How Extremists Weaponize Irony To Spread Hate

2021/04/28 Leave a comment

Of interest, and no “just joking” is no excuse:

On a recent episode of his livestreamed show, the 22-year-old extremist Nick Fuentes repeated a formula that has won him a following with some of the youngest members of the far right. He went on an extended, violent and misogynistic rant, only to turn to the camera and add with a smirk, “Just joking!”

In this case, from the April 22 edition of Fuentes’ show, America First, a viewer wrote in to ask Fuentes for advice on how to “punish” his wife for “getting out of line.”

Fuentes responded, “Why don’t you smack her across the face?”

The rant continued for minutes.

“Why don’t you give her a vicious and forceful backhanded slap with your knuckles right across her face — disrespectfully — and make it hurt?” Fuentes went on. At one point, he pantomimed punching a woman in the face.

He then added, “No, I’m kidding, of course. Just kidding. Just a joke.”

Fuentes was following a playbook popular among domestic extremists: using irony and claims of “just joking” to spread their message, while deflecting criticism.

Researchers who track domestic extremism say the tactic, while not new, has helped several groups mask their danger, avoid consequences and draw younger people into their movements.

Irony as “cover” for extremism

Fuentes is best known for using cartoonish memes to spread white supremacist propaganda. His followers refer to themselves as “Groypers” — a reference to a mutated version of the Pepe the Frogcartoon that was co-opted by the far right. Though Fuentes exists on the fringes of the extreme right, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., spoke at a political conference that Fuentes hosted, drawing widespread criticism.

But Fuentes has said himself that he uses irony and “jokes” to communicate his message without consequences.

“Irony is so important for giving a lot of cover and plausible deniability for our views,” Fuentes said in a 2020 video. He specifically cited Holocaust denial — or what he termed Holocaust “revision” — as a topic that is too fraught to discuss earnestly, even on the far right.

Far-right extremist Nick Fuentes, seen here in a screenshot from his livestreamed show, has said he uses irony because it provides “plausible deniability” and cover for some of his most incendiary statements.

“When it comes to a lot of these issues, you need a little bit of maneuverability that irony gives you,” Fuentes said.

And, in fact, after Fuentes questioned the death toll from the Holocaust in one rant, he later claimed to The Washington Post that it was just a “lampoon.”

Researchers who track domestic extremism say Fuentes is not the only figure to adopt these tactics, particularly among far-right content creators, who encourage their audiences to follow suit.

“A lot of these content creators will tell the audience explicitly, ‘When people say you’re racist for liking this or thinking this, just laugh at them. They can’t handle it — they’re sensitive babies,’ ” said Jared Holt, a resident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Concern on campus

In early 2020, Oona Flood started getting more and more worried about a classmate at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The classmate, a 22-year-old named Christian Secor, was already well-known for his self-proclaimed “love” of guns. Around that time, he was also posting racist and antisemitic memes and tweets, attacking immigrants online and publicly supporting Fuentes. Often, Secor adopted the kind of “trolling” style that’s prevalent on the internet.

When one student called Secor out for a tweet that the student found offensive, Secor responded that he was using “post irony.”

“It’s called a joke and the fact that you think that these posts are anything more than that is telling,” added Secor.

Flood, who is Japanese American, said they wanted to speak up.

“I definitely felt that sense of threat,” Flood told NPR recently. “And, like, I really hate to say, [because] it sounds so much like, overblown, ‘snowflake,’ that we’re just overreacting, you know?”

And throughout 2020, students told NPR, UCLA took no action against Secor despite his escalating rhetoric, likely because of free speech concerns. (As a public university, UCLA is legally bound to follow the First Amendment, which protects hate speech.)

In retrospect, Flood’s concern does not seem like an overreaction.

Secor is currently facing federal criminal charges for allegedly storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Prosecutors have cited his support for Fuentes in charging documents. Secor has pleaded not guilty.

In addition to Fuentes and his followers, other experts point to the extremist group known as the Proud Boys, which has embraced outlandish rituals. The group’s name was inspired by a song from the Broadway version of Disney’s Aladdin, and one of the group’s initiation rites involves members listing breakfast cereals while they get lightly punched in the stomach. Yet that same group is known for its involvement in violent street fights. At least 25 members of the group are facing federal criminal charges related to the Capitol riot, including, in some cases, conspiracy.

Gavin McInnes, the group’s founder, said in an email that the media, including NPR, “willfully ignores” jokes to paint the group in a more negative light. The Proud Boys are “funny dudes, not Nazis,” McInnes wrote.

