David: Le taureau [Premier Legault denial of systemic racism]

2021/10/04 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Michel David:

Le premier ministre François Legault avait déjà gâché une bonne occasion d’élever le débat en se lançant dans une charge partisane totalement déplacée à l’Assemblée nationale le jour de l’anniversaire de la mort de Joyce Echaquan.

Il a été encore plus désolant de l’entendre justifier son refus de décréter un jour férié pour marquer la réconciliation avec les Premières Nations par le tort que cela causerait à la productivité de l’économie québécoise.

Le geste aurait pourtant été élégant, bien que la plupart des provinces n’aient pas suivi non plus l’exemple d’Ottawa. Mais faire valoir un argument aussi mercantile traduisait un manque d’empathie désolant. M. Legault aurait pu simplement dire qu’il préfère les gestes concrets aux commémorations symboliques ; on aurait difficilement pu lui donner tort.

Dans des provinces où la productivité est plus élevée qu’au Québec, comme l’Ontario, la Colombie-Britannique ou l’Alberta, il y a plus de jours fériés. Inversement, des provinces dont la productivité est moindre, comme Terre-Neuve ou la Nouvelle-Écosse, en offrent moins.

Ce n’est pas la première fois que son obsession économique lui fait oublier que le rôle d’un gouvernement est aussi de contribuer à bâtir une société plus humaine et plus juste. Lors de la réforme du Programme de l’expérience québécoise (PEQ), il ne semblait ni comprendre ni être touché par le drame vécu par ceux qui s’en étaient prévalus dans l’espoir de s’installer au Québec, et qui voyaient soudainement leur rêve brisé après avoir tout quitté. À ses yeux, la satisfaction des besoins du marché du travail constituait le seul critère.

Personne ne conteste la qualité du travail effectué par le ministre responsable des Affaires autochtones, Ian Lafrenière, dont le doigté a permis de renouer un dialogue qui était pratiquement rompu, mais la participation du premier ministre aux cérémonies de commémoration de la Journée nationale de la vérité et de la réconciliation aurait mieux témoigné de la détermination de l’État et de la nation québécoise à établir des relations avec les Premières Nations sur de nouvelles bases.

Tant que M. Legault s’entêtera à nier que les Autochtones sont victimes de « racisme systémique », il sera très difficile de les convaincre de la sincérité de ses intentions. Mais il semble voir rouge et fonce comme un taureau dès que ces mots sont prononcés. Cette semaine, il donnait l’impression d’avoir un urgent besoin de vacances.

Après avoir crié sur tous les toits qu’on cherchait à culpabiliser les Québécois, il s’est lui-même condamné au déni. Après la commission Viens, voilà pourtant que la coroner qui a enquêté sur la mort de Joyce Echaquan arrive elle aussi à la conclusion que le racisme systémique est bel et bien réel. Fait-elle aussi partie de ces wokes radicaux qui se complaisent dans le dénigrement du Québec ?

Évidemment, à partir du moment où M. Legault reconnaîtrait que les Autochtones sont victimes de racisme systémique, il deviendrait encore plus difficile de prétendre que les minorités visibles ne le sont pas. Les droits que des millénaires d’occupation du territoire confèrent aux uns rendraient-ils plus acceptable la discrimination envers les autres ?

Depuis trois ans, M. Legault s’est employé à redonner aux Québécois une fierté et une confiance en eux-mêmes que les lendemains difficiles du référendum de 1995 et la dégénérescence des mœurs politiques sous la gouverne libérale avaient mis à mal, mais il ne rend pas service au Québec en l’enfonçant dans un débat stérile dont il ne peut pas sortir grandi. L’année électorale s’annonce inquiétante.

Il est vrai que le concept de « racisme systémique » n’est pas facile à saisir, mais il est désolant de voir le premier ministre le déformer pour mieux le rejeter. À l’entendre, il s’agirait simplement d’une nouvelle arme utilisée par ceux qui se complaisent dans le Quebec bashing. En matière de relations avec les Autochtones, le Canada anglais n’a certainement pas de leçons à donner, mais la turpitude des uns ne saurait justifier celle des autres.

Les Québécois ont le sentiment qu’eux-mêmes ont toujours été victimes de discrimination depuis la Conquête. Ils sont donc bien placés pour comprendre à quel point la coexistence de deux cultures et de deux modes de vie peut être difficile, surtout quand on est en situation minoritaire.

Ils peuvent légitimement être fiers de ce qu’ils ont réussi à bâtir dans l’adversité, mais ils pourraient aussi tirer une grande fierté à avoir su aménager une société où chacun se sentirait chez lui, accepté et respecté tel qu’il est.

Le défi est de taille, mais M. Legault a démontré qu’il ne manque pas de cœur à l’ouvrage. On peut se féliciter d’avoir un taureau comme premier ministre, à la condition qu’il fonce dans la bonne direction.

