Quebec’s Roxham Road on track to see record number of asylum seekers — but they face delays and despair in post-pandemic Canada

2022/07/06 Leave a comment

As do many others…

In Pascal’s Canadian dream, he becomes a doctor.

He’s only been in the country a month. He has a long way to go. But consider how long he’s been running, and how far he came to get here.

He left his home in Cap-Haïtien, on the north coast of Haiti, for the Dominican Republic, which occupies the eastern half of the island of Hispanola, right next to Cuba.

From there, he travelled with others in a car to Brazil. From Brazil, west to Peru, then north, through Ecuador, Colombia and Panama, where they were set upon by thieves who stole pretty much everything — except for the money that Pascal had hidden in a hollowed-out deodorant container.

This money allowed him to continue his northward journey, through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and the United States, said 39-year-old Pascal, who requested that his last name not be published for security and privacy reasons.

On May 21, he arrived at the Canada-U.S. border, where more than 13,000 people so far this year have been arrested by Royal Canadian Mounted Police as they take their first hesitant steps along a dirt path at the end of Roxham Road onto Canadian soil.

Technically a dead-end street, Roxham Road is a sleepy country route watched by high-tech border surveillance cameras. The passage that starts in New York state and continues into Hemmingford, Que., stands as the worst-kept secret of those seeking refuge from despots, disasters and all manner of dire circumstances, including North American immigration laws.

Thanks to the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions on border crossings, the return of air travel and a general increase in the numbers of people seeking asylum, 2022 is on track to become a record year for the controversial crossing point.

The federal government, which screens newcomers to determine their eligibility to make a refugee claim, is now straining to keep pace with the flow.

The result is delay and despair: a months-long wait during which asylum seekers receive social assistance payments but are denied a temporary work permit in a country struggling to meet its labour needs.

“They want to work,” said Stéphanie Valois, president of the Quebec Association of Immigration Lawyers. “They’ve got nothing — no money, no furniture. They’ve got nothing and they need it.”

This could also be a decisive and pivotal moment for a haphazard arrangement that allows refugee claimants to cross at Roxham Road, make their asylum claim while already on Canadian soil, and thus bypass the terms of the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, which obliges asylum seekers to make their claim in the first country they reach.

The Quebec government, facing a fall re-election, wants Ottawa to plug the hole in the nearly 9,000-kilometre Canada-U.S. border, saying that it has neither the resources nor capacity to deal with the flow of migrants.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Canada has agreed to hear a constitutional challenge to the Safe Third Country Agreement which, if successful, could allow asylum seekers to make a claim at any official Canadian border crossing — spreading Quebec’s burden more equitably across the country.

“We have an obligation to examine the cases of people who seek protection here,” says Wendy Ayotte, founder of Bridges not Borders, a support group for asylum seekers.

“Of course it is correct to say that it isn’t a fair distribution of people entering irregularly into Canada. Obviously it’s not fairly distributed across the country, but surely the response … is to call for the end of the (Safe Third Country Agreement) and then people can go anywhere.”

The Star met Pascal, a community organizer who said he was beaten and threatened by members of a local Haitian political party, at Maison d’Haïti, a Montreal community centre where he had come, immigration documents in hand, to consult Peggy Larose, a social worker.

From her cramped office behind the reception desk and the centre’s coffee bar, Larose helps Haitian refugee claimants complete their myriad forms and find housing, food and jobs, all while listening to the thoughts that weigh heavily on their minds.

“They are long stories and difficult stories. There are stories that rip you apart, that make you want to scream and cry out,” she said, recounting the plight of one couple who told her how their young daughter had been struck and killed by a truck while they travelled through Mexico, and was buried where she died.

Evidence of the great distances and hardships that people endure to get to Canada lies in the high grass on either side of Roxham Road.

The two halves of an identification card for a 25-year-old woman who stayed at a homeless shelter in Portland, Maine; part of a bright yellow Bancolombia bank card; the four ripped quarters of a blue plastic pass issued to a Nigerian man upon his admission to to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing centre in Tacoma, Wash.

Relics, secrets or the shame from past lives that people hope to leave behind.

Last Sunday, a group of seven people — three men and four women — boarded American Airlines Flight 1280 from Phoenix to New York, paying $378.60 (U.S.) each for the second-to-last leg of their journey to Canada. Their tickets were recovered floating in the water of a stream that runs alongside Roxham Road.

The next day, Monday, a woman named Jakelina boarded an Adirondack Trailways bus in New York City at 6:30 p.m., arrived in Plattsburgh, N.Y., at 1:20 a.m. on Tuesday and made her way toward Roxham Road, discarding the receipt for the $77.25 trip moments before starting a new life in a new country.

Roxham Road owes its popularity among those fleeing their homeland to the immigration policies of former U.S. president Donald Trump.

In January 2017, Trump signed an executive order banning Syrian refugees and blocking citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States — the so-called Muslim ban.

Later that year, 58,000 Haitians living in the U.S. learned of Trump’s plan to let their “Temporary Protected Status” expire, depriving them of protections under the special programs for migrants from countries deemed unsafe or which had suffered humanitarian emergencies, as Haiti did during the 2010 earthquake.

These policies prompted a flight to Canada with little modern precedent as asylum seekers took advantage of a loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement that allowed them to avoid being forcibly returned to the U.S. by crossing into Canada at a spot between official border posts — something known as an “irregular border crossing.”

In 2017, 18,836 people were intercepted by the RCMP crossing irregularly into Canada in the province of Quebec, compared to 1,018 who were intercepted in Ontario and 718 in British Columbia, 14 in Saskatchewan and six in Alberta.

The phenomenon — and the provincial ratio — continued in 2018 and 2019 but dropped sharply with the arrival of COVID and the closure of the Canada-U.S. border.

“If you crossed at Roxham Road, you were given a notice by the Canadian government known as a ‘direct back’ notice, which means that we’re not willing to hear your claim right now, we’re going to send you back to the U.S. and at some later date when we think the time is good we will allow you to return to pursue your claim,” says Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees.

She says that some of those who wanted to make refugee claims in Canada were subsequently detained in U.S. immigration detention centres and, in at least a few instances, were deported to their country of origin.

When the Canada-U.S. border reopened in November 2021 asylum seekers returned almost immediately to Roxham Road.

Compared to October 2021, when there were 96 RCMP interceptions, 832 people were picked up after crossing in November and 2,778 in December. That monthly tally has remained steady through to May 2022 — the last month for which statistics are available — when 3,449 people entered through the Quebec crossing.

In response to questions from the Star, a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said that federal officials “continuously monitor conditions and developments in other countries to inform our planning.”

The government declined to speak about the possible reasons for the increased volume of people crossing the border, though others attribute it to the newfound freedom of movement that people around the world are experiencing after lengthy pandemic lockdowns

“I think it’s just normal that — like everyone else — people are starting to move again. These are people who were blocked in their home countries or in transit on their way to Canada,” says Valois, who practises immigration law in Montreal.

“Looking at the bigger picture, there are many more people entering the United States each day and there is also an increase in the number of asylum seekers who arrive in the U.S., so the percentage of those who make it to Canada is really small.”

