Australia’s state parliaments are lagging behind in racial and cultural diversity compared with the populations they represent, according to a new analysis.
While approximately 21% of Australians have non-European ancestry, according to a 2018 report from the Australian Human Rights Commission, only 10% of Victorian state MPs and 9% of NSW MPs have non-European ancestry, not including Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander ancestry.
This is far lower than comparable state or sub-national parliaments in the UK or Canada, according to Osmond Chiu, a research fellow at the Per Capita thinktank.
In Canada, 23% of MPs in the Ontario parliament – the country’s most populous province – are of a visible minority, and 18.3% in the British Columbia parliament. This is compared with 29.3% of Ontario’s general population having non-European ancestry, and 30.3% in British Columbia.
Grassroots members in NSW Labor have argued that the party must increase the diversity among its MPs or lose electoral ground. A cross-factional group propose inserting a clause into the party’s platform at the upcoming NSW state conference, recognising the under-representation.
The motion argues that a lack of representation is an electoral issue for Labor as the Coalition has made significant ground campaigning in more diverse communities, especially in western Sydney.
Chiu told Guardian Australia that previously-safe Labor seats in Sydney had been won by Liberal MPs in recent years as part of a concerted strategy from the Coalition.
“There is a belt of multicultural marginal seats in Sydney that will determine government at a state and federal level,” he said. “They were once Labor-held seats but were lost to the Liberals who spent more than a decade focusing on culturally diverse voters in these seats.
“As Australia becomes more diverse, other seats will be at risk if Labor does not take the growing cultural diversity of the electorate seriously when the Liberals clearly do.”
Chiu said that under-representation was also an issue for the Liberal, National and other parties, not just Labor.
“However, there’s been an assumption that Labor does better because of its historic support for multiculturalism,” he said. “The reality is in some ways the Liberals are ahead of Labor. For example, there currently are two state and territory Liberal leaders, Gladys Berejiklian and Elizabeth Lee, with non-European ancestry versus none for Labor.”
In the United Kingdom, the London Assembly is 32% BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) compared with 40.6% of London. Scotland and Wales’s populations are far less diverse than Australia, but their parliaments are comparatively more diverse than Australia’s parliaments, according to the Per Capita research.
In Scotland, 4.5% of MSPs are BAME compared with 5% of the population. In Wales, 5% of MSs are BAME compared with 5.6% of the population.
The change to be tabled at the NSW Labor conference states that the party “recognises the ongoing under-representation of culturally and linguistically diverse people in senior leadership positions across business, politics, government and higher education”.
It adds that NSW Labor should be “committed to improving the representation of culturally and linguistically diverse people across all organisations and institutions, including within the party”.
Nearly 50 party units across NSW have endorsed the change to the party platform, with more than 300 party members signing a petition, according to Chiu.
More naiveté regarding China and the IOC. Ironically, Kidd’s example of the 1936 Berlin Olympics underlines the weakness of his proposed approach:
With the Tokyo Olympics coming to an end, human rights activists are expected to step up their campaign against the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing in protest against the genocide of the Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking people in Xinjiang, the colonization of Tibet and the suppression of democracy in Hong Kong. They will call upon the International Olympic Committee to cancel or move the Games that start in just six months, and if that fails, they’ll urge athletes to boycott.
As frightening as those human rights abuses are, they’re not likely to persuade the IOC or athletes to change their plans for Beijing. Cancelling, moving or boycotting the Beijing Olympics runs counter to the very purpose and history of the Olympic movement and places athletes in an untenable position.
Choosing a different strategy
Given the almost constant tensions in world politics and international sports, boycotts and threats of boycotts have almost been an accepted feature of the modern Olympics. The first occurred at the inaugural Games in Athens in 1896, when German gymnasts known as “turners” refused to participate because most of the events were British sport.
There have been feminist boycotts (British women stayed away from Amsterdam in 1928 when the IOC reneged on its promise to add 10 women’s events to the athletics program), podium protests against racism (Tommie Smith, John Carlos and other U.S. athletes in 1968), so-called recognition boycotts (Taiwan left in 1976 when the IOC refused to call it the “Republic of China”), anti-apartheid boycotts (29 African and Caribbean teams walked out of the Montreal Olympics in 1976 to protest a New Zealand rugby tour of apartheid South Africa) and Cold War boycotts in 1956, 1980, 1984 and 1988.
