Young Hong Kong dissidents were told Canada welcomed them. Why can’t they get visas?

2022/02/12 Leave a comment

Of note:

It wasn’t an inherently risky choice — he just heeded calls on social media to attend a public gathering to mark a student’s death at the height of anti-government protests. 

However, it was a decision that may have wrecked his future in Canada.

Clad in all black, he ventured out to join the event but as soon as he and four friends got off the bus in Hong Kong’s Central District, police stopped them. Authorities found a laser pointer in his backpack and charged him in 2019 with possession of a weapon with the intent to assault.

After serving seven months in a youth rehab centre in Lantau Island, the 20-year-old was released last June and planned to start his undergraduate study in Toronto, where he finished high school as an international student.

However, more than five months since he applied for a student visa and submitted thousands of pages of translated legal documents, the Hong Konger is still waiting for a decision from the Canadian visa post in the former British colony, now part of China.

Pro-democracy advocates in Canada say they have started to see visa-seekers from Hong Kong whose applications — a first step to access asylum in this country — have been stalled or refused, despite Ottawa’s public commitment to ease their passage here in light of the alarming human-rights situation there.

“These youngsters have been charged and imprisoned for wearing a mask or carrying laser pointers during demonstrations … arrested and convicted with trumped-up charges. To us, they’re political prisoners,” said Winnie Ng, chair of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China.

“The Canadian government had stated quite clearly that protest is a right and that convictions of these offences will not be a ground for inadmissibility to Canada.”

In 2020, after a new national security law took effect in Hong Kong, Ottawa announced a string of new initiatives to welcome students and youth to “quickly” come to Canada on work and study permits as well as introduced new pathways for them to stay here permanently.

Marco Mendicino, then Canada’s immigration minister, expressed deep concerns about the imposition of the new law in Hong Kong, which critics say has reduced judicial autonomy and restricted freedoms for dissent. 

“Taking part in peaceful protests is not considered an offence in Canada. As such, arrests or convictions outside of Canada for taking part in peaceful protests are not grounds for inadmissibility to Canada,” Mendicino told a parliamentary committee meeting then.

“No one will be disqualified from making a legitimate asylum claim in Canada by virtue alone of having been charged under the new national security law, and neither will they be hindered in any way from availing themselves under any other immigration route.”SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Calling himself a supporter for “peace, reason and non-violence,” the young man who was found guilty of possession of a weapon by carrying the laser pen said he is disappointed that Canada hasn’t followed through its commitment.

“We have translated all the legal documents into English and explained to the visa officers the circumstances of the arrest and conviction,” said the man, who studied for three years in high school in Toronto and returned to Hong Kong for the summer in 2019.

“We were told to bring a torch light or laser point to commemorate the death of a protester who died two days earlier. And police called the laser pointer a weapon. But there was no confrontation or violence.”

According to the immigration department, at least 10 Hong Kong residents have been refused a visa on criminal grounds to date under the special measures — but many have successfully taken advantage of those initiatives for a shot to settle in Canada.

By the end of last year, 668 Hong Kong nationals who have studied or worked in Canada had been granted permanent residence, 7,950 others issued a three-year open work permits and 7,786 visitors, students and work-permit holders had their temporary status extended.

However, it’s the applications that are stalled or refused on “protest-related” criminality that advocates are concerned about.

Data collected by Toronto Association for Democracy in China showed Hong Kong police charged 2,605 people in the 2019 pro-democracy protest movement. The top charges were rioting, conspiracy with the intent to cause riot, face covering, unlawful assembly and possession of offensive weapons and items with the intent to destroy or damage property.

One of those arrested and convicted of facial covering was Ken, a 23-year-old university graduate, who took part in a protest against police violence in late 2019. He was acquitted of one count of rioting but was sentenced to a two-month jail term for violating the anti-mask law.

He said he wore the gas mask for self-protection because police had previously used tear gas and pepper spray on protesters. As a result of the prosecution, he said he and his family became targets of cyberbullying and he was shunned by potential employers for his association with the political movement.

“I didn’t see a future for myself in Hong Kong. We were harassed online and I didn’t feel safe there. I just wanted to start a new chapter in life,” said Ken, who fled Hong Kong to an undisclosed country after his application to travel to Canada was recently refused.