Not so small that they escaped the attention of Quebec Premier François Legault.

In mid-May, Legault, who casts himself as a fiscally conservative nationalist whose policies are guided by common sense, complained about the “unacceptable” number of people crossing the border into the province and the strain it was placing on the province’s resources.

“We are the only province that has a wide-open road named Roxham, and the federal government, which is responsible for controlling the borders, is not doing its job,” he said.

Legault added that there is a long delay in making an initial eligibility assessment to determine whether there are sufficient grounds for a refugee-claim hearing. During this time, the province is obliged by law to provide health-care services and financial assistance to asylum seekers, he complained.

“A good number of these people aren’t real refugees,” the Quebec premier said in a news conference. “A refugee is someone who faces physical risk in their country, but the majority are not refugees and eventually, when their case is analyzed, they are refused and returned to their country.”

Data from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada from February 2017 to March 2022 on refugee claims made by irregular border crossers such as those who enter Canada through Roxham Road would appear to contradict Legault’s claim.

Of more than 63,000 claims, nearly 28,000 were accepted and 19,000 rejected while some 6,000 were abandoned or withdrawn. More than 11,000 claims are waiting to be heard.

But government statistics show that refugee claims made by individuals from the two largest source countries of irregular border crossers — Nigeria and Haiti — find their demands for protection from Canada rejected more often than they are accepted.

Marjorie Villefranche, Maison d’Haïti’s general manager, says Haitians are compelled to come to Canada not so much due to the widespread poverty in the country but because of the violence and insecurity in their native land.

“They say, ‘If I remain here, I will die. I will die with my children.’ What family would accept to stay and die?” she asked. “Anyone would try to do whatever they can to save their lives and to save the lives of their children.”

Villefranche says that it was “exaggerated” to claim that a wealthy country such as Canada could be overloaded by an influx of 20,000 or 30,000 refugee claimants, as the Quebec government claims.

“I think that, as a rich country it’s the least we can do to receive a certain number of refugees,” she says. “There are even poor countries that receive a million or two million refugees across their borders.”

Post-pandemic, Canada is nevertheless struggling to keep up with the flow of asylum seekers.

Upon arrival on Canadian soil, people undergo an initial interview where border agents record their identities, take fingerprints and make biometric recordings. Once their file is created, they are able to receive health care and social assistance.

But it is not until a more thorough admissibility investigation is conducted that a refugee claimant is eligible to receive a temporary work permit.

Dench, from the Canadian Council for Refugees, says a delay that was once limited to several days has now stretched to a months-long wait because officials conduct more extensive security checks that include the exchange of biometric data with other countries.

“They are so keen to exclude people from the refugee determination system that they make a system that is unworkable and starts accumulating these huge backlogs,” she says.

In response to the Star’s questions about delays, a spokesperson for the Canada Border Services Agency said the time required to complete an eligibility check depends on the complexity of the case, the availability of information and the amount of research required.

Legault, the Quebec premier, put this delay at 14 months. Pascal, the Haitian asylum seeker who arrived in May, says he was told he would have to wait until March 2023 before he would receive an eligibility ruling — meaning he will not legally be able to work for 10 months.

Valois, the immigration lawyer, said the delay in receiving an admissibility hearing was “relatively new” and “really problematic.”

“The client wants to work. They want to get moving. They want to have a hearing. They want to be heard. The delay is not to their advantage.”

In an post-pandemic economy that is experiencing desperate labour shortages, the delay in approving work permits for people ready and willing to work is not to the country’s advantage either.

“It’s so ridiculous when you see that so many employers are wanting to employ people and yet the federal government is keeping people in this kind of limbo state because they can’t even get them through the first part of the process,” says Dench.

Another young Haitian couple arrived in Canada in April after a seven-month period in the U.S. during which they were held in detention and the man was forced to wear an ankle bracelet to track his movements.

He wants to find work as a driver, eventually. She said she would like to train to become a caregiver in a hospital — a line of work that, by some estimates, up to 2,000 asylum seekers in Quebec took up during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the needs were greatest.

The couple did not want to provide their names, nor would they discuss the reasons they had for seeking refugee protection from Canada.

But they were happy to share the details of their first Canadian victory — finding an apartment of their own that will allow them to finally leave the downtown Montreal shelter that they and hundreds of other refugee claimants call home.

It’s a studio apartment. It will cost them $850 a month, not including utilities. That will leave them less than $300 a month to eat, to support themselves as well as the baby boy due to enter the world this fall.

Source: Quebec’s Roxham Road on track to see record number of asylum seekers — but they face delays and despair in post-pandemic Canada

There are legitimate concerns regarding the undue burden on Quebec given that over 99 percent of irregular arrivals occur there (2022 to date):

The federal government is starting to relocate asylum seekers who have crossed irregularly into Quebec from the United States, following a rise in the number of would-be refugees at the border.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada says that as of June 30, officials have started to transfer a “small number” of asylum seekers to Ottawa and Niagara Falls to help reduce the pressure on Quebec. The department didn’t give details.

More than 13,250 refugee claimants were intercepted outside official points of entry in Quebec by border agents between January and May, mostly at Roxham Road — a rural road leading from the U.S. into the province.

That is more than double the number of people who crossed irregularly into Quebec during the same period in 2019, before the entry points into Canada were closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Roxham Road was reopened to would-be refugees in November 2021.

Premier François Legault has asked the federal government to shut down Roxham Road because of the pressure the rise in asylum seekers is putting on Quebec’s ability to care for the newcomers.

The Canada Border Services Agency says it has increased its capacity to temporarily house asylum seekers at the Roxham Road crossing, to 477 people from 297.

Source: Ottawa starting to transfer ‘small number’ of asylum seekers to Ontario from Quebec

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Quebec and the rest of French-speaking Canada are at a crossroads

2022/07/06 Leave a comment

Interesting contrast on how Francophones outside Quebec are embracing Francophone immigration and multiculturalism:

A rebelle and rêveur, my father was a young audacieux, venturing from Sudbury, Ont., the Nickel City where he had come of age, off to the Université Laval in pursuit of graduate studies in 1978.

But after he arrived in la ville de Québec (a wonderful city, he insists), he was excluded by his Québécois peers — “from Ontario,” he had lived among les anglais. Among the Anglos. 

It did not matter that he was born and raised in la belle province, that he was French Canadian and Catholic, or that he spoke eloquent French and then-incomprehensible English. He was, as René Lévesque said in 1968, a dead duck. A “cadavre encore chaud,” the still-warm corpse of a Francophone outside Quebec. A spectre that (falsely) reminded this société distincte of what would happen if it did not seek refuge from the empire and its dominion, which had worked to uproot the fait françaisin Canada over centuries. 

A rebelle and rêveur, my father was a young audacieux, venturing from Sudbury, Ont., the Nickel City where he had come of age, off to the Université Laval in pursuit of graduate studies in 1978.

But after he arrived in la ville de Québec (a wonderful city, he insists), he was excluded by his Québécois peers — “from Ontario,” he had lived among les anglais. Among the Anglos. 