Source: https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/637374/chronique-le-taureau?utm_source=infolettre-2021-10-02&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=infolettre-quotidienne

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Indo-Canadians tend to vote Liberal. But will they continue to do so?

2021/10/02 Leave a comment

Interesting discussion of the generational differences:

For nearly two weeks, pundits have scoured pre-election surveys and post-election exit polls to analyze the voting patterns of Canadians in granular detail. So it’s surprising that scant attention has been paid to how Canada’s burgeoning immigrant communities voted.

Among immigrant groups, Canada’s large and rapidly growing Indo-Canadian population deserves particular consideration. According to the 2016 census, there are nearly 1.4 million people of Indian origin residing in Canada, accounting for four per cent of the population. Those numbers have grown dramatically since then; today, Indians represent the largest group of new immigrants in the country. In 2019 alone, more than 80,000 Indians made their way to Canada from India — one-quarter of all immigrants arriving that year.

For years, the Indian community in Canada — much like other ethnic minorities — has been perceived as a strong votary of the Liberal party. But the community’s rising socio-economic profile and young demographic skew, combined with the emergence of the Indo-Canadian NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, have raised questions about its political leanings.

On the eve of the election, we collaborated with YouGov on a nationally representative survey of Indo-Canadians. Our survey of 724 citizens of Indian origin suggests that the Indo-Canadian community continues, in large measure, to support the Liberals, with 38 per cent of respondents indicating their support of the party — twice the number that planned to vote Conservative. One in five (21 per cent) backed the NDP.

Remarkably, this breakdown is nearly identical to the distribution of Indo-Canadian votes in both 2015 and 2019, according to our analysis of the Canadian Election Study. How do we explain the voting habits of Indo-Canadians?

For starters, on a standard left-right ideological spectrum, Indo-Canadians strongly skew left. Nearly three in four Indo-Canadians self-identify on the liberal half of the scale. When it comes to the issues topping their agenda this election season, respondents identify the same bread-and-butter issues that weigh on most Canadians’ minds: health care and COVID-19, the cost of living, the state of the economy. 

If the Indian diaspora exhibits a leftward tilt, why don’t more of them vote for the NDP? Indeed, for many Indo-Canadians, Singh’s allure is undeniable. Nearly half of respondents reported that Singh’s leadership of the NDP makes them more enthusiastic about the party, in large part due to his Indian and/or Sikh roots. Furthermore, when asked to rate their views of Canadian political leaders on a sliding scale from 0-100, Justin Trudeau and Singh are virtually deadlocked — Singh earns an average rating of 67, with Trudeau at 65 and Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole lagging at 49.

However, Singh is handicapped by the one impediment that has arguably prevented many Canadians from voting NDP: the party is perceived to have little shot at forming the government. One in four Indians say the primary reason they do not vote NDP is because they do not want to waste their vote. 

On the other end of the spectrum, when asked why they do not identify with the Conservatives, survey respondents reported that the party is too influenced by big business and seeks to cut public services. On everyday economic issues, Conservatives appear out of step with the left-of-centre policies Indo-Canadians favour. Misaligned policies on the right and limited electability on the left seem to funnel Indo-Canadian voters to the Liberal camp. 

The seeming stability of the votes of the Indo-Canadian community, however, elides deeper changes underway. While older voters (above 30) favour the Liberals over the NDP by a two-to-one margin, younger Indo-Canadians split their vote almost evenly between the two. The divide between first-generation Indo-Canadians (who came as immigrants) and second-generation citizens (born and raised in Canada) is starker. While half of naturalized citizens support the Liberal party, just one in three born in the country do so. The NDP is the principal beneficiary of this shift: the party’s vote share among second-generation Canadians is twice as large as among their first-generation counterparts. Indeed, country of birth is the single most important predictor of whether Indo-Canadians are likely to vote Liberal, even after controlling for age, education, gender and religion. 

The relative absence of a religious divide is worth emphasizing, as it stands in contrast with the voting attitudes of Indians in another large, English-speaking country — the United Kingdom. There, Hindus have abandoned the left-of-centre Labour Party in droves and embraced the Conservatives, which has given British Indians prominent cabinet berths and adopted pro-India policies. In Canada, partisan polarization on religious lines is not so evident in the Indian community. But differing views over how Canada should engage with India’s government and concerns that the Liberal party favours Sikhs over the Indo-Canadian community at large could trigger a realignment.

Looking forward, the voting behaviour of the community will be shaped by two competing demographic trends. As the size of the diaspora increases, so will the number of young, Canadian-born Indians who are eligible to vote — increasing popular support for the NDP. At the same time, the sharp increase in recent Indian immigration will boost the numbers of naturalized citizens, who are more likely to support the Liberal party. The net effect of these trends, and how the Conservatives respond, will determine if the stability in the voting preferences of the Indo-Canadian community continues.