But Cassie Miller of the Southern Poverty Law Center said the group’s use of “jokes” is strategic. “It distracts from what their actual political ideology is and from their violence,” said Miller. “Because if you point it out, it’s, like, ‘well, they’re so goofy.’ ”

Similarly, the far-right, pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is often so over the top on his InfoWars broadcasts that his own attorney likened him to a “performance artist” during a court hearing about Jones’ divorce.

The appeal to young people

Humor has always been crucial to building social movements, experts say, because it serves to define the people who are “in on the joke” and those who “just don’t get it.”

And online extremists have adopted irony because it is, in many ways, the native language of the internet.

“I’m speaking the language of other zoomers,” said Fuentes in 2020. “If you’re a young person online, I mean, this is the language of our generation.”

“Every kid naturally wants to push away from their parents,” said Joanna Schroeder, a writer based in California.

Schroeder was troubled when she saw a pro-Hitler meme pop up in one of her kids’ Instagram feeds. Memes that merely pushed boundaries were mixed in alongside outright racist and antisemitic content.

“The problem is that all of this kind of trolling behavior, some of it is harmless and goofy,” said Schroeder, “and others of it is designed to look harmless and goofy but will drive our kids’ social media and YouTube algorithms toward alt-right and even more extremist content.”

Schroeder has since collaborated with the Western States Center to develop a guide for parents who see their kids share online extremist content.

Historic parallels

Violent domestic extremism in America long predates the internet, however, and so does the tactical use of irony.

Historians have documented how the early iterations of the Ku Klux Klan were portrayed by group members and their allies as outlandish, rather than as a dangerous terrorist group. The KKK put on racist minstrel shows and created its own songs.

This drawing from 1868 depicts early members of the Ku Klux Klan. Historians have documented how the group used absurdity to mock its opponents and to try to mask the seriousness of the KKK’s atrocities.

Descriptions of attacks by men in hoods, who had titles like “dragon,” “ghoul,” and “wizard,” were often seen by white Americans as tall tales and ghost stories. Newspapers that supported the KKK played up those aspects of the group and mocked their opponents for supposedly taking the KKK too seriously, said Elaine Frantz, a historian at Kent State University.

Pro-KKK newspaper editors would often “talk jokingly about what the klan has done,” said Frantz, “in order to be deniable.”

And at first it seemed to work. Frantz cites the testimony of a Georgia congressman who tried to play down klan murders and other racist atrocities.

“Sometimes, mischievous boys who want to have some fun go on a masquerading frolic to scare the negroes,” testified U.S. Rep. John H. Christy of Georgia in the early 1870s. Christy insisted that stories of klan attacks were “exaggerated.” In fact, he claimed, the group did not exist at all. Frantz said there were also documented instances in the Reconstruction era of white Northerners dressing up in klan robes as a supposedly boundary-pushing “joke.”

But eventually, Frantz said, the testimony of Black Americans who witnessed these atrocities — published widely by newspaper reporters and in government investigations — so thoroughly demonstrated the KKK’s campaign of lynchings and assassinations that it became undeniable. They pulled back the klan hood to see the terrorism and violence it masked.

Source: How Extremists Weaponize Irony To Spread Hate

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India is in a COVID-19 crisis. South Asian-Canadians are weeping from afar, but also seeing devastating parallels for our people in Ontario

2021/04/28 Leave a comment

Captures well some of the dilemmas facing diaspora communities:

11,627 km.

That’s the distance from my house in Peel to Delhi, India, where the majority of my family lives.

This past week has been extremely difficult as a first generation Canadian born in India. I watch the devastation occurring in my hometown, and can’t help but see the parallels happening here in Ontario within the South Asian community. Immigrants like myself are fighting two pandemics – one here and one tens of thousands kilometres away, and it weighs heavily, each and every day.

On March 23, India had 40,000 COVID-19 cases. Fastforward to April 22, that number rose to 330,000. This is what exponential growth looks like. Experts believe these numbers are vastly under-reported by a margin of at least 10 times. Even if 10 per cent of these were hospitalized, with the average COVID-19 related hospital or ICU stay being 15 days, there is simply no healthcare system in the world that has the capacity to sustain such volume.

The situation in India is grave and complex. India saw a sharp decline in cases earlier this year, with around 10,000 cases on average per day in February. This unfortunately led to a sense of complacency, with some experts claiming preemptively that the country had achieved herd immunity. Subsequently, life returned to a form of “normalcy,” with weddings, religious festivals and political rallies being commonplace. Even Kumbh Mela, which is one of the largest gatherings in the world that sees upwards of 110 million people over the duration of the festival and up to 30 million people per day, went ahead as planned.