It did not matter that he was born and raised in la belle province, that he was French Canadian and Catholic, or that he spoke eloquent French and then-incomprehensible English. He was, as René Lévesque said in 1968, a dead duck. A “cadavre encore chaud,” the still-warm corpse of a Francophone outside Quebec. A spectre that (falsely) reminded this société distincte of what would happen if it did not seek refuge from the empire and its dominion, which had worked to uproot the fait français in Canada over centuries. 

It was, said my father years later, une mentalité de paroisse — a parish mentality. One that excludes, prompting the question: who has a right to be Québécois? Who has a right to be Franco-Canadian? Who has a right to belong? 

It’s a question that Francophone communities across Canada, at a crossroads in the expression of our identities, are contemplating with vastly different outcomes. We, Quebec and the rest of French-speaking Canada, are following divergent paths as we define what we aspire to be.

On the eve of la Fête Nationale last month, celebrated on June 24 under the banner of “our language of a thousand accents,” Quebec Premier François Legault threw oil on the traditional feu de joie, or bonfire. “It’s important that we don’t put all cultures on the same level; that’s why we oppose multiculturalism,” said Legault. “We prefer to concentrate on what we call interculturalism, where we have one culture, the Quebec culture.”

Quebec’s notion of predatory multiculturalism intertwines with its secularism law (which impacts Muslim women in particular) as well as its problematic new language law (a notable transgression on truth and reconciliation with Indigenous nations). Coupled with obstinate denials of the existence of systemic racism in the terrible aftermath of Joyce Echaquan’s death, this all conspires to put the province on a path to a narrow and exclusionary definition of who is truly Québécois. 

By contrast, Franco-Canadians are choosing a different path — one that rejects the notion of our provincial and national identities as being pure laine, instead connecting us back to a mosaic that is multiracial, multifaith, multilingual and multicultural. Our communities and institutions have recognized that, despite our unbreakable spirit, our declining demographic dividend may not sustain the French language over generations to come. Francophone immigration can ensure that the French language continues to thrive in Canada, opening us to an incredible “francophone galaxy.”

Despite my determined idealism, our communities in Franco-Canada are far from utopian. In my hometown of Sudbury, a “welcoming francophone community,” advocates are calling out systemic barriers to employment for francophone immigrants and the need for a northern anti-racism strategy in pursuit of equity for immigrants and First Nations, Inuit and Métis nations. We Franco-Ontarians have our work cut out for us.

And so, who belongs? 

After over 50 years in northern Ontario, my father continues to speak eloquent French and still-incomprehensible English. The jeune audacieux would grow to become a leader of la Franco-Ontarie, among the youth involved in the creation of the beloved Franco-Ontarian flag. 

He wasn’t from Sudbury, from the north, or even from Ontario. Yet he became Franco-Ontarian. On ne naît pas Franco-Ontarien — on le devient. You aren’t born Franco-Ontarian — you become one.

As Franco-Canadians, we benefit immensely from multiculturalism. Our Francophonie is ripe with a thousand accents, persuading us that there is much to be gained in global citizenship — and as a mosaic of global sociétés distinctes in our own right.

Isabelle Bourgeault-Tassé is a Franco-Ontarian writer.

Source: Quebec and the rest of French-speaking Canada are at a crossroads

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Prominent Radio-Canada personalities urge broadcaster to fight CRTC N-word decision

2022/07/06 Leave a comment

Of course, there was bound to be a complaint. And equally, of course there would be a counter complaint. But context matters in the use of the N word after all Vallières used it to drive home his arguments of francophone Quebecers being second class citizens prior to the Revolution tranquille, just as the University of Ottawa Professor Verushka Lieutenant-Duval looked at how the word has been reclaimed by Blacks:

Black Montrealer who filed a complaint against Radio-Canada over the on-air use of the N-word says he’s disappointed but not surprised by the pushback against a recent CRTC decision ordering the public broadcaster to apologize.

Ricardo Lamour, a social worker and artist, filed the complaint with the broadcasting and telecommunications regulator after hearing a journalist and a commentator repeat the offensive word several times on air in 2020.

Some 50 Radio-Canada personalities said in an open letter published Monday in La Presse that last week’s CRTC decision in Lamour’s favour threatens journalistic freedom and independence and “opens the door to the dangers of censorship and self-censorship.”

“Also, if we are alarmed, it’s not only for us, at Radio-Canada, but for all communications companies regulated by the CRTC,” wrote the signatories, which included prominent news anchors, such as Céline Galipeau and Patrice Roy, and Guy A. Lepage, host of the talk show “Tout le monde en parle.”

Radio-Canada’s former ombudsman, a Quebec cabinet minister and groups representing journalists have also denounced the decision as a blow to freedom of expression or freedom of the press.

When asked if he was surprised by the backlash, Lamour quoted American author and activist James Baldwin, who wrote, “The power of the white world is threatened whenever a Black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.” Lamour noted that most francophone Quebec media figures are white and he questioned how many of the letter’s signatories are Black.

He said he was motivated to file a complaint two years ago after hearing two on-air radio personalities repeatedly use the full name of a book that has the N-word in the title, “without adequate warning and contextual discussion.”

Lamour had been waiting to go on air to discuss his work mentoring Black youth, and heard the comments in the Radio-Canada studio through a pair of headphones. He said he was troubled by the “careless and callous” use of the word.

“I found it offensive and upsetting,” he said.

He filed a complaint with the CRTC after first being told by Radio-Canada’s ombudsman that the use of the word in that specific context — quoting a book title — did not contravene the public broadcaster’s journalistic standards and practices.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission sided with Lamour. While it recognized that the word was not used in a discriminatory manner, it found the public broadcaster nevertheless violated Canadian broadcasting policy objectives and values.

Radio-Canada did not do enough to mitigate the effect the word could have on its audience, “particularly in the current social context and given its national public broadcaster status,” the CRTC decision read.

In addition to a written apology to the complainant, the broadcaster must also put in place internal measures and programming to ensure that it better addresses similar issues in the future, the CRTC said.

Signatories of the open letter in La Presse acknowledged that the N-word is “loaded,” but they said it is used rarely on air and only in a factual context “that is neither offensive, insulting or dehumanizing, which respects the journalistic standards and practices of Radio-Canada but also the intelligence of our institution and its employees.”

The province’s professional journalists association, the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec, denounced the decision as a “dangerous precedent that imposes upon media a censorship that is as exaggerated as it is unjustified.” Quebec’s culture minister also expressed concern over the decision, tweeting that it was a serious violation of freedom of expression.

Lamour says he sees the backlash against the N-word decision partly as a fight “to assert some rights to not be accountable” by broadcasters who are resistant to making the necessary changes to better reflect an evolving society.

“We’re not seeing some form of introspection here; we’re seeing offensive things,” he said.

Instead of fighting, he said, broadcasters should read the reasoning behind the decision and try to do better.

In an email, a spokesperson for Radio-Canada said the broadcaster was aware of the “wide range of opinions” on the CRTC decision.

“Radio-Canada acknowledges that use of the ‘’N-word’ is offensive; that’s why we have limited its use on our airwaves,” the statement read.

