Ian Mulgrew: Refugee says foreign buyers property tax discriminates

2022/06/20 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see how the court rules. Pretty wealthy refugee given the value of the property tax:
An Iranian refugee who has lived in Canada for 27 years but only recently obtained permanent resident status wants to be reimbursed for the $1.32-million foreign buyers property tax he paid for his West Vancouver home.
In a B.C. Supreme Court statement of claim filed recently, Kourosh Bakhtiari, who has been described in documents as an aspiring terrorist decades ago for convictions on weapons charges and who once escaped custody using s rope made of dental floss, maintains that a 61-month delay in granting him permanent resident status violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, causing him duress and unnecessary expense.“His case shows how the foreign buyers property surtax in part harms a group of homeowners it is intended to help — long-term residents of B.C. without formal immigration status who wish to express their roots in this territory through home ownership,” veteran Vancouver lawyer Jason Gratl said.

Bakhtiari, who has no criminal record in Canada, was initially ruled inadmissible to the country by the Immigration and Refugee Board because of his crimes in the U.S., and was issued a conditional deportation order on April 9, 1996.

But he fought that and was designated a refugee on May 27, 1998.Ten years earlier, Bakhtiari was caught attempting to buy a Manhattan apartment while impersonating a State Department employee.

His briefcase contained weapons — including a 9 mm M-11 semi-automatic pistol, a silencer for the gun, a knife, grenades, and a garrote.

He and two other inmates reportedly later escaped from New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center using a rope fashioned out of 15 packages of dental floss braided together.

While recuperating in a New York hospital after being captured, he tried unsuccessfully to flee again.

Deported to Iran after a stint in a U.S. prison, Bakhtiari came to Canada and claimed political asylum on Dec. 10, 1995, fearing torture in Iran because in 1984 his father was captured, tortured, and killed for leading a revolt against the Islamic regime.

He applied to the immigration minister for permanent resident status in 1997, but was denied due to his U.S. convictions and his failure to pay a fine. Bakhtiari wrongly assumed that the fine would be paid from seized assets.On Dec. 15, 2011, more than 100 police officers converged on five locations, including Bakhtiari’s company offices, in a dramatic raid that netted more than $220,000 and four kilograms of methamphetamine.

Nevertheless, police apologized in 2017 for “Project Enape,” which targeted Bakhtiari’s firm for manufacturing legal pharmaceuticals and male hair-growth products allegedly because it was linked to organized crime. Civil proceedings in the case resulted in the forfeiture of seized cash.

In 2014, Bakhtiari again attempted to apply for permanent resident status. This application was again refused. He applied once more in January 2017.

Bakhtiari was finally granted permanent resident status this past Feb. 16, although no explanation was given for the delay.

He alleges the process took three times longer than average and was the product of gross negligence and bad faith by the minister.

During this waiting period, Bakhtiari, on July 1, 2021, was forced to pay $1.32 million in surtax on the June 14, 2019, purchase of a home registered in his company’s name on Groveland Road  in West Vancouver. He lives there.

He appealed, but on Feb. 29 was deemed ineligible for an exemption because he had not received permanent resident status within one year of the purchase — the process had taken 32 months.

The lawsuit, filed by Bakhtiari and his firm, Technocorp Venture Capital Inc., alleges the tax not only imposes an enormous financial burden on Bakhtiari but sends an implicit government-sponsored message that he is the kind of person who should be discouraged from owning a home in B.C.“The immigration minister’s delay in processing his application for permanent resident status contributed to the imposition of the surtax and loss of dignity, loss of social status, psychological distress and anxiety resulting from the imposition of the surtax and the implicit message of the surtax,” the lawsuit alleges.

Bakhtiari wants to be reimbursed for the surtax, the lien removed, the law amended, and paid damages.

“Discrimination against Bakhtiari, who has been a resident of British Columbia for 27 years, is contrary to the true intention of the legislature,” Gratl said.

He added that the purpose of the surtax is to promote home ownership by long-term residents and the one-year limit is arbitrary and unreasonable.

The attorney-general has told the court that persons in Bakhtiari’s position should not be subject to the surtax.

“The immigration minister’s unjustified delay of more than five years to process my client’s application for permanent resident status deprived him of an exemption from the 20-per-cent foreign buyer property surtax,” Gratl said.

“It might be tempting to believe that the wealthy are not entitled to civil liberties, but in law the right of equality belongs to everyone.”

The federal and provincial governments have roughly three weeks after they receive a copy of the suit to respond.

Source: Ian Mulgrew: Refugee says foreign buyers property tax discriminates

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Expert opinion mixed on changes to N.S. student immigration program

2022/06/20 Leave a comment

One small point in this article struck me: “He says familiarity with the local economy allows greater success opening businesses such as restaurants and grocers stores.”

Highlights that for some, study is mainly an immigration pathway to relatively lower skilled jobs, rather than building an innovation economy:

Immigration experts in Nova Scotia have mixed views about how changes to a fast-track program for international students will affect over-all immigration.

Last week, the province disqualified students who studied outside the province from applying to the Nova Scotia Experience: Express Entry (NSEEE) immigration stream.

It was a shock to hundreds of foreign students who had already moved to Nova Scotia and worked for months toward the program’s one-year employment target. It offered the chance to apply for permanent residency after 12 months rather than the usual two years.

People have come here on the understanding that this program is available to them,” said Elizabeth Wozniak of North Star Immigration Law in Halifax, “To have that program pulled out from under them midway through doesn’t seem fair at all.”

On Thursday Labour, Skills and Immigration Minister Jill Balser announced a record boost in Nova Scotia’s immigration allocation from the federal government — 400 new spots for the provincial nominee program, and an extra 1,173 spaces under the Atlantic Immigration Program.

Wozniak thinks restricting the NSEEE could make it more challenging to fill those new spots.

Still a draw for students

“The changes to this program … really are going to make it the least attractive of the immigration programs, whereas in the past it was one of the ones that was the most popular,” she said.

But an immigration lawyer in Bridgewater believes Nova Scotia officials will still be able to fill the province’s expanded allocation.

“I don’t recall them ever falling below their quotas or allocations, so I expect that they will meet that,” said David Nurse of McInnes Cooper.

Nurse says the top tiers of Canadian student immigrants are graduating with master’s and PhD degrees, and usually find work right away in their chosen fields.

He says students in Nova Scotia’s immigration streams play an important role in local labour markets while upgrading their language and employment skills.

“They are adding to the labour market. They’re contributing here in Nova Scotia,” he said.

Support from a former student worker

Samual Shaji came to Nova Scotia from southern India to study.

He graduated from Cape Breton University in 2020 with a degree in environmental science.

Then he secured a job managing a McDonald’s restaurant in Bedford, and was able to apply for permanent residency after 12-months thanks to the NSEEE.

But Shaji says many international students in Nova Scotia aren’t so fortunate.

He says it’s difficult to get restaurant jobs in smaller communities such as Sydney and Antigonish, and that lack of experience means students from elsewhere often get hired first after graduation.