Complacency, however, wasn’t the only factor that led us to this situation. It’s a culmination of other factors. India has one of the lowest testing capacities per capita, with only 0.4 tests conducted per 10,000 people. India also has a much slower vaccination program. While India has manufactured large quantities of vaccines, it has distributed the majority of these globally. It is one of the largest suppliers into the COVAX program, accounting for 60 per cent of global vaccine supply. Meanwhile, less than 10 per cent of India’s own population has received one dose of the vaccine, with only 1 per cent fully vaccinated with two doses.

In addition, India now has a potentially concerning new variant, B.1.617, that amongst many mutations has two critical ones — L452R and E484Q — within the spike protein, making it more transmissible and possibly able to evade pre-existing immunity. It is still unknown whether vaccines are efficacious against this variant.

The stories, pictures and videos coming out of India are devastating. Scenes of people lying on the ground on the street with oxygen masks connected to empty tanks, dying outside of hospitals that did not have capacity to take them in, health care systems collapsing. There are make-shift outdoor hospitals, mass cremations sites, and reports of families having to keep dead bodies of relatives at home for two days because there was no wood left to build a funeral pyre. Hospital with mere hours left of oxygen supply.

Many in the South Asian diaspora are carrying the burden of knowing our own family members are amongst those affected. My father, who lives with me, spends his entire day calling each and every one of his family and friends. So many infected, many hospitalized, many searching for hospitals. Daily updates, sometimes hourly. Everytime he utters Hari Om Tat Sat (a sanskrit mantra) I wait with baited breath. I feel helpless remembering we are again, 11,627 km, apart — a number I can’t stop thinking about.

What hurts my heart even more is knowing that what is occurring to my people in India is also occurring here on Canadian soil. South Asians have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. The pandemic has been deeply inequitable, from support and protections to testing and now access to vaccines. Further, we are seeing additional stigmatization of South Asians due to this new variant now being found in Canada despite the fact that the primary reason for transmission remains to be structural barriers faced by our racialized communities. And like me, they are dealing with two pandemics — the one here and the one back home.

It really feels like because our skin is brown, our lives mean less. But we didn’t get to choose the colour of skin we were born into our socioeconomic status. We didn’t get to choose the country we were born in.

It was heartbreaking to see the world’s response to India’s crisis. Canada shut its borders. Simultaneously, our Premier’s office contacted the Indian high commissioner to request additional AstraZeneca vaccines in spite of the current crisis. The United States of America continues to sit on unused AstraZeneca vaccines and withhold raw materials required for India to manufacture more vaccines. This ‘me first’ strategy is not only inequitable, it is unwise because we know how the pandemic unfolds in one country will eventually happen in another.

And this is why vaccine nationalism is lethal. Your access to vaccines and subsequent right to life is dependent on factors that are out of your control. It is the stark inequities, the perpetuation of discrimination, the haves vs the have nots, the unfairness of it all that weighs heavily on me.

India gasps for air and burns with funeral pyres. But these lives don’t seem to matter. Because they’re brown.

I can’t stop crying. Because my heart can’t take it anymore.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/04/24/india-is-in-a-covid-19-crisis-south-asian-canadians-are-weeping-from-afar-but-also-seeing-devastating-parallels-for-our-people-in-ontario.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=thestar_recommended_for_you

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Spokesman: Israel to deport dozens of African Hebrews

2021/04/28 Leave a comment

Strange story and history:

Dozens of members of a polygamous, vegan sect in Israel have received deportation orders from the government, the group’s spokesman said Monday, despite much of the community having received permanent residency under arrangements with Israel.

The community, which numbers around 3,000 people, is comprised of Black Americans whose founders moved to Israel in the 1960s and believe they are descendants of an ancient Israelite tribe. Most live in the southern desert town of Dimona.

Prince Immanuel Ben-Yehuda, spokesman for the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, said the Interior Ministry had given notice to at least 46 families that they must leave the country within 60 days, calling it a “shock to the system.”

The African Hebrew Israelites began arriving in Israel in 1969, following Ben Carter, a Chicago steelworker who renamed himself Ben Ammi Ben Israel and claimed to be God’s representative on earth.

But Israel wasn’t sure what to make of the newcomers, who arrived on tourist visas, adopted Hebrew names and a West African style of dress. The government was unsure whether they qualified for citizenship under the country’s “Law of Return,” which is granted to almost any Jew who requests it.

The Interior Ministry granted many members of the community temporary residency in 1992 and permanent residency status in 2003. Many members study in Israeli schools and serve in the military.

“For quite some time, we’ve had a number of members of the community with different levels of immigration status, some of us have full citizenship, some taken permanent residency, some have temporary residency, and some have no status whatsoever,” said Ben-Yehuda. He said the community has been working for years with Israeli authorities to sort out the legal status of those without permanent residency.

