Canada squanders economic, social benefits by keeping out new Canadians’ relatives

2022/02/02 Leave a comment

More an opinion piece than factual reporting. Would be useful if Canada would have overstay data comparable to other countries like the USA:

Canada is losing manifold economic and social benefits and going against its own values when it denies visitor visas and study permits to family members of new Canadians. Denials are rooted in belief that visitors with family ties in Canada are more likely to overstay their visas, but while no data exists to back up this claim, why should that even be a concern?

In the last century, Canada has earned a great reputation for accepting a large number of immigrants and valuing multiculturalism. Immigrants are a great boost for the economy. In fact, Canada’s current plans to accept 411,000 immigrants in 2022 and 421,000 in 2023 were touted by former Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Marco Mendicino as a way to help the Canadian economy recover from COVID-19.

Such framing emphasizes how immigrants benefit our economy not just by filling labour force shortages and paying taxes, but also by significantly increasing employment creation.

Despite this warm welcome, new Canadians often face hurdles when their family members wish to come to visit. When applying for a visa, relatives of new Canadians frequently receive the following response: “I am not satisfied that you will leave Canada at the end of your stay as a temporary resident, as stipulated in paragraph 179(b) of the IRPR [Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations], based on your family ties in Canada and in your country of residence.”

The first three thoughts that come to mind when I encounter a sentence like this are: Do people with family ties stay and those without them return? Is this a favourable decision for the Canadian economy or even the IRCC’s plan? Do officers denying visas consider the repercussions of such a decision?

For this article, I spoke with 11 new Canadians whose family members had gotten multiple denials because of their ties to Canada. These dismissals have affected each of them in various ways.

Many said they felt guilty, believing that rather than being of assistance, they were obstructing their families’ dreams. This is especially true for those whose siblings had education or job opportunities but were turned down because of their familial ties.

Some of the people I spoke to said their family members, particularly their parents, felt Canada could reject their submission multiple times. This resulted in either familial issues or a sour relationship.

No one I spoke to wanted their names or photos to be made public for fear that expressing their unhappiness might result in troubles in Canada or further denials of their relatives’ applications in the future. It is hard to imagine they are feeling included in the Canadian society.

Due to the lack of official statistics regarding the number people who had family ties in Canada and didn’t return to their countries of origin compared with people who didn’t have family ties and didn’t return, I put the question to immigration lawyer Steven Meurrens.

“Logically it would be a reason not to go back,” Meurrens said of people with family ties, but quickly added he had clients of both types and couldn’t tell which category was more likely to stay.

Andrew Griffith, the former Director General for Citizenship and Multiculturalism at the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, and Mikal Skuterud, Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Waterloo, point to Immigration Canada’s concern to keep the system’s integrity.

According to Griffith, the author of Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote and Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism, the “Canadian government tends to be very conscious of maintaining public confidence in the immigration system. Whenever we have the appearance or actual perception that people are taking advantage of the system, which is a very generous system, the government is concerned.”

Skuterud added that Immigration Canada understands the importance of public trust in the immigration system. There are numerous alternatives available, including family class, refugee, workers and students. In any case, people have to follow the correct procedure.

However, one must ask whether these programs are effective. Based on anecdotal evidence, the various visa programs don’t function as promised. I am aware of several refugees who have been working on family reunification since 2017. So far, to no avail. They haven’t seen their kids in at least four years.

My experiences as a refugee in Canada may prevent me from supporting the IRCC’s immigration plan. However, they allow me to reflect on the above questions and on how such a policy approach undermines Canada’s economic and social interests, especially given the lack of official statistics on overstayers with and without family ties in Canada.

Immigrants spend a significant amount of money and time on their family members in their countries of origin. For Canada, this has various negative economic consequences. One is the financial outflows in the form of remittances, as immigrants send a portion of their earnings back to families in their home country. This is typically sent to immediate family members such as parents, children, and siblings.

Another way that Canada misses out is that immigrants return to see their remaining family members more frequently, sometimes once a year. Not only does this mean that their holiday money is spent abroad but also that they often have to quit their jobs and stop earning an income in order to travel.

If the immigration system had less stringent rules for immediate family members, these funds would have been spent in Canada. Furthermore, new Canadians would be safer, as many of them travel to dangerous countries.

Canada sets aside a large sum of money each year for the settlement of newcomers. In the fiscal year 2021-2022, IRCC has around $1.7 billion to spend on settlement services across Canada. In Ontario alone there are nearly 1,260 newcomer services provider organizations.

Settlement services aren’t required for most newcomers who have family members in Canada. Relatives who are already familiar with the system can help new immigrants in finding a home, a family doctor and a job, all needed to build a new life in Canada. This safety net translates to significant savings for the Canadian immigration system.

Griffith and Skuterud also believe that having family ties is vital in the job market, as newcomers will be assisted in finding work and integrating.

I often hear from the new Canadians I know that they want a large family with more than two children if the circumstances allow for it.

Canada is one of the most exhausting countries socially and emotionally if you don’t have your own big circle, and the same goes for work and everything else. I’m not going to list the dozens of barriers; instead, I’d like to point out that having family members in Canada helps alleviate some of the burdens that immigrants face.

People I spoke to believe that Canada considers parents who come to live with their adult children in Canada as merely a financial burden on the system. In fact, the opposite is true. Parents and grandparents make a significant contribution to the Canadian system in the form of social and emotional support that is converted into financial benefits.

In many countries that Canadian immigrants come from, family members, particularly grandparents, aid in the upbringing of children. The perspective that their children will have a large circle of relatives to turn to in times of hardship, and that they will grow up in a community encourages single individuals to start families and immigrant families to have more children.

Furthermore, having family members nearby not only means not having to send remittances abroad, but also that the cost of daycare is reduced, if not eliminated entirely. This contributes to lowering the cost of government child-care subsidies for low-income families.

Above all, having immediate family members nearby provides both partners with peace of mind and contributes to their mental and emotional well-being. Because Canadian health care is publicly funded, this can also be viewed as an economic gain.

The Canadian immigration system is without a doubt one of the best in the world. Canada is also one of few countries to have formally adopted multiculturalism, which should imply more kindness and inclusion.

