two articles getting over 100,000 page views apiece.

RRM Canada notes the timing coincided with the first federal leaders’ debate and increasingly close poll numbers. Similar pieces published by major Canadian media outlets earlier in September, as well as the Conservative party platform released in August, elicited no response from state-controlled media in China, the analysis says.

Several popular Canada-focused WeChat news accounts began engaging with the Global Times narrative on Sept. 9, copying the content and form without crediting the publication, “obscuring the narrative’s point of origin,” the analysts found.

Accounts also added commentary about the Tories to the articles, such as “Chinese are frightened by the platform,” and questioned whether “Chinese compatriots should support the Conservatives if they use this rhetoric.”

“Unless otherwise credited, WeChat users would not know that the narrative about the Conservatives and O’Toole originated from the Global Times and would assume the articles were original reporting from the Canadian WeChat accounts.”

Many WeChat news accounts that serve Canadians are registered to people in China and despite being well-established news sources, “some may have unclear links” to Chinese Communist Party media groups, the analysis says.

The researchers were “unable to determine whether there is co-ordination between the CCP media that originally promoted the narrative and the popular WeChat news accounts that service Chinese-speaking Canadians that are now amplifying the narrative,” the Sept. 13 analysis cautions.

“RRM Canada is also unable to determine whether there was inauthentic activity that boosted user engagement with the narrative as Chinese social media platforms are completely non-transparent.”

However, Communist Party media accounts on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, published videos that repeated a Sept. 8 Global Times headline, the analysis says. For instance, the Douyin account of Xinhua, China’s state press agency, shared a video saying the Conservative platform mentions China “31 times” and that an “expert” says the party “almost wants to break diplomatic relations with China.”

The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa did not respond to a request for comment on the RRM Canada analysis.

Among the Conservative platform planks in the election campaign were promises to stand up to Beijing on human rights issues, diversify supply chains to move them away from China, adopt a presumption against allowing Beijing’s state-owned entities to take over Canadian companies, and work toward less global reliance on critical minerals from China.

Chong says it’s clear that proxies were spreading disinformation on behalf of Beijing in the federal election.

“It’s hard to measure whether that was the reason for the loss of some Conservative MPs. But I think we can safely say that it was a contributing factor.”

If Beijing comes to the same conclusion, China “may very well be emboldened to do something much bigger in a future federal election, undermining our democratic process,” Chong said.

Under a federal protocol, there would be a public announcement if a panel of senior bureaucrats determined that an incident — or an accumulation of incidents — threatened Canada’s ability to have a free and fair election. There was no such announcement last year.

At a House of Commons committee meeting early this month, Bill Blair, public safety minister during the election campaign, said while “we’ve all heard anecdotes and various opinions,” he had not directly received “any information from our intelligence services” that provided evidence of foreign interference in the campaign.

Deputy minister Rob Stewart told the meeting there were, “as you would expect,” activities on social media that would constitute disinformation and attempts to influence votes. “There was no threat to the overall integrity of the election.”

The Canadian Election Misinformation Project, which brought together several academic researchers, found Chinese officials and state media commented on the election with an apparent aim to convince Canadians of Chinese origin to vote against the Conservative party in 2021.

“Misleading information and information critical of certain candidates circulated on Chinese-language social media platforms. However, we find no evidence that Chinese interference had a significant impact on the overall election.”

The Conservatives “could have done a better job” of countering such messaging, Chong said. “Clearly we didn’t, and that’s a lesson learned.”

Even so, the federal government needs to actively counter foreign disinformation between election campaigns, Chong said. During campaigns, the government should make analyses from the Rapid Response Mechanism immediately available to inform the public, he added.

Fen Hampson, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University who closely watches China, agrees that more transparency would be beneficial.

He argues for broadening the analytical process, perhaps through creation of a centre that includes non-governmental players, gathers information from various sources and regularly publishes reports about apparent foreign interference.

“That takes it out of the domestic political arena, which is always going to be highly charged.”