The Population and Immigration Authority said in a statement that in 2003, 1,200 African Hebrew Israelites were found eligible for residency, and that in the years afterward the office received other requests from people who were not members of the community.

“All those who were not included in the list of community members and didn’t meet the criteria received a negative reply and in effect are residing illegally in Israel for a long period and must leave according to the law,” the authority said in a statement. It added that those who had received deportation letters were entitled to appeal.

Ben-Yehuda said the community would appeal the decision. “We’re here because we chose to be here to build this country and give our energy to the improvement and the betterment of this nation, so it’s quite a bit disheartening in that respect,” he said.

Source: Spokesman: Israel to deport dozens of African Hebrews

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Korean citizenship may soon be more attainable for foreign children

2021/04/28 Leave a comment

Marginal change, given requirement for “deep ties”, with priority given to those whose families have been in Korea for two generations:

The underage children of foreigners with permanent residency in Korea may soon be able to acquire Korean citizenship under a revision to the nationality law proposed by the Ministry of Justice on Monday.

Generally, the acquisition of Korean nationality follows the principle of jus sanguinis, and ethnic Koreans are able to more easily attain Korean citizenship.

However, the Ministry of Justice’s proposed revision to the Nationality Act will introduce a “simple nationality acquisition policy for young children born in Korea to permanent residents.” Under the revised law, if a permanent resident with “deep ties” to Korea gives birth to a child in Korea, the child will become a citizen by simply reporting his or her intent to acquire Korean nationality to the Minister of Justice.

Previously, children born in Korea to permanent residents had to apply for naturalization, even if they completed their primary and secondary education in the country.

Although the revision does not signal a complete abandonment of the jus sanguinis principle, it would make it significantly easier for minors to become Korean citizens earlier in their youth.

If the revision passes, children 6 years old or younger would be able to report an intent to naturalize without any additional requirements. Children who are 7 or older can do the same, provided they have resided in the country five or more years.

However, not all children born on Korean soil to permanent residents can naturalize with ease under the policy. Priority will be given to those children whose families have been in Korea for two or more generations and permanent residents who have “deep blood or cultural ties” to the country.

One of the main beneficiaries of the law will be ethnic Chinese who have resided in Korea for several decades but were barred from citizenship under the strict application of the jus sanguinis principle.

According to government estimates, about 3,900 individuals are currently eligible to acquire Korean nationality under the revised scheme. The Ministry of Justice believes that 600 to 700 additional people will be eligible every year.

“By giving children of permanent residents with deep ties to Korean society an opportunity to acquire nationality early, [the policy] will help foster their cultural identity and establish stability,” the Justice Ministry said. “It will also contribute to secure growth in the labor pool in the era of low birth rates and an aging population.”

Source: Korean citizenship may soon be more attainable for foreign children

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with ,

ICYMI: Retaking language test unfair during COVID-19: applicants to new residency pathway

2021/04/27 Leave a comment

Of note:

International graduates and essential workers eligible to apply for permanent residency under a new program say requiring them to retake language proficiency tests is unreasonable, especially during a global pandemic.

Akshay Aman, a law clerk graduate currently working as a security officer in Toronto, said international students have already passed language tests and proved their proficiency in English or French when they got their school admission and student visa.

“We all had our degrees from Canada and everything was in English,” Aman said.

“There is no sense (in taking) the test again and again.”

The new program announced last week aims to grant 90,000 essential workers and international graduates who are currently in Canada permanent status.

On May 6, the immigration department will start accepting up to 50,000 applications from health care and other essential workers and 40,000 applications from international students who graduated from a Canadian institution.

The government is requiring international graduates and essential workers to submit an official language evaluation that is less than two years old when the permanent residency application is received.

Aman, who graduated from Niagara College, said he has all the documents he needs in order to apply for permanent residency except a new English proficiency test.

He said the websites of the government-approved language tests have crashed since the announcement of the new program last week, leaving thousands of applicants struggling to register for an exam.

All the spots are booked until the end of September, he said, adding that after he failed to book a test in Toronto, he tried to find one in Alberta or British Columbia but all the exams are booked there too.

He added that it’s unsafe to require tens of thousands of people to take in-person tests during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They should delay (this requirement) or they can drop that because we already have our degrees,” he said.

Alexander Cohen, a spokesman for Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino, said the department wants to assure prospective applicants that the process will be fair for everyone, but he didn’t say whether the department will drop the language requirement for those who have already passed proficiency tests.

