Human rights? China won that Winter Olympics battle. Almost.

2022/02/22 Leave a comment

Time for Canadian Olympians and sport officials to speak up:

When three-time Olympian Gus Kenworthy took the remarkable, perhaps even brave decision to speak out against “human rights atrocities” while still in China at the Winter Games, the self-proclaimed “loud and obnoxious” British skier also proved that other athletes, had they chosen, perhaps could have used their Olympic platform to pipe up, too.

Because Kenworthy wasn’t hauled away and imprisoned, as Chinese critics of the ruling Communist Party routinely are. Doing so would have generated exactly the sort of global focus on the Chinese government’s authoritarian methods that it sought to avoid while global sports’ biggest show was in town. 

And with the notable exception of Kenworthy, China largely accomplished that mission. 

Olympians with any qualms about chasing medals in a country accused of genocide against its Muslim Uyghur population and of other abuses kept their views on those topics to themselves for the durations of their stay. And perhaps for good reason: They faced vague but, as it turned out, undeployed Chinese threats of punishment, constant surveillance and the sobering example of tennis star Peng Shuai’s difficulties after she voiced allegations of forced sex against a Communist Party official.

“We have seen an effective silencing of 2,800 athletes, and that’s scary,” said Noah Hoffman, a former U.S. Olympic skier and board member of the Global Athlete advocacy group pushing for Olympic reform.

Kenworthy, speaking to The Associated Press before his 8th-place finish in the halfpipe final on the Games’ penultimate day, laid out why.

“We’re in China, so we play by China’s rules. And China makes their rules as they go, and they certainly have the power to kind of do whatever they want: Hold an athlete, stop an athlete from leaving, stop an athlete from competing,” he said.

“I’ve also been advised to sort of tread lightly while I am here and that’s what I am trying to do.”

Immediately after competing, however, the proudly gay athlete’s gloves came off. 

He prefaced criticism with praise for China’s “incredible job with this Olympics” and carefully calibrated his words. But unlike other Olympians, he couldn’t bite his tongue until he got home. Kenworthy aimed jabs not only at the host country’s rights abuses and “poor stance on LGBTQ rights” but also at other athletes he said try “to appeal to the masses” and avoid ruffling feathers. 

“I’ve already kind of accepted that that’s not what I’m gonna do,” he said. “I’m just gonna speak my truth.” 

In fairness, Olympians found themselves squeezed on all sides in Beijing. Campaigners abroad hoped they would spark global outrage over the imprisonment in re-education camps of an estimated 1 million people or more, most of them Uyghurs. China, backed to the hilt by the International Olympic Committee, didn’t want critical voices to be heard. And their own voices told athletes to focus, focus, focus on the pursuit of Olympic success that they, their coaches and families sacrificed for.

The sweep and vagueness of a Chinese official’s threat before the Games of “certain punishment” for “any behavior or speech that is against the Olympic spirit” appeared to have a particularly sobering effect on Beijing-bound teams. Campaigners who met with athletes in the United States in the weeks before their departure, lobbying them about Uyghurs and the crushing of dissent in Tibet and Hong Kong, noticed the chill.

“Prior to the statement, we had been engaging with quite a few athletes,” said Pema Doma, campaigns director at Students for a Free Tibet. They “were expressing a lot of interest in learning more and being engaged in the human rights issue.” 

Afterward, “there was a very, very distinct difference” and “one athlete even said to an activist directly: ‘I’ve been instructed not to take anything from you or speak to you,’” she said in a phone interview.

Other concerns also weighed on Olympians, way beyond the usual anxieties that often come with travel to a foreign land, away from home comforts.

Warnings of possible cyber-snooping by Chinese security services and team advisories that athletes leave electronic devices at home were alarming for a generation weaned on social media and constant connectivity with their worlds. 

Also wearing were daily coronavirus tests that were mandatory — and invasive, taken with swabs to the back of the throat — for all Olympians, locked inside a tightly policed bubble of health restrictions to prevent infection spreads. The penalty for testing positive was possible quarantine and missed competition, a terrible blow for winter athletes who often toil outside of the limelight, except every four years at the Games.

“Who knows where those tests go, who handles the results,” Kenworthy said. “It’s definitely in the back of the mind.”

“And there’s like all the cybersecurity stuff. It is concerning,” he told The AP.

Often, athletes simply blanked when asked about human rights, saying they weren’t qualified to speak on the issue or were focused on competition, and hunkered down. 

On Twitter, Dutch speedskater Sanne in ’t Hof blocked, unblocked and then blocked again a Uyghur living in the Netherlands who posted critical comments of Olympians in what he called “genocide” Games. Mirehmet Ablet shared a screengrab with The AP showing that the skater had barred him from accessing her account, where she tweeted that she “enjoyed every second!′ of her first Olympics. Ablet’s brother was arrested in 2017 in the Uyghur homeland of Xinjiang in far western China, and Ablet doesn’t know where he’s now held.

Other athletes also were effusive in praising their China experience. “Nothing short of amazing,” said U.S. speedskating bronze-medal winner Brittany Bowe. 

Hoffman, who competed for the U.S. at the 2014 and 2018 Games, said internal politics within teams may also have dissuaded athletes from speaking critically. Coaches can bench athletes who bring unwanted attention and “there’s pressure from your teammates to not cause a distraction,” he said in a phone interview. Athletes with self-confidence dented by sub-par performances may also have felt that they’d lost any platform.