Why then should we not address our problems before they become unmanageable? Why not become more flexible with temporary visa offers for visitors with family ties in Canada, rather than exclude a segment of our society and miss out economically?

Source: Canada squanders economic, social benefits by keeping out new Canadians’ relatives

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Livermore, Welsh and Party: Ottawa shirking duty to help Canadians stuck abroad

2022/02/02 Leave a comment

The rhetoric versus the reality of consular assistance:

There is little that is more predictable than the soothing words spoken by Canadian governments when citizens are in difficulty in foreign countries. “We are fully aware;” “we are working to help;” and “we are doing everything to see them back safely in Canada” are among the familiar refrains.

For many Canadians in serious difficulty, the reality is different. Serious problems are not resolved quickly, communications and transportation are often difficult, legal problems are complex and even longer than in Canada to resolve, and frequently foreign governments do not see the problems of Canadians as warranting urgent action.

There are daily stories and reminders of such experiences and as recent ones demonstrate they are often matters of life and death. Since the 2015 election of the Trudeau government, there have been three deadly and tragic stories. In each, the actions—or lack thereof—by the government have contributed to the problems.

In 2016 two Canadians, John Ridsdel and Robert Hall, were executed in the southern Philippines when the government refused to initiate appropriate and available action to obtain their release from kidnappers. Two other Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, between 2018 and 2021, spent more than 1,000 days in the prisons of China. Ottawa, once again, refused to initiate appropriate and legal action to see them freed and returned home. It was the action of the United States that led to their release.

Today, nearly 50 Canadian children, women, and men have spent over two years in “filthy, deeply degrading, life-threatening, and often inhuman conditions” in detention centres in northern Iraq and Syria, in the words of Human Rights Watch 2021 annual report. Again, the Canadian government has refused to take action to have these Canadians returned to Canada.

This, despite the willingness of the authorities administering the detainees to have the Canadians returned. As well, other governments, including the United States and allies in Europe and elsewhere, have made arrangements for the repatriation of their citizens from the same areas. The United Nations and the House Foreign Affairs Committee have urged Canada to “pursue all options possible” to repatriate its citizens with the UN placing Canada on a “list of shame” for its lack of action.

So far only a four-year-old child has returned to Canada, initially without her mother, but in the face of court action, the mother was issued a passport and returned home. Who made the arrangements for this child? Not Canadian authorities but a former American diplomat who went to the region and made the arrangements.

Some of these Canadians have now filed an application with the Federal Court seeking relief from the lack of action by the Canadian government. The case is yet to be heard but it is hoped the court will force the government to take the necessary action to have these Canadians returned home using the mobility and legal rights guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The government argues it is too dangerous for Canadian officials to go to the region to make the arrangements for the repatriations. This is fallacious—other governments go to the region; international humanitarian organizations operate in the area daily; and the authorities administering the regions are willing and able to assist. But the government maintains Canadian officials are without the ability to do so.

The government’s reasons for not helping are specious and are meant to disguise its complete unwillingness to help this specific group of Canadians. They are the reminders of the thousands of foreigners who rushed to the region in support of the early success of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (IS/Daesh) in 2014. Countering military action by local governments supported by the United States and Russia put an end to IS in the region.

Thousands of the intervening foreign nationals were killed and thousands of other, and women and children, especially, were detained. For the most part, only the Canadians have been refused help by their government. In doing so, Ottawa conveniently ignores these persons are Canadians and are legally entitled to the support and assistance.

The government’s position finds some measure of public support and, importantly, both the RCMP and CSIS oppose the return of these detainees to Canada citing the impact on their responsibilities. Both organizations have a long history of opposing support for Canadians who have travelled to countries in conflict, some for legitimate reasons and others, like the detainees in Iraq and Syria, for misconstrued or illegal reasons. The RCMP and CSIS ignore the scope within our criminal justice systems for possible punishment in Canada.

Investigations by commissions of inquiry and various court applications provided ample examples of this opposition by the RCMP and CSIS. But tens of millions of dollars have been paid to the victims of this opposition and more is pending. For the small group of Canadians in Iraq and Syria it is now time for the government to accept its obligations and make the arrangements for their return to Canada.

Discretion must not be a cover for discrimination.

Dan Livermore is the former director general for security and intelligence. Michael Welsh and Gar Pardy are former directors general for consular services.  All three have served as ambassadors or high commissioners.   

Source: Ottawa shirking duty to help Canadians stuck abroad

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Roads blocked during anti-illegal immigration protest in northern Chile

2022/02/02 Leave a comment

Of note:

The northern Chilean city of Iquique was the scene of roadblocks, store closures and a truck drivers’ strike on Monday, with protesters demanding action to address rising crime and an illegal immigration crisis in that region.

Trucks and other heavy equipment were used to block multiple roads leading into and out of the city and prevent workers from reaching the airport, according to different local reports.

The airport suspended operations early Monday and urged passengers to contact their airline for updates on the status of their flights.

“Retail establishments and the duty-free zone decided not to open, while different social leaders decided to join in the protest. The call (for change) is quite big at this time,” Mayor Mauricio Soria said.

Monday’s actions come after hundreds of people demonstrated Sunday in different parts of the far-northern Tarapaca region – home to Iquique and more than 1,800 kilometers (1,120 miles) north of Santiago – against the presence of undocumented migrants.

During that gathering, some protesters broke up tent structures used by foreigners and held up xenophobic signs.

Similar incidents occurred in September, when a mob of demonstrators burned tents and the belongings of Venezuela migrants who had been using a public square in Iquique as a makeshift nighttime shelter.

Those actions were roundly condemned by authorities and non-governmental organizations.

The Chilean Altiplano (high plain) is the main route of choice for undocumented migrants, despite severe health risks related to that region’s big temperature swings and high elevation.

After a surge in illegal border crossings in February 2021, the crisis worsened further in October when hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants fleeing economic crisis in their homeland occupied public squares and avenues, an influx that led the Chilean government to announce the construction of several shelters to mitigate the crisis.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in December that nearly 500 Venezuelan refugees and migrants, including children, cross daily from Bolivia to Chile via irregular border crossings and arrive at their destination “after several days without eating and (suffering from) dehydration, hypothermia and altitude sickness.”