“(The program) will allow far more international students to plan their futures in Canada,” Cohen said in a statement.

“The size, scope and speed of this new program is unprecedented.”

Morad Roohi, a third-year PhD student at Queen’s University, said he has been trying to book an English evaluation test with his partner, so they can apply for permanent residency under the new program.

He said they have spent days searching for an available test appointment, but they couldn’t find one.

Roohi described the application process, which also involves gathering many documents, as like hitting a “stone wall.”

“It is really, really unfair.”

He said they moved from Kingston, Ont., to Toronto during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when his partner found a job at a homeless shelter in the city.

“She risks her life all through these months of (the) pandemic and lockdown. She has not been at home for a single day,” he said.

“When it comes to this application, still you’re just bombarded by … different (reasons for) pressure and stress.”

Roohi said requiring international students to pass a general language test after they passed an academic exam is not understandable.

Newcomers are offering their skills and expertise to the Canadian society despite all the difficulties they are facing during the pandemic, he added.

“As international students, as newcomers, (we are) going through lots of stress, pressure, uncertainty and many, many difficult things,” he said.

He said the government should make changes to the application requirement to make it easier for international graduates and essential workers to apply.

“When there is a pandemic and where there is no exam available, what can we do? There should be some accommodation for us.”

Source: Retaking language test unfair during COVID-19: applicants to new residency pathway

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Canada must process applications for children’s immigration in six months: advocates

2021/04/27 Leave a comment

Of note:

Ottawa should establish a standard of six months to reunite newcomers to Canada with their children, as many refugee and immigrant families now wait years, says a national advocacy group.

The long wait is unacceptable, especially for children who are separated from both parents, said Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees.

She said parents who have been forced to flee as refugees end up in many cases leaving their children with a grandparent, another family member or even a neighbour in their home countries.

“That is a very vulnerable situation,” Dench said in an interview.

“Sometimes, they’re staying with their grandparents, who, we often hear … they’re not necessarily in the best of health. They don’t necessarily have the means to support the kids.”

Dench said many children don’t get the care they need and in some cases become subject to physical and sexual abuse.

Canada is legally obliged under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to deal with family reunification applications in a positive, humane and expeditious manner, she said.

Jennifer Wan, an immigration lawyer in Toronto, said parents who come to Canada as refugees usually flee persecution in their home countries.

She cites the case of two refugee parents who have been waiting for years to see their children who are still living in unsafe conditions in India.

The parents were granted refugee status in Canada in July 2019 and applied for their children to join them that October but they are still waiting.

“The father was attacked. His business was destroyed. The wife was also separately attacked,” she said.

“Knowing what they went through, they fear for their children.”

Wan said the parents left their children in the care of an elderly relative hoping that they would be safe.

“(Their teenage child) has been really frightened to even leave his house,” she said. “He was being followed. The house was being watched.”

Wan said the government should prioritize family reunification cases that involve children, especially when the young people are in danger or don’t have anyone to care for them.

Global migration has been upended by the COVID-19 pandemic and the entire processing system has been operating at reduced capacity, said Alexander Cohen, a spokesman for Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino.

Refugees face travel restrictions and difficulties obtaining documents including evidence of a familial relationship, Cohen said.

“Since the onset of the pandemic, we have prioritized processing of vulnerable persons, family members and those in essential services,” he said.

“We’re prioritizing applications from refugees sponsoring their dependants … and are also assessing the results of two pilot programs to improve processing for protected persons with dependants abroad.”

Wan said the Immigration Department has not been responsive to her requests to expedite processing of the children waiting in India to join family in Canada.

“Sometimes, I feel quite helpless,” she said. “When we send a letter to an immigration office, we don’t really get a response to know that it has an impact.”

Dench said about 35 families have contacted the refugee council for help in speeding up their children’s immigration applications and there are many more struggling with the same issue.

Many children are suffering psychologically due to separation from their parents, she said. “Some of them have clinical diagnoses.”

Dench said she has heard heartbreaking stories of children crying out to their parents and thinking that they are to blame for the fact that they’re still separated.

The psychological distress of parents in Canada is “absolutely agonizing,” she added.

“Many, many medical professionals in Canada have also written expert opinions on what they’re seeing: the physical and psychological impacts of the stress of separation.”

Source: Canada must process applications for children’s immigration in six months: advocates

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Home Office handling of Windrush citizenship claims ruled ‘irrational’

2021/04/27 Leave a comment

More on Windrush:

The Home Office’s handling of some Windrush citizenship applications has been irrational and unlawful, the high court has ruled in a judgment that will prevent the department from refusing citizenship to Windrush-generation applicants due to minor, historical convictions.