“There’s lots of really subtle pressure,” Hoffman said. 

He expects some athletes won’t be critical once home, so as to not disrespect the cheerful and helpful Games workers.

But he’s hopeful others will speak up on their return and that “we do get a chorus.” 

Feeling unmuzzled, some already are. 

Back in Sweden with his two gold medals in speedskating, Nils van der Poel told the Aftonbladet newspaper that although he had “a very nice experience behind the scenes,” hosting the Games in China was “terrible.” He drew parallels with the 1936 Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany and Russia hosting the Sochi Olympics before seizing control of the Crimean peninsula in 2014. 

“It is extremely irresponsible,” van der Poel said, ”to give it to a country that violates human rights as clearly as the Chinese regime does.”

Source: Human rights? China won that Winter Olympics battle. Almost.

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USA: Investor immigrants say their applications are viable despite program lapse

2022/02/21 Leave a comment

Of note:

A group of immigrant investors have filed a lawsuit claiming the Biden administration is unlawfully refusing to process their applications for visas and green cards after Congress allowed a major visa program they participated in to lapse.

More than a dozen plaintiffs in a complaint filed in Seattle federal court on Thursday said that while a program earmarking EB-5 visas for investors who pool money has expired, federal law still requires U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service and the Department of State to process their applications, which were filed before the expiration.

The EB-5 program allows foreign citizens who invest $1 million in a U.S. business – or $500,000 in economically depressed areas – and create at least 10 jobs to qualify for visas and green cards.

The plaintiffs, who are citizens of Canada, Russia, India and other countries, applied to participate in the EB-5 Regional Center program, which reserves thousands of visas each year for investors who pool their money into large economic development projects.

Authorization for the program, which was first created in 1992, expired in June without action from Congress and its future is still in limbo. USCIS in December said it would not process visa and green card applications tied to the program until it is renewed.

But in Thursday’s complaint, the plaintiffs said the expiration of the program only meant that the government no longer had to grant a preference to applicants involved in the Regional Center program. The federal Immigration and Nationality Act still requires USCIS to process their EB-5 applications and set aside visas for them if they qualify, the plaintiffs said.

Jon Wasden of Wasden Banias, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said that a decision in the plaintiffs’ favor could ultimately spur USCIS to process thousands of other pending applications.

USCIS and the Department of State did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The case is Bajaj v. Blinken, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, No. 2:22-cv-00189.

Source: Investor immigrants say their applications are viable despite program lapse

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Dutrisac: Le Québec largué [on immigration processing, levels and demography]

2022/02/21 Leave a comment

Of note, along with the ongoing trend of a relative decline compared to other Canadian provinces. Not clear that having more powers for Quebec would change that unless a Quebec government decides to match Canadian immigration targets:

Si on fait exception de 2020, année marquée par les sévères restrictions liées à la pandémie, le gouvernement Trudeau vole de record en record en matière d’immigration. Cette semaine, le ministre de l’Immigration, des Réfugiés et de la Citoyenneté, Sean Fraser, a dévoilé de nouvelles cibles qui placent le Canada au sommet des pays — et de loin — quant au nombre d’immigrants qu’ils accueillent.

Au cours de son premier mandat, le gouvernement Trudeau a fait passer le seuil de 280 000 immigrants du gouvernement Harper à quelque 350 000. L’an dernier, Ottawa a voulu effectuer un rattrapage en raison des contraintes touchant les déplacements internationaux et des ratés administratifs qui ont contribué à réduire à 186 606 le nombre d’immigrants admis en 2020 au lieu des 341 000 prévu ; il a donc porté ce nombre à 400 000 en 2021.

Cet objectif de 400 000 et plus, c’est maintenant le nouveau plancher canadien en matière d’immigration. Dans son rapport annuel de 2021 présenté cette semaine au Parlement, le ministre Fraser a établi les seuils à 431 000 pour 2022, 447 000 pour 2023 et 451 000 pour 2024. C’est grosso modo 20 000 à 30 000 de plus que les niveaux avancés dans le rapport annuel précédent.

Si on se réfère à la cible élevée plutôt que moyenne, telle qu’inscrite dans le rapport pour 2024, soit 475 000 immigrants, nous sommes tout près de la recommandation de l’organisme canadien-anglais Century Initiative, qui entend convaincre le gouvernement Trudeau de hausser à 500 000 le seuil d’immigration pour 2026. L’objectif, c’est de faire passer la population canadienne de 37 millions à 100 millions en 2100.

Tandis que le ministre pousse à la hausse le nombre de dossiers à traiter, sa machine administrative ne suit pas. On ne sait d’ailleurs pas sur quelle planète Sean Fraser vit quand il écrit dans son rapport : « Heureusement, le Ministère a su s’adapter aux immenses pressions exercées par la pandémie. » La réalité, c’est qu’au Québec, son ministère est dysfonctionnel.

Les délais pour obtenir le statut de résident permanent, c’est-à-dire devenir un immigrant reçu en bonne et due forme après avoir été sélectionné par Québec, ont encore augmenté, pour atteindre en moyenne 28 mois.

En raison de problèmes administratifs, Ottawa n’arrive même pas à remplir les objectifs d’immigration que lui transmet le gouvernement du Québec. Le ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration a demandé qu’un rattrapage soit effectué en 2021 pour combler les retards engendrés par la pandémie, soit un total de 18 000 nouveaux résidents permanents de plus. Manquent à l’appel 15 000 d’entre eux.