“There is a McDonalds and a Tim Horton’s in every street in Toronto or Edmonton, so they have more experience in that job,” Shaji said, “Employers tend to hire them.”

‘They know the market of Nova Scotia’

“A lot of international students are moving from county to county because they cannot get into any job that will help them in immigration,” he said.

While Shaji sympathizes with the struggle of all international students in Canada, he thinks focusing the fast track on Nova Scotia students will lead to more graduates sticking around.

He says familiarity with the local economy allows greater success opening businesses such as restaurants and grocers stores.

Source: Expert opinion mixed on changes to N.S. student immigration program

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Swiss government rejects automatic citizenship for those born in Switzerland

2022/06/20 Leave a comment

Of note:

On 15 June 2022, a proposal put forward by Stefania Prezioso Batou, a federal parliamentarian from Geneva, to grant automatic citizenship to those born in Switzerland was rejected by 112 to 75 votes in Switzerland’s federal parliament, reported 20 Minutes.

Batou would like to see the introduction of jus soliwhere a child born in Switzerland to foreign parents and schooled in Switzerland would automatically qualify for Swiss citizenship at the age of 18.

Those against the idea argued that being born and raised in Switzerland did not guarantee integration. In addition, automating the process at a federal level would run counter to cantonal independence on the naturalisation process.

A similar proposal was rejected in December 2021 by the Council of States, Switzerland’s upper house.

Unrestricted jus soli, or birthright citizenship, is rare beyond North and South America, where it remains the norm. Beyond these regions, only Chad, Lesotho, Tanzania, Tuvalu and Pakistan have it, while another 30 odd nations have restricted forms of it.

Gaining Swiss citizenship is slow and difficult. It requires a minimum of 10 years residence in Switzerland on the right kind of permit and a long list of other requirements. Applications for Swiss nationality must be approved by the federal administration, cantons and the municipality where the applicant resides. In the end, many who call Switzerland home never get around to becoming Swiss, sometimes after several generations.

Source: Swiss government rejects automatic citizenship for those born in Switzerland

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Chris Selley: Asking a baby to get help from Russia is another Ottawa disgrace

2022/06/20 Leave a comment

These kinds of stories are showing up more regularly, given the (small) number of cases and the publicity of the court case and efforts by the lawyer and advocates to generate public attention.

The advantage of the first generation cut-off remains its clarity and simplicity to administer in a consistent manner, in contrast to the previous provisions which were not. But part of the “package” when the change was made over 10 years ago were provisions for statelessness whose implementation would take into account the particular circumstances, implicitly in an understanding if not compassionate manner.

This would appear to be one of those situations where IRCC could have shown more common sense in reviewing the case.

Unfortunately, we can’t be surprised by the obtuseness regarding Russia given Global Affairs and their Minister’s Office regarding the Russia Day embassy reception:

Recent events have called ever more into question Canada’s basic competencies on the world stage, both on the ground and especially in the back office. We made a hash of evacuating our Afghan friends as the Taliban retook the country, then forced many who escaped to wait for months while we churned through their paperwork. The same delays are plaguing many Ukrainians who accepted Canada’s offers of help. Speaking of Ukraine: A senior foreign affairs official’s presence at the Russian embassy’s garden party continues to boggle the national mind. On the much more mundane end of the spectrum: With six months’ notice, IRCC failed to approve a visa for popular Formula One reporter Karun Chandhok in time for this weekend’s Montreal Grand Prix.

Is it sloth? Understaffing? Active malice? It’s difficult to tell. But the story of the Burgess family — father and husband Gregory, mother and wife Viktoriya, and baby Philip, who currently live in Hong Kong — combines all these threads into a perfectly absurd package.

I first spoke to Gregory around six months ago. He is a 46-year-old Edmontonian with deep, permanent roots (and citizenship) in Canada and nowhere else — his great-grandparents immigrated to Alberta from Ukraine in 1894 — but who just happened to have been born in Connecticut. Because his infant son Philip was the second consecutive generation born on foreign soil, our citizenship law does not automatically recognize Philip as Canadian. Gregory and Viktoriya, who is Russian, nevertheless wish to relocate eventually to Canada and think it reasonable they be allowed to do so.

The bureaucrats at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) are having none of it.

Six months ago, the situation was approaching emergency: Gregory’s and Viktoriya’s work visas were soon to expire. Things have stabilized since, Gregory told me this week over Zoom while wrangling a seven-month-old at 6 a.m. “Hong Kong has been very humane to us,” he said, including issuing Philip a Hong Kong identity card. That’s at least proof that a government recognizes his existence, but it offers no path to citizenship.

The Burgesses and their lawyers and advocates quite reasonably insist Philip is stateless as defined in the 1954 UN Convention: “a person who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law.” In keeping with Canada’s international obligations, the Citizenship Act compels minister Sean Fraser to unilaterally grant citizenship in some cases of statelessness, and invites him to in others.

But when Gregory filed an application for Philips’ citizenship on grounds of statelessness, he got an amazing answer: Basically, IRCC wants proof some other country won’t take the kid off their hands.

On June 3, “senior decision maker” E. Nguyen wrote to Burgess asking for “a resual (sic) letter and/or correpondence (sic) from the American authorities advising that Philip … does not have a claim to American citizenship.” (Refusal and correspondence are the mistyped words.)

The answer is a bit complicated, but nevertheless U.S. citizenship rules are clear and easily Googleable: The simple answer is no.

It gets better: E. Nguyen wants the same refusal letter — no word of a lie — from the Russian authorities.

These are the Russian authorities raining death on Ukraine, heavily sanctioned by Ottawa, whose garden parties we must on no account attend. Canada’s travel advisory for Russia flashes bright red: “If you are in Russia, you should leave.”

Oh, and senior decision-maker E. Nguyen requires these documents within 30 days. IRCC would struggle to order a pizza in 30 days.

Even if the Burgess family were content to live in a pariah state run by a warmongering madman, Russia wouldn’t be a realistic option: Russian citizenship rules, also easily Googleable, stipulate Gregory would need to formally agree to Philip gaining Russian citizenship through his mother — but Gregory would have no immediate claim to citizenship himself. What parent would consent to the potential splitting up of his family?

When I wrote about this in January, two people with intimate knowledge of the IRCC bureaucracy and the Citizenship Act objected to my characterization of the second-generation-born-aboard rule as a “dumb law, easily fixed.” I remain convinced: Instead of judging prospective infant citizens by their parents’ accidental birthplaces, we should judge them by their parents’ substantial connection to Canada, just as we do for would-be naturalized citizens.

Admittedly, though, that’s only a fix in law. If it takes two or three or four years for IRCC to determine such “substantial connections,” families like the Burgesses will still be left in the lurch. And many will be in much more perilous situations than the Burgesses are.

In the meantime, there is an easy fix: Sean Fraser, the minister, can grant citizenship to anyone he chooses, any time he likes, as often as he likes. Unfortunately, with more than 24 hours’ notice, IRCC could not manage to respond to my questions, which included “why won’t he?”