Caroline Duckworth and Milan Vaishnav are with the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Devesh Kapur is Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/10/01/indo-canadians-tend-to-vote-liberal-but-will-they-continue-to-do-so.html

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Australia: Why Diversity Seems Easier Said Than Done in Politics

2021/10/02 Leave a comment

Australia’s political representation is much worse than Canada (haven’t yet seen the final 2021 numbers for Canada which a number of researchers are working on):

Recently, I’ve been reporting on the controversy over Labor’s pick to represent Fowler, where Tu Le, a young lawyer and the daughter of Vietnamese migrants, was passed over, with the party instead choosing Kristina Keneally, a party leader and white woman. I’ve been using it as a starting point to examine why Australia’s Parliament lags behind other English-speaking countries when it comes to cultural diversity.

I’ve talked to people from across the political spectrum, including many young people of color within the Labor Party who have led the debate. For them, the controversy is just the latest example of the dissonance between a country that claims to be the most successful nation when it comes to multiculturalism and a governing elite that is reluctant to address diversity at the cost of political convenience.

What I wasn’t able to go into much in my article (coming soon) was the details that party members shared about the barriers they faced on every rung of the political ladder. It all added up to a picture of a two-tiered political system that sees people of color as fine community representatives or liaisons but not cut out for higher leadership positions, and treats immigrant communities as expandable membership bases or voting blocs.

A few caveats: they had differing views about the Fowler preselection. They had nothing against Kristina Keneally and her qualifications for office. They stressed that underrepresentation is a problem across all parties, not unique to Labor — it’s just particularly disappointing when the party that purports to champion diversity doesn’t make good on its promise.

Ethnically diverse members regularly have their worth tied to their communities, said Joseph Haweil, 30, mayor of Hume City in Melbourne. “Very often there’s a feeling if you’re someone from a multicultural background and you walk into a branch meeting without already having signed up five or 10 people from your community, you’re a nobody.”

Migrant communities are courted for fund-raising and to build a base for internal power struggles, but afforded little genuine engagement, said Tu Le. “When you go to a Cabramatta branch meeting, half the people there have no idea what you’re talking about, they’re just there because someone signed them up,” she said. “How parties engage with local communities — it’s one-sided, it’s not participatory.”

There’s a huge pool of untapped talent within the Labor party, she added, that gets overlooked because “we’re just seen or categorized in certain ways that don’t let people see our full potential.”

“There’s two different set of rules,” said Kun Huang, 30, a Cumberland councilor in Sydney. A person of color needs to simultaneously demonstrate that “you can bring along your community” and that they have appeal to those outside their own ethnicity, he said, but if you’re not a minority, “you just need to know the right set of people and you’re in.”

The system privileges party insiders who spend their time around other party members, shoring up support for internal preselections and ballots, said Charishma Kaliyanda, 33, a Liverpool councilor in Sydney. If you’re busy engaging with or volunteering for cultural or community organizations, “you have less time to do the organizational work that you need to do to build up that support.”

“There’s a really disjointed relationship between the skills you may have being from a different cultural background or being a community advocate, and how they’re valued in a political sense,” she added.Sign up for the Australia Letter Newsletter  Conversation starters about Australia and insight on the global stories that matter most, sent weekly by the Times’s Australia bureau. Plus: heaps of local recommendations. Get it sent to your inbox.

The other question I’ve been asking is: what needs to change?

It seems that the first step is acknowledging the issue. In N.S.W., party members are putting forward a platform change at the next state Labor conference to formally recognize the underrepresentation of racial minorities in leadership positions, including Parliament, and commit to improving representation in the party.

Party members also said change needs to happen at every level — from how members are recruited, to who is given staff positions, to who gets preselected.

“I don’t want to see a situation where the party just randomly picks, say, a Chinese Australian so that it fulfills the diversity image,” said Mr. Huang. “I want the party to select good local candidates who have been contributing to the party and who have been active.”

If there aren’t candidates who fulfill both those criteria, he added, “our job is to recruit more culturally diverse members into the party.”

Tim Soutphommasane, Australia’s former racial discrimination commissioner, theorized that we may be starting to see two different understandings of “multiculturalism.” There’s the one celebrated by the majority of the political class that “would see things as pretty good the way they are and would understand any underrepresentation as an issue that’d be fixed with time,” he said.

Then, there’s a more political form that sees underrepresentation as a matter of urgency and asks: “If we really are the most successful multicultural country in the world, why does the leadership of our society look much like it did during the era of White Australia?”

“The lesson here should be clear,” he added. “Multicultural voices will need to be more assertive. Power is rarely shared or gifted. It needs to be contested and won. But that’s not easy, especially when there is a strong social pressure for our multiculturalism to be nice, polite, compliant — anything basically but disruptive.”

My article about why Australia’s halls of power don’t look like our population will be out in the next few days.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/world/australia/why-diversity-seems-easier-said-than-done-in-politics.html

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Feds find no bias in racial profiling by traffic stop study in Canada

2021/10/02 Leave a comment

Of note:

There was no evidence of bias found in a federal study on racial profiling by traffic police in Canada.