Qui plus est, sur les 48 600 détenteurs d’un certificat de sélection du Québec toujours en attente de leur résidence permanente, 25 000 résident au Québec et occupent un emploi. Le ministre Jean Boulet a demandé à son homologue fédéral d’accorder la priorité à ces demandeurs. Mais Ottawa se montre réticent. Si on tient compte de toutes les catégories de nouveaux arrivants, ce sont 90 000 personnes qui sont en attente, selon les données obtenues par Radio-Canada auprès d’Immigration, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada.

C’est deux poids, deux mesures, car les délais imposés au Québec sont beaucoup plus importants que dans le reste du Canada. Par ailleurs, les autorités fédérales exercent une discrimination à l’endroit des étudiants étrangers en provenance de l’Afrique francophone qui souhaitent étudier au Québec : le taux de refus de ces étudiants pourtant admis dans nos cégeps et nos universités est beaucoup plus élevé que celui des étudiants étrangers anglophones.

Mais plus grave encore, c’est que le Canada, avec sa politique d’immigration extrêmement vigoureuse, est en train de larguer le Québec. On voudrait diminuer rapidement son poids démographique — et celui du Québec français — au sein du Canada qu’on n’agirait pas autrement. En clair, le reste du Canada, toutes proportions gardées, accueille deux fois plus d’immigrants que le Québec. Si l’on voulait résister à cette érosion démographique, ce ne sont pas 53 000 immigrants qu’il faudrait admettre, mais près de 120 000 l’an prochain et davantage les années suivantes.

Dans ce contexte, il est clair que l’entente Canada-Québec sur l’immigration, signée en 1991 par les ministres Gagnon-Tremblay et McDougall, ne tient plus, du moins dans son esprit. Cette entente prévoyait que le Canada consulte le Québec pour établir ses seuils d’immigration, ce qu’il ne fait plus. En outre, les seuils canadiens devaient permettre au Québec de recevoir un pourcentage d’immigrants égal à celui de sa population. Ce n’est plus possible.

Cette évolution du Canada postnational constitue une menace pour la nation québécoise. Il est temps — et c’est un minimum — que le Québec obtienne tous les pouvoirs en matière d’immigration.

Source: Le Québec largué

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Refugees in Quebec will have to learn French within 6 months

2022/02/21 Leave a comment

Not realistic and discriminatory (but not surprising), unfortunately):

The Quebec government is moving ahead with a controversial part of its proposed language bill, which will require all government officials to communicate with new immigrants exclusively in French, six months after their arrival — with no exceptions for refugees and asylum seekers.

The article of Bill 96, which was introduced at the National Assembly last May, was recently approved by the legislative committee studying the bill, amid criticism from opposition Liberal and Québec Solidaire MNAs. The bill is expected to become law this spring but still faces detailed study in committee.

Some organizations, opposition members and even the union representing public servants tried to persuade the government to soften the rule, to no avail.

“For newly arriving immigrants, the basic principle of the law is clear: as of Day 1, it’s exclusively in French,” said Simon Jolin-Barrette, justice minister and minister responsible for the French language.

There are exemptions in the law, which allow communication in a language other than French, “where health, public safety or the principles of natural justice so require” such as getting health care.

As well, the bill allows for a six-month grace period for “particular situations that require the use of a language other than French with new immigrants” according to Élisabeth Gosselin, spokesperson for Jolin-Barrette.

The bill says after that six-month period has lapsed, communication must be in French.

“Currently, the government communicates with immigrants who have requested it, sometimes for years, or for their whole lifetime, in a language other than French, which does not foster integration,” Gosselin said.

Learning French in 6 months

Community organizations working with newly arrived immigrants have been calling on the government to extend the six-month grace period.

“We all agree that the government cannot respond to immigrants in every language. But we have to give them time to learn French,” said Élodie Combes, member of the Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes réfugiées et immigrantes (TCRI), a working group that represents community organizations working with immigrants.

Combes believes that the bill may actually hinder the integration of immigrants, by making it more difficult for them to get government services.

“It’s as if we’re telling them to retreat into their lingustic minority, that the government is not there for them, because they aren’t francophone enough,” she said.

Garine Papazian-Zohrabian, an associate professor in educational psychology at the Université de Montréal who researches French-language training for immigrants, says the six-month hard cap will be most harmful for refugees and asylum seekers, who are arriving in a vulnerable state.

“Members of this population are already disoriented, arriving in Quebec. They can been burdened by a difficult past and face cultural challenges. They’re not ready to learn a new language, like French, right after their arrival,” said Papazian-Zohrabian.

“You might as well say that we don’t accept refugees or immigrants, rather than place so many obstacles in front of them,” she added.

Opposition slams ‘excessive’ measures in bill

The union representing 40,000 Quebec civil servants, the Syndicat de la fonction publique et parapublique du Québec (SFPQ), is also in favour of extending the six-month grace period.

In its submission to the committee examining the bill, the union suggested the delay could be extended to two years, to allow new immigrants more time to adapt.

Ruba Ghazal, Québec Solidaire MNA for the Mercier riding in Montreal, proposed a grace period of three years, saying that Jolin-Barrette is “totally disconnected from the reality of newly arrived immigrants.”

“The minister makes no distinction between a refugee and an economic class immigrant,” she said. “These people need more kindness and understanding.”

Jolin-Barrette dismissed the idea of extending the grace period, saying six months was a “reasonable” period.