At least two people have died so far this year while trying to cross the border, while at least 23 have perished since migrants began arriving in large numbers in February 2021.

Around 1.4 million migrants live in Chile, equivalent to more than 7 percent of the population. Venezuelans make up the largest portion of the foreign-born population, followed by Peruvians, Haitians and Colombians.

Source: Roads blocked during anti-illegal immigration protest in northern Chile

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Heckbert: Advice to Well-Meaning Protestors: Don’t Stand with Nazis

2022/02/01 Leave a comment

Really good piece:

A quick primer for those who wanted to “support the truckers” with this protest:

  1. It wasn’t really truckers – any more than it was carpenters, or nurses, or bricklayers. Calling it a Freedom Convoy – rather than “bunch of white guys in pickup trucks going for a long drive” – is the mistake.
  2. If you want to know why Erin O’Toole, Pierre Poilievre and others were quick to support this movement – there are eight million reasons why. A GoFundMe effort raised $8 million in a week – to Conservative fundraisers, that was their money. Or worse, it’s money that could have gone to Maxime Bernier. Until politicians say, “if these are your beliefs, you are not my people” to groups like this, the temptation to stay with the money is there.
  3. Numbers don’t matter – just because 10,000 people, or 100,000 people, or even a million people support something – that doesn’t mean you’re on the right side of the issue. The earth, for example, is round. You can get a million people to believe it isn’t, and yet, there it is – still round.  Look around you when you’re angry about something – is your anger focused on the right thing, or are you howling in the wind? Are people frustrated with the pandemic and government responses to it? Absolutely. Does that mean yelling at a teenager at a hotel in downtown Ottawa, and honking your horn as you drive around yelling “Freedom!” will convince others of the rightness of your viewpoint? Ummm, no, it won’t.
  4. If you’re a parent and you brought your child out to support this yesterday, maybe some shame wouldn’t kill you. Again, admitting you were wrong is a sign of intelligence – take your child and say, “I misunderstood what we were supporting – we, in fact, are not in favour of the things that represented.”
  5. It’s time for social media companies to be held accountable, and here’s a quick way to start: no more anonymous accounts. Zero. Every account verified. “But that will be hard to do,” say the people at Meta, Twitter, Google, et al. The truth? Your revenues suggest you can afford it.
  6. Expectation management matters – people can see, with their own eyes, when your numbers don’t come anywhere near what you said they would, and while, yes, there was some support along the route, it wasn’t nearly as evident as people said it would be.
  7. Once the Nazi and Confederate flags show up, once you desecrated the Terry Fox statue and the National War Memorial, and once you started harassing the young men and women just trying to do their jobs, your protest turned into a national embarrassment, not a movement. And, please, if you want to tell me about “the good people there who aren’t like that,” let me quote Chris Rock – if ten white guys are standing somewhere with a Nazi, that’s 11 Nazis.

Some basic facts: more than 80 per cent of truckers are vaxxed, a percentage not out of line with the general population. A large percentage of those truckers come from a very diverse background – if this were really a Freedom Convoy, it would have looked a little more like Canada and a little less like a rural Albertan’s idea of Canada.

My father was a diesel mechanic. My father, in 1980, let a young man park his van beside our small business and handed him all the money out of his wallet while he was early in his Marathon of Hope. I grew up around truckers. The ones I grew up around would not have had the time, nor the desire, to spend any time with the bros on the Hill this weekend. So, please, thank a trucker – a real trucker – for their ongoing efforts. And don’t let this group claim to represent truckers.

Finally – it bears repeating you have to spend time understanding someone – or some group – before you give them your support and your money. For anyone prone to blame the “media” for “not covering the real story” – I can’t hear you because of where you’re standing. Don’t stand with Nazis, and maybe then we can talk.

The co-author, with Phil Gaudreau, of “Headliner,”and the co-host of Headliner: The Podcast, Stephen Heckbert is a professor of public relations at Algonquin College.

Source: Advice to Well-Meaning Protestors: Don’t Stand with Nazis

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Lisée: Le graphique du déclin

2022/02/01 Leave a comment

While Lisée and Lacroix’s critique of declining French among immigrants suffers from the fallacy that the decline reflects increased use of immigrant mother tongues at home, not a shift from French to English (see Allison Hanes: Challenging the orthodoxy that French is in free fall in Quebec). Concerns over language usage by international students is more justified, but hard to see how any government would reduce the numbers given the financial needs of post-secondary institutions:

Décomposons ensemble ce stupéfiant graphique, élaboré par Frédéric Lacroix, auteur récemment de l’excellent ouvrage Un libre choix ?, sur la situation linguistique en éducation supérieure.

Immigration permanente. C’est la ligne pleine qui montre que, bon an mal an, avant la pandémie, entre 50 000 et 55 000 immigrants devenaient résidents au Québec. Tout le débat se concentre sur cette donnée des « seuils d’immigration ». Nous savons déjà qu’à ce niveau, le Québec reçoit davantage d’immigrants par habitantque les États-Unis, la France ou le Royaume-Uni, mais moins que l’Australie, l’Allemagne et le Canada. (La baisse de 2019 sera compensée par un rattrapage, à 70 000, cette année.)

Immigration temporaire. C’est la ligne en pointillé qui monte inexorablement et qui rend caduque — sans objet ou risible, au choix — le débat sur les seuils. Cette immigration, gérée par le fédéral, est constituée pour plus de moitié d’étudiants étrangers, le reste étant des travailleurs temporaires de tous les secteurs. Une partie d’entre eux deviendront des immigrants permanents (donc un jour comptés parmi les 55 000), mais le nombre de permis délivrés augmente sans cesse. Alors si vous pensiez que le Québec accueillait par an environ 55 000 personnes, vous sous-estimiez le nombre de 150 000.