“How can you seek political asylum in Canada if you can’t even get into the country? I understand Canadian officials need to feel safe about someone coming to their country and they do need to screen out criminals. I’m just disappointed that they don’t take a more lenient, humanitarian approach in handling our cases.”

Toronto immigration lawyer Barbara Jackman said immigration officials can deem someone criminally inadmissible if they assess and find Canadian equivalency of the offences. However, an officer also has the discretion to look to the facts behind the case.

“It all depends on how they’re going to look at them in terms of whether China has overreacted and is actually prosecuting lawful dissent and protest,” said Jackman, who is involved in both the young Hong Kongers’ cases.

“The Canadian government has announced all these programs for Hong Kong residents. They are all parts of the news releases and bulletins that they come up with. It’s an expression of the government’s views on the matter. Visa officers are supposed to take it into account.”

The immigration department could not comment on the two specific cases but said inadmissibility decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.

“Security screening and the overall complexity of a case are some factors that can result in higher processing times. Other factors include delays associated with requests for additional information from the applicant, and how easily information can be verified and whether the application is complete,” said department spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald.

Source: Young Hong Kong dissidents were told Canada welcomed them. Why can’t they get visas?

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Trichur: Cirque du Soleil walking an ethical tightrope in Saudi Arabia

2022/02/12 Leave a comment

Valid questions and questionable ethics and values:

Send in the clowns.

Don’t bother. They’re here.

Cirque du Soleil is defending its decision to deepen its business ties with Saudi Arabia despite concern about that country’s human-rights record and the fate of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi – whose family lives in Quebec.

The Montreal-based entertainment company recently signed an agreement with the Saudi Ministry of Culture to bring more of its shows to the kingdom, including The Illusionist, Now You See Me, Paw Patrol Live – Race to Rescue, Trolls Live! and Blue Man Group World Tour.

The agreement also sets the stage for Cirque to create an original performance for Saudi Arabia and to collaborate with its officials to establish a regional training academy and office.

Although Cirque is eager to generate new revenue after emerging from bankruptcy protection, its new owners are walking an ethical tightrope by doing more business with Saudi Arabia. The company has had six shows there since 2018, and some of those performances prompted a backlash from employees and ordinary Quebeckers. So it is baffling that it is risking a new controversy while there is widespread worry about Mr. Badawi’s case.

“Through our shows, our goal is always to inspire the local population and our presence in any market should not be interpreted as a political and moral stance,” Cirque spokeswoman Caroline Couillard wrote in an e-mail. “As a private company, we do not believe it is appropriate to interfere in the domestic and foreign affairs of the governments of the countries we visit.”

Let’s get real. This is where the rubber meets the road on corporate social responsibility. Cirque’s seemingly apolitical stance isn’t in keeping with its pledge to act “as a responsible agent of change.”

Saudi Arabia is talking a good game about cultural transformation these days, but it is still very much a repressive regime. Despite relaxing some social norms, the kingdom has made no substantial progress on human-rights issues since the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

Its track record on human rights is already a sore spot with Canadians. We’ve learned that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) allegedly sent a hit squad to Canada in a foiled attempt to assassinate former Saudi intelligence officer Saad Aljabri not long after Mr. Khashoggi’s murder. And much to our collective horror, Canadian arms are fuelling the worsening conflict in Yemen (effectively a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran).

Now, with Ottawa calling on Riyadh to release Mr. Badawi from prison, offer him leniency and allow him to reunite with his family, Cirque’s new agreement comes at a particularly sensitive time for Canadian-Saudi relations.

Although Mr. Badawi is a Saudi citizen, his wife Ensaf Haidar and three children are Canadian. He was arrested in 2012 and sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for criticizing Saudi clerics on his blog. According to the Islamic calendar, Mr. Badawi’s prison term ends Feb. 28, but his release is far from certain. Even if he is liberated, he still faces a 10-year travel ban.

Perhaps that’s why the Cirque agreement caught the eye of Ms. Haidar, who congratulated MBS for it in a recent letter, written in French. She took the opportunity to urge him to release her husband and lift his travel ban.

“We believe that this gesture would be in perfect harmony with the reforms you are undertaking,” Ms. Haidar wrote.