In 1936, an international coalition of socialists, labour unions and churches not only mounted a highly visible boycott campaign against the staging of the Games in Nazi Germany, but tried to hold a counter-Olympics in Barcelona. It was only cancelled when the Spanish general Francisco Franco led an armed attack upon the city on the morning of the opening ceremonies, starting what became the bitter, three-year Spanish Civil War.
While the Olympic movement is not indifferent to human rights, it seeks to bring representatives of every community in the world together for peaceful dialogue and sports — recognizing that there are very real political and ideological differences among nations.
To build such a big, inclusive tent, it makes few demands upon National Olympic Committees, the international federations that govern the sports or the host countries. It’s the sporting equivalent of the long-held principle of “non-intervention” in the internal affairs of nation states.
As the world has begun to contemplate the obligation of the international community to safeguard citizens from an abusive national state, activists are calling on the IOC to apply and enforce human rights upon National Olympic Committees, federations and host countries. That battle is far from won.
The IOC has been able to withstand boycotts because it selects its own members, a grossly undemocratic process that ironically has enabled it to stand up to the strongest governments. In 1980, in the face of intense pressure from U.S. President Jimmy Carter to cancel or move the Moscow Olympics, the IOC voted unanimously to go ahead.
While most athletes are concerned with human rights, an earlier generation learned in 1980 that governments, corporations and human rights activists are quick to volunteer them for symbolic actions, only to find that they’re the only ones who actually sacrificed something important.
In 1980, the government of Pierre Trudeau forced Canadian athletes to stay home, despite their strong objection, and then cut their funds afterwards. The oral history of that bitter experience looms large in the informal discussions about the proposed Beijing boycott currently taking place among Canadian athletes.
A way forward without boycotting
Is there a way for the Olympic community to attend the Games without legitimizing atrocities in China? As an Olympian and an academic who has studied the Olympic movement for decades, I believe there is.
Instead of the IOC knuckling under host country repression, as it did in Beijing in 2008 and Sochi in 2014, it should ensure that the freedom of expression now guaranteed in the revised Rule 50 should be respected during the 2022 Winter Olympics. Activists should insist that no one will be penalized under the revised rule.
Secondly, the IOC should affirm the importance of human rights and full intercultural exchange in the opening ceremonies and the schedule of events and meetings in the Olympic Village, as modern Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin always intended. That would give athletes and others concerned about human rights the opportunity to express their views freely with other Olympic participants and their hosts without constraint.
There is Olympic precedent that needs to be remembered and strengthened. In 1936, when he arrived in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany for the Winter Olympics, IOC president Henri Baillet-Latour found the city plastered with anti-Semitic, Nazi propaganda. He immediately met with Adolf Hitler and demanded that the posters and flags be taken down.
Hitler is said to have replied: “When one visits a home, one doesn’t immediately ask the host to redecorate.” Baillet-Latour rejoined: “Yes, Mr. Chancellor, but when the Olympics is held, it’s not a national city but an Olympic city, and should be held according to Olympic rules. The propaganda must come down.” It did.
Baillet-Latour also established the requirement that the host country must recognize every participant duly entered by a National Olympic Committee, regardless of their background, a stipulation that ensured full participation in Berlin and during the Cold War.
In the end, the 1936 Games were a tremendous propaganda victory for Hitler, and the world lost sight of the safeguards won by the IOC. But an updated version of that strategy would be useful today.
The IOC should make it clear that while it’s grateful to China for hosting the Winter Olympics, the Olympic movement guarantees the right to free speech — including the condemnation of genocide and other abuses — within the Olympic precincts. Activists should support it.
It would be an important step on the long road to human rights.
Agree with B’nai Brith that enforcement is the bigger issue, along with the discomfort or reluctance of some to report incidents to the police:
Ottawa says existing Criminal Code offences are adequate to confront a recent surge in hate-fuelled incidents, but the federal government has recommitted to passing a law aimed at improving hate crime prosecutions.
After recent online summits on antisemitism and Islamophobia, the Department of Justice said this week that it wants to ensure hatred is better defined but otherwise has no plans to overhaul the way hate crimes are dealt with in the courts. Suspects are most often charged for a core crime and then prosecutors may argue hate motivation at the end of a trial to secure a heavier sentence.
The National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) released a list of 35 federal recommendations including a call for Ottawa to introduce new provisions in the code to single out hate-motivated assault, murder, threats, and mischief that would include specific new penalties for each infraction. The existing code only singles out three hate propaganda offences and mischief relating to religious or cultural sites.
Nadia Hasan, chief operating officer of the NCCM, said doing this would create a much stronger deterrent for potential criminals as hate crimes have risen in recent years.
