Canada should boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022 in response to China’s imposition of a national security law on Hong Kong, says Canada’s former top diplomat to a city whose freedoms are coming under the increasingly direct control of authorities in mainland China.
Over the past few years, relations have been strained between China and a number of major Winter Olympic medal-winning countries, including the United States, Norway, Sweden, South Korea, Japan and Canada, whose athletes are preparing to compete in Beijing even as China continues to incarcerate Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
Canada also counts an estimated 300,000 citizens in Hong Kong, where Beijing is extending its control through the introduction of a new law, expected this month, that will criminalize conduct that Chinese authorities consider secession, subversion, terrorism or foreign interference. Ottawa has unsuccessfully sought to pressure Beijing to release Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor. It has also criticized the new law for Hong Kong, without any result.
Now, it’s time for Ottawa to make a more assertive response, says John Higginbotham, who from 1989 to 1994 was commissioner for Canada in Hong Kong, a role equivalent to an ambassador. Mr. Higginbotham was previously posted as a diplomat to Beijing.
The next “Winter Games are in February, 2022, not long from now. China wants them badly as the latest pageant of national power and prestige,” he said. Canada should organize a boycott of those Games unless China ”lays off Hong Kong,” he said. With the exception of Russia, he noted, “Winter Olympics are easier to organize a boycott than Summer. Medals are concentrated in a few friendly, cold, democratic countries.”
Others, too, have called for a boycott of the Beijing Games. Advocates for China’s Uyghur population have said it would be wrong for Western athletes to come to Beijing at a time when the largely-Muslim group has been forcibly incarcerated for political indoctrination.
China’s actions toward Hong Kong, which it has promised a high degree of autonomy, have created new concern.
“Boycotting the 2022 Olympics is one of the ways for the world to challenge China’s decision and urge for the withdrawal of this evil law,” said Joshua Wong, one of the most visible young activists in Hong Kong.
”The new security law is just another new weapon for Beijing to leverage political pressure, which puts all Canadians working and living in the city under threat,” he added. To defend “the city’s autonomy and the Canadian interests in this global financial city, I call upon the Canadian government to reconsider Hong Kong’s special treatment and take all necessary actions to oppose the national security law.”
Canada’s foreign ministry referred a question on the 2022 Olympics to Canadian Heritage, which said in a statement: “The decision on whether or not to participate in the Olympic and Paralympic Games lies with the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic committees.” The Canadian Olympic Committee did not respond to a request for comment.
In China, scholars dismissed the possible impact of any Olympics snub. “Unlike small to medium-sized countries, I don’t think a Winter Olympics boycott would bring any detrimental effect to China,” said Wang Yizhou, a prominent Chinese foreign policy thinker who is deputy dean of the school of international studies at Peking University.
Prof. Wang himself raised concern over the impact of Beijing moving too quickly to intrude on Hong Kong’s autonomy. But “I don’t think rising criticism or foreign pressure would wound China,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if some countries decide to quit the Winter Olympics, honestly.”
It’s not the first time people have called for exclusion of an Olympics in China. Across Europe and North America, lawmakers decried the 2008 Summer Games, and some national leaders, including Canada’s Stephen Harper and Germany’s Angela Merkel, declined to attend the opening ceremony.
But Canada and Germany still sent teams to the 2008 Games, which marked a major moment in China’s modern history. The Olympics cast a favourable spotlight on Beijing as a warm host, efficient organizer and co-operative global partner.
Since then, however, views on China have darkened among major Western democracies. China took years of trade measures against Norway after the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to imprisoned dissident writer Liu Xiaobo. Chinese authorities angered Sweden after Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong bookseller with Swedish citizenship, was seized from Thailand and sentenced to prison in China. Japan and South Korea have long-standing frictions with China over territorial disputes. Chinese diplomats have created anger across Europe for comments considered insulting or hostile.
The 2022 Olympics “may well be seen by some governments as a possible pressure point on China,” said Brian Bridges, a scholar of politics and sport who is an affiliate fellow of the Centre of Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University.
Against that backdrop, “whether it’s Canada, European governments or the U.S., the idea that they would pull out as a national policy seems far, far more likely” in 2022 than it was in 2008, said Matt Ferchen, head of global China research at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies.