“Most participants were stopped by police for traffic violations and some were aware of why they were being stopped even before speaking to police,” said the report called National Justice Survey 2021.

“These participants acknowledged they were speeding or committing some other traffic violation such as not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign. A few were pulled over for having expired license plates.”

The poll, which cost $147, 463, was conducted last February and March following coverage of the May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that followed.

Ekos Research Associates polled 3,211 people across the country including doing follow-up interviews with Black, Asian or Indigenous drivers.

Of the Black drivers surveyed, all said they were stopped for routine infractions.

Source: Feds find no bias in racial profiling by traffic stop study in Canada

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BONOKOSKI: The media is biased on diversity. Let the students rise up 

2021/10/02 Leave a comment

Ironic Bonokoski article given that much of Sun/Postmedia commentary reinforces the belief that mainstream media has a left-wing bias (of which, of course, Postmedia is part):

The non-partisan think tank the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) has launched an essay-writing contest for students, claiming the “dominant mainstream media narrative seems to offer a single, simplistic, politically biased view to represent all people of colour on the most important political and cultural issues.”

It cited no example of that bias.

The contest rules don’t implicitly say that ‘white people need not apply’ but it is certainly inferred that white students would not have the world or personal experience to address the issues.

“A diversity of opinions from individuals with different backgrounds represents a strong measure of a successful democracy,” said MLI Senior Fellow Jamil Jivani.

“Young Canadians deserve to be heard, especially those whose opinions are often left out of public debate.”

This essay competition, says MLI, is part of the institute’s Speak for Ourselves project, which “seeks to amplify the views of people of colour whose dissent from mainstream narratives might leave them without a platform for expressing their opinions.”

The contest winner — with essays limited to 750 to 1,000 words and open to students 25 and younger — will receive a $1,500 prize and have their essay published in MLI’s Inside Policy magazine.

According to MLI Munk Senior Fellow Shuvaloy Majumdar, “Supporting true diversity and inclusion is much more important than succumbing to the narrow ‘culture war’ debate being perpetuated in much of society.”

As Jivani notes, successful submissions will be those that provide “a unique and compelling argument or commentary on issues of race, racism, and diversity — the kind of argument you might not read in the opinion sections of Canada’s major papers or in a university classroom.”

The deadline for submissions is midnight Nov. 29.

The World Economic Forum recently put out a paper on the need of the media and entertainment industries to expand diversification, stating that it opens the door to increased profits.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) has recently become one of the most trending topics in the media and entertainment industry,” said the forum.

“But embracing diversity isn’t only about doing the right thing.

“Analysis shows that ethics and profits are two sides of the same coin. There’s financial logic to making sure that content — and those who create it — are authentically and inclusively representative of today’s society.

“For example, movies that lack authentic and inclusive representation underperform by around 20% of their budget at the opening weekend box office.

“In advertising, 64% of consumers in a Google survey said that they had considered buying or had made a purchase after seeing an ad that they considered diverse or inclusive.

“Similarly, other sectors have sizable untapped opportunities from increased diversity and inclusion.

“However, true diversity includes diversity of thought and, in this respect, minority communities are as diverse as any other communities in our country,” says the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

“This essay competition is an opportunity for students across Canada to challenge the dominant mainstream narrative on race and racism in Canada.

“Reflecting from a place of personal experience is encouraged and, in doing so, a successful essay will exemplify true diversity — the diversity of thought — in our country,” it offers.

“This is to say, the winning essay will be one that provides a unique and compelling argument or commentary on issues of race, racism, and diversity — the kind of argument you might not read in the opinion sections of Canada’s major papers or in a university classroom.”

So, there’s the ground rules.

We in the media are allegedly one dimensional.

Source: https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/bonokoski-the-media-is-biased-on-diversity-let-the-students-rise-up?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=truncated_content&utm_content=opinion_columnists&utm_term=mark_bonokoski

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Immigration adds 1.4 to 1.5 years to U.S. life expectancy, study says

2021/10/02 Leave a comment

Interesting study for both first and second generation immigrants, and the factors influencing shorter lifespans of non-immigrants:

If immigrants to the United States formed their own country, their pre-COVID-19 life expectancies would exceed or match those of the world’s leaders in longevity -; Swiss men and Japanese women. A new study by USC and Princeton researchers estimates that immigration adds 1.4 to 1.5 years to U.S. life expectancy at birth. In 2017, foreign-born life expectancy reached 81.4 and 85.7 years for men and women, respectively. That’s about 7 and 6.2 years longer than the average lifespan of their U.S.-born counterparts.

Demographers knew that immigrants lived longer. The main question that we set out to answer was, How much is this really contributing to national life expectancy trends? Our results show that they’re making an outsized contribution to national life expectancy.”