Gregory is admirably equanimous about all this. “I don’t want to overdramatize things,” he told me. “It’s not terrible. … We’re OK here and everything’s fine.” But that uncertainty hangs over their heads, and they’re baffled. “I don’t know what the agenda is,” Gregory said. “I don’t know what’s achieved by this.”

Me neither.

There aren’t tens of thousands of Canadians in similar situations as the Burgesses, but there aren’t just dozens either. Whatever resources are being expended fighting seven-month-old Philip Burgess for Canadian citizenship — and a good few other children in the same situation — would surely be put to better use helping our various and shameful citizenship-and-immigration backlogs.

Source: Chris Selley: Asking a baby to get help from Russia is another Ottawa disgrace

And from the Star:

A Canadian with Ukrainian roots has been told his baby boy may have to apply — and be rejected — for Russian citizenship before he can become a Canadian.

“My son is not going to Russia and not becoming a Russian citizen when they’re killing Ukrainians,” says Gregory Burgess.

The bizarre situation has come about for a baby who is technically considered “stateless” because neither he nor his father was born in Canada.

Burgess, 46, has always considered himself a Canadian. He grew up in Edmonton and his Ukrainian great-grandparents arrived in what is today’s Alberta back in 1894.

But Burgess was born in the United States, where his father was then working, before coming to Canada at age seven. He acquired citizenship through his Canadian mother.

That, coupled with the fact that his son was born during the pandemic in Hong Kong, where Burgess is currently working, has meant the baby is not guaranteed Canadian citizenship.

It’s the result of a controversial policy change brought in by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper back in 2009 that was meant to curtail the number of “Canadians of convenience.”

“Canada is my home,” says Burgess. “I don’t have another home. It’s where my family has been for more than a hundred years.”

The so-called “second generation” citizenship cut-off against Canadians born abroad was introduced by the Conservative government after Ottawa’s massive effort to evacuate 15,000 Lebanese Canadians from Beirut during a month-long war between Israel and Lebanon in 2006.

The $85-million price tag of the evacuation effort sparked a debate over “Canadians of convenience” about individuals with Canadian citizenship who live permanently outside of Canada without “substantive ties” to Canada but were part of the government liability.

It’s now complicating things for Burgess.

The expat spent his formative years in Canada and graduated from the University of Alberta.

“My mother got us citizenship. And as soon as my Canadian citizenship was taken care of, one wouldn’t assume that somewhere down the road you become a lesser citizen because of it.”

Starting in 2004, he took up jobs in Asia. He met his now wife, Viktoriya Kharzhanovich, in 2017 when he was working in Shanghai. The following year, she applied unsuccessfully for a Canadian visa to accompany him to his cousin’s wedding.

In 2019, he started to explore the spousal sponsorship process to bring his common-law wife to Canada, just before the pandemic was beginning in China.

The couple moved to Hong Kong from China in June 2020 when he got a two-year employment contract in building information management there. Meanwhile, he and his wife, now 41, decided to start a family.

Due to the arduous paperwork required, they didn’t submit their spousal application until last November. It was during their preparation for the application when his lawyer noticed he wasn’t born in Canada and raised the issue about the two-generation citizenship cutoff for the yet-to-be born Philip.

Kharzhanovich, who had already been refused a visitor visa before, was more than seven months into her pregnancy and did not have an obstetrician and gynecologist or health insurance in Canada. She was also not scheduled for her COVID vaccination until after giving birth to Philip.

“After consulting physicians, researching flights, examining visa options, and studying quarantine rules, we determined that it was not safe or possible to fly to Canada for Viktoriya to give birth there,” says Burgess, who has since joined six other Canadian families in a Charter challenge against the citizenship cut-off rules.

Since neither Burgess nor his wife is a Hong Kong citizen or permanent resident, Philip doesn’t have permanent status in the former British colony, now part of the People’s Republic of China.

“It’s a lot of sleepless nights,” Burgess says. “It’s very important to me that I never lose my job (in Hong Kong) and nothing ever goes wrong because if it does, then that’s catastrophic. And so there’s that stress.

“It’s just constantly trying to get on the paperwork and it seems endless. I keep putting in paperwork or talking to the embassy or consulate. And I’ve been at it for nine months basically.”

At the advice of the Canadian consulate, Burgess applied for a two-year “limited validity passport” for Philip in November, which was ultimately refused by Passport Canada. Burgess’s own parents weren’t abroad serving in the Canadian military or for the federal or provincial governments at his birth in the U.S., hence his baby didn’t qualify.

Earlier this year, as a last resort, Burgess filed an application for a grant of citizenship under section 5 (4) of the Canadian Citizenship Act that gives Immigration Minister Sean Fraser the discretionary power to do so to “alleviate cases of statelessness or of special and unusual hardship or to reward services of an exceptional value to Canada.”

In a response to the family’s request this month, the immigration department gave the couple 30 days to provide proof of Philip having been refused a claim to American and/or Russian citizenship.

“Following a review of his application and supporting documentation, it appears that Philip Alexander Burgess may have a claim to American citizenship through yourself and to Russian citizenship through his mother, Viktoriya Kharzhanovich,” said the letter prepared by the immigration case management branch.

There was no mention or concern raised about Burgess’s and the family’s expiring status in Hong Kong, and the urgency to resolve the crisis.

“I feel like I’m being asked to show that I’m in duress. It’s continually asking, ‘show us it’s a bad situation.’ And I’m like it’s not bad yet, but it’s only because I’m staying ahead of the game,” says Burgess, who does not have an American passport or meet the “substantial connection” requirement to convey citizenship to Philip.

Although Philip is not at the end of his rope and may still acquire Canadian citizenship by naturalization if his father can successfully sponsor his mother and him to Canada, Burgess says he has yet to get an acknowledgment of receipt of his sponsorship application and the family is running out of status in Hong Kong.

Their lawyer, Sujit Choudhry, says Philip’s statelessness is only one of the factors for the consideration of the immigration minister, who should not overlook the “special and unusual hardship” the family is facing under the circumstances.

“The government’s insistence that Gregory seek Russian citizenship for Philip is Kafkaesque,” says Choudhry, who is also representing the other families in the ongoing Charter challenge against the citizenship act before the Superior Court of Ontario. “Canada has advised its citizens to not travel to Russia for geopolitical reasons.

“If Philip becomes a Russian citizen, Gregory will not be able to travel to Russia to take care of him. Canada’s Citizenship Act will produce a profoundly unjust family separation. This law is clearly unconstitutional.”

Source: ‘Kafkaesque’: Will the infant son of a Ukrainian Canadian need to turn to Russia for citizenship?

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Mills: Just another day in Canada’s passport purgatory

2022/06/18 Leave a comment

Useful account. Positive note – the patience of applicants and the “kind, helpful and patient the front-line passport officers”:

The sun was barely over the treetops when I drove into the parking lot of the Passport Canada office in the Rideauview Mall on Meadowlands Drive. It was 5:45 Monday morning and the line was already snaking along the side of the building facing Prince of Wales, and around the corner. I found my place in line, extracted a novel from my tote bag, and sat down cross-legged on the ground.

The office itself wouldn’t open until 8:30 a.m. There were already more than 30 people ahead of me.