The broadcaster said it was still studying the decision and considering how it would respond.

Source: Prominent Radio-Canada personalities urge broadcaster to fight CRTC N-word decision

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Pratte: Federal gridlock is a threat to national unity

2022/07/05 Leave a comment

Agree:
Like most Canadians, Quebecers have relatively few interactions with the federal government. When constituents face difficulties, they usually call their provincial representative, rather than their MP.
Most “close-to-people” government services — health care, schools, day cares, etc. — are delivered by the provincial government, while Ottawa deals with things like passports, customs, immigration and employment insurance. Unfortunately, virtually all the services administered by the Government of Canada are currently broken, despite the fact that the federal government has significantly increased its expenses and its workforce since the pandemic hit.

When Quebecers are thinking about the federal government these days, they are not impressed. How come a G7 country is not able to issue passports in less than three months? Why can’t it deal with an immigration file in months rather than years? How is it that the government can’t ensure there are enough security and customs agents at major airports to process travellers within an acceptable time frame?

Le Journal de Montréal reported this week that a newly unemployed man has been waiting for close to three months for his first employment insurance cheque. It appears that his file needs to be treated by a “public servant level 2,” which would explain the delay …

Remember the sponsorship scandal, the massive (and corrupt) advertising program developed by the Chrétien government to increase the federal government’s visibility in Quebec? What we are seeing these days is the reverse.

Sovereignist columnist Joseph Facal was quick to highlight the federal government’s “gross incompetence,” and compare it to the Quebec government’s more responsive attitude: “While there is certainly incompetence at the Government of Quebec level, one does not see that lazy indifference, that feeling of distance, of flying way over ordinary people, of living on another planet that coats the federal public service.”

How can the Government of Canada argue that being part of the federation is advantageous if it cannot deliver the basic programs it is responsible for? Even before this latest mess, the proportion of Quebecers who said they think that Canadian federalism has more advantages than disadvantages for Quebec slipped to 43 per cent in 2022, from 51 per cent in 1998, according to Environics’ annual Confederation of Tomorrow survey.

This trend is not unique to Quebec; Canadians from other regions have also become skeptical about the advantages of federalism. Fortunately, other data points from that survey are more encouraging. For example, over the last two years, the percentage of francophone Quebecers who feel “Quebecers only” has dropped to 12 per cent from 22 per cent, while the proportion who feel equally Canadian and Quebecer has increased to 25 per cent from 18 per cent.

The same survey shows that 80 per cent of French-speaking Quebecers feel they are both Quebecers and Canadians to some degree. Quebecers know, for example, the very high value of a Canadian passport in foreign lands — if you can manage to get your hands on one, that is.

The breakdown of the services delivered by the Government of Canada cannot be allowed to continue. It is intolerable for Canadians, who carry a heavy load of taxes to receive those services in an efficient and timely manner. It is bad for the country, because it weakens the trust that Canadians have in their national government.

Because of this, and because repairing the large machine of government is obviously a complex undertaking, that should be priority number 1 for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet. It’s fine to issue statements and tweets about Ukraine and abortion in the United States, but when your government cannot deliver passports or unemployment cheques, it is your responsibility and your duty to come back from your worldly travels and get to work.

As long as the bureaucracy does not feel the pressure coming from the prime minister himself, this frustrating situation will continue. Members of cabinet like to show up at airports when refugees arrive; why don’t they show up at airports and passport offices now?

Relatively few Quebecers celebrated Canada Day yesterday. For most of us, the true national holiday is June 24, the Fête nationale. This does not mean Quebecers don’t feel some connection with Canada. But nowadays, the prevalent feeling is indifference — which could easily turn to anger if the Trudeau government does not tackle the current bureaucratic disarray head-on.

Source: Federal gridlock is a threat to national unity

Filed under Government, Passports Tagged with ,

Paul: The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count

2022/07/05 Leave a comment

A plague on both their houses:

Perhaps it makes sense that women — those supposedly compliant and agreeable, self-sacrificing and everything-nice creatures — were the ones to finally bring our polarized country together.

Because the far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women don’t count.

The right’s position here is the better known, the movement having aggressively dedicated itself to stripping women of fundamental rights for decades. Thanks in part to two Supreme Court justices who have been credibly accused of abusive behavior toward women, Roe v. Wade, nearly 50 years a target, has been ruthlessly overturned.

Far more bewildering has been the fringe left jumping in with its own perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda. There was a time when campus groups and activist organizations advocated strenuously on behalf of women. Women’s rights were human rights and something to fight for. Though the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, legal scholars and advocacy groups spent years working to otherwise establish women as a protected class.

But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.

As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.”

Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of women’s rights, omits the word “women” from its home page. NARAL Pro-Choice America has used “birthing people” in lieu of “women.” The American Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of women’s rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups: “Black, Indigenous and other people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, immigrants, young people.”

It left out those threatened most of all: women. Talk about a bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.

The noble intent behind omitting the word “women” is to make room for the relatively tiny number of transgender men and people identifying as nonbinary who retain aspects of female biological function and can conceive, give birth or breastfeed. But despite a spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side.

Women, of course, have been accommodating. They’ve welcomed transgender women into their organizations. They’ve learned that to propose any space just for biological women in situations where the presence of males can be threatening or unfair — rape crisis centers, domestic abuse shelters, competitive sports — is currently viewed by some as exclusionary. If there are other marginalized people to fight for, it’s assumed women will be the ones to serve other people’s agendas rather than promote their own.

But, but, but. Can you blame the sisterhood for feeling a little nervous? For wincing at the presumption of acquiescence? For worrying about the broader implications? For wondering what kind of message we are sending to young girls about feeling good in their bodies, pride in their sex and the prospects of womanhood? For essentially ceding to another backlash?

Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore. This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.

It wasn’t so long ago — and in some places the belief persists — that women were considered a mere rib to Adam’s whole. Seeing women as their own complete entities, not just a collection of derivative parts, was an important part of the struggle for sexual equality.

But here we go again, parsing women into organs. Last year the British medical journal The Lancet patted itself on the back for a cover article on menstruation. Yet instead of mentioning the human beings who get to enjoy this monthly biological activity, the cover referred to “bodies with vaginas.” It’s almost as if the other bits and bobs — uteruses, ovaries or even something relatively gender-neutral like brains — were inconsequential. That such things tend to be wrapped together in a human package with two X sex chromosomes is apparently unmentionable.

“What are we, chopped liver?” a woman might be tempted to joke, but in this organ-centric and largely humorless atmosphere, perhaps she would be wiser not to.

Those women who do publicly express mixed emotions or opposing views are often brutally denounced for asserting themselves. (Google the word “transgender” combined with the name Martina Navratilova, J.K. Rowling or Kathleen Stock to get a withering sense.) They risk their jobs and their personal safety. They are maligned as somehow transphobic or labeled TERFs, a pejorative that may be unfamiliar to those who don’t step onto this particular Twitter battlefield. Ostensibly shorthand for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” which originally referred to a subgroup of the British feminist movement, “TERF” has come to denote any woman, feminist or not, who persists in believing that while transgender women should be free to live their lives with dignity and respect, they are not identical to those who were born female and who have lived their entire lives as such, with all the biological trappings, societal and cultural expectations, economic realities and safety issues that involves.