Canada has participated in Olympics boycotts before. In 1980, it joined the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Games as a protest against the Soviet-led invasion of Afghanistan. Conversely, more than two dozen countries boycotted the Montreal Games in protest against a New Zealand rugby tour of South Africa.
It’s wondrous, isn’t it, how the people just keep coming out? Day after day, night after night, in dozens of cities, braving a deadly virus and brutal retaliation, they continue to pack the streets in uncountable numbers, demanding equality and justice — and, finally, prompting what feels like real change.
How did this happen? How did Black Lives Matter, a hashtag-powered movement that has been building for years, bring America to what looks like a turning point?
I have a theory: The protests exploded in scale and intensity because the police seemed to go out of their way to illustrate exactly the arguments that Black Lives Matter has been raising online since 2013.
For the last two weeks, the police reaction to the movement has been so unhinged, and so well documented, that it couldn’t help but feed support for the protests. American public opinion may have tipped in favor of Black Lives Matter for good.
By “the police,” I mean not just state and municipal police across the country, but also the federal officers from various agencies that cracked down on protesters in front of the White House, as well as their supporters and political patrons, from police chiefs to mayors to the attorney general and the president himself.
Black Lives Matter aims to highlight the depth of brutality, injustice and unaccountability that American society, especially law enforcement, harbors toward black people. Many protesters set out to call attention to the unchecked power of the police, their military weaponry and their capricious use of it. They wanted to show that the problem of policing in America is more than that of individual bad officers; the problem is a culture that protects wrongdoers, tolerates mendacity, rewards blind loyalty and is fiercely resistant to change. More deeply, it is a law enforcement culture that does not regard black lives as worthy of protection.
And what did the cops do? They responded with a display of organized, unchecked power — on camera, in a way that many Americans might never be able to unsee.
To understand why this moment may prompt structural change, it is worth putting the latest protests into a larger context. To me, the past two weeks have felt like an echo of that heady moment late in 2017, after The New York Times and The New Yorker exposed Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual assault. At the time, #MeToo, as an online rallying cry against sexual abuse and harassment, was more than a decade old. The Weinstein story didn’t create that movement, just as the videos of George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police didn’t create Black Lives Matter.
Good account. Some of the data on breakdowns between different Black groups can be found and analysed through of mix of ethnic ancestry, place of birth and generation status (approach used I believe in the StatsCan overview of the Canadian Black community.
The issue is less with respect to basic demographic and socioeconomic data and more with respect to specialized data sets that can identify, highlight and quantify inequities in areas such as health, education, policing etc:
When the Liberals announced the Centre for Gender, Diversity, and Inclusion Statistics in 2018, the government said it would have a “particular” focus on Black Canadians, recognizing a gap in data collection that academics and organizers say is so large it renders promises to address anti-racism “meaningless.”
For the centre to effectively offer information on Canada’s diverse Black population, understand how it’s doing and create policy to address inequality, both it and Statistics Canada need much more funding than the Liberals have allocated, according to one of its academic advisors on Statistics Canada’s Expert Working Group on Black Communities in Canada, and on immigration and ethnocultural statistics.
For months now, as COVID-19 swept across Canada, advocates and researchers have been calling for race-based data on the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities. In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests across the world and Canada, advocates have redoubled that call.
With its “very poor” disaggregated data Canada can’t properly address systemic experiences around racism, including disparities of income and health, said Malinda Smith, a University of Alberta professor.
“You can’t address them without good data. It doesn’t get measured, it doesn’t get done,” she said. “My view is any politician, policy maker, university president making a statement about a commitment to address anti-racism and yet are not collecting data, are not consulting the Black population, I think those commitments, those statements become meaningless.”
Over the last week Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) spoke of systemic racism in Canada, promising to change “the systems that do not do right by too many Indigenous people and racialized Canadians.”
In the 2018 budget, the Liberals announced $6.7-million over five years to launch the centre. That funding is applied to both the centre and across various units at the agency to fulfill the mandate, said Statistics Canada spokesperson Peter Frayne by email. It has 10 people whose salaries are at least 50-per-cent funded by the centre, but who also have other duties, he said. In 2019, the Liberals’ anti-racism strategy set aside another $4.2-million, he added, so it could expand data collection in four areas: the general social survey, potential changes to the uniform crime reporting survey, supporting a new advisory committee on ethnocultural and immigration statistics, and added analysis of existing data to include racialized communities.