En arrivant, le français ? No thanks ! Sur le graphique, l’espace bleu représente la proportion de tous les immigrants qui déclarent connaître le français, l’espace rouge, ceux qui déclarent ne pas le connaître. En détail, la proportion des permanents qui avouent ne pas le maîtriser au point d’entrée est passée de 42 % en 2015 à presque 50 % en 2019. Cette donnée est assurément sous-évaluée, car chaque contrôle opéré a posteriori, par le vérificateur général ou les agents d’immigration, révèle qu’il y a toujours moins de français que ce qui est affiché. Chez les étudiants étrangers, l’ignorance du français est passée de 35 % en 2014 (44,5) à 43 % (45,2) en 2019. Parmi les travailleurs temporaires du programme de la mobilité internationale (ne parlons pas de la main-d’œuvre agricole, massivement hispanophone), 37 % déclaraient en 2019 ne pas connaître la langue de Molière et pour 40 % d’entre eux, on ne le sait pas ! Faut-il même croire ces chiffres ? Aucune preuve n’est requise. Plus largement, l’objectif du gouvernement Legault est de faire croître de 15 % le nombre de travailleurs temporaires d’ici 18 mois.

Une fois arrivés, toujours no thanks ! Peut-être les étudiants étrangers tombent-ils amoureux du français, une fois plongés dans notre métropole francophone ? Une étude de Statistique Canada vient détremper nos espoirs et nous détromper : « Malgré leurs intentions initiales d’apprendre le français, la plupart des étudiants n’ont pas réellement amélioré leurs compétences linguistiques à cause de contraintes temporelles, d’un manque de motivation, ou parce qu’ils interagissent principalement avec des étudiants anglophones. »

L’impact sur Montréal. Le graphique indique les entrées annuelles, mais — sauf pour les étudiants étrangers — pas le nombre cumulatif. Pour faire simple, si on ne compte pour 2019 que ceux qui déclarent ne parler que l’anglais et qui sont à Montréal, au moins 26 500 jeunes étrangers alimentent l’anglicisation montréalaise. Ajoutons ceux qui ne parlent que l’anglais parmi les étudiants canadiens-anglais (5363), les cadres et professionnels temporaires (9300) et les immigrants permanents (8860), et cela fait 50 000 personnes. C’est l’équivalent de plus de deux fois la ville ontarienne de Brockville. Il s’agit de l’hypothèse basse. Comme l’écrit Frédéric Lacroix parlant des maisons d’éducation publiques et privées anglophones, la politique d’immigration temporaire canadienne est en train de créer, « centrée sur McGill, Dawson, Concordia, Matrix, Herzing, etc., une cité-État anglophone au cœur de Montréal ».

Mais le projet de loi 96 ? J’aimerais pouvoir dire que, face à cet afflux, le projet caquiste offrira un rempart. Mais on n’y trouve pas le début d’une tentative de correction. Le gouvernement Legault, qui autorise les agrandissements de Dawson et de McGill, ne prévoit rien pour réclamer, par exemple, une connaissance préalable du français dans la sélection des étudiants étrangers ou une obligation de formation en français pendant leur séjour. Pire : le PLQ, lui, nous avait habitués à fixer, pour l’immigration permanente, des cibles de connaissance du français qu’il échouait à atteindre. Le premier ministre Legault, ses ministres, son caucus n’ont même plus de cible. Ils observent ce déclin, cet engloutissement linguistique du centre-ville, en spectateurs désintéressés.

Source: https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/666720/le-graphique-du-declin?utm_source=infolettre-2022-01-29&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=infolettre-quotidienne

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Glavin: Neil Young vs Spotify, and the gathering storm

2022/02/01 Leave a comment

Good column:

The fight the legendary hippie singer-songwriter Neil Young brought to the music-streaming giant Spotify on Monday over the privileged place it provides a wildly popular podcast by the contrarian comedian and former wrestling colour-commentator Joe Rogan appears to have ended as quickly as it began. But the wider war is gathering steam.

“I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines,” Young said. Either Rogan goes or I go, he told the Stockholm-based audio-streaming giant. On Wednesday, Spotify responded: Off you go, then. By Thursday, Young had decamped with his entire 45-album backlist and all his bread to Apple Music, while Rogan’s big-tent circuses, with their sideshow freaks and thrill rides, will carry on, as before, with Spotify.

It all sounds so frivolous, but it isn’t, because the public-policy hostilities arising from our common captivity in the grip of COVID-19, now in the first days of the third year of SARS-CoV-2, are only becoming more pronounced with every passing day. Millions are dead, the stricken keep on dying, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to discern what the basic facts are and the uproars are unfolding in the midst of what has been called a “crisis of epistemology.”

That’s the philosophical way of describing the erosion of common understandings about not just what the truth is, but about how we’re all supposed to go about the work of figuring out what the truth is in the first place. Facts used to matter. Now, not so much.

Rogan stands accused of engaging in dezinformatsiya, as the Russians elegantly describe the traffic in dangerous half-truths and lies deployed as offensive weaponry in propaganda warfare. Specifically, Rogan’s offside notions about vaccines and masks are widely understood to make him a dangerous menace to public health. While he’s helpfully referred to himself as a “moron” for suggesting young people shouldn’t bother themselves with COVID vaccinations, the former “Fear Factor” game show host’s Spotify broadcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, still draws roughly 11 million listeners per episode.

I should straight away confess my own loyalties this week were to the cause of Team Neil. One must take sides, after all. Sorry, but that’s how these proxy wars work. There’s little room for conscientious objection, and the alliances that form up can draw the most disparate and ordinarily unfriendly parties to one another in the same blocs, rallying behind banners that wouldn’t otherwise summon them.

In all the epistemic chaos abroad in the Anglosphere—it churns and roils its way through the culture only most noticeably in the undying allegiance of millions of Americans to the disgraced former president Donald Trump—we’ve reached the point where the pandemic’s early public consensus and trust in government experts, in Canada at least, appears to be collapsing.

Canadians almost invariably end up adopting the culture-war habits Americans torture themselves with, so there’s now a “small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing.” This is how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau inelegantly described the convoys of truckers and their camp followers rumbling along Canada’s highways in their Peterbilts and Kenworths, and Freightliners and Macks, intent upon converging in Ottawa this weekend.