Her tone was remarkably polite given the circumstances, but when the potential penalty for offence is to be cut into pieces like Mr. Khashoggi, it’s understandable.

Separately, Mr. Badawi’s supporters are urging Ottawa to grant him Canadian citizenship.

“The Government of Canada is very concerned by the case of Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia,” said Jeffrey MacDonald, a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. “We have consistently advocated on his behalf and will continue to use every opportunity to do so. His well-being is foremost in our minds.”

That’s why it’s unfathomable that Cirque would sign an agreement like this. And yet Ms. Couillard frames the deal as coming “on the heels of announced reforms and social changes in the country, as well as the announcement of business deals to build an entirely new entertainment industry in Saudi Arabia.”

However, Canadians are unlikely to buy into Saudi Arabia’s propaganda campaign, given how some of Cirque’s previous performances in the kingdom also generated controversy. Not only did Cirque’s own artists voice their concerns back in 2018, but so, too, did co-founder Guy Laliberté, according to a published report from Radio Canada International.

Cirque’s most recent performance in the country was Messi10, named after Argentinian soccer player Lionel Messi, which was held in 2021. Perhaps it should instead take its cues from entertainment heavyweights, such as rapper Nicki Minaj, who have cancelled shows there over human-rights concerns.

The company is twisting itself into a pretzel to justify this new agreement, but its mental gymnastics only risk courting more controversy.

Source: Cirque du Soleil walking an ethical tightrope in Saudi Arabia

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Milloy: In this increasingly polarized society, how can we learn to trust each other again?

2022/02/11 Leave a comment

No easy answers in terms of how we address weakening trust:

How should we react to calls for both sides of the COVID-19 debate to try to find common ground? Many federal Conservatives as well as a collection of commentators are urging dialogue on vaccine mandates and public health restrictions. The new Conservative leader, Candice Bergen, has talked of the need to extend “an olive branch.”

Their arguments are simple. Although there may be racists and extremists involved in the anti-vaxx movement, most of those protesting current COVID-19 rules are ordinary Canadians who deserve to be heard. The trucker’s protest in Ottawa, which has now spread to other communities, is symptomatic of a divided nation that needs to be healed.

Communication is generally a good thing, and both the “pro” and “anti” vaccine sides could certainly benefit from a dose of humility. But beyond gaining a deeper appreciation of each other’s basic humanity (never a bad thing), here is a question to ponder: if they ever did meet what would the two sides talk about?

Those who oppose COVID vaccines and restrictions have made it clear that they don’t trust our political leaders. They mistrust scientists, public health officials, doctors and much of the mainstream media.

And on the other side, proponents for vaccine mandates and restrictions don’t trust the protesters. They don’t trust their claims about science or public health. They don’t trust their opinions on politics or governing and would be quick to point to their bizarre calls for the Governor General and the Senate to somehow force the federal government and provinces to end COVID-19 restrictions. Most of all, they don’t trust their motives and see them as a bunch of yahoos looking simply to cause trouble.

We have a problem in our country. The level of polarization seems to be growing exponentially. Extreme views are becoming more commonplace, but perhaps more concerning is the fact that even middle of the road people are increasingly admitting that they have no time for anyone who doesn’t share their opinion. A recent Angus Reid poll found that close to 40 per cent of Canadians believe that “there is no room for political compromise in Canada today.

This isn’t about the need to “hash things out.” This is about trust. We don’t trust each other. We don’t trust our governments, our political leaders, experts, media, multinationals, or our churches.

As a society we have developed ways of dealing with issues and challenges. We have institutions and systems that are supposed to analyze problems and drawing upon the best evidence, find the needed solutions.

Do we trust that process? Just ask any Black Lives Matter protester, climate change activist, Indigenous Leader or Freedom Convoy Member to learn of the profound mistrust that many have in our traditional way of approaching problems.

Why all this mistrust? Is it COVID and the resulting lockdown? Is it social media; growing economic inequality; or a decline of deference toward our traditional institutions?

Is it all these things and more?

Regardless of its origins, it is not going to be solved by Justin Trudeau welcoming a delegation of truckers into his office or us trying to be more sympathetic to a friend or relative who refuses to get vaccinated because “they have done their own research.”