That funding is “peanuts,” said Prof. Smith who said these gestures give the ”appearance of addressing the problem.”
For the Nova Scotia-based Delmore “Buddy” Daye Learning Institute, it can be difficult to get important details about Black Nova Scotians, said its executive director Sylvia Parris-Drummond.
It’s evident Black Canadians face systemic racism across the board, she said, given they are disproportionately low income, have poorer health outcomes, and lower wages. Black people represent 8.6 per cent of the federal prison population, despite accounting for 3.5 per cent of Canada’s population.
“We know all those things exist, we would know them more deeply if we could get the disaggregation of data more strongly done,” she said, and the gap necessarily means policy making is coming from “a less informed place.”
Centre’s work on Black Canadians ‘key,’ says centre specialist
Since 2018, the centre and Statistics Canada have undertaken “major work” on the Black community, said Jean-Pierre Corbeil, the centre’s assistant director and chief specialist.
“Clearly the work on Black Canadians is key,” he said in an interview with The Hill Times about the centre’s work over the past two years, including four projects focused on the population.
After the 2018 budget announcement, Statistics Canada struck an ethnocultural advisory committee, which met that summer and into the fall. During Black History month in February 2019, it published an infographic demonstrating the growing diversity in Canada’s Black population and a 20-page overview of how it had changed over the decades. It showed that Canada’s Black population doubled in size between 1996 and 2016.
It was important to showcase the diversity of Black population, Mr. Corbeil said, and it was the first of its kind at that level of detail and “very well received.” In the early 2000s, the agency offered a few portraits of ethnocultural groups, but not to that level.
Using census data, he said it presented statistics in an accessible way, including portraits of differences between provinces, like Nova Scotia, where the Black community is for the most part third generation, compared to recent immigrants in Toronto and Montreal.
It also showed that cities like Edmonton and Calgary have more than 50,000 Black residents, noted Ms. Smith, which is consistent with the fact that the Prairies have a fast-growing Black population in Canada. Lethbridge, Alta., and Moncton, N. B., were two of the fastest growing populations.
“Diversity has escaped much attention and analysis,” Prof. Smith said, adding it may be surprising for people to know that before 1981, more than 80 per cent of the Black population immigrated from the Caribbean, but since 2001, it’s shifted to more than 62 per cent from Africa.
“There’s a tendency to treat it as a homogenous group,” she said, and Canada’s lack of data has helped make that so.
In February 2020, the centre released another report called “Canada’s Black population education, labour, and resilience.” In this study, the centre integrated the 2006 census with the 2016 census for the same person, making it possible to look at education attainment and the educational characteristics of Black youth in Canada and look at labour market integration 10 years later.
It showed that Canada’s Black population is younger than average, and though more Black youth aged 15-25 (94 per cent) reported wanting to get a university degree, only 60 per cent thought it would happen, compared to 79 per cent of the rest of that age range in Canada.
Labour force ‘pilot’ survey to include visible minorities
In July, the labour force survey will include a question about visible minority status for the first time. These mandatory monthly surveys have a 56,000-household sample, so there will still be limitations in the technical analysis, but Mr. Corbeil said it’ll be a first for tracking employment.
Mr. Frayne said the pilot to expand the survey makes up part of Statistics Canada’s response to the data needs stemming from the pandemic. The agency has “enhanced crowdsourcing survey instruments to enable reporting for key vulnerable populations,” including immigrants, Indigenous people, and visible minority groups.
“Statistics Canada recognizes that the social, economic and labour market impacts of COVID-19 have not been equally felt by all Canadians,” he said, adding the agency is also developing techniques to add information by race and visible minority status to previously released data.
Also, in the coming months, the centre plans to release a comprehensive report on changes to the socioeconomic situation of Canada’s Black population, from 2001 to 2016, Mr. Corbeil said, noting there’s a “very, very big appetite” for this analysis.
And, through Canada’s anti-racism strategy, announced in 2019, the centre received an additional $3-million to expand the sample size for the next social identity cycle of the General Social Survey—a smaller, annual themed survey. The survey typically has about 25,000 respondents, while the 2020 survey will be expanded to 80,000 respondents and will allow StatsCan to track perception of discrimination and belonging.