The On-to-Ottawa organizers insist they are against vaccine mandates imposed upon anyone, not just cross-border truckers, but many protesters appear to share more seething anger and frustration than any clear and coherent objective. Parliament Hill police were planning on about 10,000 people showing up. It’s been a bit unsettling to consider how all this might end up playing out, because there are some genuinely nasty characters who have insinuated themselves into the anti-mandate protests. The Parliamentary Protective Service insists that everything would proceed according to routine this weekend, but it still seems unlikely that events will go on to resolve themselves quite as efficiently as they appeared to in the Young-Rogan conflict.

It wasn’t just a quarrel about Spotify’s royalty rates or shuffle features. The Spotify rumpus was at least partly about whether a musician like Young could use his enormous star power to force an audio-streaming company with roughly 380 million monthly users to ditch what could be described, in the most charitable terms, as the world’s most popular streaming public-affairs talk show. But it’s also about money. A lot of money.

Rogan signed an exclusive contract with Spotify two years ago, reportedly worth more than $100 million, and Spotify is discovering that there’s more profit to be had in podcasts than in archiving digital versions of yesteryear’s hit singles. Young, who had six million monthly listeners on Spotify last week, sold his music catalogue to publisher Hipgnosis last year for $150 million. While Young says losing his him-or-me ultimatum would cost him 60 per cent of his streaming-service revenue, it’s not like his abdication from Spotify will cause him any pain.

Young’s net worth is estimated at $200 million. Now that Apple Music has declared itself Young’s new streaming home, Young’s earnings shouldn’t be disrupted all that dramatically. So as tidy as some of us might want it, this story is not so simple as a moral tale about a shaggy and lanky iconic veteran protest singer, in his 76th year, gallantly impoverishing himself by bravely sticking it to the man.

In normal times, there’s hardly anything even newsworthy about celebrities throwing themselves into causes. They do it all the time and they’re often pretty weird. There are celebrities against circumcision, celebrities against Oprah Winfrey and celebrities against meat. There have always been celebrities against vaccines. Now there are celebrities against COVID lockdowns.

“No more taking of our freedom And our God-given rights, Pretending its for our safety When it’s really to enslave . . .” That’s a lyric line from a one of several anti-mandate songs recently released by Van Morrison, the usually mild-mannered Northern Irish musical icon whose lyrics are sometimes so ethereal as to be comparable to the poetry of the English mystic William Blake.

Early on in the pandemic, Noel Gallagher, the force behind the chart-topping band Oasis, vowed that he would not wear a mask when he was out at the shops. Only last weekend, the Marvel star Evangeline Lilly joined prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy at an anti-mandate rally in Washington D.C.

Last September’s celebrity COVID eruption was perhaps the most amusing. That’s when pop star Nicki Minaj drew unwanted attention to herself by claiming that a cousin’s friend in Trinidad had been abandoned at the altar by a bride who was displeased by the way a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine had made the groom’s testicles swell.

Nicki Minaj has 22 million Twitter followers. Joe Rogan’s Twitter crew, incidentally, numbers eight million. And now there’s a #DeleteSpotify thing on Twitter that’s taking off.

In this bizarre new world where celebrities are taken to be epidemiologists and the toxins of antisemitism are as prevalent on the “left” as they’ve conventionally been situated on the “right,” it’s not especially helpful to dismiss all those angry truckers as a pack of howling white supremacists. Something’s happening here, to borrow a Buffalo Springfield lyric from Young’s late 60s heyday, and what it is ain’t exactly clear.

Jonathan Rauch, the journalist, author, Atlantic magazine fixture and senior fellow in governance studies with the Brookings Institution, proposes a helpful way of comprehending the perplexing phenomena of the times. It goes like this.

Just as the formalized political rules that derive from the American constitution are necessary to make American democracy work, the ways that knowledge itself is constituted are necessary for politics in liberal democracies to work. And the system is close to broken.

In his just-published book, the Constitution of Knowledge: A Defence of Truth, Rauch describes how the space occupied by what he calls the “reality-based community” is shrinking. Its customs and conventions are falling away. The intellectual strata that has conventionally distilled truth from facts and data and goes about the work of constituting knowledge—historians, social scientists, journalists, policy-makers, jurists—is succumbing to cultures of enforced conformity that stagnate in their own hived-off echo chambers.

Ideological rigidity, speech codes, Twitter-induced outrage spasms and a strict emphasis on consistency with “narrative” are supplanting the social mechanisms that have long served to transform disagreement into knowledge. We are counselled to assess truth claims by sizing up the people “who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing,” as Trudeau put it. The norms and institutions forged over decades by peer review, humility, fact-checking, good-faith debate and the evaluation of truth claims against objective evidence, verification and replication—it’s all up for grabs.

It’s not just that facts don’t seem to matter anymore. It’s that it doesn’t seem to matter that facts don’t matter.

Source: Neil Young vs Spotify, and the gathering storm

Filed under disinformation, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Paradkar: Is teaching kids about racism scary? Exploring the critical race theory bogeyman in Ontario

2022/02/01 Leave a comment

Really liked some of the examples of student projects that reflect the perspectives of different minority groups, not just Blacks:

A Florida bill banning schools and businesses from making white people feel “discomfort” when they teach about discrimination.

A Georgia teacher asking fourth-graders to write a letter to the seventh U.S. president, Andrew Jackson, on how removing members of the Cherokee Nation would help America grow and prosper.

Texas schools pulling books by dozens of Black authors off library shelves.

What a short-lived reckoning on race this has been. Eight states have passed legislation to restrict the teaching of racism and bias in public schools. Another 20 have introduced legislation, or plan to.

A manic panic has taken root in the U.S. over supposed critical race theory (CRT) teachings in education, and on the pretext of banning it, conservatives, cheered on by erstwhile free-speech warriors, are simply limiting conversations on racism and anti-Blackness in particular.

Because Canadians tend to be faithful copycats of American toxicity, we can rest assured a subtle pushback is underway here, too. One way to prevent it from taking hold in education is — education. School boards mandating Black studies in the curriculum would not only validate Black lives in school but also show everyone why such opposition is unnecessary.

We are not there yet, which is why a new course on Deconstructing Anti-Black Racism being taught in a couple of dozen Ontario schools feels not so much like progress, in this moment, as resistance.