Arun Hendi, the lead author of the study and assistant professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University

The study was published in the September 2021 issue of SSM Population Health, by Hendi and Jessica Ho, an assistant professor of gerontology and sociology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. Their work provides new insights on how immigrants contributed to national life expectancy trends over nearly three decades, from 1990 to 2017.

The research suggests that immigrants are responsible for approximately half of the recent U.S. gains in life expectancy. Moreover, the gap in life expectancy between foreign-born and native-born residents is widening.

In fact, the researchers say, Americans’ life expectancy would steeply decline if it weren’t for immigrants and their children. Under that scenario, U.S. life expectancy in 2017 would have reverted to levels last seen in 2003 -; 74.4 years for men and 79.5 years for women -; more closely resembling the average lifespans of Tunisia and Ecuador.

Study shows diverging trends during the last decade

Prior research has shown that between 2010 and 2017, overall U.S. life expectancies saw an unprecedented stagnation. The plateau has been largely attributed to drug overdose deaths among adults in their prime working ages and slowdowns in the rate of improvement in cardiovascular disease mortality. But this new study shows that immigrants experienced life expectancy gains during this period, while the U.S.-born population experienced declines.

“If it weren’t for immigrants, our national life expectancy stagnation that we experienced since 2010 would instead be a national decline in life expectancy,” Ho said. “For them to have that large an impact is unexpected because they represent a relatively small proportion of the U.S. population.”

In addition, while the immigrant advantage was already present in 1990, the research shows that the difference between immigrants and the U.S.-born has widened substantially over time, with the ratio of American-born to foreign-born mortality rates nearly doubling by 2017.

“When compared to immigrants’ life expectancy, the U.S.-born are doing poorly. Much of this is related to their very high mortality at the prime adult ages,” said Ho, an expert in the social determinants of health and mortality. “Low mortality among prime-aged immigrants doesn’t just help the foreign-born -; it helps the U.S.-born too. Prime-aged adults are likely to be in the labor force and raising children. This means that they contribute to higher tax revenues and slower population aging.”

Hendi says this is particularly relevant today because those prime adult ages are where the country is losing years of life due to drug overdose mortality and other preventable causes of death.

“The fact that immigrants are doing well suggests that there is a capacity to thrive in the U.S., but the U.S.-born aren’t fulfilling that potential,” he said.

Immigrants are a small but influential share of the U.S. population

Immigrants make up under 15% of the U.S. population, up from around 8% in 1990 but still a small percentage of the total. Hendi and Ho cite healthy behaviors and the changing selectivity of the immigrant population as factors that may contribute to their influence on total life expectancy.

“Immigrants tend to be healthier in part due to the selective migration of those who have the health, resources and stamina to migrate to the U.S., and this selectivity may have grown stronger,” Ho said.

The researchers highlight the role of increases in high-skilled immigration, which is partly reflected in changes in countries of origin as immigrant streams shift from Mexico to places like India and China. They also note that there may be pro-longevity characteristics of immigrant populations, regardless of country of origin, including a lower propensity to drink, smoke and use drugs than U.S.-born residents.

“Many of America’s immigrants come from lower-income, less-developed nations, leading some to worry that these immigrants bring their home countries’ high-mortality conditions with them and thus drag down America’s national average longevity,” Hendi said. “But the results say just the opposite. Far from dragging down the national average, immigrants are bolstering American life expectancy. A big part of the story appears to be that immigrants take fewer risks when it comes to their health.”

The study additionally found that the children of foreign-born residents retain some life expectancy advantage but do not fare as well as their parents.

Hendi and Ho used data from the National Vital Statistics System and the U.S. Census Bureau to estimate life expectancy levels among foreign-born, U.S.-born and total populations between 1990 and 2017.

The team plans to examine COVID-19’s impact on immigrant life expectancies. A January 2021 study by USC and Princeton researchers found the COVID-19 pandemic had significantly affected life expectancy, with stark declines in life expectancy among Black and Latino populations. A separate USC study last July of a large diverse group of Medicaid enrollees found Latino patients had starkly higher odds than whites of testing positive for COVID-19 as well as higher odds of hospitalization and death.

Source: Immigration adds 1.4 to 1.5 years to U.S. life expectancy, study says

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Saint-Jacques: After the two Michaels’ release, Canada must work with allies to challenge China’s bullying tactics

2021/10/01 Leave a comment

Sound commentary:

The return of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor to Canada should be celebrated as they were unfortunate pawns in the geopolitical contest between China and the United States. Let’s hope that they can get back to a normal life quickly ‒ and that Canada was not forced to agree to egregious demands from China to guarantee their release.

As we take stock of this sad episode, we have to look at our China policy from the perspectives of security, trade and co-operation. The starting point should be the defence and protection of our values and interests. As trust has been broken, future Canadian engagement with China will have to be a lot more selective to areas that serve our interest, and be implemented in a consistent manner.