But in a world of chosen gender identities, women as a biological category don’t exist. Some might even call this kind of thing erasure.

When not defining women by body parts, misogynists on both ideological poles seem determined to reduce women to rigid gender stereotypes. The formula on the right we know well: Women are maternal and domestic — the feelers and the givers and the “Don’t mind mes.” The unanticipated newcomers to such retrograde typecasting are the supposed progressives on the fringe left. In accordance with a newly embraced gender theory, they now propose that girls — gay or straight — who do not self-identify as feminine are somehow not fully girls. Gender identity workbooks created by transgender advocacy groups for use in schools offer children helpful diagrams suggesting that certain styles or behaviors are “masculine” and others “feminine.”

Didn’t we ditch those straitened categories in the ’70s?

The women’s movement and the gay rights movement, after all, tried to free the sexes from the construct of gender, with its antiquated notions of masculinity and femininity, to accept all women for who they are, whether tomboy, girly girl or butch dyke. To undo all this is to lose hard-won ground for women — and for men, too.

Those on the right who are threatened by women’s equality have always fought fiercely to put women back in their place. What has been disheartening is that some on the fringe left have been equally dismissive, resorting to bullying, threats of violence, public shaming and other scare tactics when women try to reassert that right. The effect is to curtail discussion of women’s issues in the public sphere.

But women are not the enemy here. Consider that in the real world, most violence against trans men and women is committed by men but, in the online world and in the academy, most of the ire at those who balk at this new gender ideology seems to be directed at women.

It’s heartbreaking. And it’s counterproductive.

Tolerance for one group need not mean intolerance for another. We can respect transgender women without castigating females who point out that biological women still constitute a category of their own — with their own specific needs and prerogatives.

If only women’s voices were routinely welcomed and respected on these issues. But whether Trumpist or traditionalist, fringe left activist or academic ideologue, misogynists from both extremes of the political spectrum relish equally the power to shut women up.

Source: The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count

Filed under gender Tagged with , , , ,

QS permettrait les signes religieux « pour tout le monde »

2022/07/05 Leave a comment

Welcome position:

« On va permettre le port de signes religieux pour que tout le monde puisse travailler au Québec, peu importe ses croyances. On va ajouter des dispositions à la loi pour que la laïcité au Québec soit rassembleuse et cohérente », affirme le chef parlementaire de QS en entrevue avec La Presse.

À l’heure actuelle, la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État (« loi 21 »), que le gouvernement Legault a fait adopter sous bâillon en juin 2019, prévoit que les enseignants, les directeurs des écoles primaires et secondaires publiques, les agents de la paix, les procureurs de la Couronne, les juges de nomination québécoise ainsi que le président et les vice-présidents de l’Assemblée nationale ne peuvent porter de signes religieux dans l’exercice de leurs fonctions. Le Parti québécois (PQ) a appuyé la loi, mais le Parti libéral du Québec (PLQ) et QS ont voté contre.

« Un signe religieux est tout objet, notamment un vêtement, un symbole, un bijou, une parure, un accessoire ou un couvre-chef, qui est soit porté en lien avec une conviction ou une croyance religieuse ou qui est raisonnablement considéré comme référant à une appartenance religieuse », selon la définition du gouvernement du Québec.

De nouvelles balises

M. Nadeau-Dubois propose de modifier la loi pour y ajouter des balises « simples, claires et faciles à interpréter » afin d’encadrer le port de signes religieux, en conformité avec les dispositions prévues par la Charte québécoise des droits et libertés de la personne. Sous un gouvernement solidaire, il serait uniquement permis d’interdire le port d’un signe religieux à un employé de l’État pour des raisons de sécurité, promet-il, ou s’il l’empêche de bien faire son travail.

« Pour prendre un exemple très simple, une personne qui souhaite enseigner au Québec ne peut pas le faire pleinement et ne peut pas le faire convenablement si elle a un signe religieux qui couvre son visage. C’est un élément élémentaire et important. Même chose pour un policier qui interpelle quelqu’un dans la rue. Les citoyens s’attendent à pouvoir identifier l’agent qui les interpelle », explique le chef parlementaire de QS.

Ainsi, Québec solidaire appuie les parties du texte législatif en vigueur qui disent que « tout membre du personnel d’un organisme [public] doit exercer ses fonctions à visage découvert » lorsqu’il rend un service.

« Il faut en avoir le cœur net »

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois propose également de demander à la Cour d’appel du Québec — le plus haut tribunal de la province – d’indiquer si les dispositions actuellement prévues par la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État respectent la Charte québécoise des droits et libertés de la personne. Cette charte a été adoptée à l’unanimité par l’Assemblée nationale en 1975 et ne relève pas du gouvernement fédéral.

« Il faut tourner la page sur ce débat-là. Il faut en avoir le cœur net. Il faut, une bonne fois pour toutes, savoir si interdire à une jeune femme d’enseigner parce qu’elle porte un foulard [comme l’a fait la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ)] respecte notre Charte québécoise des droits et libertés de la personne », estime M. Nadeau-Dubois.

« Il y a en ce moment une contestation judiciaire et François Legault vient de recruter le rédacteur de la charte des valeurs pour faire partie de sa prochaine équipe gouvernementale », poursuit-il en faisant référence à l’ex-chroniqueur et ancien ténor souverainiste Bernard Drainville, qui se présente pour la CAQ dans la circonscription de Lévis.

« Une femme qui enseigne à l’école, si on voit bien son visage et qu’elle respecte les normes professionnelles de son emploi, il n’y a pas de raisons d’interdire qu’elle enseigne. […] Ce sont les mêmes critères pour tout le monde. Ce qu’on veut, c’est de revoir la loi 21 pour permettre de manière générale le port de signes religieux tout en affirmant des balises pour encadrer la question du visage couvert », dit-il.

Les groupes religieux visés

Dans son projet de réforme de la loi 21, Québec solidaire propose également de mettre fin au financement public des écoles religieuses et aux exemptions fiscales pour les organisations religieuses.

Face au premier ministre caquiste qui affirme que la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État définit une valeur québécoise, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois réplique qu’il ne comprend pas « le lien que fait François Legault entre la loi 21 et la fierté québécoise ».

« Des lois sur la laïcité, il y en a dans plusieurs pays. Ce qui me rend fier, c’est notre langue, notre culture, notre territoire, pas le fait qu’on encadre des signes religieux pour quelques employés de l’État », dit-il.

Source: QS permettrait les signes religieux « pour tout le monde » 

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

UK: Universities to defy government pressure to ditch race equality group

2022/07/05 Leave a comment

Of note:

Universities in England have launched a fightback against government attacks on their autonomy, telling ministers they “crossed a line” by pressurising them to abandon a scheme designed to improve equality on campus.

In what may be a turning point in the so-called “culture wars” over free speech, Universities UK (UUK) took on the education minister Michelle Donelan after she warned them to reconsider membership of a race equality charter, run by the charity Advance HE.