It’s a Grade 12 course that was developed in 2020 by four Black teachers at Toronto’s Newtonbrook Secondary School in response to student inquiries in the wake of the global reckoning. The Toronto District School Board approved and published it, thus opening it up for use by other school boards. It is being taught in about 17 schools, the board said.

“Students are becoming increasingly aware that the idea of ‘soft racism’ that we have here in Canada is not soft. It is just as painful. It’s just as hurtful and it’s just as damaging,” says Toronto teacher Monique Willacey, who will be teaching the course for the first time to students at Riverdale Collegiate Institute next semester.

She hopes to begin with the fundamentals; the difference between non-racism and anti-racism, between racism and anti-Black racism. Address questions such as: “Don’t we just address this when we look at multiculturalism? Don’t we just do this when we look at diversity? We already know about bias and discrimination. So why do we need to learn that in specific relation to anti-Black racism?”

The Toronto board’s own human rights report last year, its first, found the board has a “serious racism problem.”

Racism was the most frequently cited human rights violation, followed by disability. In the 2018-19 school year, 64 hate activity reports were filed. The following year the number spiralled to 312. “Incidents citing anti-Black racism exceeded all other incidents reported by a wide margin,” the report said. Antisemitism and homophobia also rose at an alarming rate.

“We are at a complex and critical juncture in public education and navigating resistance to achieving anti-racism and equity,” said the Toronto school board’s director, Colleen Russell-Rawlins.

Conservative Americans are lashing out against critical race theory, falsely claiming it attributes racism to all white people as individuals. In fact, the theory, which is a framework of legal analysis, is based on the premise that race is not natural and that racism is embedded in social institutions.

CRT is one of the frameworks that inform this course, Monique Willacey says. Let’s take a look at how dangerous this theory is.

In this final week of the Grade 12 semester, Ottawa occasional teacher Raj Doobay, who taught the course at Woodroffe High School, was awaiting feedback from his students. It was, he says, “one of the best classes I’ve had the opportunity to teach,” and “a very humbling experience.”

The course is student-centred, meaning the students decide what they want to learn and what they don’t want to learn.

“What they didn’t want to learn is the tokenization thing that happens, and you’re going to see it next month, Black History Month, where, you know, teachers are putting in the pictures of Martin Luther King and we learn all of the stuff that happens in America while ignoring the real stuff that’s happening in Canada,” Doobay says. “They want to talk about real racism and how to deal with it.”

One of the themes of his course was From Act to Action.

At any given moment there is an imminent possibility that yet another Black person is going to be shot by the police, Doobay says, so the class explores ideas such as: how do you fight effectively? “It’s one thing to go out and, you know, march, protest. What are you doing behind the scenes? How do you network and build with your community? How do you engage professional organizations and how do you fight in a way that they can’t write us out of the story?”

One student from Haiti did a project on how French colonialism affected the Haitian trajectory.

A Cambodian student made a powerful presentation with history and research along with the story of the choice her grandfather made to sacrifice his life, to save the rest of the family from being killed by the Khmer Rouge.

A dance teacher taught West Indian dances as students traced roots of music created in Africa. How, for instance, Yoruba roots influenced West Indian music that in turn influenced music in Brazil, and how all that transforms into Beyoncé’s music.

Sessions with guests foster curiosity and build community. In Toronto, where teachers say they were recently encouraged to only have pre-recorded sessions, the board confirmed that teachers of this course could invite guest lecturers for live online sessions.

Neither Doobay nor Willacey, who has previously discussed issues of racism in other classes, has ever received parent complaints, and both credited their school community for supporting them.

“This course isn’t about finding the right answers or wrong ones. This course is about challenging our thinking and opening our minds to the fact that this world isn’t perfect and we’re working really hard to improve it,” Willacey told students in an introduction video.

Scary stuff, indeed.

Source: Is teaching kids about racism scary? Exploring the critical race theory bogeyman in Ontario

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Falconer and Damian Smith: Asylum-seeker smuggling is a symptom, not a root cause

2022/02/01 Leave a comment

Good arguments in favour of a managed approach to asylum seekers (as Canada largely has with even Roxham Road given how the government processes claims). On the other hand, just as “cracking down” incentivises more crossings between official points of entry, so does having “unofficial” points of entry like Roxham Road, with the important and real difference that they are known and identified, and have to go through the official process.

So the hard part is ensuring a quick, efficient and fair efficient determination process that is subject to enforcement, without the endless appeal processes that undermine confidence among Canadians:

Earlier this month, the Patels – a family of four from India – died of cold exposure trying to walk south through the Canada-U.S. border, near Emerson, Man.

But rather than look at how policies incentivize such irregular migration and produce such tragedies, Canadian politicians and news media have been quick to parrot rhetoric from other rich countries, speculating about the responsibility of criminal smugglers and wider networks of nefarious actors. “It is so tragic to see a family perish like this, victims of human traffickers, misinformation and people who have taken advantage of their desire to build a better world,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said.

Just three months earlier, the U.K.’s Interior Minister blamed smugglers for the death of 31 peoplewhen a boat capsized in the English Channel, and vowed to pass laws to make it illegal to claim asylum. And the U.S., which for decades has forced irregular migrants to make deadly desert crossings, has criminalized humanitarian groups as smugglers.

But while the Florida man arrested in the Patels’ case allegedly sought to profit from their desperation, he did not cause it.

What the political rhetoric around irregular migration misses is that human smuggling is a symptom of the friction between the desire to migrate or find protection, and the absence of safe and legal pathways to do so. Prohibition in the face of high demand only fosters illicit markets, and “cracking down” on small-time criminals addresses symptoms, not the causes.

The number of U.S. green cards offered every year has been capped at 675,000 since 1991, resulting in an average wait time of 7.5 years for eligible immigrants. But it varies by country; for an Indian professional, wait times to enter the U.S. can reach up to 50 years. Roughly 14 per cent of potential applicants will die of old age before receiving a green card.

The U.S. has taken an even more restrictive approach to asylum. The Biden administration has continued a series of Trump era policies to expel asylum seekers without a hearing, or force them to remain in Mexico until it is heard. That led the backlog to surpass 1.6 million last December, pushing wait times to more than five years.