Source: Beijing may have tried to discourage Canadians from voting Conservative: federal unit

Filed under foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

The U.S. is reckoning with its troubled past of Indian boarding schools

2022/06/25 Leave a comment

Long overdue. Having an Indigenous head of the Dept of Interior makes a difference:

When the U.S. federal government began its Indian Boarding School Initiative in the mid-19th century, the goal was clear: to erase Indigenous cultures through a process of forced assimilation.

Now, the head of the Department of the Interior hopes to address the generations-long fallout from those policies.

On Wednesday, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland advocated for a Truth and Healing Commission to examine past U.S. government efforts to eradicate the languages, identities and cultural practices of Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians. Her comments came as she updated the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on her department’s ongoing investigation into federal boarding schools, which released its first report last month.

Haaland told the committee the story behind the federal boarding schools is “a part of America’s story we must tell.”

“While we cannot change that history, I believe that our nation will benefit from a full understanding of the truth of what took place and a focus on healing the wounds of the past,” she said.

The U.S. government operated hundreds of Indian boarding schools

Between 1819 and 1969, the federal government operated more than 400 boarding schools across the country and provided support for more than 1,000 others, according to the department’s investigation. It also counted 53 schools with marked and unmarked burial sites of children, a number it says will likely increase as the investigation continues.

Haaland was speaking in support of the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act, which could allow Congress to issue subpoenas to non-federal entities to obtain more detailed information about the locations of the burial sites. It would also help trace the identities of the children back to their families, work with tribal leaders to arrange repatriation in a culturally-appropriate manner, and end removal of Indigenous children from their families by state adoption, social service, and foster care agencies.

Haaland introduced the legislation in the U.S. House in 2020, before her appointment to the Cabinet. A Senate version is now being sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Haaland told the committee she hoped it could work alongside existing efforts by the Interior Department to help Native American communities heal from the impacts of the policies.

She also requested $7 million in additional congressional funding– the same amount as last year– to continue the Interior Department’s work documenting and cataloging grave sites, as well as to create a “road to healing” that will work directly with tribal communities to document stories and assess their needs. She emphasized the need for the federal government to act in a holistic way.

“I believe that our obligations to Native communities mean that federal policies should fully support and revitalize Native health care, education, Native languages, and cultural practices that prior federal Indian policies, like those supporting Indian boarding schools, sought to destroy,” she said.

Haaland says she is a product of these policies

In her remarks, Haaland, who is a member of Laguna Pueblo, said her position as the first Native American cabinet secretary places her in a “unique position” to address the impacts of the U.S. government’s policies towards Native children.

“Like all Native people, I am a product of these horrific assimilation-era policies, as my grandparents were removed from their families to federal Indian boarding schools when they were only eight years old and forced to live away from their parents, culture, and Pueblos until they were 13 years old,” she said.

A group of other leaders from around the country, who also testified in support of the bill, described the impacts of the boarding school policies on their people, which they said have included physical, mental, and emotional traumas over the course of generations. Several described their own work to document those today.

Sandra White Hawk is president of the Minneapolis-based National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which has been working to survey boarding school survivors and their descendants, and has found high rates of depression, PTSD, and suicide attempts among respondents. She said the truth and healing commission could provide an opportunity to allow people’s stories to be heard by a wider audience.

“It’s one thing to share your stories within your home, or in your community,” she said, “but it’s another place to share it, where it’s going to be validated with the outside entities that brought this on.”

Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, who is the committee’s chairperson, said the boarding school era was a “dark period” in U.S. history and a “painful example” of how U.S. policy has failed Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawai’ians.

“We must do all we can to right this wrong,” he said.

Committee vice chairperson Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, pointed to the conditions at the boarding schools, where the Interior Department report noted children were subjected to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse as well as malnutrition, unsanitary conditions, and forced labor.

“And we know it just scratches the surface of what actually happened,” Murkowski said.