Mr. Frayne added by email that an advisory committee on immigration and ethnocultural statistics has been formed and met once, with another meeting this week. There is also work underway to improve information on hate crimes by linking police data to courts data, he said.
Canada is long overdue in developing better data on its Black and broader visible minority populations, said Prof. Smith, far behind the United States and United Kingdom. In Britain, researchers can break down racialized students attending post-secondary institutions, but Canada is unable to do that.
“Frankly, we need a Royal Commission on visible minorities in order to examine more systematically and thoroughly the different experiences of the nine groups within that category,” she said, saying it remains shocking to her that the Black population is considered one category despite remarkably different immigration routes and experiences. There are more than 170 different places of birth for the Black immigrants in Canada.
Over the next three years, the centre is also planning to release new indicators, consulting with the agency’s expert advisory committee on ethnocultural and immigration statistics to develop a conceptual framework on ethnocultural diversity and inclusion to better track relevant “inclusion” indicators over time.
“This is a great opportunity to identify data gaps,” Mr. Corbeil said, and when some surveys do not have a large enough sample, it’s an opportunity “to send the message” if more information is needed. Asked if the centre had enough resources, including staffing and funding, he said following the 2018 budget it was “clearly” a key initiative from the government to assign resources to address gaps.
“This is where the emphasis right now is put, trying to get the funding to have the oversampling and all the efforts to integrate the information with different data sources,” he said.
Agree. Starts, of course, with better and more comprehensive data:
In the COVID-19 era, Canada needs to better understand the relationship between identity and health. To do that, we need to use intersectional analysis, the study of the way identity categories such as gender, race and ability interconnect to create discriminatory systems that impact individuals in different ways. Fortunately, we have a policy tool in our policy toolbox for precisely this purpose, and it can and should be deployed by provincial ministries of health across this country: Gender-Based Analysis plus (or GBA+). Our federal government has been using GBA+ for years across many departments, though it is not mandatory for all federal departments. But it is in use at the Privy Council Office, Finance, the Department of National Defence and Health Canada. There is therefore a wealth of Canadian policy experience with this tool, and we need GBA+ now more than ever.
The GBA+ tool was developed by the federal Department of Women and Gender Equality (WAGE), formerly Status of Women Canada. It is an approach to understanding sex and gender alongside other identity factors such as race, ability and age, to assess how various groups experience policies, programs and initiatives. The aim of GBA+ is the creation of equitable policies, programs and initiatives — equitable from inception to execution. Awareness of the differential impacts that government policies and actions have on different identity groups is central to that goal.
There are no hard and fast rules on how GBA+ should be done; in fact, it is perhaps best thought of as a competency rather than a methodology. In other words, there is no set formula to achieve equity in all situations; rather, progressing toward equitable change requires the continued cultivation of knowledge about various groups, the challenges they face and potential avenues for change. Nevertheless, GBA+ consistently relies on the use of disaggregated data, in addition to other forms of research, to gain insights into policy. Reliable data are essential to effect change, especially with identity-based issues. Showing patterns of discrimination is more compelling than anecdotal accounts in documenting a need for policy change. GBA+ also requires the monitoring and evaluation of the effects of policies on Canadians. It is not enough to enact change; change must be equitable.
Properly applied to the government’s COVID-19 response, GBA+ would have directed policy-makers to draw on fine-grained differentiated data to evaluate equity considerations. In asking whether policies are equitable, GBA+ analysts ask whether policy outcomes track a range of identity factors, including race, ethnicity and socio-economic background. Thus, if GBA+ had been applied to provinces’ public health response to COVID-19 from the start, requisite data would have been collected from the outset. These data, as the trickle of international evidence is making increasingly apparent, are key to targeting necessary medical supplies, policies and programs to those most affected, and hence helping to curb the spread of the virus.
GBA+ directs policy-makers to include identity-based considerations in the formulation, deployment and evaluation of their policies. Of course, GBA+ is not perfect: critics sometimes charge that it is too abstract, offering little actionable guidance to policy-makers. While its goals may be commendable, it is not always readily apparent how GBA+ should influence decisions within a specific portfolio or policy. This is why proponents of GBA+ argue it is a competency rather than a methodology. Policy-makers need to develop the ability and experience needed to make equitable decisions. Whether or not this response satisfies critics, it is true that GBA+ has clear implications in the context of COVID-19. If it had been employed in the appropriate offices before the pandemic, it would have helped policy-makers see and act upon considerations of identity in the making of health policy, including in their collection of data. Even at this later stage, the deployment of GBA+ would significantly improve our understanding of the virus and our response to it.