Ghazal said while the bill takes a harsh stand with newly arrived immigrants, it contains a clause that allows the government to continue to communicate in languages other than French with people who immigrated to Quebec in the past.

Source: Refugees in Quebec will have to learn French within 6 months

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with ,

Regg Cohn: Pipeline protest or convoy blockade — police should apply the same standards to all illegal demonstrations

2022/02/21 Leave a comment

This really becomes a test of being consistent of not, one that applies to both the right and left. And if not, what should be the criteria for when a blockade is acceptable and when it is not (Brian Lee Crowley made similar points We undermine the neutrality of the law at our peril:

The belated liberation of Ottawa from occupation is a lesson.

The breaking of blockades at the borders is a primer.

They are refresher courses in the fragility of democracy and the rigour of the rule of law.

They are reminders that there is a fine line between the consent of the governed, the discontent of anti-government protesters, and the disinformation that fuels it.

How did we get there? Where do we go from here?

A couple of thousand protesters make up a mere 0.01 per cent of the 17.2 million Canadians who voted in the last election. When a tiny minority insists on imposing its will on our elected Parliament, they are dissenters from democracy.

Their written demands were to disband the government and replace it with their own convoy cabinet. Until they got their way, they’d stay — and for nearly a month, they called Canada’s bluff in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Through their determination and defiance, they exposed the emptiness of police threats and the hollowness of deterrence. Outnumbered and outmuscled, local police in Ottawa and Windsor had to call in reinforcements and regroup before they could reclaim lost territory and frontiers.

Declarations of emergency followed — first municipally, next provincially, finally federally. On Friday, as MPs tried to debate the latest measures, Parliament was suspended for the day because of urgent fears for their safety.

That this ragtag band of occupiers sang civil rights hymns, brandished bibles and soaked in hot tubs hardly lessens the gravity of the challenge. They ransomed the economy and entrapped a city while crying for freedom. They wielded captive children as human shields while boasting of their fearlessness.

There is a legitimate debate, in the aftermath, as to whether the disruption and disorder rose to the level of an emergency in strictly legal terms. Critics argue that the authorities had sufficient laws and tools to get the job done without special powers.

In ordinary times, the regular tool box should suffice. But in extraordinary times the tactics of conflict resolution, de-escalation and deterrence are merely theories without practical application — as Ottawa’s former police chief, Peter Sloly, discovered to his dismay after a career devoted to dialogue and community engagement while in Toronto’s force.SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Amid the disorder, the flow of cash (and bitcoin) continued apace and tow truck operators who normally converge on accidents were running for cover. The reality is that the regular playbook was insufficient to restore the rule book.

Critics of the emergency laws point to Toronto as the model of effective enforcement, noting that without special powers our police kept the convoys from becoming blockades at Queen’s Park. Full credit to Mayor John Tory and Toronto’s police chief for learning lessons from the failures in Ottawa and Windsor, mustering a show of force to enforce law and order.

By avoiding the mistake of being outnumbered, Toronto’s cops were not cornered — and therefore had no need of emergency laws to oust any occupiers. But there are glaring contradictions in this comparison.

Many who praise Toronto today for keeping the convoys at bay were harsh critics last year, accusing the city of deploying disproportionate force to remove illegal encampments that had persisted in public parks for more than a year. Most accounts at the time overstated the actual use of force while condemning the mere show of force.

Police were there to safeguard the city workers who did the actual evicting and escorting of the tent occupants — occupiers, if you will — to shelters. Most of the non-violent conflict arose between cops and outside supporters of the encampments (and in some cases photographers — a recurring question of rightful media access).

The argument from many self-styled progressives seems to be that occupying parks for years at a time is no big deal, because it doesn’t directly impede people or commerce. As if the urban planning imperative of public parks and right of access for all Torontonians is optional and dispensable depending on your politics.

Across the country, police have rightly been questioned for apparent hypocrisy — diligently enforcing court orders against earlier Indigenous protests, while turning a blind eye to the latest blockades. If the argument is that police were unacceptably inconsistent, that is incontestably true; but if the point is that two wrongs make a right — that illegality should be ignored equally everywhere — then it simply doesn’t add up.

Police should absolutely be consistent. They should break up occupations in Ottawa and blockades at the border, just as they should also end blockades of rail lines or pipelines that hold the economy hostage in similar ways.

That doesn’t mean police cannot use common sense and exercise discretion, for each demonstration is different in its own way. But all protesters share an unshakable belief that they are in the right and have been wronged.

If politicians pick and choose their favourite causes — as Conservative MPs did by meeting and greeting the Ottawa occupiers — we will privilege some protesters over others and be caught in the contradictions.

The quintessentially Canadian phrase, “Peace, order and good government,” is written into our Constitution and etched into our ethos. Those five words go hand in hand, until they don’t — and people take the law into their own hands.

Source: Pipeline protest or convoy blockade — police should apply the same standards to all illegal demonstrations

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For Companies, Winning in China Now Means Losing Somewhere Else

2022/02/21 Leave a comment

Should be an awaking, both given Chinese government repression and the IOC various wilful blindnesses:

Companies usually shell out for Olympic sponsorship because it helps their business and reflects well on their brands. But this year, with the Olympics in Beijing, Procter & Gamble paid even more to try to prevent any negative fallout from being associated with China’s repressive and authoritarian government.

The company, one of 13 “worldwide Olympic partners” that make the global sports competition possible, hired Washington lobbyists last year to successfully defeat legislation that would have barred sponsors of the Beijing Games from selling their products to the U.S. government. The provision would have blocked Pampers, Tide, Pringles and other Procter & Gamble products from military commissaries, to protest companies’ involvement in an event seen as legitimizing the Chinese government.