A pathway for stories from the elders who experienced the schools

La Quen Náay Liz Medicine Crow, president of the Anchorage-based First Alaskans Institute, called the government policies “intentional and purposeful”. And, she said, tribal elders are some of the only ones who will be able to tell the complete story about what really happened there. She described hearing her grandmother asked to recount experiences in boarding schools.

“And my grandmother responded, ‘I can tell you what happened physically, but I’m still not able to tell you what happened inside,'” Medicine Crow said, gesturing to her heart.

“This commission will open up a pathway where these stories, from people – who are now elders – will be heard,” she said. “Time is of the essence. We cannot waste any more of their precious life [by] not giving them a forum to share their lived experiences.”

Source: The U.S. is reckoning with its troubled past of Indian boarding schools

Filed under Aboriginal Tagged with , ,

Senior public servants feel ill-equipped and fearful to provide fearless advice

2022/06/25 Leave a comment

More of a recap of the Top of Mind report than concrete suggestions on how to address the apparent decline in “fearless advice” beyond reexamining the Accountability Act of the Harper government:

Canada’s public servants have a noble and proud heritage of “answering the call” to serve their country and communities. Professional, non-partisan, and highly trained, they work within our public institutions to help elected leaders make our communities safer, cleaner, healthier, and more prosperous both today and for the future.

However, according to a recent report, Top of Mind, senior executive leaders today feel ill-equipped to provide “fearless advice” in a climate of divisive politics, polarization, and misinformation. “Fearless advice and loyal implementation” are the bedrock bonds between those elected and those who serve in the public service.

This foundation supports our democracy and how public services rise to meet the challenges of the day. At its core, “fearless advice” is about elected decision-makers knowing they have been given the best information and the broadest options available to address the issue of the day. Those elected to represent their communities get to decide what to do. Once the decision is taken, public servants move on to “loyally implement.”

In Top of Mind: Answering the Call, Adapting to Change Summary Report, recently released by the Institute on Governance and the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University, senior public service leaders at the local, provincial, territorial, and federal levels of government were unanimous in their concern that fearless advice was more challenging to deliver than ever before.

One participant said, “I think there is a[n] [em]broiling of political perspective about the role of the bureaucracy and the work that it does and is challenged to do, and the independence of that in my view is no longer understood or seen by a lot of political bodies, parties, and individuals for what it is truly supposed to be.” Other participants remarked about the lack of “a safe space” to give alternative perspectives or views on a given issue. It’s a situation that, if left unattended, could be contributing to the erosion of trust in our public institutions.

The role of the senior public servant is unfamiliar to many Canadians. Often unseen, this cadre of professionals support decision-making and program delivery underpin the very quality of life that Canadians take pride in. Many successful partnerships between prime ministers and the heads of the public service have resulted in significant Canadian accomplishments.

Lester Pearson and Gordon Robertson teamed up to bring about our national safety net, our anthem, and our flag. Pierre Trudeau, Gordon Osbaldeston, and Michael Pitfield respectively delivered official bilingualism, international peace measures and the repatriation of the Constitution along with the establishment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Brian Mulroney, Paul Tellier, and Glen Shortliffe helped to end apartheid in South Africa, brought in free trade and eliminated the manufacturing sales tax. Jean Chrétien, Jocelyne Bourgon, and Mel Cappe returned Canada to economic surplus, helped the country overcome the aftermath of 9/11 and said no to the war in Iraq. These teams understood the principle or ‘secret sauce’ of fearless advice and loyal implementation.

Michael Wernick, former clerk to the Privy Council, wrote that, “Open, honest, and two-way communication is key” between the minister and their deputy minister in his book, Governing Canada A Guide to the Tradecraft of Politics. Wernick’s advice to deputy ministers: “Your most important task is to secure and maintain the trust and confidence of the minister. That doesn’t mean telling ministers what they want to hear. On the contrary, you will want ministers to be confident that you will warn them of upcoming trouble and to trust you to give them the frank advice and full information.”