The court was ruling on the case of Hubert Howard, who was repeatedly denied British citizenship over the course of a decade, despite having lived in the UK since he arrived from Jamaica at the age of three in 1960.

The Home Office sought to deny him citizenship, despite the 59 years he had spent continuously in the UK, because of a number of minor convictions, most of them committed in the 1970s and 1980s – none were serious enough to trigger a jail sentence. He was still fighting for naturalisation from his intensive care bed as he was dying in hospital in October 2019.

Source: Home Office handling of Windrush citizenship claims ruled ‘irrational’

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At a Vancouver forum, experts see immigration adding fuel to the overheated big-city housing market

2021/04/26 Leave a comment

No surprise:

Spring is in the air and the outlook is cheery for the next couple of years, according to pundits who spoke at the Vancouver Real Estate Forum held online last week

The opening remarks were delivered by Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal. His tone was far more encouraging than his talk last fall, in which he predicted the next six months would “not be very pretty,” with a housing market that would slow by winter. The housing market, however, did not slow. It only gained momentum. Last week, Mr. Tal said he sees a quick economic recovery – with Canadians sitting on piles of savings accumulated in the pandemic and immigration numbers greater than predicted, both of which will add more fuel to the already overheating housing market.

And he estimates around 60,000 to 70,000 non-resident Canadians, most of them living in Hong Kong, will return.

“We are starting to see this money coming into real estate in Vancouver and Toronto,” he said.

Anthem Properties chief executive officer Eric Carlson, who spoke as part of a panel, and other industry members also forecasted a roaring market thanks to increased immigration.

“[Immigration] numbers will be up in 2022, almost like the way they were pre-COVID. But it will take time to get up,” Mr. Carlson said. “In 2023, they will be higher; 2023 will be a rock concert of immigration. It’s going to be phenomenal. It’s going to completely mess up housing affordability.”

Mr. Tal says the economic fallout from the pandemic is deep, but narrow. Low-income jobs were wiped out, but high-income earning jobs actually increased.

“This is the first recession in Canadian history [in which] personal income has gone up. Crazy, but that’s exactly what we’ve seen.”

As a result, the income gap is even wider than it was prior to the crisis. That will increase the need for affordable housing.

“I see purpose-built rental as the solution,” Mr. Tal said. “I see a situation in which you are 35 years old and you are married with two kids, renting, and there is nothing wrong with [that]. When we develop this mentality, this way of thinking, I believe the affordability channel in the Vancouver market will be open in a very dramatic way.”

As for those who were lucky enough to make more money in the past year, the only obstacle getting in their way of spending it is access to the COVID-19 vaccine. A lot of people have saved a bundle, which will play a role in the recovery.

“This has major implications, because you have high-income individuals keeping their jobs and their income is rising, but they are not spending.

“We are sitting on a mountain of cash. I estimate that individuals are now sitting on roughly $100-billion of extra cash, more than they need. This is money that is sitting in chequing and savings accounts, collecting nothing, and those people are willing and able to spend that money the minute that they have the green light. Believe me, all those people are dying to go to restaurants but they are not willing to die doing so, and so they are waiting.”

The question becomes, what to do with all those savings? With interest rates as low as 1.3 per cent, mortgage broker Andrew Wade said borrowed capital is too cheap to even think about paying off the home. He’s seeing a “major surge” in Canadians buying vacation properties in Canada. However, he’s also seeing spending behaviours that are making him nervous. It’s common to see bidding wars on houses where people are making subject-free offers up to $300,000 above asking price, Mr. Wade said.

“This scares me,” he said. “I advise explicitly against this if the buyer is depending on borrowed funds.”

Mr. Wade is not so sure there is a “mountain of cash” available to most Canadians, who need to think about the high cost of future retirement and other costs. Also, the new stress test for uninsured mortgages goes up to 5.25 per cent on June 1, which will reduce a buyer’s borrowing amount by about 4 per cent, he says. That should help address a market that might not be sustainable, particularly on purchases of more than $1-million. Another trend he is seeing is homeowners tapping into their equity to afford their lifestyle. If there’s a market correction, he advises his clients to remember that, “cash is king.”

Real estate industry veteran Rudy Nielsen concurs. Mr. Nielsen, founder of the NIHO Land & Cattle Co. Ltd., says he always keeps available cash, even if it’s earning next to nothing. Mr. Nielsen generally agrees with Mr. Tal’s outlook, but he adds that there are a lot of people struggling, too.

“Some people do have a lot of money in their bank account, yes, and some are living month-to-month. Lots of people are hurting out there.”