Canada needs to recover its voice. Ottawa must call China into question when it transgresses obligations undertaken through international treaties. This includes problems such as the trampling of human rights in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, the militarization of the South China Sea, the undue pressure on Taiwan and Beijing’s refusal to collaborate with the World Health Organization to investigate the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

After the case of Meng Wanzhou, it is not impossible that we will be asked again to arrest a prominent Chinese citizen at the request of a foreign country with which we have an extradition treaty ‒ or that we will have to arrest someone here who is engaging in espionage or interference activities. We have to put mechanisms in place to prevent future hostage taking. One way would be for Canada to develop criteria that would trigger common responses, including sanctions, by countries that have signed the Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention in State-to-State Relations. All these countries have realized that what happened to the Michaels was pure hostage diplomacy and that it could happen to their citizens, too.

Canada should also ban Huawei from its 5G development to ensure that the company’s equipment cannot be used for espionage and to align with the United States. It must also become a lot more active to prevent Chinese interference in domestic affairs, including cyber espionage. A good starting point would be to look at the four foreign interference laws adopted by Australia.

To prevent China from using trade to punish opponents, Canada should impress on Washington that it needs to make the World Trade Organization functional again by allowing arbiters to be appointed to panels. Countries could then launch actions against China when it imposes punitive sanctions(this would apply to other countries that enact these measures as well). Canada could suggest an alliance to Australia and U.S. (to start), whereby they agree not to increase exports to China beyond their historical share of a given product if one of them is victim of such sanctions. Trade data for the first six months of 2021 show that our exports to China have increased by 23 per cent on a year-to-year basis. This gives us more leeway to take strong measures as China will always need our agri-food products, iron and copper.

There are, of course, areas where it is in our interest to pursue co-operation with China. For example, on the environment, Canada already has a reputable record of providing assistance. This can facilitate business opportunities for Canada to provide China with clean technologies, liquefied natural gas and hydrogen to help reduce its coal emissions. On public health and pandemics, Canada should continue to collaborate with China ‒ especially to ensure it doesn’t cut corners. There’s also people-to-people exchanges: Chinese people like to travel to Canada for tourism and appreciate Canadian education for their children. We also have our own homework to do: Let’s increase Canadian literacy on China by devoting more resources to Mandarin training and centres studying the country’s politics, economics and culture.

But demonstrating strength, first and foremost, is key. To be successful, this new engagement strategy will have to be implemented in close collaboration with like-minded countries. An impending test to do so will be at Beijing’s 2022 Winter Olympics. Let’s propose that delegations to the opening ceremony be limited, and that foreign leaders not attend. The more we speak with one voice and the more China will be forced to stop its bullying tactics.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-after-the-two-michaels-release-canada-must-work-with-allies-to/

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Le Pen Joins French Conservatives Seeking Immigration Referendum

2021/10/01 Leave a comment

Here we go again, with a race to the bottom:

After trying to moderate her image for months, far-right leader Marine Le Pen went back to basics by casting a national conversation about immigration as a battle for the soul of France and renewing a pledge to hold a referendum on the issue if she defeats Emmanuel Macron next year.

“The April 2022 election will be about our civilization,” Le Pen said during a press conference on Tuesday. “Will France remain France, or be brushed aside by the uncontrolled torrent of massive migration flows that will wipe out our culture, our values, our way of life.”

Le Pen said she’d consult the French about changing the constitution to “drastically” reduce immigration. She pledged to introduce a law that will prevail over international treaties and allow her to breach European Union legislation if a majority of citizens backs the idea.

“What we are offering is a ready-for-use solution,” she said.

Several presidential hopefuls on the traditional right are seeking tougher rules on who is allowed to live in the country, including Michel Barnier and Xavier Bertrand.

And though Macron ran as a centrist in 2017, he has since become more conservative and his government has also talked about the need to control immigration. On Tuesday, it said it will reduce the number of visas granted to Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians to protest their countries’ refusal to facilitate the return of nationals in “an irregular situation” in France.

But Le Pen’s harsher tone may be more the result of the threat posed by ultra-right media personality Eric Zemmour, who has been publicly toying with a run. He has previously demanded a referendum to overhaul immigration law as well as a short-term moratorium on entries. He links immigration to terrorism.

Le Pen is placing second in surveys of voting intentions, after Macron, though polls show support for Zemmour rising and cutting into her voter base. If Zemmour joins the crowded contest, he’d likely increase the chances Le Pen would be knocked out of the second round and throw the race wide open.

During the press conference, Le Pen said she wants to make it illegal for people from different countries to live in closed communities as a way of preserving their traditions and ban undocumented people from regularizing their situation. The Schengen accord, which allows free circulation for people in Europe, would need to be renegotiated, she said.

Source: Le Pen Joins French Conservatives Seeking Immigration Referendum

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Unvaccinated Conservative MPs should ‘stay home’ from Parliament: Bloc leader

2021/10/01 Leave a comment

Valid given vaccine mandates elsewhere even if this will only affect Conservative MPs:

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet said Wednesday the next session of Parliament should happen in person with any members who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19 staying home.