So, if fearless advice is on the decline, the question is why? Top of Mind does not explore the root causes. However, a brief examination of how the role of the deputy minister has changed over the years may be a good place to start. In 2006, the role of the deputy minister at the federal level was fundamentally changed along with changes to the Public Service Commission, the public service oath, and the executive leadership competencies for choosing those in charge of people; money and physical assets.

Sixteen years later, it is time to examine whether the changes introduced in 2006 have contributed to the erosion of the bedrock principle of “fearless advice and loyal implementation.” It may be proven that the reforms undertaken then have little to do with the situation today. However, in the absence of a thorough assessment or review, we will never know.

Clearly something is amiss within the public services of our country. Having an open discussion on the barriers to fearless advice is both urgently required and essential if Canada to restore trust in its public institutions and to serve Canadians effectively to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Stephen Van Dine is senior vice-president of the Institute on Governance. Don Abelson is director of the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University.

Source: Senior public servants feel ill-equipped and fearful to provide fearless advice

Filed under Multiculturalism

Glavin: Good news! Canada is not being overrun by racist zombie hordes

2022/06/25 Leave a comment

A bit overly dismissive of the Abacus poll IMO:

There are cranks among us. There are racists, loons, nutters, dingbats and weirdos among us and there are millions of them, according to a recent Abacus Data poll. I know this to be true because I read it in all the newspapers.

Here’s a National Post headline from last week: “Millions of Canadians believe in white replacement theory: poll.” Here’s the Toronto Star: “’Kind of terrifying’: Numbers show racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory has found audience in Canada.” Here’s Abacus Data’s own headline: “Millions believe in conspiracy theories in Canada.”

And then the story just seemed to disappear. If the story were true, why did it vanish after a couple of news cycles? Shouldn’t we all be taking this a lot more seriously?

If the story is true, millions of Canadians are afflicted with exactly the same fascist derangement that drove white supremacist Brenton Tarrant to massacre 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand three years ago. In a similarly live-streamed replication of the Christchurch atrocity only last month, the lunatic Payton Gendron slaughtered ten people in a Black neighbourhood in Buffalo, N.Y. with a weapon with the words “White replacement theory” written on it.

Surely it can’t be true that millions of Canadians are devoted to the same hideous “theory” that motivated Tarrant and Gendron, can it?

I’m happy to report that no, there’s no evidence to support the proposition, or contention, or if you like, this “theory” about millions of Canadians revealed by that Abacus poll, because the poll did not provide any evidence of the sort.

This is not to say that there weren’t some quite disturbing findings that the Abacus pollsters came up with. And the story didn’t quite vanish, either.

In an otherwise thoughtful contemplation of the degeneration of political discourse that appeared in Policy magazine last weekend, the outspoken New Democrat Charlie Angus contemplated the tendency to crazy thinking as a kind of orchard where Conservatives are happy to find low-hanging fruit, and perhaps it explains why “some Conservative leadership candidates have spent so much time promoting all manner of conspiracy claims.”

Angus wrote: “Maybe the Conservatives think they will be able to harness the tactical rage of this phenomenon to the faux outrage of political theatrics.”

And that may be so.

It’s certainly true that the populist Conservative leadership contender and bitcoin enthusiast Pierre Poilievre does sometimes give the impression of being an eccentric who wasted too much of his youth playing with Buzz Lightyear action figures in his room.

But it’s also true that among the poll respondents inclined to believe what is possibly the craziest proposition Abacus canvassed for — the notion that Microsoft uber-zillionaire Bill Gates has been using microchips to track people and their behaviour — New Democrats were only two percentage points behind Poilievre fanciers: 11 per cent as opposed to 13 per cent.

As for the white supremacist “Great Replacement” imbecility, the idea is that there’s a plot, often attributed to the Jews, to orchestrate immigration policies in such a way as to monkeywrench a country’s demographics in order to replace “white” people with Muslims, specifically, or with people of colour, generally.