Canada is experiencing a “trust” deficit. We need to acknowledge it and try to figure out how to restore it — or at least slow down its crumbling before it’s too late.

Now that’s a conversation worth having.

Source: In this increasingly polarized society, how can we learn to trust each other again?

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Swedish tweets about immigration reveal new insights into polarization dynamics

2022/02/11 Leave a comment

Would love to see some comparative analysis with Canada, USA and other countries:

A computational analysis of more than 1 million Tweets from Swedish speakers has found little evidence for significant polarization within this network on the topic of immigration—even after Sweden’s 2015 refugee crisis. Elizaveta Kopacheva and Victoria Yantseva of Linnaeus University, Sweden, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 9, 2022.

Social media platforms can enable grassroots activism and expose people to new ideas, but they can also create echo chambers and cause group . However, most research into polarization caused by social media has focused on political party support or membership, while neglecting a wider selection of social issues, such as immigration.

To broaden understanding, Kopacheva and Yantseva studied a network of Swedish speakers who discussed immigration on Twitter from 2012 to 2019. The research team applied analytical tools known as and natural-language processing to almost 1,200,000 tweets in order to explore the dynamics of interactions between active users in the network, and to quantify polarization in their sentiments regarding immigration.

This analysis revealed the development of different discussion communities within the network over time. However, despite immigration being thought of as a controversial topic, the researchers did not find significant evidence for polarization between users in the network and communities.

Moreover, polarization dynamics did not change significantly in the wake of the 2015 refugee crises, when an unprecedented number of asylum seekers came to Sweden, and the government struggled to adequately accommodate them. However, the researchers did note a shift in sentiment after the 2015 crisis, with users’ tweets becoming more negative in tone and a declining proportion of tweets having a neutral tone.

The authors discuss potential mechanisms that could underlie their findings and outline possible next steps. For instance, future research could incorporate more information on Twitter users’ behavior and consider less-active users, or it could examine the potential impact of Twitter’s 2017 expansion of the maximum-allowed length of each .

Overall, the researchers say, their findings could help clarify the potential role could play in reducing radicalization and right-wing populism.

The authors add: “We detected no permanent changes in the levels of polarization that could be directly attributed to the crisis, which applies both to the and community levels. Still, we saw a moderate but long-lasting shift towards a more negative tonality of users’ messages after the crisis and a declining share of neutral tweets.”

Source: Swedish tweets about immigration reveal new insights into polarization dynamics

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Over 800,000 Indians have renounced their citizenship since 2016, US top choice

2022/02/11 Leave a comment

Of note, Canada and Australia after USA:

More than 800,000 Indians have renounced their citizenship to become citizens of other countries, while India granted citizenship to nearly 5,000 foreigners in the last five years.

According to the Indian government’s data, nearly 610,000 Indians became foreign citizens in the five years to December 2021.

The data shows that 42% of the more than six lakh Indians who renounced their citizenship did it to become US citizens, according to a report by The Times of India.

In the first nine months of 2021, more than 50,000 Indians acquired US citizenship.

After the US. Canada was the most favoured country of Indians who renounced their Indian citizenship. As a result, 91,000 Indians became Canadian citizens between 2017 and 2021.

86,933 Indians gave up their Indian citizenship to become Australian citizens, followed by England (66,193) and Italy (23,490). 83,191 Indians have acquired citizenship in one of the 86 other countries worldwide.

The Indian government says 4,844 foreigners were granted Indian citizenship in the last five years.

On Tuesday, India’s Minister of State, Home Affairs, Nityanand Rai, told Lok Sabha that as many as 4,844 foreigners had been granted Indian citizenship under the Citizenship Act 1955 since 2016.

The minister informed that most foreigners (1,773) received Indian citizenship in 2021. As many as 639 foreigners became Indian citizens in 2020, 987 in 2019, 628 in 2018 and 817 in 2017.

People from Pakistan (2,405) were at the top of the table acquiring Indian citizenship between 2016 and 2019, followed by Afghans (431), Bangladeshi (132), Sri Lankans (92) and the US (80).

Union Home Minister of State Rai responded to a question about the total number of foreigners granted Indian citizenship by the Central government during the last five years to clarify reasons for taking it.