I had known my visit to the passport office would be a lengthy one. For weeks, media outlets had chronicled the chaos: the long wait times, the desperate travellers who camped out overnight at passport offices in hopes of getting their documents quickly.

I had snacks, a bottle of water and a variety of reading material. As the chill of the morning seeped into my bones from the cold concrete, I wished I had thought to bring a folding chair, as many others had. But at least it wasn’t raining. I’d also been able to book an entire day off work to devote to my mission: getting our daughters’ passports in time for a weeklong holiday in Maine.

My family’s adventures with Passport Canada started in February when our passports expired. We got new photos taken, and filled out renewal applications for my husband and myself, as well as brand-new adult passport applications for our twin daughters, who were then 17. We dutifully mailed them off a full nine weeks before a planned trip to New York City in May.

April came and went with no passports. By the beginning of May, we were starting to worry. We had a flight booked to New York on May 21 — an early birthday gift for the girls, who would turn 18 the following week. I decided to phone Passport Canada.

The first time, I called six times just to get on the line and there were 187 people ahead of me on hold. The second time, I called 35 times to get on the line and there were more than 200 people ahead of me. When I finally got through, I learned that my daughters’ applications had been rejected because we had not provided sufficient proof of Canadian citizenship … even though we sent back their old child passports. I had failed to include their original birth certificates.

We didn’t make it to New York. There was no way, however, that we were going to miss out on Maine, our favourite summer destination since the girls were little, and which we hadn’t seen in two years. This is what had brought me to Rideauview Mall.

They let us into the building around 7:30 a.m. The line re-formed. It started at the Passport Canada office door, stretched to the Prince of Wales entrance, and curved around and along the opposite wall. A young woman in line who must have been a camp counsellor at some point took on the role of directing new people who came through the door (those poor folks who thought an hour early was sufficient!) towards the end of the line.

I overheard people saying they were travelling that week. Even the next day. Two young men came through the door just before 8 a.m. hauling enormous rolling suitcases. There were families with young children and others with elderly relatives. One young guy near the end of the line recorded a video for his social media followers. I caught the words: “No, this is not a third-world country. This is Canada.”

And yet, there was a sense of camaraderie. Everyone was in the same boat, chatting with their line-mates about where they were going and when and sometimes about what had gone wrong with their applications. Many were clearly anxious, but also very civilized. I couldn’t help feeling thankful to be living in Canada rather than, say, Florida.

Finally, the office opened. The line advanced. Immediately, Passport Canada staffers began shouting information in both official languages, triaging people based on their departure dates, separating those who were picking up completed passports or whose files had been transferred from the walk-ins, and confirming (repeatedly) that everyone had proof they were travelling within the next 45 business days.

Eight hours and 15 minutes later, I left the office clutching a receipt that would allow me to pick up my daughters’ passports in 14 days. I had exhausted my snack supply, read 200 pages of my novel, and was consistently impressed with how kind, helpful and patient the front-line passport officers managed to be in the face of so much stress. I also had a lot of time to ponder what might make the process more efficient:

• Hire and train passport officers to be on standby even if they typically work in other areas so they can be pulled in temporarily at times like this. That would allow for the extension of office hours, which would help clear the backlog.

• Allow Canadian citizens who hold child passports to upgrade to adult passports through a renewal process rather than having them fill out a brand-new adult passport application as though they’ve never held a Canadian passport before. I’m certain this is the cause of a lot of errors and delays, as it was with us.

• Allow Canadian citizens who hold a current adult passport that’s about to expire to renew online. This would force the government to come up with some acceptable process for the use and verification of digital photos, but isn’t it past time for that?

• Develop a new electronic passport form that flags obvious errors, like not including an address or postal code for your guarantors while you’re filling it out (rather than having the passport officers flag it for you when you get to the office).

Canadian passports are precious things and issuing them is a basic function of our federal government. We’ve got to get it right. The front-line officers are doing their job exceptionally well under these circumstances. Now it’s up to our elected representatives to ensure this situation never happens again.

Lara Mills is a professor in the public relations program at Algonquin College.

Source: Mills: Just another day in Canada’s passport purgatory

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Immigration backlog in Canada reaches 2.4M

2022/06/18 Leave a comment

Good overview of the backlogs, with helpful charts (nice to see CTV investing in good data journalism). The pandemic, like in so many areas, highlighting long-standing government management and operational issues, one that IRCC has started to address but is a multi-year project given IT and other modernization:

The immigration backlog in Canada has ballooned to 2.4 million people, with over 250,000 applications adding to the pile over a one-month span alone.

That’s according to recent data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) across all categories, from temporary residence and permanent residence to citizenship applications.

“I have not seen backlogs like these in 16 years of my career as an immigration lawyer,” Rick Lamanna, director at Fragomen Canada, an immigration services provider, told CTV News in a phone interview on Thursday.

“Prior to the pandemic, things were running fairly well.”

The increased backlog has already led to frustrations for those waiting to receive an application update from IRCC.

The recent data only raises more questions than provides answers to the applicants in limbo.

Can’t see the graphs below? Click here

Despite being among the top five destinations with immigrant-friendly policies around the world, Canada is seeing an upward trend in backlogs since the pandemic.

Long processing times and a lack of communication and transparency are some of the many issues highlighted by families that reached out to CTVNews.ca.

‘EXTREMELY STRESSFUL’

Lamanna said changing processing times are preventing families and even businesses from planning anything ahead of time.

“If you were to go online right now, and take a look at the processing time, out of India, it’s taking close to a year,” he said.

Part of the problem he pointed out is that IRCC faced a cascading effect from the fall of Afghanistan and then the pandemic.

During COVID-19, IRCC staff was not deemed as “essential workers” so the backlogs only started to grow. Now with the Ukraine war, there is a massive backlog, he adds. Between March 17 and June 8, 2022, 296,163 applications were received under the program.

For most, the long delays have postponed their life decisions as they continue to wait in another country.

Kazim Ali applied for permanent residency through the Express Entry program in 2020 from Pakistan and has been waiting since to receive an update. He said he has no idea how long he has to wait until he begins his new life in Canada with his wife.

“Our lives have come to a screeching halt because of a lack of communication and no clear timeline on the processing delays,” Ali said in an interview with CTVNews.ca from Pakistan over a zoom call on Wednesday.

Ali said the estimated processing time was six months at the time of submission.

Despite repeated emails, Ali’s application seems to have come to a screeching halt. He said the IRCC helpline is of no help to those outside Canada.

He was told to reach out to the visa office that is processing his application. Currently, it lies in the London, UK office with no updates.

Ali has put a stop to his long-term plans–including his career, buying a home, and family planning.

He said the wait is now taking an agonizing toll on his mental and emotional health and has been “extremely stressful” for the couple.

“IRCC really needs a reality check and needs to understand that it is not only processing a bunch of papers but making decisions that are affecting lives of families and generations to come,” Ali said.

In an emailed statement to CTVNews.ca, IRCC’s communications officer Jeffrey MacDonald said that application inventories grew during the pandemic while health and travel restrictions were in effect, and it will take some time to fully recover.