The Abacus poll doesn’t provide all that much insight into how many poll respondents, let alone Canadians, actually believe this drivel. If you drill down below the way the poll findings have been reported and then dig below the way Abacus described its findings to the bedrock of the poll question itself, you might be relieved to discover that it isn’t quite time yet to head for the hills to build yourself a compound to defend yourself against millions of marauding racist zombies.

Abacus described its findings this way: Some 37 per cent of Canadians (11 million people) think “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Canadians with immigrants who agree with their political views. This is an articulation of what is commonly referred to as replacement theory.”

Set aside the fact that this isn’t so much an “articulation” of any theory, exactly, and the fact that the lunatic “replacement theory” doesn’t quite match the Abacus description of it. Last month, Statistic Canada reported this simple fact: “Canada is a low-fertility country, or below the no-migration population replacement level of 2.1 children per woman.” The Abacus poll didn’t ask about “white” people, but rather “native-born” Canadians. And native-born Canadians are retiring in huge numbers. Boomers are exiting the job market in droves.

It’s data of this kind that the Trudeau government has quite openly factored into its Immigration Levels Plan, which sets out the objective of drawing 430,000 newcomers to Canada each year. This is the highest level of immigration in Canadian history, and a higher immigration rate than any other G7 country. Only a small minority of those immigrants are coming from Europe, so they’re not, you know, “white” people. And anyone who hasn’t noticed that it has been a custom of the Liberal Party to jimmy with immigration so as to replenish its urban vote banks hasn’t been paying attention to the way things are done in Canada. The Conservatives do it too, but they’re just not very good at it.

The Abacus poll findings are perfectly consistent with a series of polls of its own and of other polling outfits that show Canadians are becoming deeply distrustful of politicians, government institutions and the news media. The world is in a state of upheaval to an extent unparalleled in decades. Overseas there’s war and looming famine in Central Asia and Africa, and here in Canada you have to be rich to be poor these days, especially when it comes to housing. Canada’s economy is a house of cards that’s increasingly dependent upon high immigration levels.

Canada’s “native-born” population can’t replace itself. Just one reason is that you have to be quite well-to-do to raise a family nowadays, and you can’t raise a family in a 600-square-foot, $600,000 condo. It’s no wonder that nostalgia is so commonplace. So is the sentiment that we’re all being dragged by forces we can’t control into a maelstrom of inhospitable, culturally fractured bedlam. People have every right to look at the rich and famous of the World Economic Forum, for instance — the object of quite a few silly conspiracy theories — with utter contempt.

But millions of Canadians are not setting out across the landscape in roaming hordes of racist zombies. That’s the good news.

These days, we should take the good news wherever we can find it.

Source: Glavin: Good news! Canada is not being overrun by racist zombie hordes

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Federal government scrambles to address hordes of passport applicants at overwhelmed offices

2022/06/25 Leave a comment

Ongoing story. Short-term measures sensible but this was anticipated and should not have happened (quoted in article):

Families Minister Karina Gould, the minister responsible for passport services, said Thursday the government is adding more staff on the ground to help triage hours-long lineups at many passport offices as tens of thousands of people look to get their hands on travel documents.

The strategy shift comes as policy experts, and the government’s Conservative critics, say the situation should never have been allowed to get so dire when it was obvious to many that there’d be a strong interest in travel as the pandemic receded.

Gould said, after reports of chaos at some passport offices in the Montreal area this week, Service Canada is deploying managers to walk the lineups that have popped up at some offices.

These managers will speak to would-be travellers about their applications before they get to a customer service agent — a system that will help staff identify people who are most in need of a passport.

People who require a passport for travel in the next 12, 24 and 36 hours will get priority service while others will be told to come back at another time, Gould said.

The minister said, after the first day it was in place in Montreal, the process “didn’t go as smoothly, quite frankly, as we had hoped, but today we’re seeing much better progress.”

While Gould reported “progress,” the government website that tracks wait times was warning people to expect delays of at least six hours at busy sites like Montreal’s Guy-Favreau complex and Ottawa’s only passport office on Meadowlands Drive.