Questions remain about what the return to Parliament will look like for Canada’s 338 elected representatives after the recent federal election saw the Liberals re-elected with a minority government.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he will name his cabinet next month and Parliament will resume sometime in the fall.

Since the pandemic hit in March 2020, the House of Commons and committees had been functioning with some MPs working from Ottawa, but many others appearing virtually, including, later on, to vote, before the election was called.

Blanchet said he wants to see Parliament resume quickly with MPs having to be fully vaccinated in order to be there in person because now vaccines against the novel coronavirus are more widely available.

His party, along with the New Democrats and Liberals, made it a rule that candidates had to be fully vaccinated in order to hit the doorsteps, but the Conservatives did not.

“They get fully vaccinated or they stay home,” Blanchet said of Conservative MPs who might not have had their shots.

“Parliament should not come back under any kind of hybrid formation … now we know that we can go on with the way this building is supposed to work, and we should not refrain from doing so because a few persons don’t believe that the vaccine works. This belongs to another century.”

NDP MP Peter Julian said in a statement that because Canada is battling a fourth wave of the virus, the party wants to talk to others about continuing some of the hybrid practices when Parliament resumes.

“All of our NDP MPs are vaccinated and we’ve been very clear that federal government employees must be vaccinated too. Getting vaccinated is the right thing to do and elected leaders have a responsibility to set a good example by following public health advice,” Julian said.

The Liberals and Conservatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

The Conservatives saw 119 MPs, including incumbents and new candidates, elected on Sept. 20, after the party spent the race dogged by questions about its opposition to making vaccines mandatory as a tool to defeat COVID-19.

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole refused to say on the campaign trail whether he knew how many of those running for the Tories had been fully vaccinated, saying he told campaign teams that those who are not immunized against COVID-19 should take daily rapid tests.

O’Toole is himself vaccinated and has been encouraging others to get their shot, but the Conservative leader says he also respects the personal health choices of Canadians and attacked Trudeau for using the issue to sow division in the country.

Conservative MPs will make their way to Ottawa next week to have their first caucus meeting since the election, where they will have to decide whether they want to review O’Toole’s leadership.

The call for MPs to be vaccinated comes as Trudeau works on bringing in a mandate requiring the federal civil service, along with those working in its federally regulated industries, to be fully vaccinated.

His government has promised to make it a rule by the end of October that travellers flying or taking a train in Canada have to be immunized in order to board.

Many provinces have already introduced a vaccine passport system requiring consumers to provide proof of immunization to access non-essential businesses like restaurants and sports and entertainment venues.

“For the safety of House of Commons staff, translators, pages, security, other MPs and their staff, all parliamentarians should show proof that they are fully vaccinated in order to take their seats in the House,” tweeted former Liberal cabinet minister Catherine McKenna, who didn’t seek re-election, but served for six years in government.

As of Friday, Health Canada reported that around 79 per cent of people 12 and older as having being fully vaccinated, with about 85 per cent receiving at least one dose.

Source: Unvaccinated Conservative MPs should ‘stay home’ from Parliament: Bloc leader

Filed under Politics Tagged with , , ,

McWhorter on Redlining

2021/10/01 Leave a comment

Good reminder of the importance of considering socio-economic factors along with racism, bias and discrimination:

“He thinks there’s no systemic racism.”
No, it’s just that I think we overstate its role in American society today.
“But what about redlining? What about the cops? Can he really …?”
Yes, he can — because things like that just aren’t as simple as we are taught to suppose.
One recent study of redlining is Exhibit A.
First, some background: Redlining was a policy in which certain neighborhoods — coded in red on maps — were considered too risky for mortgage lending. In a great many American cities, Black people were essentially corralled into these red zones, unable to build equity in better housing found elsewhere.
Redlining is now widely seen as a major justification for reparations for Black Americans, especially in light of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s famous Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.” In Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, the City Council in March approved a plan to pay out $25,000 grants for home repairs, down payments or mortgage payments to Black people who suffered housing discrimination or whose family lived in the city during the years of active redlining. However, as with so many matters of race, the redlining story is more complicated than many know.
For one thing, there’s the matter of how many white people owned homes and lived in the redlined areas. An interesting National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by the economist Price V. Fishback and co-authors matched households in the 1930 and 1940 censuses to their locations in neighborhoods in “residential security” maps of 10 major Northern cities produced by a New Deal mortgage entity, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. The researchers found that white people accounted for 82 percent of individuals living in the lowest-rated areas. White people also owned 92 percent of the homes in these areas. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation made a higher share of its loans to Black people than the other lenders at the time (a better-known New Deal agency, the Federal Housing Administration, insured a substantially smaller share of Black mortgages).
I know where you may think I’m going. One approach to this data is to say that redlining was about class, not race, and treat it as a refutation of arguments such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s.
But not so fast. Black people were still represented disproportionately in the lowest-rated neighborhoods: More than 97 percent of Black people — in other words, almost all of them — rented or owned homes in redlined neighborhoods in the 10 cities surveyed.
One reason for that was almost all Black people were poor, a disproportion due certainly to manifestations of other forms of racism at the time and historically. And this disproportionate representation in redlined communities helped keep them poor. Plus, there is plenty of anecdotal and fragmentary evidence that people working on the ground for the F.H.A. and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation had not only classist but also racial biases. And of course within neighborhoods, homeowners themselves openly barred Black people from becoming neighbors via the racially restrictive covenants memorably depicted in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” (I recommend Charles Shields’s forthcoming Hansberry biography).