McDonald said IRCC is moving towards a more integrated, modernized, and centralized working environment in order to help speed up application processing globally.

He said IRCC is also working to improve the level of service at the Client Support Centre (CSC).  Between April 2021 and March 2022, IRCC’s CSC communication lines received over 10.5 million inquiries (8.6 million by telephone and 1.9 million by email).

‘COVID IS NO LONGER AN EXCUSE’

But Mustakima Gazi, who works as a long-term care pandemic resident assistant, said COVID-19 can no longer be an excuse.

Gazi, a Canadian citizen from London, Ont., has been waiting for her husband’s spousal application since December 2021 and has seen incremental progress since she last spoke with CTVNews.ca in May.

But despite the application reaching the next stage, she remains discouraged.

The couple is a part of a Facebook community that includes families waiting for IRCC updates. She said that some who had submitted the request for medical exam ( a requirement for those filing for permanent residency) last year have still been waiting to get an update from IRCC.

Gazi’s husband lives alone in the Netherlands and with his application in limbo, is under immense mental stress.

Making matters worse, she said, are the processing times on the online portal that keep changing.

She said one would think that the processing time would decrease as applications are being processed.

“But that is not the case,” she said. “At one point the estimated time was 12 months, and the next week it was 23 months.”

Processing times for different visa categories [May vs. June]

Data was retrieved on May 6, 2022 and June 14, 2022 for comparison purposes and is subject to change on the website due to fresh updates.

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Categories 14-Jun-22 6-May-22
PR Cards
Waiting for the first card 71 days 99 days
Renewing or replacing a PR card 60 days 70 days
Citizenship
Citizenship grant 27 months 27 months
Citizenship certificate (proof of citizenship) 17 months 17 months
Resumption of citizenship 23 months 23 months
Renunciation of citizenship 15 months 15 months
Search of citizenship records 15 months 15 months
Citizenship for adopted persons Part1: 10 months Part1: 12 months
Part 2: Varies by complexity Part 2: Varies by complexity
Family Sponsorship
Spouse or common-law partner living inside Canada 15 months 15 months
Spouse or common-law partner living outside Canada 23 months 22 months
Dependent child depends where the child lives depends where the child lives
Parents or grandparents 34 months 33 months
Adopted child/relative depends where the adopted child/relative lives depends where the adopted child/relative lives
Temporary residence (visiting/studying/working)
Visitor visa (from outside Canada) depends from where you are applying from depends from where you are applying from
Visitor visa (from inside Canada) Online: 166 days Online: 16 days
Paper: 29 days Paper: 27 days
Visitor extension Online- 196 days Online- 214 days
Paper:214 days Paper:216 days
Supervisa (parents/grandparents) depends where they live depends where they live
Study Permit (from outside Canada) 12 weeks 11 weeks
Study Permit (from inside Canada) 3 weeks 3 weeks
Study Permit extension Online: 65 days Online: 60 days
Paper: 193 days Paper: 219 days

Processing times vary based on: if the application is complete, how quickly applications are processed after they are received, how easily information is verified, how long the applicant takes to respond to any requests or concerns other factors. Additional information depends on the visa category applied for and is on the website.

Table: Deena Zaidi/CTVNews.ca Source: Government of Canada Created with Datawrapper

Gazi has tried to call IRCC many times to get more information on our application, hoping to speed things up, but has never been able to reach anyone who could provide her any answers on the status.

“Sometimes the helpline just gets disconnected without even putting me in a waiting line,” she said.

The one time that she got connected, the IRCC agent tried to help but could not provide any updates since the application was being processed outside Canada.

“Everyone is fighting a battle and trying their best to get through these hard times. We want to be close to our families who can support us,” she said. But the delay is leading to nothing but desperation.

‘ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION’

Among those frustrated by the lack of communication and transparency is Anne Marie Trad, a Canadian citizen waiting to be with her husband, Pierre Ajaltouni, since 2019.

The couple married in 2018 in Beirut, Lebanon and Trad filed for a spousal visa from there in 2019.

It has been over 50 months since.

Trad has tried all the routes to get updates: she contacted the MP office, reached out to her local MP, filled out web forms, and called the IRCC helpline. But nothing has helped.

Her husband’s spousal application was filed outside Canada (Beirut) so navigating through the application status is more complicated than those processed in Canada.

Trad said the status has been saying “doing a background check” since 2019.

In hopes of a quicker route, she filed for a visit visa from Canada in 2020. But even that has seen no momentum.

Trad last visited her husband in August 2021 and now worries that with Lebanon’s ongoing crisis, it could be increasingly difficult to make these visits.

The three-year wait has taken a toll on the couple’s mental health – leading to anxiety, and depression. Trad said her husband has lost a lot of weight and she is concerned about his health.

The couple took a legal route last year to get immigration officials to act on files caught up in delays – a writ of mandamus.

The legal route is definitely not cheap, Trad said, but she sees no better option to speed up the process.

“We just want to get our life back on track after wasting three years in waiting,” she said.

WHAT IS IRCC DOING?

MacDonald said that a number of factors can impact the application and these include the type of the application submitted, and how well and quickly applicants respond to the IRCC requests. These requests include biometrics and additional information. Verification and complexity of the application can also affect the processing time of an application.

To support the processing and settlement of new permanent residents to Canada, the government has committed $2.1 billion over five years and ongoing $317.6 million in new funding announced in Budget 2022.

With additional funding of $85 million from the 2021 Economic and Fiscal Update, IRCC is looking to reduce application inventories accumulated during the pandemic by hiring new processing staff, digitizing applications, and implementing technology-based solutions such as digital intake and advanced analytics.

Lamanna said the hiring will help reduce the backlogs but that itself will take some time.

“Even if IRCC hires more people, it could take months before any group of new hires is actually effective in tackling the backdrop since that would require new training,” he said.

He said digitizing is a step in the right direction but even that could take years before it is finally implemented and may not assist those who are currently waiting and may help new applicants in 2023.

“It is a very difficult situation,” he said.

HOW DID IT GET SO BAD?

Many immigration law firms have seen a spike in the mandamus applications. In over 10 months, Toronto -based law firm, Abramovich & Tchern has processed over 200 mandamus files.

It is unfortunate that applicants have to take this route, Lev Abramovich, an immigration lawyer at Abramovich & Tchern, told CTVNews.ca on Thursday.

Abramovich, who is not representing any of the applicants in this story, said it wasn’t COVID-19 itself that created the backlog, but it ultimately revealed the “archaic structure and the management style that is not very agile.

”After the pandemic hit, processing centers were operating with very limited capacity, and that partly contributed to the increasing backlogs.

Some application categories filed during the pandemic were paper-based and lay in offices, gathering dust for many months.

Abramovich said most mandamus applications his firm has received have been from countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, India, and China.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

Lamanna said one of the solutions is focusing on prioritizing groups or processes and fixing them instead of trying to have a catch-all approach. “So, people understand how to process these applications,” he said.

Abramovich said the existing system needs to be “centralized and agile.”