“The citizenship to eligible foreigners is granted by registration under section 5, by neutralization under section 6 or by incorporation of territory under section 7 of the Citizenship Act, 1955,” he said in a written reply.

Also, 10,635 applications were pending with the Ministry of Home Affairs as of December 2021. Most of these applications are from Pakistan (7,306), followed by Afghanistan (1,152).

Source: Over 800,000 Indians have renounced their citizenship since 2016, US top choice

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Immigration patterns are reflected in Facebook data on popular foods and drinks

2022/02/11 Leave a comment

Not surprising but nevertheless interesting:

Researchers have developed a novel strategy for using Facebook data to measure cultural similarity between countries, revealing associations between immigration patterns and people’s food and drink interests. Carolina Vieira of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 9, 2022.

Migration may play a key role in shaping cultural similarities between countries. However, its influence is difficult to study, partly due to the challenge of quantifying culture. Typically, researchers have relied on surveys to compare different countries’ cultures, but surveys are associated with several difficulties, such as their cost, the possibility of bias in their construction, and the difficulty of applying them to a large number of countries.

To complement survey data, Vieira and colleagues have now developed a new analytical method based on earlier evidence that and drink preferences may be a proxy for cultural similarities between countries. The new method employs data on the top 50 food and drink preferences for any given country as captured by the Facebook Advertising Platform.

To demonstrate the new method, the researchers applied it to 16 countries, finding that food and drink interests generally reflect immigration patterns. In most countries, including the U.S., preferences for foreign food and drink align with top foods and drinks in the countries from which most immigrants came. Countries with fewer immigrants, such as Indonesia, Japan, Russia, and Turkey, stand apart from the others, showing more idiosyncrasy in their preferences for foreign foods and drinks.

The findings align well with earlier survey data, and they highlight asymmetry between countries; for instance, the top 50 foods and drinks from Mexico are more popular in the U.S. than the top 50 U.S. foods and drinks are in Mexico, reflecting a greater degree of immigration from Mexico to the U.S. than vice versa.

Overall, the researchers say, this study suggests that immigrants indeed help shape the culture of their destination country. Future research could refine the new method outlined in this study or repurpose it to examine and compare other interests beyond food and drink.

The authors add: “We analyze data from Facebook users about their food and drink preferences to measure the cultural similarity between 16 countries. When compared with official migration data, we observe that countries with more immigrants show a higher cultural similarity between the origin and destination .”

Source: Immigration patterns are reflected in Facebook data on popular foods and drinks

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Immigration Canada’s backlog stands at 1.8 million people, but there are signs of improvement [citizenship numbers]

2022/02/11 Leave a comment

But not for citizenship :

Citizenship backlog has grown by 20,000 persons

IRCC reported the backlog for citizenship applicants was standing at about 468,000 on December 31, 2021. On October 31 of last year, there were around 448,000 citizenship applications in the inventory. In 61 days, the citizenship backlog grew by 20,000 applicants.

In its email to CIC News, a spokesperson from IRCC said in all of 2021, Canada processed more than 206,000 citizenship applications. Compared to 2020 when IRCC processed 80,000 citizenship applications.

Source: Immigration Canada’s backlog stands at 1.8 million people, but there are signs of improvement

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Most Black nurses in Ontario deal with racism. This task force of nurses has a way forward

2022/02/10 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Nurse practitioner Corsita Garraway still thinks about a patient she had years ago who lost her foot.

She was an older, Black woman who had been in the hospital due to complications with diabetes and developed gangrene. But it went overlooked until the only solution was to amputate.

Gangrene often turns the skin black, but Garraway said others caring for this woman must not have been able to identify it on her dark skin. “People didn’t recognize that the blackness of her foot was a blackness of her foot that shouldn’t have been there,” Garraway told the Star.

She knew something was wrong the moment she walked into the patient’s room because of the smell — the off scent was a signal to her right away that something was amiss. And when she went over and touched her foot gently, the patient screamed.

She can only guess how these three issues — the smell of decaying flesh, the discoloration and the pain — had gone unnoticed for so long.