“This amendment would punish P.&G. and the Olympic movement, including U.S. athletes,” Sean Mulvaney, the senior director for global government relations at Procter & Gamble, wrote in an email to congressional offices in August.

Some of the world’s biggest companies are caught in an uncomfortable situation as they attempt to straddle a widening political gulf between the United States and China: What is good for business in one country is increasingly a liability in the other.

China is the world’s biggest consumer market, and for decades, Chinese and American business interests have described their economic cooperation as a “win-win relationship.” But gradually, as China’s economic and military might have grown, Washington has taken the view that a win for China is a loss for the United States.

The decision to locate the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing has turned sponsorship, typically one of the marketing industry’s most prestigious opportunities, into a minefield.

Companies that have sponsored the Olympics have attracted censure from politicians and human rights groups, who say such contracts imply tacit support of atrocities by the Chinese Communist Party, including human rights violations in Xinjiang, censorship of the media and mass surveillance of dissidents.

“One thing our businesses, universities and sports leagues don’t seem to fully understand is that, to eat at the C.C.P.’s trough, you will have to turn into a pig,” Yaxue Cao, editor of ChinaChange.org, a website that covers civil society and human rights, told Congressthis month.

The tension is playing out in other areas as well, including with regards to Xinjiang, where millions of ethnic minorities have been detained, persecuted or forced into working in fields and factories. In June, the United States will enact a sweeping law that will expand restrictions on Xinjiang, giving the United States power to block imports made with any materials sourced from that region.

Multinational firms that are trying to comply with these new import restrictions have found themselves facing costly backlashes in China, which denies any accusations of genocide. H&M, Nikeand Intel have all blundered into public relations disasters for trying to remove Xinjiang from their supply chains.

Harsher penalties could be in store. Companies that try to sever ties with Xinjiang may run afoul of China’s anti-sanctions law, which allows the authorities to crack down on firms that comply with foreign regulations they see as discriminating against China.

Beijing has also threatened to put companies that cut off supplies to China on an “unreliable entity list” that could result in penalties, though to date the list doesn’t appear to have any members.

“Companies are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to complying with U.S. and Chinese law,” said Jake Colvin, the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents companies that do business internationally.

President Biden, while less antagonistic than his predecessor, has maintained many of the tough policies put in place by President Donald J. Trump, including hefty tariffs on Chinese goods and restrictions on exports of sensitive technology to Chinese firms.

The Biden administration has shown little interest in forging trade deals to help companies do more business abroad. Instead, it is recruiting allies to ramp up pressure on China, including by boycotting the Olympics, and promoting huge investments in manufacturing and scientific research to compete with Beijing. 

The pressures are not only coming from the United States. Companies are increasingly facing a complicated global patchwork of export restrictions and data storage laws, including in the European Union. Chinese leaders have begun pursuing “wolf warrior” diplomacy, in which they are trying to teach other countries to think twice before crossing China, said Jim McGregor, chairman of APCO Worldwide’s greater China region.

He said his company was telling clients to “try to comply with everybody, but don’t make a lot of noise about it — because if you’re noisy about complying in one country, the other country will come after you.”

Some companies are responding by moving sensitive activities — like research that could trigger China’s anti-sanctions law, or audits of Xinjiang operations — out of China, said Isaac Stone Fish, the chief executive of Strategy Risks, a consultancy.

Others, like Cisco, have scaled back their operations. Some have left China entirely, though usually not on terms they would choose. For example, Micron Technology, a chip-maker that has been a victim of intellectual property theft in China, is closing down a chip design team in Shanghai after competitors poached its employees.

“Some companies are taking a step back and realizing that this is perhaps more trouble than it’s worth,” Mr. Stone Fish said.

But many companies insist that they can’t be forced to choose between two of the world’s largest markets. Tesla, which counts China as one of its largest markets, opened a showroom in Xinjianglast month.

“We can’t leave China, because China represents in some industries up to 50 percent of global demand and we have intense, deep supply and sales relationships,” said Craig Allen, the president of the U.S.-China Business Council.

Companies see China as a foothold to serve Asia, Mr. Allen said, and China’s $17 trillion economy still presents “some of the best growth prospects anywhere.”

“Very few companies are leaving China, but all are feeling that it’s risk up and that they need to be very careful so as to meet their legal obligations in both markets,” he said.

American politicians of both parties are increasingly bent on forcing companies to pick a side.

“To me, it’s completely appropriate to make these companies choose,” said Representative Michael Waltz, a Florida Republican who proposed the bill that would have prevented Olympic sponsors from doing business with the U.S. government.

Mr. Waltz said participation in the Beijing Olympics sent a signal that the West was willing to turn a blind eye to Chinese atrocities for short-term profits.

The amendment was ultimately cut out of a defense-spending bill last year after active and aggressive lobbying by Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Intel, NBC, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others, Mr. Waltz said.

Procter & Gamble’s lobbying disclosures show that, between April and December, it spent more than $2.4 million on in-house and outside lobbyists to try to sway Congress on a range of tax and trade issues, including the Beijing Winter Olympics Sponsor Accountability Act.

Lobbying disclosures for Coca-Cola, Airbnb and Comcast, the parent company of NBC, also indicate the companies lobbied on issues related to the Olympics or “sports programming” last year.