Many times, an application is stuck in an office outside Canada that may be partly functional due to a number of reasons such as shut down or remote work orders.

He said a centralized agile system would manage applications by redistributing them in different offices.

“And they will be processed, more or less based on when they came in, not based on the country of nationality or other factors which is deeply unfair,” Abramovich said.

Abramovich said the new immigration minister inherited the existing system and has been open to dialogue, and that an independent review could provide recommendations for a long-lasting change. He added an impartial investigation to understand the actual root causes will only help prevent something like this from happening in the future.

“We are dealing with human lives here and let’s not pretend it has something to do with COVID-19 and that finances alone are going to be sufficient,” he said.

Source: Immigration backlog in Canada reaches 2.4M

 

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with , ,

‘There is systemic discrimination in our policing’: New Toronto police data confirms officers use more force against Black people

2022/06/17 Leave a comment

Significant. However, most activists remain sceptical, at least the ones I heard on CBC:

The hard data proves what has long been known and felt by members of the city’s Black communities.

Toronto police officers use more force against Black people, more often, with no clear explanation why. Except for race.

That is a key takeaway from a landmark new report containing never-before-seen data on officer use of force and strip searches — statistics that, for the first time, were collected and released by the Toronto Police Service itself.

The race-based statistics are so stark that Chief James Ramer offered an apology to the city’s Black community, coinciding with the release of a 119-slide presentation on the force’s findings.

“I am sorry and I apologize unreservedly,” Ramer said Wednesday morning.

“Our own analysis of our data from 2020 discloses that there is systemic discrimination in our policing,” Ramer said. “That is, there is a disproportionate impact experienced by racialized people, particularly those of Black communities.”

Meanwhile, police this weekend warned officers to brace for a “challenging” public reaction that will “lead some people to question the hard work you do every day.” 

Among the major findings: In 2020, Toronto officers used force on Black people about four times more often than their share of the population — and Black Torontonians were five times more likely to have force used against them than white ones. 

And in those cases when force was used, an officer was more than twice as likely to draw a firearm on a Black person they thought was unarmed than a white person they thought was unarmed. 

The statistics show overrepresentation in other racialized communities, too. If you are Indigenous, you were more likely to be subjected to a strip search, a highly invasive police practice; and members of the Latino, Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian communities were also more likely to have force used against them.

The sobering data released Wednesday aligns with past external reports that have found Black people are overrepresented in police use of forcein this city. 

But the new data uses internal police records to go a step further, evaluating racial disparities in police use of force not only against the city’s population but within the pool of people interacting with police — those who were arrested, considered suspects, ticketed for provincial offences and more.

“This allows us to compare outcomes against the population that actually had contact with police,” a Toronto police statement said, adding it allows police to “focus our efforts on the actions that we can control.”

In other words: If officers were simply responding to higher rates of crime in any one group, this method should make the racial disparity disappear.

Even here, Black people were overrepresented, found to be 1.6 times more likely to be subjected to force compared to their percentage of total police interactions in 2020. Latino people were overrepresented by 1.5 times and Middle Eastern people were overrepresented by 1.2 times.

And Black people were already more than twice as likely to be the subject of this baseline police enforcement. Although they represented approximately 10 per cent of the city’s population in 2020, they accounted for 22 per cent of what police called “enforcement actions,” including arrests, tickets and other stops.

The police report has been independently peer-reviewed, Ramer said. 

He added: “This is some of the most important work we have ever done.”

Where the data is coming from

The race-based data released Wednesday details the use of force and strip searches conducted by Toronto police in 2020.

The use of force data is taken from Ontario’s “use of force reports” — documents required to be filled out whenever an officer uses physical force requiring medical attention, deploys a TASER, or draws or points their firearm. In 2019, Ontario’s provincial government required all police services to begin recording the officer’s perception of the race of the person they used force against.

Toronto police then cross-referenced these reports with internal “occurrence” reports — allowing them to conduct a deeper analysis, including of the type of call and the location of the incident.

In total in 2020, Toronto police said there were 949 use of force incidents involving 1,224 members of the public. Of those, 39 per cent were perceived as Black, while 36 per cent were perceived as white. (In 2020, 46 per cent of Toronto’s population was white.)

In 2020, Toronto police also began recording officer perception of race for strip searches — an invasive procedure conducted on people who are arrested. For years, Toronto police and other services were not capturing race-based data on strip searches, something critics said was long overdue.

The data analysis independently reviewed “leading experts” in race data collection with a human rights lens, Toronto police said. Since it began collecting race-based data, Toronto police has been consulting with a community advisory committee that includes members of Black, Indigenous and racialized communities.

Use of force — from low to high

Police use of force reports capture a range of interactions. Lower level force includes the use of aerosol spray, a baton, a police dog or a strike with a hand. Less lethal force is the use of a Taser or bean bag gun, and higher levels of force include when a firearm is pointed or discharged.

Of the 949 use of force incidents in 2020, a firearm was pointed at someone 371 times. The gun was fired four times, twice killing someone.

When officers use force, Toronto police were more likely to point a firearm toward a Black person compared to a white person.

Even in situations where police believed the subject was armed, a Black person was 1.5 times more likely to have a gun pulled on them than a white person in the same scenario.

The difference increased even when police didn’t think the subject had a weapon. In that scenario, a Black person was more than twice as likely as a white person to have a police officer pull out their gun and point it at them.

Black, South Asian and East/Southeast Asian people were more likely to experience higher uses of force compared to white people when it came to “less than lethal force,” such as a bean bag gun.

Locations

https://misc.thestar.com/interactivegraphic/2022/06-june/15-use-of-force-rate-map/index-doubled.html

Toronto police also examined police officer use of force rates in police divisions across the city. The results showed that, overall, incidents involving white people had lower use of force rates while those involving Black people had higher use of force rates. 

The differences appear to be stark in some mid-Toronto police divisions, including downtown’s 51 and 52 Divisions. 

In those areas, officers used force on a white person in .5 to .75 per cent of all enforcement interactions (such as arrests). But when the person was Black, force was used in more than 1.75 per cent of these same interactions — numbers that show these divisions used force against Black people around two to four times more frequently.

The differences, Toronto police said, are “not explained” by the demographic makeup of the local population. 

In other divisions there is a much lower racial disparity, or none at all, according to the data. In Scarborough’s 42 Division and midtown’s 53 Division, for example, the data shows no difference in use of force between white and Black people.

Calls for service and types of offences 

In calls for service that were classified as violent, Black people were 1.2 times more likely and Indigenous people were 1.4 times more likely to be on the receiving end of officer use of force, according to the data.

With calls regarding a person in crisis, Black people were nearly two times more likely to be subjected to force, while Indigenous people were 1.4 times.

Black people were found to be more likely to be subjected to police officer use of force in incidents involving assaults, mental health calls, fraud, mischief and robbery. 

Strip searches

In 2020, more than 22 per cent of all arrests — more than one in five — resulted in a strip search by Toronto police (7,114 strip searches in total, from 31,979 arrests). 

Of those, 31 per cent of those strip searched were perceived as Black, roughly three times their share of the population and higher than their 27-per-cent share of total arrests.