While Canadian immigration quotas are larger per capita – 421,000 for 2022 – the federal government has taken a similar approach to asylum. The majority of asylum seekers are recognized as refugees; they differ from resettled refugees, such as those from Afghanistan and Syria, only by the manner in which they arrived. Nevertheless, they are often unfairly assailed as “queue jumpers” or “bogus refugees,” or accused of “asylum shopping.” These accusations miss the entire point of why people migrate.

Since 2004, Canada and the U.S. have returned asylum seekers to each other under a Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which applies only to official ports of entry, leading to what is often called a “loophole” in the agreement. In fact, governmental discussions in 2001 recognized that sealing the border would mean more smuggling and a larger undocumented population.

Many asylum seekers have crossed between border points to avoid being returned to the U.S., where they would likely face imprisonment and deportation. The route the Patels were using developed precisely because the STCA incentivized irregular crossings.

In 2017, Canada established an informal humanitarian corridor at Roxham Road, but from March, 2020, to November 2021, it turned back almost every asylum seeker on public health grounds. Inland claims increased significantly. Most will be from people on visas, but many have been forced to bypass new restrictions through clandestine crossings.

Canada has stated that it is now in the process of “modernizing” the STCA. While details are murky, it will likely mean expanding measures to turn back asylum seekers. This is particularly troubling with the Supreme Court of Canada set to rule on the agreement’s constitutionality.

Because a reformed STCA would limit asylum access, rather than affect demand, there will only be more clandestine journeys, more organized smuggling and more dangerous modes of border crossings. Enforcing an expanded STCA will also require massive expenditures to surveil and police the border, resulting in more incarceration, a larger undocumented population, and corruption among border guards. Securitization is a self-fulfilling policy.

Canada is at a crossroads. It can choose hard line policies to the benefit of the Canadian security establishment and create more smugglers, even as its politicians heap blame on them when tragedy strikes. Or it can choose to manage the border by investing in a timelier, fairer asylum system and rethinking how it responds to demand for migration.

Robert Falconer is a research associate at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. Craig Damian Smith is a senior research associate at the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration & Integration program at Ryerson University.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-asylum-seeker-smuggling-is-a-symptom-not-a-root-cause/

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , ,

Hainsworth: My Syrian refugee friend became a citizen. So why was I barred from the ceremony?

2022/01/31 2 Comments

Something for IRCC to think about as it maintains the shift to virtual citizenship ceremonies:

I cried tears of joy.

A friend of mine who left the destruction and despair of Aleppo, Syria, became a Canadian citizen on Jan. 24.

And, for me, that is a cause for great joy and celebration.

I too am an immigrant, a naturalized Canadian citizen.

I arrived in Canada Dec. 27, 1971.

My friend left Aleppo in 2016, arriving in Canada in late 2017.

And, I too have been through the ceremony.

Compared to my friend’s journey to citizenship, my family’s immigration to Canada was a cakewalk.

We came from England in late 1971 so my father could take a job in Trail, B.C.

The memory of our departure still causes pain. Indeed, this past October, I stood on a train platform in the city of Leeds, where 50 years ago, my grandparents stood outside the train waving as we pulled away bound for London. And, I cried at the memory. Half a century later, the pain remains. It is not an easy thing to leave one’s homeland and extended family. Even typing this, I get choked up.

Still, I count myself lucky.

I did not have to live through a brutal dictatorship like that of Syrian president Bashar Hafez al-Assad.

I did not have to endure my home being relentlessly bombed.

I did not have to witness the destruction of the city in which I lived.

I did not have to flee to the safety of Beirut, Lebanon, in order to get to Canada.

In all that, I have been blessed beyond measure.

Further, having covered refugee cases, I have been astounded at the thoughtlessness — if not inhumanity — of some Canadians who attempt to deny Canadian citizenship to others fleeing here for their lives.

One former senior journalist was critical of Sri Lankan refugees who spent their life savings to come to B.C. in leaking, rust-bucket boats to escape civil war. He said they should have stood in line at a Canadian consulate in their country to be processed like every other applicant.

I countered that filling out forms and waiting for the mail is hard when people nearby want to slice you apart with machetes. Yes, I listened to the stories of some of those Sri Lankans, some of who arrived one August on the cargo ship MV Sun Sea. I saw their injuries, their missing limbs, as they were led in shackles through a Vancouver office tower for refugee hearings. Some were little old ladies, their heads hung in despair. Yeah, terrorists.

This Canadian says, ‘welcome.’

More than 12 years later, I wanted to be part of my friend’s ceremony, to see them go through that profoundly touching rite. I cry every time I witness it.

Citizenship brings with it great privilege: the right to cast Canadian votes, the right to carry one of the world’s greatest documents – a Canadian passport.

I do not take these things lightly for granted. I am profoundly grateful for them. I did not get them through an accident of birth.

And, as my friend said to me, “The most beautiful thing about being a Canadian is the right of speech.”

That’s free speech, my friends.

However, when I joined the ceremony’s Zoom meeting, I was booted out. People taking the citizenship oath only, I was told.

And, while I accept pandemic restrictions, it is something I must protest.

Now, the citizenship oath includes reference to the monarchy, but it is not an oath to Elizabeth Windsor; it is an oath to the head of state. And, the head of state is an embodiment of the covenant that binds us as a group known as Canadians. This is why the monarch uses the pronoun ‘we.’

And, as part of that ‘we,’ I really, really wanted to be part of my friend becoming a part of this club we call Canadians. I’m somewhat biased but, it’s one of the best clubs in the world.

Further, there is another ‘we’ involved.

It’s a group of people who bonded six years ago to help a then-stranger. Some were friends, others strangers. We (that word again) came together for a common purpose, that most noble of callings, to help another.

To be fair, the oath invitation was really not to be shared. And, I can excuse my friend for sharing it. They were excited.

No Zoom at the inn

To be fair to the organizers, there are restrictions on Zoom, which make it difficult to have multiple people participate in an event with all microphones muted. The citizenship candidates must be allowed to speak and all else remain silent. And, we don’t need people being jerks and interrupting. I respect that.