Our obliviousness to the potential relationship between race, ethnicity and socio-economic status and infection, hospitalization and death rates will negatively impact our ability to control the spread of the virus in the short term and impair our understanding of how this virus impacts societies’ well-being in the long term. In response to criticism about this gap in data collection, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, for example, has said that statistics based on race aren’t collected in Canada unless certain groups are found to have risk factors.
Frankly, this position just does not align with mounting international evidence that race, ethnicity and socio-economic status have an impact on health outcomes related to COVID-19. A recent study released by a United Kingdom think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, finds that minority groups are overrepresented in hospitalizations and deaths from the virus, with Black Britons nearly twice as likely to die from COVID-19 as the white British majority. Similar patterns have emerged in the United States, where the Centers for Disease Control confirmed that current data suggest a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups. New York City, for example, has recorded a disproportionate death rate among African-Americans (33.2 percent) and Hispanics (28.2 percent), and a Washington Post analysis shows that American counties that are majority-black have three times the rate of infections and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are in the majority
There is further reason to apply a GBA+ lens to race, ethnicity and socio-economic data of those infected, hospitalized or succumbing to COVID-19. Academic studies have noted that racial discrimination, specifically when directed against Canada’s Black and Indigenous people, may itself be a determinant of chronic diseases and their underlying risk factors. Clearly, racial and ethnic inequalities in health outcomes are found throughout Canada, but the severity of these inequalities varies across racial and ethnic groups, further illustrating the importance of intersectional analysis. Moreover, academic evidence notes that a failure to distinguish between Canadian-born visible minorities and visible minorities who are immigrants to Canada is a key gap in Canadian health data of racialized individuals. This further indicates the importance of taking intersectionality into account when collecting health data.
When policy-makers truly embrace GBA+ as a lens for equitable policy-making, we can then better assess the toll of the pandemic. Only with an intersectional lens on the impact of COVID-19 on society will we see the differentiated impact of this virus on individuals and communities. Thus far, we have been flying blind, but it may not be too late to make a course correction in our COVID-19 policies.
They call them the “guardian angels,” the thousands of personal-support workers (PSWs), orderlies, cooks and janitors who have been toiling for months in Quebec’s beleaguered and often overwhelmed long-term care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Almost all of them are women, many from racialized communities, including a disproportionately large number from Quebec’s Haitian community.
In recent days, one subset of this overworked, underpaid work force has received a lot of attention – asylum seekers.
Why?
Because, despite doing essential work that no one else would and literally putting their lives at risk, juggling multiple part-time gigs for as little as $13 an hour, many of these front-line workers could face deportation.
That’s disgraceful, and un-Canadian.
Lawyer and social entrepreneur Fabrice Vil has been leading the social-media campaign #JeMeSouviendrai (I will remember) to get the provincial and federal governments to “regularize” the immigration status of asylum seekers working as essential workers.
“This pandemic has shown us the human face and the real sacrifices of essential workers,” Mr. Vil said on the popular Radio-Canada talk showTout le monde en parle. “When people make a contribution to society, we need to recognize that contribution.”
Quebec Premier François Legault has been cool to the idea, but in recent days, in response to growing public pressure, he has softened his position a bit.
A little recent history helps explain the political volatility of this issue.
In 2017 and 2018, more than 37,000 people made an “irregular” border crossing and requested asylum in Canada. Most of them simply trudged up Roxham Road in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., exploiting a loophole in the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, which said they could only be turned back at official border crossings.
Before he was Premier, Mr. Legault took a hard line on the asylum seekers, saying Quebec could not welcome “all the world’s misery” and demanding the Roxham Road crossing be shut down. It has been. Since March, there have been only 14 “irregular” crossings and all have been sent back to the United States. Yet, “Roxham Road” remains a dog-whistle term for anti-immigration proponents.
Let’s not forget that most of the asylum seekers have been working while waiting for their cases to be processed. Many have been working in long-term care for two or three years, invisible until the pandemic hit.