Indigenous people showed the highest overrepresentation in strip searches. They were overrepresented by 1.3 times compared to their presence in all Toronto police arrests. They accounted for just three per cent of the total arrests but represented to 4 per cent of all strip searches. 

The data was collected the same year Toronto police made a significant policy change to strip searches in response to a scathing report by Ontario’s police complaints watchdog that found the force conducted “far too many” strip searches. Before, more than 27 per cent of arrests resulted in a strip search; following the changes, which included having a supervisor sign off on all strip searches, that number dropped to 4.9 per cent of arrests.

Data from 2021 shows a marked decline in the number of strip searches, though arrests involving white and Black people were still more likely to result in a strip search, compared to the average. 

Source: ‘There is systemic discrimination in our policing’: New Toronto police data confirms officers use more force against Black people

And a somewhat contrary view regarding the need to include the context of crime rates in communities:

The problem with the Toronto Police report released Wednesday concluding that Blacks, Indigenous people and other racial minorities are disproportionately targeted by police when it comes to use-of-force incidents and body searches, is that it looks at only half the issue. It concludes the reason for this is systemic racism within the police force, for which Police Chief James Ramer publicly apologized and pledged to do better going forward, noting the study recommends 38 “action items” police will implement along with dozens of recommendations in other studies.

But what the report excludes are the crime rates in the various communities with which the police interact.

Logically that’s part of the equation because if they are higher in some communities than others, that will impact the frequency and type of their interactions with police.

However, it has been illegal for police forces in Ontario to gather or reveal this data for decades.

That was the result of a controversy that erupted in 1989 when then Toronto police superintendent Julian Fantino released statistics suggesting Blacks in one Toronto community were disproportionately involved in crime.

Fantino said he did it to counter allegations police were racist.But politicians, criminologists and civil rights groups responded that releasing the data without the context that the Black community was over-policed, was unscientific and would feed into racism.

As a result, race-based police statistics today are used solely to search for systemic bias within policing.

Scot Wortley of the University of Toronto and Maria Jung of Toronto Metropolitan University in a 2020 report for the Ontario Human Rights Commission which concluded Blacks were disproportionately arrested and charged by Toronto police compared to whites, cited both theories to explain why this happens.

One is the “Bias Thesis” which argues, “Black people are over-represented in police statistics because they are subject to biased or discriminatory treatment by the police and the broader criminal justice system. “Rates of Black offending stem from the negative consequences of centuries of colonialism, slavery and racial oppression … The impact of intergenerational trauma and contemporary social disadvantage, in turn, results in higher rates of Black offending.”

An alternative explanation, the “Higher Rate of Offending Thesis” argues “Black people engage in criminal activity at a higher level than other racial groups and this fact is accurately reflected in official crime statistics … when such factors as the criminal history of individuals and the seriousness of their offences are considered, there’s no evidence disparities in arrest rates are the result of police racism.”

The authors of the OHRC study cited “growing evidence (that) suggests that both explanations have merit … (that) the over-representation of Black people in arrest statistics may be caused both by higher rates of offending and racial bias within the criminal justice system.”

That is, police disproportionately arrest and charge Blacks (for example) because while the vast majority of Blacks are law-abiding, a minority are disproportionately involved in criminal activity and the reason is often due to the adverse social and economic conditions faced by Blacks because of systemic racism, not just in the police force, but in society in general.The problem is that by continuously ignoring the issue of crime rates within the communities with which the police interact, we are no longer looking honestly or completely at all aspects of the issue.

This will inevitably contribute to public skepticism among many about the findings of this latest report by Toronto Police identifying systemic racism in the force.

Source: GOLDSTEIN: Here’s why we no longer talk honestly about police race-based data

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , ,

Harder: Three years on, Quebec’s law on religious symbols hampers our ability to defend global human rights

2022/06/17 Leave a comment

Of note:

Shortly after I retired as deputy minister of foreign affairs, a senior Canadian diplomat told me of a spat he overheard between a French reporter and an Iranian official on the issue of religious face-coverings.

The Iranian official was condemning a French law prohibiting Muslim women from wearing the niqab in public when the reporter shot back that Iran’s restrictive dress codes for women amounted to much the same thing.

“Yes,” the Iranian official agreed. “The difference is that we have never promised anyone liberté, égalité, or fraternité.”

The hypocrisy alleged by the Iranian came back to me recently in advance of Thursday’s third anniversary of Quebec’s law on laïcité, Bill 21, which prohibits Quebec public servants such as teachers from wearing religious symbols while performing their duties.

The enactment of the law unsettled many Canadians in 2019, not least because Quebec overrode the protection of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms through use of the notwithstanding clause. But the law has also had a knock-on effect by undercutting Canada’s international standing as a defender of pluralism — an obstacle which gets worse the longer the law is in place.

In a world where civil liberties become ever more restricted, the global community needs every credible proponent and protector of pluralism that there is, and Canada should be at the top of that list. But we degrade our position when we tolerate within our borders two classes of citizens: those who enjoy the full liberty to express their religion in their dress, and those who do not.

Consider the position of Canadian diplomats who might want to press Russia for its arrest of demonstrators protesting the invasion of Ukraine, or protest the crackdown on freedom of expression in Hong Kong or censure the treatment of Uyghurs in China? Will we have maximum credibility when we speak?

Not unless we clean up our own house.

One place to start is to guard against becoming so accustomed to measures such as the Quebec law that we no longer speak out against them. That means making our voices heard not only on anniversaries, but regularly and in as many forums as are available to us.

A compromise of any civil liberty becomes more offensive the longer it remains place. At all costs, we must refuse to become desensitized to rights’ violations simply because they have been with us for an extended period of time.

Second, our leaders must stop shying away from criticizing the actions of other jurisdictions in the hope that staying silent will lead to acquiescence when and if they decide to abridge rights in their home jurisdiction.

Provincial premiers muse far too often these days about using the notwithstanding clause, a habit that will over time erode Canadians’ resistance to its use. Since the day three years ago when Quebec invoked the clause on religious symbols, Ontario has done the same on third-party advertising laws. Quebec also invoked it pre-emptively in the passage of Bill 96 recently, the bill designed to reform the Charter of the French Language.

To be sure, the law on the wearing of religious symbols is not the only example where Canada has fallen short on the protection of rights, and our opponents will remind us of those historic deficiencies when we try to shine a light on wrongdoing outside our nation. Witness the treatment of Indigenous Canadians in residential schools, which has already been the subject of a request by China and its allies for an independent investigation.

We can’t change the past. What we must do now is take every effort possible to clean up our act in the present. If we don’t, we will end up with a patchwork quilt in our own country, without a leg to stand on when advocating for equality in other parts of the globe.

In failing to get tough with ourselves, we will do a disservice to those millions of people fighting the good fight against authoritarian regimes in their own countries.

Peter Harder is a former deputy minister of Foreign Affairs and former government representative in the Senate.