The scheme – which counts the majority of Russell Group universities among its members – aims to identify barriers to success for black, Asian and minority ethnic students. But in a letter to vice-chancellors this week, Donelan claimed that membership of the charter was “in tension” with universities’ duties to uphold free speech.

In its letter of response on Thursday, Universities UK said: “An important line has been crossed with the letter appearing to direct universities to take a specific approach” on equalities.

In a later statement, UUK confirmed that it intended to ignore Donelan’s request and remain affiliated with Advance HE.

A spokesperson for UUK said: “Universities take their responsibilities to promote and protect free speech very seriously. We have yet to see any evidence of how this voluntary, non-prescriptive scheme works against this.

“The scheme is voluntary and provides a means through which universities can address racial inequality within the sector and we will continue our work with Advance HE to support this goal.”

The row comes as the higher education freedom of speech bill is being debated in the Lords, where it has come under fire from Conservative, Labour and cross-bench peers. It has been criticised for imposing a new free speech regulator with new powers to fine universities for failing to comply with free speech provisions.

Vice-chancellors said Donelan’s letter was a chilling forerunner of how a regulator could interfere with internal university affairs if the bill is passed in its current form, with one describing it as “an unambiguous attack on university autonomy”.

David Willetts, the Conservative peer and former universities minister, said: “I do wish to see protections for freedom of speech, but it’s very odd to protect freedom of speech at the same time as further intervention.

“I think one of the reasons why universities in Britain are so internationally respected is because of their autonomy. I don’t think it’s as much a line being crossed as a slippery slope that we are on, in which the autonomy of our universities is gradually eroded.”

The letter to Donelan, signed by Prof Steve West, vice-chancellor of the University of the West of England, reminded the minister that racism remained “a pervasive societal issue” that affected students from ethnic minority backgrounds.

But it added: “Universities, as autonomous institutions, must also remain free to decide how best to foster inclusivity and tackle societal issues such as racism which have a serious and detrimental impact on staff and students.”

The letter continued: “We do not believe that free speech and voluntary external assurance frameworks are at odds with each other – rather they can help to address power imbalances and ensure a more diverse range of voices are empowered to speak up.

“We understand from our members in England that a number will likely respond to you directly, both to restate their commitment to ensuring free speech and to highlight how external assurance schemes play an important role in tackling serious issues such as harassment and degree awarding gaps.”

While Donelan’s letter noted that universities were autonomous and free to join schemes such as the race equality charter, she went on to say they should “reflect carefully” on membership.

While Advance HE’s race equality charter was the only example mentioned by name, Donelan went on to say that “there are of course a number of other, similar, schemes, and this letter invites careful consideration in respect of all these”.

Advance HE also administers the Athena Swan charter that seeks to improve gender equality within higher education and research. Donelan has previously described the scheme as “at worst a dangerous initiative that undermines scholarship”.

“Bearing in mind the substantial sums invested by the taxpayer into higher education, I would ask you to consider whether membership of these schemes; the initiatives that flow from them; and the creation of new, highly paid, management roles in these areas truly represent good value for money for taxpayers or students,” Donelan said.

Criticising the higher education freedom bill when it was debated this week, Shami Chakrabarti, a Labour peer and a former director of Liberty, said: “How can it be a protection of academic freedom to give more and more power over independent institutions of scholarship to the government’s Office for Students and the new director for freedom of speech?”

Willetts said that the current bill was heavy-handed and questioned how the bill’s freedom of speech regulator could balance the government’s demands that some forms of legal speech, such as holocaust denial, would not be allowed on campus.

“They are expecting the regulator to be more restrictive than simple lawful, freedom of speech. We need to know exactly what things he or she is not going to protect despite them being lawful,” Willetts said.

Willetts said he hopes the government would make “significant” amendments to the bill, pointing out that universities could find themselves punished for suppressing some forms of speech at the same time as tech platforms were punished under the government’s new online safety bill for transmitting the same opinions.

Source: Universities to defy government pressure to ditch race equality group

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Les délais pour le Certificat de sélection du Québec humanitaire explosent

2022/07/05 Leave a comment

Nice to see a rare critical article on the Quebec’s government handling of an immigration program rather than the almost reflexive but sometimes warranted blaming the feds:

Le gouvernement Legault accuse des retards sans précédent dans la délivrance du Certificat de sélection du Québec (CSQ) pour des immigrants que le Canada a pourtant acceptés comme résidents permanents pour motifs humanitaires. Alors que ce n’était qu’une formalité de quelques semaines, il faut maintenant près d’un an pour obtenir ce précieux sésame, qui donne accès à d’importants services, dont l’assurance maladie du Québec.

« C’est une situation dramatique », dit l’avocate Anne-Cécile Raphaël. « C’est un document court et simple. Il n’y a pas de difficultés à le produire. »

Me Raphaël a plusieurs clients ayant été acceptés comme résidents permanents pour des raisons humanitaires, mais qui attendent depuis des mois d’avoir le CSQ. « J’ai des clients dont la demande a été déposée en juillet-août [2021] et qui n’ont toujours pas leur CSQ, dit-elle. J’ai une cliente qui a un dossier complet et dont le CSQ est la dernière pièce manquante. D’ailleurs, pour l’écrasante majorité des cas, il n’y a que ça qui manque. »

Le Devoir a pu constater que de nombreux avocats ont des clients dont la demande de CSQ, déposée à l’été dernier, n’a effectivement toujours pas été traitée. Certains rapportent même que ces personnes ont carrément abandonné l’idée de vivre au Québec pour aller dans une autre province. « J’ai même une famille du Nigeria qui a déménagé en Ontario en raison des longs délais pour avoir le CSQ », a indiqué l’avocate Nataliya Dzera.

Ancien président de l’Association québécoise des avocats et avocates en immigration, Guillaume Cliche-Rivard, remarque que le problème des délais semble uniquement se poser pour les personnes ayant fait une demande de résidence pour des « considérations d’ordre humanitaire ». « Ce n’est pas aussi long pour le refuge ou la réunification familiale. C’est dans l’humanitaire que les délais explosent », soutient l’avocat qui s’apprête à briguer les suffrages pour Québec solidaire dans Saint-Henri–Sainte-Anne, à Montréal.

« Je ne comprends pas pourquoi le gouvernement tarde à donner le CSQ. Ce sont tous des gens qui sont ici et qui ont fait l’objet d’une décision positive d’IRCC [Immigration, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada]. Ils ont des circonstances personnelles assez dramatiques qui ont justifié ces demandes humanitaires. »

Privés de RAMQ

Le gouvernement fédéral a le pouvoir d’accorder une résidence permanente pour considérations d’ordre humanitaire à quelqu’un qui fait la démonstration d’une bonne intégration et qui remplit certains critères justifiant les exemptions demandées. Pour une personne désirant s’installer au Québec s’ajoute l’étape du CSQ qui, il n’y a pas si longtemps, s’obtenait facilement et rapidement, soit en deux ou trois mois, selon les observations des avocats. « Quand le formulaire est rempli et que toutes les informations sont là, c’est un simple document à délivrer. C’est un taux d’approbation de plus de 95 % », a observé Me Cliche-Rivard.