The minister said a similar process is being rolled out in Toronto Thursday and Vancouver-area offices will also have managers triaging passport applicants as of Monday.

Gould also said more passports will be printed in bulk at the Gatineau, Que. processing centre near Ottawa and ferried to other locations, which will take some of the stress off of smaller passport offices that don’t have large industrial printers to churn out hundreds of passports each day.

“We have received a large volume of passports. That doesn’t make the situation acceptable,” Gould said. “Canadians should never have to experience this.”

Bureaucrats warned government about passport onslaught

Andrew Griffith is a former director general with Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and a former top official at Service Canada and the Privy Council Office.

In an interview with CBC News, Griffith said the government should never have allowed the situation to get to this point.

In Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s 2022-23 department plan, bureaucrats told the government there would almost certainly be a surge in passport applications as COVID-related travel restrictions were relaxed, Griffith said, and yet not enough was done to prepare passport offices for the onslaught of applicants.

In that department plan, which Griffith shared with CBC News, internal experts advised the government that “forecasts predict that a recovery to pre-COVID-19 demand will begin in spring of 2022, and that demand for passports will continue to increase over the next three years.”

Griffith said the passport situation is a clear instance of the government “neglecting its core responsibilities and not planning or preparing properly.”

“It’s very clear that the policy folks were aware that there would be an increase but it wasn’t connected to the operations side to make sure they were putting adequate preparations in place. It’s one of those unfortunate examples of where the government sort of tends to over promise and under deliver,” he said.

Speaking to CBC Radio’s The House in an interview that will air Saturday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defended the government’s record on the passport issue but vowed to do more to address an “unacceptable” situation.

Trudeau said the government did hire 600 more passport workers in January to support the existing workforce and it’s looking to add more in the coming weeks to clear mounting backlogs.

Griffith said subjecting thousands of Canadians to hours-long lineups risks undermining faith in government institutions. Canadians expect a certain level of service from the federal government and, when it fails to deliver, there’s an erosion of trust, he said.

“If they can’t get service in a timely manner, people become disillusioned. People are understandably frustrated about these things. I think it’s a really serious issue,” Griffith said.

‘This is a waiting nation’

Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre said Thursday, in a video posted to his social media channels, that Canadians deserve better than what has transpired at passport offices in recent weeks.

Poilievre is seen walking the lines that have formed at Ottawa’s passport office in the video, speaking to applicants who have camped out since 3 a.m. to get to an agent.

“What’s the deal folks? Well, this is a waiting nation. We are asked to wait for everything as sleepy bureaucrats and government gatekeepers stand in the way of you getting the basic services to which you are entitled — one of them is a passport,” Poilievre said.

“You see what’s happening here? The government is doing a lot of things poorly rather than a few things well.”

Source: Federal government scrambles to address hordes of passport applicants at overwhelmed offices

Filed under Citizenship, Passports Tagged with , , ,

Canada’s racist social norms — and how we can change them

2022/06/24 Leave a comment

Significant survey along with some suggestions, learning from previous shifts such as attitudes on smoking and LGBTQ2+:

In a Facebook group, a white woman responds to a post about new government funding for clean water at an Indigenous reserve, complaining that Indigenous people already get too much support and should do a better job of looking after themselves.

At a bar, a man of European descent joins a discussion about police treatment of Black people and insists that racism and racial profiling happens in other countries, but not in Canada.

Why is it that some people make these kinds of perceivably racist and offensive remarks publicly even as others who might share the views hold their tongue? Whether someone makes such comments out of ignorance, prejudice or insensitivity, people tend to conduct themselves in accordance with what’s socially acceptable.

“Thirty years ago, smoking in public was acceptable. It was cool. It was just part of the framework. And there was an actual long-term public health campaign, if you will, in essence, to de-normalize smoking in public. It’s a complex intervention that, over time, was quite successful,” says Keith Neuman of the Environics Institute, author of the Canadian Social Norms and Racism study.

“That’s where we’d like to go with racism. Anti-racism initiatives may benefit by focusing more on social norms, which are more easily changed than ingrained attitudes and prejudices.”