Garraway was a registered practical nurse at the time so there were certain tasks other degree-holding health-care providers were meant to conduct. She eventually got her master’s degree and is now doing a PhD because she wanted to be able to provide more care for her patients.

After more than 30 years working in nursing, she’s seen anti-Black racism affect both her patients, and nurses.

“I feel like people just don’t always take the time when they see us,” Garraway said.

Now as co-chair of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario’s (RNAO) Black Nurses Task Force, Garraway and a group of 17 Black nurses and students are hoping to bring change to the field in the province.

The task force will release a report of its work so far Tuesday morning, which includes 19 specific recommendations for change in the industry. They’re aimed at post-secondary education, workplace leadership, the province, policy-makers and allies working in the field, to name a few.

The report’s recommendations are backed by a survey of 205 Black nurses and nursing students in Ontario.

About 88 per cent of respondents said they’ve experienced racism or discrimination of some kind in the field.

Almost 63 per cent of Black nurses and nursing students said their mental health was moderately or strongly affected by dealing with systemic discrimination and racial microaggressions.

Among the changes the task force wants to see are mandatory anti-racism education and training for all nurses, more Black nurses on committees and boards, changes in hiring practices, and mentorship and financial support for Black nurses.

“The whiteness of our profession is blinding,” RNAO president Doris Grinspun told the Star, noting that the lack of diversity is especially pronounced the further you move from the bedside to leadership and policy-makers.

“We miss out on the talent, we miss out on the expertise. We all bring expertise that is a mix of what you study and what you live,” Grinspun said. “We miss out as a system, as a society.”

As a white woman, Grinspun has wanted to make sure RNAO is there to provide resources, but that Black nurses take the lead.

Past RNAO president Angela Cooper Brathwaite was brought on as co-chair along with Garraway.

Cooper Brathwaite has spent her long career in Newfoundland, Manitoba and Ontario working as a nurse, midwife, managing departments and teaching in colleges and universities.

But the area where she dealt with the most friction was in teaching.

In her second year of teaching in the ’80s, Cooper Brathwaite said all of her course content disappeared from her filing cabinet days before classes were to start.

When she raised the issue with administration, someone suggested maybe a student took her lesson plans. But Cooper Brathwaite said that wasn’t likely. Students had freely borrowed her notes and returned them and also didn’t have access to her office.

She remembers college administration didn’t spend much time investigating the incident, but she couldn’t shake the thought that one of her colleagues was behind it.

Cooper Brathwaite still teaches part time at Ontario universities, but the experience early on soured her from taking full-time positions when they were offered.

But having Black professors in the field is exactly what kept student Ola Abanta Thomas Obewu on the nursing path.

Thomas Obewu quickly realized bedside nursing wasn’t for her, but seeing no examples of Black women venturing into other areas of the field was discouraging. She thought she’d have a more realistic go of it in medical school.

But then she got a Black nursing instructor. And later, she joined RNAO’s task force and saw more paths she could take as a Black woman in the field.

“I saw researchers, PhD holders, people who were the chief nursing officer in their hospital,” Thomas Obewu said. “Just that connection alone made me realize I could be like those people.”

Source: Most Black nurses in Ontario deal with racism. This task force of nurses has a way forward

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Chinese widow once ensnared in major Canada money laundering case seeks Canadian citizenship

2022/02/10 Leave a comment

While not convicted (charges were stayed), takes a certain amount of chutzpah to apply:

Caixuan “Summer” Qin and her now-deceased husband once stood accused by the Canadian government of running an underground bank that allegedly laundered hundreds of millions of dollars for transnational organised crime groups, catering to wealthy Chinese gamblers and international drug gangs.

But Qin and her husband Jian Jun Zhu, who was shot dead in a Vancouver restaurant in 2020, were never tried or convicted. Canadian prosecutors stayed money laundering and other related charges in November 2018 after the identity of an informant was mistakenly revealed in evidentiary disclosure to the couple’s defence lawyers.

Now, it’s Qin who is taking the Canadian government to court, fighting its demand for alleged unpaid taxes, and claiming that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) had wrongfully delayed processing her bid for Canadian citizenship.