For a long time, Mr. Nielsen was B.C.’s largest owner of private property, with about 500 properties at his peak. He started out logging properties, and then bought acres of ranch land and farms, office buildings, even entire towns. He’d sell properties in the towns on a lease-to-own basis.

In the 1970s, he’d built a real estate empire and then in 1981 he got caught in the crash, when interest rates soared to 17 per cent, and he owed $1.8-million. He rebuilt the empire, and he says he learned some lessons, such as not to over-leverage like he’d done when he was young. Today, at 80, the appraiser, developer, landowner and outdoorsman has downsized to about a dozen large properties, including 700 acres of farmland in the north only accessible by helicopter.

His advice is to invest for the long term.

“Some of the properties I’ve sat on for 30 years, but my returns are incredible, in the thousands of per cent,” Mr. Nielsen says.

He believes in investing in mortgage investment corporations, which he admits are “a little risky” because they are mostly investments in second mortgages, and foreclosures are always a possibility. But the returns he’s getting are 9 per cent to 10.5 per cent, he says.

“And I still keep some properties. I am patient and I sell as I see fit.

“The way I look at my land is, it’s my second bank.”

He advises people who’ve saved some money and who are starting out to buy recreational property that they will use, which will be worth a lot more by the time they retire. He tells the story of meeting a young family a decade ago in Williams Lake. They had sold off their Maple Ridge home to buy acreage with a few holiday cabins to rent out, with less income but less stress. He sees a trend like that happening now.

“I’ve always done good in land. Right now, I’ve been in business since 1964 and I’ve never seen more demand for land than I have right now. … We are selling everything we’ve got. We are getting good prices. There is a line up of people wanting the next piece.”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/article-at-a-vancouver-forum-experts-see-immigration-adding-fuel-to-the/

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The federal budget took steps toward racial justice — but activists say more must be done

2021/04/26 Leave a comment

As always. The funds allocated in Budget 2021 are significant compared to earlier budgets and we will see how effective they are through the regular evaluation processes and other analyses:

Advocates for Black, Chinese, South Asian and other racialized Canadians say the federal budget takes a number of positive steps toward building a more inclusive country, but more work needs to be done to address systemic racism in Canada.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland tabled the Liberal government’s first budget in two years on Monday. The budget proposes massive amounts of spending to contend with the uneven impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and pledges to create a million jobs within a year by funding an inclusive, equitable economic recovery.

To address systemic racism, the document sets aside $11 million over two years to expand the activities of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, a non-profit Crown corporation tasked with combating racial discrimination.

Source: The federal budget took steps toward racial justice — but activists say more must be done

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Breaking With Predecessors, Biden Declares Mass Killings of Armenians a Genocide

2021/04/26 Leave a comment

Significant even though many other countries, including Canada, have already done so:

President Biden on Saturday recognized the mass killings of Armenians more than a century ago as genocide, signaling a willingness to test an increasingly frayed relationship with Turkey, long a key regional ally and an important partner within NATO.

“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” Mr. Biden said in a statement issued on the 106th anniversary of the beginning of a brutal campaign by the former Ottoman Empire that killed 1.5 million people. “And we remember so that we remain ever vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”WHAT TO KNOWAfter years of avoiding the topic, the United States now officially views the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire a century ago as genocide.

The declaration by Mr. Biden reflected his administration’s commitment to human rights, a pillar of its foreign policy. It is also a break from Mr. Biden’s predecessors, who were reluctant to anger a country of strategic importance and were wary of driving its leadership toward American adversaries like Russia or Iran.

The Turkish government, as well as human rights activists and ethnic Armenians, gave a muted response to the news, which leaked days in advance, describing the move as largely symbolic. Later on Saturday, the country’s foreign minister summoned the U.S. ambassador to protest the declaration, state media reported.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has repeatedly denied that the killings amounted to genocide, had lobbied hard to prevent the announcement, mounting a conference and media campaigns before the anniversary on Saturday.

But in a call on Friday, Mr. Biden told Mr. Erdogan directly that he would be declaring the massacre an act of genocide, according to a person familiar with the discussion who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details of the conversation.

A summary of the call provided by the White House said only that the pair had agreed to an “effective management of disagreements.” The Turkish presidency said in a statement that both leaders agreed on the “importance of working together.” They are scheduled to meet at a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in June.

In his statement on Saturday, Mr. Biden acknowledged the Armenians who were forced to rebuild their lives.

“We affirm the history,” he said. “We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.”

Since taking office, Mr. Biden has kept Mr. Erdogan at a distance, calling other world leaders — and leaving his Turkish counterpart, who enjoyed a friendly relationship with President Donald J. Trump, waiting for months.