“I’m not saying by any means that this alone would eradicate hate crimes for Canada, but it would send a strong message” that hate crimes deserve their own penalties, said Dr. Hasan. Her group also wants the code changed to offer restorative justice measures.
Dr. Hassan said creating a new class of hate crimes would also help victims get better service from front line investigators, some of whom are unfamiliar with Canada’s laws around hate-motivated attacks. The NCCM helped more than 70 hate crimes victims across the country seek justice last year and some of those victims have told her group that police in some jurisdictions routinely discouraged them from filing a hate-related complaint by telling them “it’s not worth it.”
“It happens often enough where we have to fight back and make sure the police are listening and really advocate for the victim,” said Dr. Hasan.
But Ian McLeod, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, said in an e-mailed statement that Canadians are well served by a justice system that prosecutes the existing hate crime offences and then, with other hate-related crimes, has penalties amplified when motivation is factored in at sentencing. However, he said Ottawa is committed to updating the Criminal Code throughBill C-36 to define hate speech as “content that expresses detestation or vilification of a person or group,” including over the Internet, where these comments are common.
Bill C-36, which targeted public hate speech by individuals, did not pass into law after being introduced by the Liberal government at the end of the parliamentary session. If an election is called this summer, as is widely expected, the legislation will no longer move forward.
Mr. McLeod’s statement said Ottawa is also tackling online hate through a proposal to create a new regime to police hateful content on social media sites.
In June, MPs unanimously voted to call the emergency Islamophobia conference following the murder of three generations of a London, Ont., Muslim family by a driver now facing terrorism charges, with the government also announcing the summit on antisemitism.
Statistics Canada also recently released its annual report on crime data showing 2020 brought a 10 per cent overall decrease in cases reported by police across the country, but departments reported a record 2,669 hate crimes cases – a 37 per cent spike from the year prior. Police and criminologists acknowledge hate crimes in general go vastly unreported.
Michael Mostyn, chief executive officer of B’nai Brith Canada, said his organization would rather see the current laws enforced “more diligently” before any new amendments are legislated.
“One of the serious frustrations from a group like B’nai Brith, which is dealing with the victims of hate crimes on a daily basis, is that we don’t see so many of these prosecutions across the country,” he said.
Mohammed Hashim, executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, a Crown corporation, said many different solutions are needed as Canada’s entire criminal justice system is ill-suited to address the scourge of hate crimes.
“It starts from underreporting; to not having confidence in the police dealing with hate crimes adequately; to the number of charges that are laid, or the lack thereof; and the level of seriousness that both attorney generals and prosecutors treat hate-motivated crimes,” he said.
As part of its instructions to departments in providing their input to the annual multiculturalism report, Canadian Heritage provided the following instructions to departments, with pages 6-10 providing relevant definitions to assist them.
Not a bad list but interesting that reasonable accommodation is not one of the terms highlighted:
If you’re lucky enough to have received a Covid-19 vaccination, you probably have an immigrant entrepreneur to thank. Not only are Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna pioneers in the field of mRNA-based vaccine research; they were all founded or cofounded by immigrants.*
The entrepreneurs who started those companies are prominent examples of a larger trend. A 2012 study found that immigrants were more likely to start businesses than members of the native population in most of the 69 countries surveyed. In the United States, where 13.7% of the population is foreign-born, immigrants represent 20.2% of the self-employed workforce and 25% of startup founders. And according to a 2018 study by the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants founded or cofounded 55% of the United States’ billion-dollar companies — so-called unicorns.
Yet we have a limited understanding of why so many immigrants take the risk of starting a company. Previous research has attributed the phenomenon to host-country effects, such as labor market discrimination, selective immigration policies, and the availability of specific opportunities within ethnic groups in areas with high overall immigration.
In my recent research, I explored a more hidden driver of immigrant entrepreneurship: personality-based self-selection. The decisions to emigrate voluntarily and to start a company are both associated with high levels of risk. Entrepreneurs of all types face the threat of business failure. As a study of startups in several OECD countries showed, just above 60% survive past their third birthday, and only 40% make it past their seventh one. Immigrants, too encounter significant additional risks, from unemployment or underemployment to xenophobia and psychological trauma.