Source: Chinese widow once ensnared in major Canada money laundering case seeks Canadian citizenship

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Australia: ‘We’re being used as tools’: Multicultural groups reject support for religious discrimination bill

2022/02/10 Leave a comment

Of note:

Some multicultural groups have vehemently rejected any support for the religious discrimination bill as debate continues in parliament in the first sitting week of the year.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison used multiculturalism in an argument to sway MPs to vote in favour of the bill during Question Time on Tuesday.

“If those in this chamber want to speak about multiculturalism and how great a multicultural society it is, then they must acknowledge the role of faith and culture in this country,” Mr Morrison said.

But Nyadol Nyuon, director of Sir Zelman Cowen Centre and chair of Harmony Alliance, said it was “insulting” to use multicultural communities to aid the bill’s progress.

“Multicultural communities did not ask for this bill,” she told SBS News.

She said those who did campaign for the bill were people from “mainstream religions and mainstream politicians, insisting that this is a big problem that needs to be resolved through the institution of the law”.

“Let’s put the blame where it belongs, instead of shifting it and making multicultural communities look like we are would rather see other Australians suffer to protect our sensibilities.”

The religious discrimination bill has stoked great divisions within parliament, including within the Coalition as Liberal MP Bridget Archer refused to vote in favour of the proposed law.

The bill seeks to enshrine stronger protections to make statements of belief made on religious grounds, as well as giving employers of religious-based institutions the right to preference hiring people of their own faith.

But while Mr Morrison has ultimately won the backing of his party, his comments in parliament have angered those who represent multicultural communities, such as Ms Nyadol.

“[Mr Morrison] is trying to create this false choice by conflating multiculturalism with almost, to some degree, religious bigotry, and I think that’s incorrect. You can support multiculturalism and support equal rights for all citizens,” she said.

“We’re being used as tools in these political debates.”

Mohammad Al-Khafaji, who is the president of Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA), described Mr Morrison’s parallels as “simplistic”.

“The view that all cultural communities have religion or faith, that’s a simple way of looking at multiculturalism and we’re a very complex nation,” he told SBS News.

Mr Al-Khafaji explained the priority for people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (CALD) is that “they want to make sure everybody is protected”.

He agreed with Ms Nyadol, saying the religious discrimination bill disenfranchises those from CALD backgrounds rather than empowers them.

“[The bill] allows … more dominant, religious groups, who are more established here in Australia to vilify others who are new and emerging in Australia,” he said.

Mr Al-Khafaji has questioned the bill’s practical benefits, as he witnesses the divisions the debate has stoked between people of faith and multicultural communities.

“What we have at the moment is a bit of a class warfare between and it’s driving a wedge between communities. I guess my question is: what is the problem that we’re trying to resolve?”

The Australian GBLTIQ Multicultural Association (AGMC) said it’s “disappointed” the bill will likely be passed.

The organisation stands firm in its view the bill is divisive, particularly for people from CALD backgrounds who are LGBTIQ+.

“Every day LGBTIQ+ people of faith need to make difficult choices between their LGBTIQ+ identities and their religious and cultural communities,” AGMC president Giancarlo de Vera said.

“We have a right to live as full human beings, who are proud of our faith traditions as well as being queer.

“This bill forces [us] to make a choice we shouldn’t have to make.”

Ms Nyuon and Mr Al-Khafaji both agreed that Australia’s multicultural societies are diverse, and must include those from faith backgrounds who do support the bill.

Some include the Australian Muslim Advocacy Network (AMAN), the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council and the Australian Bahá’í Community.

In their submissions supporting the bill, they cited the necessity to practice their religious values freely without fear of religious discrimination after facing vilification for their beliefs in the past.

The Australian Bahá’í Community said its support for the bill “draws on our practical experience helping to defend the members of the Bahá’í Faith in Iran and elsewhere whose rights to freedom of religion or belief and practise of their beliefs have been violated”.
Meanwhile, Islamic-based organisations such as AMAN want the bill amended to include a vilification clause – not adequately covered under anti-discrimination laws – to counter high rates of Islamophobic abuse targeted towards Muslims in Australia.
“People of faith must not vilify others … and this protection must extend both ways … federal vilification protection will protect all Australians based on religious belief and activity nationwide,” it says.

Source: ‘We’re being used as tools’: Multicultural groups reject support for religious discrimination bill

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

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