Procter & Gamble and Intel declined to comment. Coca-Cola said it had explained to lawmakers that the legislation would hurt American military families and businesses. NBC and the Chamber of Commerce did not respond to requests for comment.

Many companies have argued they are sponsoring this year’s Games to show support for the athletes, not China’s system of government.

In a July congressional hearing, where executives from Coca-Cola, Intel, Visa and Airbnb were also grilled about their sponsorship, Mr. Mulvaney said Procter & Gamble was using its partnership to encourage the International Olympic Committee to incorporate human rights principles into its oversight of the Games.

“Corporate sponsors are being a bit unfairly maligned here,” Anna Ashton, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said in an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Companies had signed contracts to support multiple iterations of the Games, and had no say over the host location, she said. And the funding they provide goes to support the Olympics and the athletes, not the Chinese government.

“Sponsorship has hardly been an opportunity for companies this time around,” she said. 

Source: For Companies, Winning in China Now Means Losing Somewhere Else

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Douglas Todd: ‘Astonishing’ findings on Canadian ethnic groups’ earnings and education

2022/02/19 Leave a comment

While not astonishing for those of us who look at this data regularly (including public service employment equity data), nevertheless the differences are striking. Mikal Skuterud’s points on the need for nuance and understanding the life choices people make (and the circumstances that influence them) are important to keep in mind:

The latest Statistics Canada research on ethnic groups’ earnings and educational achievements reveals clues on where to look, and not look, for potential discrimination in the workplace.

Fortunately, the new data doesn’t group visible minorities into one monolithic clump — since the amount of money earned by each ethnic cohort is surprisingly different, with some groups flourishing and others not.

People of South Korean, Chinese and South Asian extraction tend to be the top earners in Canada, broadly speaking. Latin-American and Black people are often among the lowest. Whites are mostly in the middle of the pack in terms of wages, while they are in the lower echelons in regard to university education.

Economist Frances Woolley of Carleton University says such details are crucial. Visible minorities are one of four groups covered by the federal Employment Equity Act (as are women, people with disabilities, and Indigenous Canadians). But rather than assume all visible minorities are susceptible to unfairness, she says it is meaningful to focus on ethnic groups that are actually behind.

The latest StatsCan report, the first of its kind in a decade, measured the weekly incomes of Canadian-born people ages 25 to 44 (which encompasses the millennial generation) in 2016, a census year, based on 12 visible-minority categories.

The study by Theresa Qui and Grant Schellenberg illustrates the setting for Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy, which is committed to “removing barriers and promoting a country where every person is able to fully participate and have an equal opportunity to proceed.”

Using white Canadians as a majority baseline, the report pinpoints how some ethnic groups are doing much better than others in earnings and education, as well as striking differences between men and women, and how people of colour overwhelmingly live in cities.

Mikal Skuterud, an economist at the University of Waterloo, said in an interview, “Descriptive studies like this are like paintings — different people will see different things in the numbers. But the reality is that what lies behind the earnings differences reported is nuanced, complex, and largely unknown.”

Workplace and educational outcomes are often not determined by racist bosses or discriminatory educators, suggested Skuterud. They are likely more often determined by complex life decisions that people make, and transparent data is needed to get to the bottom of things, he said. This report provides a hard look at the ethnic groups that appear to be moving up the ladder and those which aren’t.

Asian-Canadians among Canada’s top earners

Most Canadian visible-minority women earn more than white females, who averaged $1,120 a week.

Korean-Canadian women earned $1,450 a week on average; Chinese women $1,440; South Asian women $1,330; Japanese $1,320; Filipino $1,260; and Arab and Iranian $1,120. Meanwhile, Black women earned less, at $1,080, while Latin-American women made $1,000 a week.

Korean, Japanese and South Asian men earned slightly more than white males, who took in $1,530. Chinese-Canadian men earned about the same. Filipino and South-East Asian men earned about 15 per cent less than white males, while Latin-American and Black males earned about 20 per cent lower.

While some wage gaps shrink when variables such as age, place of residence and educational levels are taken into account, others remained significant, Schellenberg said.

The study by Qui and Schellenberg did not look at Indigenous people or immigrants, the latter being a larger visible-minority group than those born in Canada. While people who grew up in Canada are readily comparable, Schellenberg said, immigrants are often held back in the labour market by specific factors: a shortfall of Canadian work experience, lack of fluency in English or French, and foreign work credentials not being recognized.

Even though the Statistics Canada report doesn’t suggest where discrimination might be occurring in Canada, both Schellenberg and Skuterud said the data does appear to raise at least one red flag: Black males fell further behind others in relative earnings in the period between 2006 and 2016.

‘Astonishing’ differences in educational levels by ethnicity

People of colour born in Canada are far more likely than white people to have university degrees.

More than 60 per cent of Chinese and Korean men boasted a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to just 24 per cent of white males, a gulf that Skuterud referred to as “astonishing”.

In addition, more than 40 per cent of South Asian, Arab, West Asian and Japanese men had university degrees. The only ethnic groups less likely to have degrees than white males were Black males (20 per cent) and Latin-American males (17 per cent).

Even though many more white women than white men have university degrees (38 per cent), they still lag behind almost every other ethnic group.

“More than 70 per cent of Korean and Chinese women and around 60 per cent of Japanese and South Asian women had a university degree, compared with 38 per cent of white women,” said the report. They are basically tied with Black women on higher education, and slightly ahead of Latin-American females.