My hypothesis was that people with a high tolerance for risk would be more likely than others to perceive both voluntary emigration and entrepreneurship as viable paths. So I expected that immigrants would be more likely than others to start businesses precisely because of their appetite for risk, which helped them go abroad in the first place. I tested the hypothesis through a longitudinal study of engineering and business students at two Austrian universities. In 2007 I surveyed 1,300 students about their risk-taking preferences and their intentions and concrete plans to start a business and move abroad for work. Twelve years later I collected a second wave of data from 360 of them, via two professional social media platforms, to learn about their careers since the first survey was conducted.
The results confirmed my hypothesis: Students with a high willingness to take risks were significantly more likely than others to plan to emigrate and start a business, and by 2019 those plans had become reality. More than a quarter of the former students had moved abroad, and many had become entrepreneurs. While 19% of the non-emigrants in the sample had started one or more companies, 29% of those who had emigrated and still lived abroad had done so. Among those who had emigrated but subsequently returned to Austria, the figure was even higher: 43% had started a business in the 12 years covered by the study.
Statistical analyses confirmed that a high willingness to take risks contributed greatly to the results, even after controlling for age, gender, entrepreneurship experience, and other variables. Additional findings suggested that self-selection effects might extend to other personality traits that have been associated with success as entrepreneurs and in the labor market. The data showed that individuals with a high achievement motivation (a tendency to set and accomplish challenging goals) were significantly more likely than others to emigrate and to plan on becoming entrepreneurs at some point in the course of their lives.
These findings have direct implications for investors and policymakers. In recent years some venture capitalists, such as Unshackled Venturesand OneWay Ventures, have set up funds that work exclusively with ventures founded or cofounded by immigrant entrepreneurs. Along with startup support, they provide services tailored to the needs of foreign-born founders, including visa and legal advice. Their investment rationale is simple, and it’s very much supported by my study’s results. As OneWay Ventures argues, owing to self-selection, “immigrant founders have a competitive advantage when it comes to building impactful, global reaching ventures.”
From a policy perspective, the findings suggest that the entrepreneurial potential of immigrants extends beyond the small group of late-stage international entrepreneurs who are usually the target of entrepreneurship visa programs and investment promotion agencies. Public policy should also support nascent entrepreneurs among immigrants by providing funding, training, access to work spaces, and help navigating the administrative processes associated with starting a business as an immigrant.
In countries with net emigration, self-selection can pose challenges; entrepreneurial talent can become part of the overall “brain drain.” Although countries of origin benefit from emigrants’ entrepreneurial activities through trade and remittances, they experience fewer job-creation and economic-spillover effects than host countries do. Still, there’s a silver lining to my findings: As noted, emigrants who returned to their countries of origin were the most entrepreneurial group in the study’s sample, most likely because of the experience and opportunity-recognition capabilities they gained abroad and the advantage of operating in a familiar environment upon their return. Successful public programs in China, Senegal, Mexico, and the Philippines show that countries of origin can make use of the high potential of this group through targeted entrepreneurship support.
The social impacts of such policies can be significant. Entrepreneurship can provide immigrants and return immigrants with opportunities for upward mobility and integration. What’s more, it contributes to job creation and innovation in the society at large. It might even lead to the development of a new type of vaccine against a global pandemic.
Of note. Dysfunctional US political system does not translate shift into political action:
Since 1965, Gallup has been polling Americans about whether they want immigration levels to decrease, increase, or remain the same. Last year, the percentage of Americans who want to increase immigration rose above the percentage who want to decrease it for the first time. In 2021, that shift held with more respondents again supporting increasing immigration than decreasing it (Figure 1). The support for increasing legal immigration may have narrowed in 2021 to 33 percent from 35 percent in 2020, but the changes are so small that they are likely statistically insignificant.
Consistent with the general rise in support for increasing immigration, a large majority of Americans still believe that immigration is a good thing for the United States (Figure 2). Just like in Figure 1, the percentage saying it’s a good thing has declined by 2 percentage points but that is a small shift a statistically insignificant shift. Although this is consistent with pro‐immigration policy views, it also includes those who like the current level of immigration.
However, an even more important shift has continued in U.S. opinion about immigration. Since 2001, Gallup has asked this question: “(Asked of those dissatisfied with level of immigration into U.S.) Would you like to see the level of immigration in this country increased, decreased or remain about the same?” Respondents who are dissatisfied with the level of immigration are increasingly likely to be dissatisfied because they think that there is too little immigration. I wrote about this last year but the trend has grown in 2021 (Figure 3). In 2020, 26 percent of respondents were dissatisfied with the level of immigration and they wanted to decrease immigration. By 2021, that percentage had fallen to 19 percent. The percent of those who were dissatisfied and wanted an increase stayed about the same and the percent of those satisfied climbed slightly.