Toutefois, tant que le CSQ n’est pas reçu, il n’est pas possible d’avoir accès à la RAMQ, ni aux mêmes droits de scolarité que les résidents permanents et les citoyens canadiens. Sans le CSQ, il n’est pas non plus possible pour un demandeur de conclure son dossier de résidence permanente afin, ensuite, d’entamer les démarches pour parrainer ses enfants qui seraient demeurés dans le pays d’origine. Cette lenteur, qui nuit au dossier de leurs clients, indigne plusieurs avocats en immigration.

« Je m’occupe d’une veuve originaire de l’Europe de l’Est, dont [la demande pour motifs] humanitaires avait été acceptée à la suite d’une bataille en cour fédérale. Cette fois-ci, elle doit attendre presque un an pour être admissible à la carte RAMQ », raconte Me Dzera, en laissant entendre que sa cliente est âgée et pourrait avoir besoin de soins.

Après avoir obtenu une réponse positive à sa demande de résidence permanente pour motifs humanitaires, Diana, qui ne donne pas son vrai nom par crainte de représailles, a ensuite attendu près de 8 mois avant d’avoir son CSQ et 11 mois pour avoir sa RAMQ et sa résidence permanente. « J’ai eu de graves problèmes de santé et je n’avais pas ma carte [d’assurance maladie]. Mes visites à l’hôpital coûtaient très cher », raconte cette Haïtienne d’origine, mère de six enfants. « Je n’allais pas bien. J’étais en dépression. »

Diana avait aussi le projet de faire venir au Québec sa fille aînée, qui avait alors 21 ans, âge limite pour parrainer un enfant, mais son CSQ est arrivé trop tard. Sa fille a eu 22 ans dans l’intervalle. « Je veux ma fille ici avec moi. C’est très triste ce qui est arrivé. On avait préparé tout son dossier pour pouvoir le déposer le plus tôt possible. »

11 mois d’attente

Le ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration (MIFI) ne nie pas que le délai s’est allongé et estime à 11 mois le délai actuel moyen pour le traitement des demandes de CSQ pour considération humanitaire. Cela inclut l’attente pour obtenir des documents ou renseignements manquants par le client, le cas échéant. À la mi-juin, le MIFI en était à examiner les demandes reçues à la mi-août 2021.

« Le nombre de demandes de sélection permanente [CSQ] reçues par le MIFI dans le cadre du Programme des personnes sélectionnées pour considérations humanitaires a augmenté depuis les dernières années », a indiqué le ministère pour expliquer ces délais.

« Comme une grande partie des personnes qui présentent ces demandes sont des demandeurs d’asile déboutés, le MIFI estime que l’augmentation du nombre de demandes d’asile faites au Québec influe sur le nombre de demandes pour considérations humanitaires reçues », ajoute-t-il.

Source: Les délais pour le Certificat de sélection du Québec humanitaire explosent

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Dyer : Judeo-Christian America: Why scholars reject GOP’s use of ‘Judeo-Christian’

2022/07/04 Leave a comment

Interesting and informative read:

On the right, the phrase “Judeo-Christian” has become like a password: It’s a short, fast way to prove your conservative ilk.

“We believe that America’s destiny depends on upholding the Judeo-Christian values and principles of our nation’s founding,” said former President Donald Trump recently at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

“We know that this is a nation with a deep Judeo-Christian footing. We must defend it at every turn,” said Mike Pompeo at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

Explaining his decision to start the National Association of Christian Lawmakers in 2020, Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert remarked, “Our ultimate goal and intent is that we restore the Judeo-Christian foundations of our government that were intended from the very beginning.”

And, in Idaho in 2015, a group of Republican politicians cited the “Judeo-Christian bedrock of the founding of the United States” in their proposal to make the state formally Christian.

But experts say the phrase is problematic at best, with critics describing it as a sort-of “marketing campaign” that outstayed its welcome.

“The phrase is … a modern one arising from a contemporary political setting that elides a painful history between Jews and Christians in which there was a huge power differential,” said Malka Simkovich, Crown-Ryan chair of Jewish Studies and director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies Program at Catholic Theological Union.

She and others believe the term “Judeo-Christian” papers over the history of violent antisemitism that Jews faced in Christendom and collapses important theological differences between Judaism and Christianity, erasing Jews in the process.

“There isn’t such a thing as Judeo-Christian anything,” said Meredith J.C. Warren, a senior lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield.

Critics also say that the inclusion of “Judeo” gives a false sense of multiculturalism when the term actually serves to exclude Muslims, atheists and members of many other faiths. They’re hoping the phrase “Judeo-Christian” will soon be retired in favor of a more inclusive — and accurate — alternative.

What is the history of the term ‘Judeo-Christian’?

The origin of the phrase “Judeo-Christian” isn’t entirely settled: European scholars have noted that German theologians used the term in the early 1800s. Today, the term is sometimes used — problematically, Simkovich said — in reference to the “early followers of Jesus who lived in the Jewish community.”

In the American context, the term “Judeo-Christian” was part of “a redefinition of democracy that began in the ’30s in response to totalitarianism around the globe,” said K. Healan Gaston, author of “Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy” and a lecturer on American religious history and ethics at Harvard Divinity School.

In the wake of massive Catholic and Jewish immigration to what was then an overwhelmingly Protestant country, the phrase “Judeo-Christian” was also a response to anti-Catholic sentiment and antisemitism. It can be understood as an attempt to create tri-faith unity among the three religious groups that were, at the time, at the center of American life, Gaston said.

This unity was instrumental to the war effort and post-war nation building, becoming deeply linked to the American concept of democracy. The phrase became ubiquitous during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, though Eisenhower later backed away from the term privately when he realized how exclusionary it was, according to Gaston.

The term was handy during the Cold War as a way of differentiating America from our supposedly nonreligious, communist enemies, said Marc Zvi Brettler, a Jewish studies professor at Duke University and co-author of “The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently.”

“One of the times the term was really ascendant was as an anti-communist term,” Brettler said.

Some of that anti-communist residue lingers on the word today as the right often falsely depicts Democrats — a group that includes the majority of American Jews as well as Black Americans, one of the country’s most religious demographics — as godless, secular humanists at best and radical socialists at worst.

For the most part, from the 1930s to 1970s, it was liberals that used the term “Judeo-Christian,” said Gaston. But by the 1970s, the phrase began to gain currency with the right. And it took off in the 1980s with conservatives. Ronald Reagan included the term in his presidential platform, said Gaston, who explained that Reagan imprinted a “Judeo-Christian framework on top of deep-seated anti-communism and free market economics.”

After Reagan, Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority picked up the phrase and it came to be used in five subsequent Republican presidential platforms, Gaston said, but never on the Democratic side. It remains a shorthand for all of those ideas that Reagan loaded into the term, including free market capitalism, family values and other conservative ideals.

How do Jews feel about the phrase Judeo-Christian?

For some Jews, the inclusion suggested by the phrase “Judeo-Christian” has been comforting, said Gaston, adding that the Conservative movement has historically been somewhat more amenable to the term than the Reform and Orthodox movements.