Researchers did a national online survey and asked 6,601 participants to respond to a range of vignettes of racist or anti-racist actions directed at Indigenous or Black people. The data was weighted to ensure national representation by province, gender, age and education.

Each respondent was presented with a randomized selection of six of the 12 scenarios — three involving each community — that include responding to a white person who was: 

  • Speaking up when someone tells an insensitive joke;
  • Appropriating Indigenous or Black attire; 
  • Asking where an Indigenous or Black person came from;
  • Claiming racism doesn’t exist in Canada;
  • Intervening when an Indigenous or Black person is hassled in public;
  • Making a derogatory comment on Facebook; or
  • Making a racial gesture at a hockey game.

The respondents were then asked if they had witnessed such events or knew someone else who had; if they believed what the person did was right or wrong; how many people in their social circle would say what that person did was right or wrong; and how likely they thought it that others would intervene.

Many of the respondents said they have either personally seen or know someone who has seen the racist actions directed at Indigenous Peoples, with the most common witnessing someone claiming racism doesn’t exist against Indigenous Peoples (49 per cent); followed by derogatory comments on Facebook (38 per cent); telling insensitive jokes (35 per cent); others hassling an Indigenous person (22 per cent); and making a racial gesture like “a vigorous tomahawk gesture with a loud whooping cry” at a sports event (21 per cent).

In their response to the vignettes directed at Black racism, 79 per cent of participants have witnessed or know someone who has seen a Black person being asked where they came from; claiming racism doesn’t exist against Blacks (45 per cent); telling an insensitive joke (38 per cent); hassling a Black person (31 per cent); appropriating Black attire (30 per cent); and making derogatory comments on Facebook (21 per cent).

Based on participants’ responses, researchers came up with an index that represents how acceptable the specific demeanour or behaviour was in the general population.

The indexes range on a scale from zero to 100 — from the most to least socially acceptable. That means the behaviour with the low score has the greater consensus of social approval or disapproval.

The study found that social norms are somewhat stronger in situations where people witness someone stepping up and intervening when a person acts in a racist manner toward an Indigenous or Black person, such as telling an insensitive joke or harassing someone in public. 

Expressing racism through social media posts and claiming racism doesn’t exist in Canada were both deemed socially unacceptable, under the index, while appropriating Indigenous or Black attire was believed to be uncommon and not a big social transgression.

Neuman, director of the research project, said the study showed most respondents were aware that the conduct in these vignettes were wrong but uncertain what others would think or respond to the situation.

“There are unspoken rules how people behave with others. People know whether certain things are OK or not OK to do. When people choose to say a racist thing, it matters whether they think it’s OK or not OK with the people they are with,” Neuman explained.

“This is an important part of racism in society. This is the first time we look racism in Canada from the perspective of what is acceptable or not acceptable in your social circles. So lots of people think these racist actions are wrong, but they’re really not certain what the people around them think. So these norms are not very strong and that helps explain why this kind of behaviour is still so prevalent.”

Neuman hopes the findings of the study will serve as the benchmark to measure how the social norms of racism evolve as what’s tolerated and accepted in society does change with time, as in the cases of antismoking and the recognition of the LGBTQ2+ community after the Supreme Court 2004 ruling over gay marriage.

Government policies and social norms should go hand in hand in encouraging or hindering the manifestation of unacceptable behaviour, he added.

“The likelihood of encountering people who are smoking in public spaces is very low today. It’s not because there are laws and enforcement, but it’s because people who smoke picked up on the fact that it’s not OK to do that. It’s the way social norms work and there’s very strong norms against something like smoking,” he said.

“If you go back 20 years, the attitudes, treatments and norms around LGBTQ people have changed tremendously. Canadian opinions about gay marriage and LGBTQ people changed because there’s something legitimate about it by the state. It caused people to subsume their personal prejudice and discomfort.”

Neuman said similar successes could be found in developing social norms about what’s acceptable and what’s not with racism through modelling and trendsetting.