That’s a tectonic shift. From 2001–2016, an average of 63 percent of respondents were dissatisfied with the level of immigration. Only about 5 percent of respondents were dissatisfied and wanted to increase immigration levels and a whopping 44 percent of the dissatisfied wanted to decrease them (Figure 3). This began to change shortly after President Trump took office. From 2017–2020, an average of about 11 percent of respondents wanted to increase immigration levels while 28 percent were dissatisfied and wanted to decrease them. By the end of the Trump administration, there was still quite a gap among those dissatisfied with immigration, but it had narrowed.
We’re clearly seeing a shift in public opinion where those who dislike the current system are beginning to dislike it because it’s too restrictive. To the extent that we can believe surveys that measure opinions unexpressed through concrete actions like voting, this is a big shift. So far, virtually all of the political energy and enthusiasm has been for immigration restriction. Anti‐immigration voters cared a lot more about this issue than pro‐immigration voters. Now, the decline in the percent of respondents who are dissatisfied and who want less immigration is beginning to look like the collapse in anti‐immigration sentiment that began in the mid‐1990s (Figure 1).
One doubt I had about this change in behavior last year was that this increased pro‐immigration opinion was just a reaction to President Trump and that it would fade out after he left office. In other words, I was worried that this was just an ephemeral liberal reaction of President Trump rather than a real and sustained change in opinion. But since the 2021 survey results show that only 19 percent of respondents are dissatisfied and want less immigration, a number 7 percentage points below the previous response in 2020, that is an indication that the pro‐immigration sentiment of the American public is continuing to increase in the Biden administration. That improvement is especially surprising considering the rise in apprehensions along the border.
This appears to be a positive and sustainable change in American public opinion.
Of interest and relevance even if the conclusion is likely over-optimistic:
In 1990, V.S. Naipaul delivered a celebrated lecture on the subject of “Our Universal Civilization.” The Berlin Wall had fallen, liberal democracy was ascendant, and Naipaul wanted to reflect on what the universal civilization — by which he meant the West — meant for someone like him, a Hindu son of colonial Trinidad who had made his way “from the periphery to the center” to become one of the great novelists of his time.
Naipaul intended his lecture as a celebration of the West. But he sensed an undercurrent of disquiet, which he found expressed in Nahid Rachlin’s 1978 novel, “Foreigner.” The book is about an Iranian woman who works in Boston as a biologist and seems well assimilated to American life. But on a return visit to Tehran she loses her mental balance and falls ill. The cure, it turns out, is religion.
“We can see that the young woman was not prepared for the movement between civilizations,” Naipaul observed, “the movement out of the shut-in Iranian world, where the faith was the complete way, filled everything, left no spare corner of the mind or will or soul, to the other world, where it was necessary to be an individual and responsible.”
I’ve been thinking of Naipaul and Rachlin while reading Sohrab Ahmari’s new book, “The Unbroken Thread.” Ahmari, now the op-ed editor of The New York Post, is a friend and former colleague with whom I’ve had a political falling out. About three years ago, he made an abrupt switch from being a NeverTrump conservative, railing against the new illiberalism, to being something of a new illiberal himself, railing against “nice” conservatives who, he believes, fail to appreciate that rights-based liberalism is a sucker’s game that only the left can win.
Ahmari’s elegantly written book matters because it seeks to give moral voice to what so far has mainly been a populist scream against the values of elite liberalism, above all its disdain for limits, from moral taboos to national borders to religious rituals. His device is a series of capsule biographies of important thinkers — Confucius, Seneca, Augustine, C.S. Lewis, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Andrea Dworkin, among others — who led richer lives by observing and celebrating the limits.
There’s much to admire here, particularly in the fact that many of Ahmari’s exemplars chose the lives they did, swimming against the current of their times.
The same might be said of Ahmari himself, an immigrant from Iran who arrived in America in impoverished circumstances, rose swiftly up the ranks of conservative intelligentsia, bounced between Seattle, Boston, London and New York, converted to Catholicism and switched from neoconservatism to paleoconservatism — all by his mid-30s.
It’s a trajectory that resembles Naipaul’s. But Ahmari has a political purpose at odds with the personal one. He’s grown disenchanted with the society that has provided him with such a bounty of choice.
He frets that his son will grow up to become a member of a ruthlessly meritocratic but spiritually vacuous Western elite. He mourns North Dakota’s decision to abandon its blue law against doing business on Sundays. He laments that the “American order enshrines very few substantive ideals I would want to transmit to my son.”