However, the Redlining 101 story — that cigar-chomping bigots in suspenders drew lines around where Black people happened to live while giving loans to poor whites — doesn’t fully hold up. I am not arguing that systemic racism isn’t real overall, but rather I am scrutinizing one commonly addressed case of it to show that the facts are more complex than they seem. Namely, large numbers of poor whites — recall from above, some four-fifths of the people living in redlined neighborhoods in the cities surveyed by the study I cited — dwarfed the numbers of Black people and were stuck in the redlined neighborhoods too, getting old and having to move in with their grown kids elsewhere as the neighborhoods fell apart. We just don’t hear that part of the story.
Nor do we tend to hear that the cops kill vastly more white than Black people. Or, if we do, the issue of disproportion comes up, just as it must on redlining. But then comes poverty — leaving us again with a more complicated picture than many seem to find convenient.
In 2020, a plurality of the more than 1,000 people shot and killed by the police, according to data compiled by The Washington Post, were white (459); Black people were about a quarter. That is typical year after year. From these statistics some people might wonder why we consider killings by cops a Black problem.
But not so fast. Black Americans account for about 13 percent of the country’s population, but they are more than two times as likely as white Americans to be fatally shot by police officers. This must be attended to, even if it isn’t that Black men are all, or even most, of those killed. The disproportion is typically taken to suggest that racism leads cops to value our lives less.
So: Just as racism was why most Black people lived in redlined, even if mostly white, neighborhoods, racism is why Black people are killed by cops disproportionately, even if they kill more white people numerically. Right?
Yet poverty is germane in the police-killing case as well. Black Americans are two and a half times as likely as white Americans to be killed by cops, and also more than twice as likely to be poor. And crucially, as a report on policing, poverty and racial inequity in Tulsa makes clear, policing is concentrated in poorer neighborhoods, which are more frequently communities of color and which receive more frequent calls for service. And the horrors of modern “war on crime”-style policing are focused on poverty.

Just as racism certainly operated within the housing loan system, racial bias certainly operates within policing. Solid evidence shows racial bias in who gets pulled over (Black people are less likely to be pulled over after dark, when the driver’s race is harder for officers to discern), searched (the bar for searching Black drivers is lower than that for searching white drivers) and verbally abused.

Yet data also suggests that when it comes to police shootings, with all factors taken into account, such as whether the suspect was armed and whether the officers had just cause to fear for their lives, cops kill white people in greater numbers than Black people, but they kill Black people to a disproportionately far greater degree. White cops may not like Black people much in many cases — and they show it — but when it comes to ending Black lives, just maybe we can open up to the possibility that they hold back on resorting to shooting just as much as they do with white men?
That was the finding of the Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who in 2016 found that while Blacks were more likely to experience some form of force in their interactions with the police after they were stopped, there was no racial bias when it came to officer-involved shootings.
Overall, the Cops and Black People 101 story — that police officers casually mow down Black men while letting white men pass with a summons or a slap on the hand — doesn’t hold up. Many more white men than Black men die at the hands of cops. We just don’t hear that part of the story very much.
So on that gloomy old map you see illustrating articles about housing bias, most people living within the redlined perimeter were likely white, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research study, but we don’t hear that part of the story either.
None of that means that racism hasn’t existed or doesn’t exist. But it also suggests that socioeconomic factors matter as well, and a lot. This is a point made by the historian Touré Reed, who wrote an important book to this effect; his father, the political scientist Adolph Reed Jr., is of similar mind, as is the historian Barbara Fields — all three want us to think more about class than “antiracism.”
In a nutshell, one of my takeaways from redlining and shootings by the police is that alleviating Black poverty makes Black people less susceptible to ills that disproportionately befall those who are poor — ills in which racism surely plays a part, but my interest is in the fact that being poor makes you encounter these things so much more.
Some will still prefer to focus their battle on racism, but no one is going to tell me that focusing more on poverty is anti-Black or disloyal.

Source: https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?campaign_id=229&emc=edit_jm_20210928&instance_id=41532&nl=john-mcwhorter&productCode=JM&regi_id=77668937&segment_id=70127&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F0b178996-642d-5199-a767-8cb972d22f9e&user_id=a02ab30ab014e9ab29974e92eb3bfdcd

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

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