Advertising and educational campaigns that reinforce positive norms and denounce negative norms could help develop a collective sense of what’s acceptable, he added.

“What you’re trying to do is to communicate that some kinds of behaviours are OK and others aren’t. But you need to understand what the norms are to begin with, You have to do diagnosis to figure out what they are and how strong they are,” he said.

“It may be a situation where everybody has the same personal belief that something is wrong. By making everybody aware of how everybody thinks, it strengthens that norm.”

Source: Canada’s racist social norms — and how we can change them

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

MPI: Rise in Remote Work, Including by Digital Nomads, Requires Adjustments to Immigration Systems

2022/06/24 Leave a comment

Canadian examples include not requiring a work visa when working remotely in another country and stopping the clock on residency tests:

The COVID-19 pandemic has vastly accelerated a shift toward remote work that has been ongoing for decades. As countless workers worldwide stopped coming into the office, many began working from home, with some “digital nomads” moving to work remotely in another country. But most immigration systems are poorly equipped to deal with remote work arrangements, whether admitting foreign workers who may end up working partly or fully remotely for a local employer or permitting digital nomads to visit and work remotely for an employer in another country. Similarly, unclear rules around taxation, benefits and employment law pose hurdles for digital nomads and employers alike.

Failing to address remote work in immigration policies is a missed opportunity, a new Migration Policy Institute report finds. Repositioning immigration systems to introduce greater flexibility for non-traditional working arrangements could bring sizable benefits, including economic development, permitting employers to tap new pools of talent and even allowing people displaced by conflict or environmental disaster to earn incomes.

There have been some policy innovations already. More than 25 countries and territories have launched digital nomad visas that admit foreign nationals who work for an employer outside the country, or in some cases are self-employed. These digital nomad visas differ from most work visas, which assume a person will be working in-person, full-time for an employer in the same country. Digital nomad visas have seen considerable appeal among countries whose economies are heavily reliant on tourism and that are looking to make up for the pandemic-induced loss of tourism revenue, with some encouraging international remote workers to stay in smaller towns and rural communities to contribute to their economic development.

The creation of a new standalone visa is not the only way countries are adapting their immigration systems to remote work trends. Some have adjusted existing employer-sponsored visa pathways, including by expanding flexibility on residency tests. Others allow a degree of remote work while holding a visitor visa, which can benefit business travelers and tourists alike.

The report examines the implications of remote work for immigration systems, workers and employers alike, and explores how governments can develop robust remote work strategies. The analysis benefitted from information on digital nomad visas and remote work trends shared by Fragomen, a firm that provides immigration services worldwide.

“Remote work, at scale, could change the terms of the global race for talent, which would require governments to develop a more expansive understanding of labor migration policy—one that looks beyond addressing domestic skills and labor shortages to think about how best to capture the benefits of cross-border movement,” write MPI analysts Kate Hooper and Meghan Benton. “To truly reap the benefits of remote work, governments need to understand that this is about more than generating revenue from digital nomad visa programs, but also making a country an attractive environment for temporary visitors, business activity and job creation (even for jobs overseas).”

As workplaces reopen, with many retaining more flexible remote work policies, the question of how to adapt is one with which countries must reckon. As policymakers rethink immigration systems for this new era of work, the analysis suggests they should consider:

• Creating flexible immigration policies that can allow a greater degree of remote work and/or attract digital nomads, in line with national economic priorities.
• Coordinating across portfolios to develop a remote work strategy that integrates immigration priorities with economic development and inclusive growth objectives.
• Working with other countries to streamline immigration, employment, social security and tax requirements so that it is easier for workers and employers to understand the rules and their obligations.
• Exploring how regions outside of major metro areas can capture the benefits of remote work.
• Creating temporary-to-permanent pathways so that some remote workers on visitor and nomad visas can transition to permanent residence.

You can read the report, The Future of Remote Work: Digital Nomads and the Implications for Immigration Systems, here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/remote-work-immigration.

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

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