When the idea of granting residency to asylum seekers was first floated, the now-Premier rejected it out of hand, saying: “We can’t open the door and say, ‘If you come here illegally, if you find a job, we’ll accept you as an immigrant.’ That’s not how it works.”
His critics responded by saying that, first of all, asylum seekers are not illegals. Further, they stressed that what is wanted is a special dispensation for those who work in health care facilities in these extraordinarily difficult times. The precise number is unclear, but believed to be at least 2,000.
Mr. Legault responded by promising to review their requests on a case-by-case basis, potentially accepting them as economic immigrants. (While immigration is a federal jurisdiction, this is a provincial program.) Federal Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino has tried to stay out of the fray, saying “all asylum claimants will receive a fair and full hearing on the individual merits of their claim.”
Quebec’s Immigration Minister, Simon Jolin-Barrette, has also announced a plan to recruit 550 temporary workers as PSWs and fast-track their permanent residency applications.
Around the same time, Quebec also announced a bold plan to hire 10,000 PSWs by offering a paid three-month training course and full-time jobs at $26 an hour. (About a $50,000 annual salary.)
The catch is that the program is only for Canadian citizens, so asylum seekers, refugees and migrant workers are shut out again.
This sparked another wave of outrage.
Wilner Cayo of the advocacy group Debout pour la dignité says the exclusion adds insult to injury.
“These women were good when it came to working for a miserable salary,” he told CBC News. “But now that this work is going to be well paid, the thank-you they get is ‘You can’t be part of the program.’”
At a demonstration last week, the sentiment was well summarized on a protester’s sign, written in Haitian Créole: “Nou pap mouri pou gran mèsi!”
Translation: “We will not die for a ‘thank you’ and we will not die in vain.”
Indeed, a proper thank-you must begin with granting permanent residency. Then full-time jobs. And speeding up family reunifications.
It’s the least we can do for these guardian angels, for services rendered selflessly.
No surprise. Broadly consistent with other countries:
On 21st May 2020, the government released its ‘Immigration statistics, year ending March 2020’, and it confirmed what those in the world of academia already knew; that there was a sharp drop in the number of international students when the lockdown took hold at the end of March. While the publication was not intended to provide a full analysis of the impact of Coronavirus on the immigration system, it did find a significant fall in applications for study visas in March 2020; it states, “in March 2020, Tier 4 visa applications fell significantly when compared to March 2019, in particular for Chinese nationals, and likely related to COVID-19. At the same time, the number of Tier 4 (sponsored study) visas issued in the first quarter of 2020 increased by 84&#x c;ompared with the same quarter in 2019, although there were falls towards the end of March 2020”.
The fall in student numbers follows record increases in 2019
The clear reduction in student numbers is all the more jarring given that the sector has seen a boom in international students in recent years, helped in large part by the reversal of Theresa May’s student immigration policy which required students to depart only four months after completing their studies. According to Government data, in the year ending September 2019, sponsored study visas increased by a not inconsiderable 13&#x (;258,787 students), of which 86&#x w;ere for university education.
UK universities planning for a return of students
There is no doubt that UK academic institutions have been hit hard by COVID-19, not least because of the large black hole which now exists in place of the regular supply of domestic and international student fee revenue. According to a recent analysis by London Economics for the University and College Union, it is expected that UK universities will see a £2.6 billion shortfall in the next academic year due to the ongoing impacts of COVID-19. Of this £2.6 billion is from domestic students and the remainder from international students. It is clear; therefore, how important overseas students are to UK universities and positive and reassuring that plans are now in place to allow some students to return to campus-based learning.
Some UK universities are planning to reopen from June 2020 with a range of essential measures to ensure the safety of staff and students being put place. Smaller class sizes and an increase in the number of online lectures will become normal from the middle of this year. While not all universities have a plan to reopen yet and are instead waiting for clarity from the government before reopening, some have mature plans almost ready to go. The University of Wolverhampton, for example, will be offering a “full digital suite of course material”, and will prioritise the opening of building openings over time. The university’s vice-chancellor Geoff Layer stated, “We will be looking at a gradual return to certain buildings being open and we will develop a plan which prioritises which parts can open first. It won’t be ‘we’re all back’. Social distancing has to be part of what we do, so I’d imagine we would be opening selected spaces over time”.