After news broke on Wednesday of the impending announcement, Mr. Erdogan said in a statement that Turkey would “defend the truth against the lie of the so-called ‘Armenian genocide.’”

Mr. Erdogan is widely expected to use the designation to whip up support at home, where he has increasingly adopted a nationalist-Islamist stance to retain his voter base. But political analysts said he was likely to tread carefully with the United States.

Relations between the countries have reached their lowest point in decades, as Mr. Erdogan has turned increasingly combative in his dealings with Washington, particularly after a failed coup in 2016. Mr. Erdogan has blamed the bid to oust him from power on a Turkish cleric living in self-imposed exile in rural Pennsylvania, and by extension on the United States.

Tensions escalated with Turkey’s deal to buy a missile system from Russia in 2017, which prompted the Trump administration to impose sanctions on Turkey in December. Syria, too, has been a flash point. Mr. Erdogan has bitterly criticized the United States military’s support of Kurdish forces in Syria that are affiliated with a group that has waged a decades-long insurgency against Turkey, and his own operations there have further tested the Atlantic alliance.

Mr. Erdogan sees Turkey, a country of 80 million and a member of the Group of 20, as a regional power that deserves greater respect on the world stage. That view has fueled a greater geopolitical assertiveness demonstrated in military interventions in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Azerbaijan and in exploration for energy in contested waters in the eastern Mediterranean last year.

European leaders and members of the Biden administration advocate continued engagement with Mr. Erdogan’s government because Turkey houses millions of Syrian refugees who might otherwise head to Europe. They also point to Turkey’s support for Ukraine and Afghanistan, where it will maintain a small force to train Afghan army and police personnel as the United States and other coalition troops withdraw by Sept. 11.

The White House’s sustained silence toward Mr. Erdogan had been seen as a sign that Mr. Biden did not view Turkey as a priority and intended to manage the relationship at lower levels of the administration.

“They don’t want to have a conflict with him, but they don’t want to be too cozy with him either,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the director of the Ankara office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Mr. Erdogan also would not seek to further damage relations over the genocide designation, said Asli Aydintasbas, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. By one count, at least 29 other countries have taken similar steps.

“In the past, Turkey used to issue all types of threats, but lately the policy toward genocide recognition from allies has been to shrug it off,” she said. “They will issue denouncements, but not go so far as to create a crisis.”

Mr. Unluhisarcikli, like other analysts and human rights defenders, questioned the timing and purpose of the announcement.

“The Turkish government will feel obliged to respond in ways that are consequential for the U.S. and for U.S.-Turkey relationship,” he said.

The Turkish public will see it as evidence of American double standards, and anti-Western forces in Turkey will use it to incite fury, he said.

Both opposition and pro-government leaders attacked the expected designation.

“This is an improper, unfair stance,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the largest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party.

Dogu Perincek, the leader of the ultranationalist Patriotic Party, in an open letter to Mr. Biden, questioned his authority to issue such a declaration. “As is known, the genocide against the Jews was adjudicated at an authorized court,” he wrote, “but regarding the 1915 incidents, there is no judicial ruling.”

The killings of Armenians occurred at the end of World War I during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey. Worried that the Christian Armenian population would align with Russia, a primary enemy of the Ottoman Turks, officials ordered mass deportations in what many historians consider the first genocide of the 20th century: Nearly 1.5 million Armenians were killed, some in massacres by soldiers and the police, others in forced exoduses to the Syrian desert that left them starved to death.

Turkey has acknowledged that widespread atrocities occurred during that period, but its leaders have adamantly denied that the killings were genocide.

n the days leading up to Mr. Biden’s announcement, Armenians and human rights activists in Turkey expressed caution, partly because of years of political seesawing over the issue.

“Personally, it is not going to make me excited,” Yetvart Danzikyan, the editor in chief of Agos, an Armenian-Turkish weekly newspaper in Istanbul, said, pointing to a statement President Ronald Reagan issued in 1981 about the Holocaust that mentioned the “genocide of the Armenians” in passing.

Murat Celikkan, a journalist and longtime human rights activist, said the declaration would be good for American-Armenian citizens, but he did not expect it to change attitudes in Turkey or encourage reconciliation between Turks and Armenians.

“It did not change with more than 20 countries officially recognizing it, including Germany,” he said.

In the United States, some Armenian activists welcomed the declaration as a step forward.

“The denial of the genocide has been such a painful chapter,” said Bryan Ardouny, the executive director of the Armenian Assembly of America. “This is a really critical moment in the arc of history, in defense of human rights.”

“The president is standing firmly against basically a century of denial and is charting a new course,” he said.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/us/politics/armenia-genocide-joe-biden.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

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