But many American Jews have a complicated relationship with the term, said Brettler, a practicing Jew

While it’s “fine to talk about the commonalities between Judaism and Christianity,” he said that current usage of the term represents a “problematic construct that makes things much more hunky dory than they should be.”

The expression emphasizes “the similarities and almost entirely (denies) the differences,” between Christianity and Judaism, Brettler added.

There’s also a risk that people who embrace the phrase “Judeo-Christian” will deny the antisemitism experienced by early Jewish immigrants to the U.S.

Invoking the so-called “Judeo-Christian” foundations of the country, Brettler said, is “a type of fake nostalgia.”

Has the phrase caught on outside the U.S.?

The phrase “Judeo-Christian” — with an exclusionary meaning — has also caught on among the European right, particularly in France, according to Nadia Malinovich, author of “French and Jewish: Culture and Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth Century France” and a researcher affiliated with the Groupe Société Religions Laïcités at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

“Jews have been re-centered as white societal insiders Europeans while Muslims are now cast as the primary others,” said Malinovich. The phrase, she added, is “being bandied about” as a cover for Christian nationalism

“Rather than saying ‘Christian civilization,’ it’s Judeo-Christian. … It’s a way of trying to cover up the fact that it’s just Christian by somehow getting the Jews involved ex-post facto,” she said.

Obliterating the theological differences and contemporary and historical tensions between Jews and Christians, Malinovich said, is, among other things, “disrespectful of the Jews who died in the Holocaust.”

Moving away from Judeo-Christian

The term “Judeo-Christian” omits the third Abrahamic faith — Islam — and erases its contributions to European history and, by extension, Western culture. The phrase ignores the fact that, historically, Jews lived with greater freedom and security in the Muslim world than they did in Christendom, said Warren.

In the American context, not only does “Judeo-Christian” exclude Muslims, Warren added, but also Indigenous communities.

“In North America specifically it’s important to foreground the rights and traditions of the continent’s First Peoples rather than erase them, too, with the phrase Judeo-Christian,” she said.

Many religion experts say the term should scrapped in favor of something more inclusive, like “interfaith.”

“Judeo-Christian” was “a brilliant civic invention that widened the country’s understanding of itself and reduced antisemitic and anti-Catholic bigotry,” Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, recently told the Deseret News.

“Now that America’s demographics have changed further — there are just as many Buddhists and Muslims in the country as there are Lutherans — it’s time to write the next great chapter in the history of American religion. And we think ‘interfaith America’ is the right title for that chapter.”

Rather than trying to create a melting pot in which individuals’ identities are subsumed into a larger national identity, we should strive for a potluck, Patel said, “where people’s unique identities are welcome contributions to the feast.”

Source: Judeo-Christian America: Why scholars reject GOP’s use of ‘Judeo-Christian’

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

Délais d’attente à Service Canada ou quand l’exception fait la règle

2022/07/04 Leave a comment

A reminder that Service Canada’s problems go beyond passport services and are long standing:

Relayée largement par les grands médias, « la crise des passeports » soulève depuis quelques semaines l’indignation de nombreux Canadiens qui s’étonnent de l’échec monumental de Service Canada à délivrer des passeports dans des délais raisonnables.

Les personnes sans-emploi qui ont dû composer avec la machine défectueuse qu’est Service Canada sourcillent probablement devant les propos de la ministre lorsqu’elle invoque le caractère exceptionnel de la situation. Certains se rappelleront également qu’en 2006, un syndicat d’employés de la fonction publique canadienne avait pointé du doigt l’existence de directives internes ayant pour effet de falsifier les chiffres sur les délais d’attente réels à Service Canada.

Le manque de transparence et le cafouillage chez Service Canada ne datent pas d’hier. Depuis l’instauration de cette méga-agence fédérale, les groupes de défense des droits des chômeurs de la province n’ont cessé de dénoncer l’accroissement des délais d’attente pour le traite006, pour résorber l’arriéré des 80 000 dossiers dont le traitement dépassait les 28 jours, le Mouvement autonome et solidaire des sans-emploi (MASSE) recommandait d’augmenter le nombre d’agents d’au moins 20 % et de cesser la chasse aux « mauvais chômeurs ».

Le même son de cloche fut donné en 2008, 2010, 2013 et pour toutes les années subséquentes. Enfin, le rapport Massé sur la qualité des services, publié en 2015, suggérait un ensemble de solutions qui auraient pu être mises en place bien avant la pandémie. Il faut augmenter le nombre d’agents et bonifier leur formation, simplifier les procédures opérationnelles et investir dans les infrastructures technologiques.

Après dix-sept ans, force est de constater que Service Canada est non seulement devenu une machine qui fragilise les populations vulnérables, mais un véritable frein à l’exercice du droit à une protection en cas de chômage pour tous les travailleurs.

Depuis l’hiver 2022 — alors que les demandes de chômage atteignent un creux historique — Service Canada bat de tristes records. En janvier, ce sont près de 300 000 dossiers qui ne respectent pas les normes de traitement, certaines personnes pouvant attendre jusqu’à un an pour que soit traitée leur demande. Gardés dans l’ombre, les futurs prestataires doivent appeler en moyenne sept fois les services de première ligne pour obtenir un suivi de leur dossier.

Comble de l’aberration, les demandes classées « urgences humanitaires » ne sont plus considérées comme prioritaires depuis quelque temps. Des chômeurs en détresse se font dire de prendre leur mal en patience, de s’endetter et parfois même d’aller chercher de l’aide sociale. Les conséquences sont dramatiques. Connaissez-vous beaucoup de personnes capables de faire vivre leur famille sans revenus pendant deux, voire quatre mois ?

Au-delà de la pandémie

Loin d’être perméable aux vagues de réformes de l’administration publique observées depuis 1970, le Canada crée en 2005 Service Canada, un organe à guichet unique au sein duquel seront désormais administrés les programmes de quatorze ministères. Cette nouvelle structure, nous promet-on, « permettra à la fois d’améliorer la qualité des services tout en réalisant des économies ».

Service Canada importe des méthodes de gestion propres à celles des entreprises privées et témoigne d’une vision clientéliste des services publics. L’importance accrue accordée aux mécanismes d’évaluation du rendement du personnel alourdit les procédures administratives, alors que l’informatisation mur à mur des services est inadaptée aux besoins réels des chômeurs dont les demandes sont « irrégulières ».

Résultat : l’ajout d’un billet médical dans la demande d’assurance-emploi, ou la déclaration d’indemnités provenant de la CNESST par exemple, peut priver une personne sans-emploi de prestations pendant des mois.

À l’été 2020, le gouvernement Trudeau a promis d’adapter le régime d’assurance-chômage « à la réalité des travailleurs du XXIe siècle ». Or, tant et aussi longtemps que le gouvernement nie les dysfonctions profondes de l’appareil censé administrer le régime, les Canadiens risquent de ne pas voir la couleur des prestations auxquelles ils et elles ont droit.

L’amnésie du gouvernement a assez duré.

Source: Délais d’attente à Service Canada ou quand l’exception fait la règle

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