Because of the years many visible minorities spend in college and university compared to white people who move directly into the workforce, Qui and Schellenberg suggest the wages of people of colour, who are on average younger and in more high-skilled jobs, will show up comparatively higher in the 2021 census.

Ethnic segregation is forming along urban-rural lines

People of colour and whites are making remarkably different choices about big cities and small towns.

Sixty per cent of all people of colour in Canada live in just three cities — Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. That compares to only 27 per cent of white people.

Put another way, the report said, “Only about one in 20 (visible-minority members) live in smaller cities, towns and rural areas, compared with about one in three white people.”

Indeed, the report says one reason many people of colour earn more than white people is they live in metropolises, where wages tend to be elevated. The authors also found white people were more likely to be married, have children, and not be living with their parents.

Despite the unprecedented amount of North American, especially U.S., research that has gone into whether employers discriminate based on race or ethnicity, Skuterud said, “It’s almost a fundamentally unidentifiable problem.”

Rather than automatically believing gaps in earnings and education are rooted in “injustice or unfairness,” Skuterud said it is also important to simply remember, “People make different choices.”

Source: Douglas Todd: ‘Astonishing’ findings on Canadian ethnic groups’ earnings and education

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Wolfson: In pursuit of a world-class health data system

2022/02/19 Leave a comment

Good arguments, challenge given complexity and jurisdictional issues. Some progress through programs like MyChart which makes managing my hospital-based visits and tests so much easier:

Canadians see new and increasingly powerful computerization in almost every facet of their day-to-day lives—everywhere, that is, except for something as fundamental as health care, where systems are too often stuck in the past.

Canadian governments have invested heavily to advance the use of health data, most often without a clear national vision. An incoherent approach for health data is hurting health outcomes, escalating sector costs and expanding inequities.

The health sector relies on data to guide almost every decision, from the choice of an antibiotic for treating an individual’s simple urinary tract infection, to national pandemic policies that affect millions of Canadians.  The challenge is that health and health-related data are so poorly organized and managed in Canada.

While health-care providers create and have responsibility for safe management of records of health care encounters, personal health information in Canada should be available to patients as well.

The reality is that patients continue to have limited access to or insight about data about them, as that remains under the de facto control of myriad and siloed health-service providers. The inevitable result of this scattered provider-centric rather than patient-centric approach is that patient data are typically spread among their various health care providers’ uncoordinated and unstandardized data systems. The result: both providers and patients have to work with incomplete and incoherent information.

The health sector has invested for years in digital technology in the mistaken belief it would immediately solve our health data woes. We have failed to realize the true obstacle to effective health data collection and use is not mainly technological, but a matter of policy and governance.

To realize its tremendous promise, health data in Canada must become centred around the individual. Services would be designed around people and by people. The “life flows” of patients and families would mesh with the “work flows” of providers and institutions. There would be one centrally accessible virtual digital record for each of us.

As patients move from home to care setting, and from provider to provider, data would remain seamlessly accessible for those in the patient’s “circle of care”; no need to repeat your health history for each new provider. Data flows about a person—who sees what—would be transparent to the person involved or to their proxy.

Health-care providers would continue to access personal information for the purposes of individual care, while a new role—health-data stewards—would be mandated to curate population-based data for public good while ensuring privacy and confidentiality.

How can we make this vision a reality in Canada?

This will only happen with a fundamentally reimagined approach to health data policy and governance for the digital age, grounded in mutual trust. Governments need to trust the public by providing clear and complete information, with people in Canada trusted to act for the good of the community. The public would be involved in policies regarding health data collection, sharing, use and communication. And governments need to make real their commitments to respect Indigenous data governance.

Governments must also trust each other and recognize the over-riding importance of coherent pan-Canadian data.  At present, each province and territory has its own health data policies, standards and governance, with very little active coordination across borders. Even in the area of death certification, where the vital statistics registrars have worked together for many decades, we have the current failure to agree on and report COVID-related causes of death in a standardized manner.

Accessing the routinely collected data that do exist is a marathon for fully authorized researchers, for example to study post-marketing drug safety and effectiveness. Even with all the available approval processes in place, it has still proven impossible to analyze these kinds of data for the country as a whole.

These pervasive blockages to generating coherent and timely pan-Canadian information seriously impairs our ability to respond to public health threats and generate insights that could improve health outcomes for all.

Ultimately, we need to rethink—not rejig—how we manage and use health data. The Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy report, authored by an Expert Advisory group, points out the need for a culture shift in health data use. Public input has to be part of the transformation to person-centred health care and health data systems.

Of course, updating health data systems has costs. But given the tens of billions of health-care dollars the federal government is providing to the provinces through fiscal transfers, it is long past time the federal government leveraged this clout—using both carrots and sticks—so that people in Canada can finally have informed, accessible health data when and where they need it most.

Michael Wolfson is a former assistant chief statistician at Statistics Canada, and a current member of the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics. Vivek Goel is president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo. Both are members of the Expert Advisory Group on the Development of the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy.

Source: In pursuit of a world-class health data system

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Know the Risks: A Guide for Journalists on Quoting Immigrant Sources

2022/02/19 Leave a comment

Useful:

WHAT HAPPENED TO ROSA still haunts Maria Hinojosa. Rosa, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, agreed to appear on camera for “Immigrant Nation, Divided Country,” a 2004 CNN documentary helmed by Hinojosa, a veteran journalist. Soon after the program aired, immigration agents arrested Rosa, her boyfriend, and her children.