Could organizers have done it differently?

Well, it is a citizenship court with the oath administered by a judge. I am frequently in the courts and they are not using Zoom. They use Microsoft Teams.

No media, I was told, despite my having explained I am both media and a sponsor group member.

“Due to privacy concerns, media is unable to attend our standard virtual ceremonies,” said a statement from Julie Lafortune, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada spokeswoman. “The candidates do not sign media consent forms before these events and their names and images appear on screen throughout the event.”

All I could see before being booted off Zoom was faces with numbers.

In all the in-person ceremonies I’ve been to, I’ve never seen a media ban, nor have I seen people signing consent forms at such public events.

Further, Lafortune said, “at this time, only selected ceremonies that are broadcast live are shared with media. We continue to explore alternative videoconferencing platforms that have the functionality required to manage large volumes of participants while ensuring client privacy is maintained during the administrative steps of the ceremony.”

All, that said, my friend’s ceremony is complete.

They are a Canadian.

My heart was with them in spirit and my soul soared for it was a magnificent day in a beautiful person’s life.

I am not naming my friend. There are, sadly, people in this country who will attack refugees and immigrants. Despite the usual bigoted assumptions, my friend has been employed almost since arrival and helps others. Our group raised funds through friends and colleagues and helped them with housing and furniture. Taxpayers didn’t pay for this.

I will not expose my friend to that, and I won’t let such things spoil this magnificent day. Seventy-plus people from around the world became Canadians. And that is a beautiful thing.

I am profoundly grateful to be a Canadian.

What was my friend’s immigration experience like? 

“The journey of belonging was and is not easy. I remember the first day I arrived in Canada. I felt like ‘why am I here? How stupid I was when I left my country and come into the unknown.’

“It seems like I am in the middle of the black and dark ocean, knowing nothing, where to go, how to begin,” they said, tears streaming.

“Challenges are really very important in human being’s life because they make us stronger.

“Despite the days I spent crying or feeling down, this journey of fighting for survival adds more skills, experience and makes me more resilient.”

Welcome, my friend. Welcome.

Source: https://www.coastreporter.net/opinion/my-syrian-refugee-friend-became-a-citizen-so-why-was-i-barred-from-the-ceremony-4992718

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Saunders: Canada is now dependent on the ‘illegal’ workers in our midst. They deserve better

2022/01/31 Leave a comment

Frustrating that we do not have better numbers than the numbers thrown around by advocates. That being said, paths to regularization are better than being underground:

You may not notice that the crew drywalling your house are visitors from Russia on tourist visas that expired a couple months ago. You don’t ask, and your contractor doesn’t, because their work is good, and drywallers are so hard to find these days.

You may not notice that the brilliant young Indian developer you hired to rework your company’s customer-service platform is a graduate student whose visa does not actually allow her to work. It’s impossible to find anyone else with that talent in this economy.

We may not often notice, but undocumented immigrants – also known by the inaccurate U.S. term “illegals” – have become increasingly integral to our economy, and to our working lives, over the past two years.

First, there were the pandemic border closings and restrictions; then, there were the supply chain crises caused by pandemic labour immobility. Together, these have created gaping labour shortages, causing industries and governments to search desperately for skilled workers wherever they can find them.

Ontario, for example, recently asked Ottawa to double the number of skilled immigrants it usually receives; the province currently has more than 300,000 unfilled positions, mainly in health care, food services, manufacturing and construction. A lot of those are essential to the survival of their enterprises, and a good number of them – although accurate counts are hard to get – are being filled by the undocumented.

In other countries, the pandemic has forced governments to be more honest about their dependency on workers without papers. Ireland, for example, recently launched a plan that, when it comes into effect next week, will grant legal residency to tens of thousands of undocumented workers and ex-students who have been living there for at least four years (or three, if they have children). Irish officials say most have been employed throughout that period. (Ireland is also asking the United States to do the same for undocumented Irish immigrants working there.)

That follows Portugal, which granted temporary regularization to 223,000 undocumented migrants in 2020 and 2021; Spain, which gave legal residency to undocumented agricultural workers and granted work permits to foreigners aged 18 to 21 who were unable legally to work; and Italy, the first country to recognize the legal-worker shortage when, in spring of 2020, it granted a right to legal residency to foreign workers in agriculture, domestic service and care work.

Other countries, forced to acknowledge their economic dependence on people who aren’t permitted to be in the country, have had political campaigns to make them legal residents. Australia, whose border-quarantine program reduced pandemic deaths but prevented seasonal workers from entering, acknowledged hundreds of thousands of crucial workers were undocumented (or had become undocumented because they couldn’t leave when visas expired). It dealt with the problem partly the way Canada did: It met annual immigration targets by drawing on hundreds of thousands of people who were already in the country, giving them permanent residency. That still left a lot of workers with ambiguous papers.

Relying on undocumented workers isn’t just inhumane (they’re more likely to be exploited) and fiscally unwise (they’re less likely to pay taxes). It can also be deadly. That’s what health officials have warned in Brazil, where there are possibly millions of undocumented workers, mainly from the countries of the Andes, whose clandestine existence means they’re unlikely to enter a health clinic to get vaccinated. There’s a big campaign to regularize them in order to prevent further disease spread in what is already the world’s most COVID-19 infected country.

Countries such as Canada and the U.S. have been slower to recognize the pandemic-era role of the undocumented, in good part because of news media and political myths that portray the typical “illegal” as someone who paid a smuggler to sneak them across the border at night. In reality, the overwhelming majority, around the world, are people who entered the country legally at an airport and have overstayed their visa or have one that doesn’t permit work.

In Canada, the issue is rarely mentioned in polite society. But it’s well known in government. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently used a mandate letter to instruct his new Immigration Minister, Sean Fraser, to “explore ways of regularizing status for undocumented workers who are contributing to Canadian communities.”

It’s a typically Canadian way of facing a problem – quietly, slowly and long after other countries have successfully dealt with it. We ought to find a better way – at the very least for the sake of our many neighbours who make our lives better while living in fear and insecurity.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-is-now-dependent-on-the-illegal-workers-in-our-midst-they/

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