In short, Ahmari, rather like the protagonist in Rachlin’s novel, thinks it would be better to put some limits on choice, not just for himself but for others as well.
There’s a charge of hypocrisy to be made here, to which Ahmari partially owns up. What he doesn’t mention is that his admiration for the unflinching high-mindedness of a Heschel or an Aquinas somehow didn’t stop him from becoming a late but enthusiastic convert to the cult of Donald Trump — that is, of the hedonistic bully.
But the larger charge against Ahmari’s book is its failure of moral and political imagination. Choice is no enemy of morality. It’s a precondition for it. It’s why, theologically speaking, temptation must exist. It’s why America, for all of its flaws, tends toward a certain kind of easygoing decency. It’s also why virtue-obsessed countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia tend to be so publicly brutal and so privately corrupt.
Ahmari’s larger falsehood is that the American order transmits few substantive ideals. “This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery,” Naipaul said in that speech.
“So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism.”
Today, what remains of conservative intelligentsia is split. On one side are those who think that what conservatism should revert to is a kind of anti-liberalism, in the reactionary 19th-century European tradition. On the other, there are those who believe that the purpose of American conservatism is to conserve the substantive principles of 1776 — that is, of the open mind and the ever more open society.
Naipaul could have set Ahmari straight: The universal civilization “is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”
Useful review, showing a reasonable yes. The effectiveness, of course, will require some time to assess:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a knee at a Black Lives Matter rally on Parliament Hill over a year ago, after the murder of George Floyd sparked worldwide protests. Some welcomed the action as a commitment to fight anti-Black racism, while others dismissed it as a hollow gesture.
Shortly after that rally, the MPs and senators who make up the Parliamentary Black Caucus issued a letter listing more than 40 calls to action to confront racism. They called on the Trudeau government to go beyond mere “words and symbolic gestures” to tackle the “crisis” Black Canadians face.
“We urge all governments to act immediately. This is not a time for further discussion,” said the letter.
Several cabinet ministers, Liberal MPs and other parliamentarians endorsed the letter’s recommendations. Trudeau himself welcomed the recommendations — and while he didn’t specifically commit to implementing each one, he did say he would work with the Parliamentary Black Caucus on a path forward.
So, how much progress has the federal government made since then?
CBC News analyzed the 44 calls to action that fall within federal jurisdiction. As of Aug. 1, the government has made progress, budgeted money or proposed a bill to address 24 out of 44 calls to action. But the outcome of a widely anticipated September federal election could unravel many of those plans.
And some critics say the proposed measures still won’t be enough to bring in substantive change.
The calls to action
The directives from the parliamentary group fall under five broad categories:
Collection of disaggregated race-based data
Support for Black-owned businesses
Police and justice reform
Diversifying the public service
Supporting Black artists and culture
How is the federal government doing so far?
Members of the Parliamentary Black Caucus said they could not provide an itemized breakdown showing where Ottawa and other levels of government are on implementing their recommendations one year later.
Liberal MP Greg Fergus (Hull-Aylmer), chair of the caucus, said the group lacks the resources to track government progress on its calls to action.
“We’re all doing this, you know, as best we can. We’re not a professional public service with all the resources that … they have available to them,” said Fergus.
CBC News has reached out to the federal departments most likely to be responsible for implementing the caucus’s recommendations. The CBC News analysis shows that there has been progress on most of the calls to action — either through budget allocations, the announcement of new programs or planned bills.
(CBC News Digital Graphics/ Rob Easton & Tim Kindrachuk)
For example, the government has committed to spending $172 million over five years to collect more detailed data on women, Indigenous people and racialized communities. The government also invested $400 million in its Black Entrepreneurship Program, which is meant to provide loans up to $250,000 to Black business owners and entrepreneurs across the country.
The government proposed legislation — Bill C-22 — to amend the Criminal Code and the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to address the overrepresentation of Indigenous, Black and other marginalized Canadians in the justice system by repealing mandatory minimum sentences for 20 offences.
But the bill is still stuck in the House of Commons and if a federal election is called soon — as many expect — it will die.
It’s not clear how much the budgeted money has actually been spent to date. Also with a potential election looming some of the programs may not see the light of day.
Far enough, fast enough?
Rosemary Moodie is an Independent senator from Toronto and a member of the Black Caucus. She said the Liberals should be careful about boasting of progress made on criminal justice reforms when Bill C-22 still hasn’t been passed through the Senate.