Hinojosa had taken care not to show where Rosa lived or worked. She later discovered, however, that despite her efforts to protect Rosa’s anonymity, she had missed one small detail: the license plate of a car belonging to Rosa’s boyfriend had appeared, unblurred, in the background of a shot. Hinojosa reasoned that agents must have used the license plate to track Rosa down.

“​I realized,” Hinojosa said in a recent interview, “that the worst could absolutely happen.”

The risks facing undocumented immigrants have only intensified in the years since—particularly during the presidency of Donald Trump, whose anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies vilified Mexicans, Africans, and Muslims, among others. How journalists work with their immigrant sources is critical to reducing those risks, even in a hyper-competitive climate where ambitious stories drive public attention.

Miriam Jordan, a lead immigration reporter for the New York Times, revealed in 2018 that President Trump employed undocumented workers at his private properties. Jordan’s story focused on Victorina Morales, an undocumented immigrant who worked at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. She also quoted Sandra Diaz, who had been undocumented when she worked there, but was a legal resident at the time of the story. Both Morales and Diaz agreed to be identified by their full name—a step Jordan, in an email, said was “essential to the credibility of the piece”—and also to be photographed. Morales told Jordan that Trump’s hateful comments, along with verbal abuse from a supervisor, compelled her to speak out. Jordan later noted the rarity of Morales’s decision:

“In all my years reporting on immigration, I had rarely encountered undocumented workers willing to risk their livelihood — and deportation — to speak out against their employers.”

After the story came out, Morales made numerous media appearances; she also applied for asylum and received a work permit. Eighteen months later, she learned that her asylum case had been referred by US Citizenship and Immigration Services to a court for removal proceedings, where a judge would review her status. (In a follow-up, Jordan reported that Morales would be able to remain in the country while her case was mired in a years’ long backlog.)

In 2020, a selection of immigration reporters told CJR and Migratory Notes that, under the Trump administration, they felt more inclined to grant anonymity to undocumented sources, and to take greater care to explore the consequences of a story with them. Though the administration has changed, the stakes haven’t: polarizing politics have stalled efforts at immigration reform, and some of Trump’s most harmful policies remain in effect under President Biden. Against this backdrop, migrants coming to the border, asylum seekers awaiting court hearings, and those with temporary protections, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, have little incentive to identify themselves on the record.

Anonymity is routinely provided to government officials who are “not authorized to speak publicly”—a practice intended to facilitate reporting without costing an official their job or livelihood. Yet, as an industry, journalism has not widely embraced anonymous sourcing in its coverage of undocumented immigrants.

Journalists who cover undocumented people must be aware that their approaches to stories—including the decisions to name sources and subjects and show images of them —can carry a range of unintended, adverse consequences. With this in mind, Define American created a toolkit on anonymous sourcing, to advise journalists on their responsibilities when working with immigrant sources and, we hope, to help them mitigate risk.

The “Quoting Immigrants” toolkit provides numerous recommendations for ensuring credible coverage across a range of media while also granting partial or even full anonymity; they include a hierarchy of attribution, recommendations for independently verifying a source’s identity, and examples of personal details to consider avoiding. The toolkit honors longstanding journalistic principles of credibility and authenticity, but also spells out the potential consequences for undocumented immigrants who are identified in news reports. Crucially, the toolkit reminds reporters that it’s OK to back off, move on, and not jeopardize or traumatize a source at risk or perpetuate trauma—a subject that Define American explored in a recent research report on the mental health toll on sources in the Dreamer movement.

Throughout the toolkit, several reporters who’ve covered immigration draw on their own experience to offer guidance. “Just understand that these are human beings and you might need to make accommodations,” Camilo Montoya-Galvez, an immigration reporter for CBS News, told us. “They are doing us a favor by talking to us.”

Armando Tonatiuh Torres-García, an immigration reporter for ABC News, cautioned reporters to consider the safety of minors: “If they were in a detention center, just because they are separated from their parents, that does not give you the right to film them as if they were adults.”

Hinojosa now hosts LatinoUSA, a radio program produced by Futuro Media Group, a multimedia organization she founded. When she interviews immigrants now, Hinojosa says she often uses only first names. When migrants readily agree to be identified by their full names, she thinks of her experience with Rosa, and fully considers her options. She wants to expose injustice for asylum seekers, but not if she endangers them.

“My role as a journalist is to get the story in their voice,” Hinojosa said. “And to do no harm.”

Source: Know the Risks: A Guide for Journalists on Quoting Immigrant Sources

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

UK axes ‘golden visa’ scheme after fraud and Russia concerns

2022/02/19 1 Comment

Overdue, and one of the few defensible immigration measures by the UK government:

The “golden visa” system that allows wealthy foreign investors a fast track to live in the UK has been axed amid concern about applicants acquiring their wealth illegally and the growing strain on diplomatic relations with Russia.

The home secretary, Priti Patel, announced that the scheme would end with immediate effect to help to stop “corrupt elites who threaten our national security and push dirty money around our cities”.

Launched in 2008, the “tier 1 investor visa” programme allowed people with at least £2m in investment funds and a UK bank account to apply for residency rights, along with their family. The speed with which applicants were allowed to get indefinite leave to remain was hastened by how much money they planned to invest in the UK: £2m took five years, while £10m shortened the wait to just two.

Source: UK axes ‘golden visa’ scheme after fraud and Russia concerns

Filed under Citizenship, citizenship-by-investment Tagged with ,

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