Source: Harder: Three years on, Quebec’s law on religious symbols hampers our ability to defend global human rights

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Australia: Multicultural groups welcome federal government’s move to collect ethnicity data

2022/06/17 Leave a comment

Another long overdue step:

The federal government has announced it will begin collecting ethnicity data as part of measuring diversity in Australia, a move long called for by experts and multicultural community groups.

Key points:

  • Comparable countries like the US, Canada and New Zealand collect data about ethnicity to measure diversity
  • Experts say failure to understand the make up of multicultural Australia hindered COVID-19 responses
  • The federal government aims to collect ethnicity data at the next census

Country of birth and language spoken at home have historically been the main diversity indicators used by Australian government agencies.

But experts say this does not adequately capture the diversity of the community — not least because many Australians from diverse backgrounds are born in Australia and speak English.

“Australia does not effectively measure our diversity,” Andrew Giles, the new Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs, told a conference in Melbourne.

He said Australia’s failure to collect data on ethnicity or race — unlike the US, Canada and New Zealand — was a “fundamental barrier to understanding the issues that face multicultural Australians”.

“I looked at the sort of countries that we often compare ourselves to … and we weren’t compiling data that enables us to understand the representation of different population groups,” Mr Giles told the ABC at the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia (FECCA) conference.

“This became a much bigger issue, of course, during the pandemic, where we saw really uneven health impacts, particularly in the vaccination rollout.”

Last year, the ABC reported that while the federal government had committed to sourcing ethnicity data during COVID-19 testing and vaccination, Victoria was the only state collecting data on ethnicity.

This was despite indications that culturally and linguistically diverse communities were being harder-hit by coronavirus outbreaks, such as those in Western Sydney and public housing towers in Melbourne.

“The pandemic showed us some pretty hard truths about our society,” Mr Giles said.

“The truth someone born in the Middle East was 10 times as likely to have died during the pandemic, than someone born in Australia, is unacceptable.”

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data to January 2021 showed that Australian residents born in the Middle East and North Africa were over 10  times more likely to die of coronavirus than people born in Australia.

Those born in South-East Asia and southern and central Asia, meanwhile, were around twice as likely to die of COVID.

“That is the most extreme example of many about our failures to ensure that everyone was counted, and everyone was supported, through a difficult time. I don’t want that to happen again,” Mr Giles said.

A culturally and linguistically diverse data collection working group with representatives from peak multicultural bodies, along with data collection and demography experts, would be established to develop national standards for diversity data collection, Mr Giles said.

The pandemic showed there was a “gaping hole” in the data collected about the Australian population, according to FECCA chief executive Mohammad al-Khafaji.

“COVID has provided that opportunity for us to actually look seriously at the systemic barriers for us to address this issue,” he said.

Mr al-Khafaji welcomed Mr Giles’s announcement, saying he was pleased the new government recognised it as a priority.

“We’ve been calling for this for the past few years, and we’re glad that that call has been answered,” he said.

“If you’re not counted, you don’t know that you exist, and the programs and the policies won’t reflect the diversity of Australia today.”

Ahead of the 2021 census, people from Asian and Pacific Islands ethnic minority backgrounds told the ABC the Australian Bureau of Statistics was not accurately capturing their ancestry.

Mr Giles said he wanted the changes to inform the next census in 2026.

“The data set we have about this is imprecise, because place of birth doesn’t really tell us the full story about who someone is, how they identify, and that’s why we do need to get better data,” he said.

Race Commissioner wants more data on racism

Australia’s Racial Discrimination Commissioner, Chin Tan, also welcomed Mr Giles’s announcement of the shift towards collecting more detailed data on diversity, calling it a “positive move”.

“We are now looking at focusing on an area that we should have taken care of a long time ago,” Mr Tan said.

“For me it’s a positive move to get more information that will support multicultural communities and support Australia in advancing multiculturalism.”

He told the ABC the Australian Human Rights Commission wanted to see greater data collection on race issues and racism.

“While we applaud and will support initiatives toward multicultural data collection, we are also looking at data collection that will capture race and race issues in this country as well,” Mr Tan said.

He said Australia was still “lagging far behind” other countries in terms of multicultural policies and programs.

“Our multicultural future needs to be enhanced, and needs to be strengthened, and reinforced,” Mr Tan said.

“We need to have policies and programs, and funding obviously, to support that.”

Source: Multicultural groups welcome federal government’s move to collect ethnicity data

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Biden officials may change how the U.S. defines racial and ethnic groups by 2024

2022/06/17 Leave a comment

Long overdue:

The Biden administration is taking steps that could change how the U.S. census and federal surveys produce racial and ethnic data that is used for redrawing voting districts, enforcing civil rights protections, policymaking and research.

The multiyear process is likely to carry out long-awaited data policy changes that will particularly affect how Latinos and people of Middle Eastern or North African descent are counted in statistics around the country.

In a blog post released Wednesday, Karin Orvis, U.S. chief statistician within the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the federal agency is starting a new formal review of the government’s standards for statistics about race and ethnicity to help ensure they “better reflect the diversity of the American people.”

The goal, Orvis added, is “completing the revision no later than Summer 2024,” which would be months ahead of the next presidential election and in time for any changes to be incorporated into 2030 census plans.

“I understand the importance of moving quickly and with purpose. It is also important that we get this right,” Orvis said in the post, noting that the process will include gathering input from federal agencies and members of the public.

A little-known part of the federal government, OMB is in charge of determining how the Census Bureau and all other agencies can ask about a person’s racial and ethnic identities, as well as defining the checkboxes found on surveys.

First set in 1977, OMB’s standards for racial and ethnic data were last revised in 1997 and have influenced how surveys across the U.S. generate demographic statistics.

A major overhaul was expected ahead of the 2020 census. But those efforts stalled during former President Donald Trump’s administration despite years of research by the bureausuggesting that certain changes to the standards could improve the accuracy of statistics about Latinos and people with origins in the Middle East or North Africa.

Other proposals included no longer officially allowing the term “Negro” to be used to describe the “Black” category on federal surveys and taking out “Far East” from the standards as a description of a geographic region of origin for people of Asian descent.

Orvis noted that the new review will make use of past research, as well as the work of an earlier working group of career civil servants who were reviewing proposals to allow forms to ask about a person’s Hispanic origins and race in a combined question and to include a checkbox for “Middle Eastern or North African.”

Many Democrats in Congress have been calling for OMB to add a separate category for people of Middle Eastern or North African descent, whom the current standards classify as “White.”

“Federal demographic data does not reflect the realities of MENA individuals and community-based organizations, which makes it increasingly difficult for advocates, researchers, agency officials, and policymakers to communicate, understand, and address community needs,” wrote a group of Democratic members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee led by Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York, the committee’s chair, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan in a letter this week to the head of OMB.

The Biden administration has previously signaled that adding such a category would be a priority. Movement at OMB, however, has been slowed by the delayed confirmation of a new agency director and the hiring of a new chief statistician.

Asked by NPR why OMB decided to start a new review of its standards on racial and ethnic data instead of continuing its earlier review, OMB’s press office did not answer directly and referred instead to Orvis’ blog post.

Source: Biden officials may change how the U.S. defines racial and ethnic groups by 2024

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