Even if the bill escapes dying with an election call, she said, it still won’t go nearly far enough in addressing disproportionate incarceration rates for Black and Indigenous people.
“When you actually look at the fine, fine print on C- 22,” Moodie said, “a third of 72 mandatory minimums were addressed in that bill, leaving behind a number of mandatory minimum penalties that we felt needed to have been eliminated …”
NDP MP Matthew Green (Hamilton Centre), another Black Caucus member, agrees the government’s criminal reform legislation would accomplish the bare minimum. He also said most of the government’s big-ticket investments in Black entrepreneurship won’t help average Black Canadians.
“It’s not the progress that I think is going to materially improve the living conditions of working-class Black Canadians across the country, many of whom are still subjected to police brutality, to racial profiling in their work, in our health care systems and certainly within policing,” Green said.
Conservative MP Kenny Chiu said his party has been in consultations with Black Canadians and community business leaders and that his leader Erin O’Toole has a plan “to secure the future with higher wages, more jobs, and more economic opportunities.”
“This means jobs and growth in every sector in every part of the country,” he said in a statement.
Fergus told CBC that while he knows there’s more work tMP Ferguso be done, the government has made gains.
“Is it at the timeline that some would desire? No, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that progress is still being made,” said Fergus, who serves as a parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Trudeau and several portfolios in addition to chairing the Black Caucus.
Fergus said the government still needs to make progress on supporting Black artists and cultural workers. A spokesperson for Heritage Canada could not point to a program the department has rolled out to support those artists.
“Black organizations and communities are eligible for funding from all programs delivered by the Cultural Affairs Sector. However, there are no Black community-specific program subcomponents in the sector,” said Amy Mills, the department’s chief of media relations and issues management.
Several other departments contacted by CBC said they had launched programs or initiatives to target supports to Black Canadians specifically.
Employment and Social Development Canada announced Wednesday a $96 million investment through the Supporting Black Canadian Communities initiative to back 1,300 projects for Black-led organizations.
“We’ve moved in a big way,” said Social Development Minister Ahmed Hussen, a member of the Black caucus. “There’s more work to be done, of course.”
Interesting and relevant paper on rebalancing policy priorities. Excerpt on immigration of note:
Some nuance on immigration policy, please (it’s GDP per capita, stupid!)
There is a growing push from opinion leaders and decision makers to
significantly raise the level of immigration.[19] The current federal government has raised the target for annual immigration levels and seems on a path to raise it further down the road.
Let me state upfront that I am in favour of maintaining immigration at significant levels. Over the past 60 years Canada has evolved into a wonderful multiethnic, multicultural nation. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have issues with tolerance and inequitable socioeconomic outcomes. But the general view of the
population is that immigration continues to be positive for Canada.[20] Furthermore, Canada has a moral obligation to do its share of ameliorating the suffering of the millions of refugees created from regional wars, civil wars, ethnic cleansing and failed states.
Given the emphasis in this paper on the essential need for tightness in the labour market, however, it is important to consider whether higher immigration levels will be helpful or harmful in re-establishing a rising standard of living.
The rationale for the need to increase immigration levels weaves together four elements:
To offset the challenges of the aging baby-boomer bulge in the population pyramid;
To keep GDP growing by increasing the labour supply and the demand for goodsand services;
To realize greater economies of scale; and
To supply employers with the workers they cannot find.
The first of these sounds reasonable on the face of it. But there is much less
there than one might suppose. The age structure of immigrants is not that different from the existing population in Canada. On average it is somewhat younger, but not dramatically so. This is because, in addition to prime working age adults and their children, the immigration mix also includes family class parents and grandparents. This has led at least one analyst to joke that the only way immigration could be a solution to the population pyramid problem is if Canada only accepted 15-year-old orphans as immigrants.
A recent analysis[21] shows that “changes in immigration levels have impacts on the margin only: no increase within the realm of practicality can prevent population aging. Other policies to ease the demographic transition, notably encouraging people to work longer are at least as powerful.” The authors calculate that Canada would need to raise immigration levels to 1.4 million a year to even out the population pyramid. In 2019, 341,000 — a record level — arrived in Canada.
The second is more than a little specious, hence the somewhat rude subtitle for this sub-section. Almost daily news items quote somebody of influence saying the only way to increase the rate of growth of GDP is to increase immigration. Some interests will benefit from increasing immigration levels — employers who would prefer a buyers’ labour market to a sellers’ labour market, the real estate industry, financial institutions that provide mortgages and people who already own their homes. But the critical metric is not GDP; it is GDP per capita and how it is distributed.
In mid-July, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that private employers in the EU can ban employees from wearing religious symbols, including headscarves, in order to present an image of “political, philosophical, and religious neutrality” in the workplace. The verdict reaffirmed a 2017 CJEU ruling and highlights longstanding tensions over multiculturalism in Europe. In particular, it raises the question of whether there is a place for visibly Muslim women in European public life.
I have spent the last several months interviewing Muslim women, many of them citizens and residents of European countries, about their portrayal in the media and perception of belonging in their countries. While many reported similar experiences of ostracism or harassment, the European women, particularly those who choose to wear the hijab (head covering), told me time and again: “I feel like I don’t exist.” The hijab is more than a religious symbol to those who wear it. Muslim women cover their hair out of tradition, to maintain a connection to their cultural heritage, or for reasons of modesty. Several young European women I spoke to explained that they wear the hijab despite protests from their immigrant families, who do not want them to face undue scrutiny or discrimination at work.
But their choice carries a high personal cost. The rampant European misperception of the hijab as a symbol of a supposedly misogynistic Islamic culture has made women who wear one feel like faceless, nameless “victims” who must be saved, instead of empowered individuals making a personal decision. “It’s frustrating, because [the media] always brings out [sic] the male members of the family,” one of them, Sama, said in a message she sent me from Italy. “It’s like, ‘did your father force you to make this choice that I actually made?’” Likewise, Lama, a French-Algerian woman now living outside France, laments the phenomenon of “white men in the media debating whether we should have the hijab.” The problem, she says, is that “it’s never about the objective garment, it’s about what the garment symbolizes [to them].”
The CJEU’s recent ruling resurfaces tensions between the right to freedom of religion and Europeans’ increasing discomfort regarding the visible face of Islam in the region. Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights sets a high bar for limiting the manifestation of freedom of religion. But the CJEU’s 2017 and 2021 rulings appear to attach greater weight to the concept of overall “neutrality” and, in the case of its recent decision, the effect on others – an issue that already weighs heavily on many Muslim women’s minds. Several women I spoke to described going through a draining mental exercise before leaving their homes – what I call the “friendly enough” test. “Muslim women look in the mirror in the morning and think, ‘do I look friendly? Do I look approachable?’” Maha, a journalist, explained. And it is not only men whose judgment these women worry about. Khadija, a young French-Algerian woman, confessed that she once stopped to put on red lipstick before going to an interview for a babysitting job. “I told them I wore the hijab ahead of time. I don’t know why I did that, preparing them for me,” she said. “I took out my lipstick and put it on so that [the mother] can see I am French, [that] I am not a terrorist.”
These psychological strains underscore the agonizing choice forced upon European Muslim women today between their faith and identity on one hand, and their nationality on the other. Whereas most European girls can dream of pursuing the career of their choice, Muslim girls in Europe face a demoralizing caveat: “but you cannot wear the hijab.” In a post-#MeToo world where young women are increasingly taught to be empowered, Europe’s Muslim women are being held back by legislation and told that their very appearance is problematic. Khadija went on to tell me that the experience of removing her hijab for a job when she was 19 left her feeling denigrated and ashamed. “It made me feel like I am nothing,” she said. “I am not the same as everyone else. I am a little bit lower.” She went on to ask, rhetorically, “What gives you the right to do that?”
Despite Europe’s stated values of emancipation, freedom, and self-sufficiency, the dearth of female Muslim voices in the European public debate over the hijab leaves many young women with little hope that the conversation will change. In a stark display of hypocrisy, some of the European politicians who decry Islam for being repressive and anti-feminist champion laws that threaten to strip away Muslim women’s agency. “Muslim women exist and have things to say when the subject concerns them,” Soumaya, 15, told me. “We are not objects, we think, we feel, we have free will, we are strong and intelligent and, above all, capable.” But, she said, “the media does not want to recognize that. It’s a pity.”
Rather than asking whether Islam is liberal enough to belong in Europe, the more relevant question today appears to be whether Europe is liberal enough to accept its female Muslim citizens – regardless of their attire – in public life. The debate will no doubt continue in Europe’s courtrooms. In the meantime, the lives and livelihoods of the region’s female Muslim population hang in the balance. As one young woman said to me resignedly, “I have to wait for a woman who doesn’t wear the hijab or a man to fight for me, because right now I don’t exist. I am no one.”
‘Europe’s Hijab Test’ – Commentary by Jasmine M. El-Gamal – Project Syndicate.
Multicultural Meanderings 