At Birmingham City University some, but not all, of the 2019-20 cohort of students will be returning for lessons from June 2020. The 2020-21 intake will start their courses in September 2020 with a new set of COVID-19 safety measures designed to protect the wellbeing of students and teachers in place. The university’s vice-chancellor, Professor Philip Plowden, says that students will be returning to the campus “on a limited basis”, and that changes are being made to the way in which buildings are utilised to ensure adherence with social distancing. Professor Plowdon believes that this partial reopening is essential to allow students who are reliant on-campus facilities to complete their courses; “Our priority for this year is to ensure that every student gets the qualifications for which they are working, or are able to make progress towards getting those qualifications. Our absolute priority is the safety of our staff and students and all of our decisions continue to be made with the safety of our community in mind.”
Even if academic institutions won’t be back to where they were before the COVID-19 pandemic, the confidence and boost to sentiment, not to say, cash flow, will be warmly welcomed by the sector.
Those universities which are not reopening in June 2020 will no doubt be watching those that do with considerable interest, not only to see whether it can be done but also to understand the measures which they too will need to put in place in the near future. It is also likely that international students will be watching to see how safe UK universities are over the next few weeks in anticipation of resuming their own studies in September 2020. As such, UK learning institutions can do much to inspire confidence in prospective overseas students by responding effectively now.
Returning students will be required to self-isolate
Anyone arriving in the UK from the 8th June 2020, including those holding a Tier 4 study visa, will be required by law to self-isolate. They will be asked to provide an address for where they will be in quarantine and will face fines of up to £1,000 and random spot checks. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee these additional measures put in place by the government will be lifted by September 2020 for the start of the new academic year, hence it is best to plan for an earlier arrival.
Wrapping up
The impact of COVID-19 on the UK’s education sector will be remembered for many years, but hopefully, with time, students from overseas will be able to continue their studies in earnest. Global events such as this allow us to truly appreciate the wonderful opportunities provided by the overseas study. As we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, our immigration specialists look forward to helping international student clients and their families over the coming months to return to the UK to resume their studies.
Wonder whether any of these types of targeted initiatives are taking place in Montreal and Toronto?
When COVID-19 first hit the United States, it spread through communities of color at alarmingly disproportionate rates.
This was especially true in Chicago. More than 70% of the city’s first coronavirus deaths were African-American. Those numbers have declined, but black residents continue to die at a rate two- to three-times higher than the city’s white residents. Researchers believe underlying health conditions that are prevalent in Latinx and black communities, such as hypertension and diabetes, make residents there more vulnerable to the disease.
While blacks suffer the most deaths, the number of people who have contracted the disease is the highest now in the city’s Latinx communities. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot calls it a public health “red alarm.” She’s worked with community groups to create a Racial Equity Rapid Response Team or RERRT. They are tackling long-standing needs for residents in African-American and Latinx neighborhoods — everything from adequate nutrition to jobs to healthcare.
One of those Chicago neighborhoods is Auburn-Gresham. It’s a predominantly African-American and working class area on the city’s South side. It’s seen its share of troubles — 30% unemployment, gang warfare. Then came the wrath of COVID-19.
The first to die was Patricia Frieson, 61, a retired nurse who lived in the neighborhood. Her older sister, Wanda Bailey, 63, also died from the coronavirus days later.
Recently, a drive-in test site opened up on 79th street, one of the main commercial strips that’s seen better times.
“Oh, this is critical. We’ve been screaming for weeks to get testing in Auburn Gresham,” says Carlos Nelson, CEO of the Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corporation. He says it’s been dire with more than 1,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and “we are dying, because we don’t have the same resources or access to information.”
Mayor Lightfoot says the racial gap is unacceptable and is the result of a racist system that for generations left black neighborhoods with little access to health care, jobs, education and healthy food. Conditions she adds that aren’t unique to Chicago.
“We’re seeing this manifest in large urban areas with large black populations,” says Lightfoot. “All over the United States — Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee and other places are experiencing the same thing, but we are going to step up and do something about it.”
Distributing free masks, hundreds of door hangers and thousands of postcards about COVID-19 are part of the effort by the rapid response team.
Recently, hundreds of people on foot and in cars lined the blocks for a pop-up food pantry run by Carlos Nelson’s group and the Greater Chicago Food Depository. Volunteers helped Carolyn Bowers load boxes of canned goods, meat and produce into a cart. Bowers works part time caring for seniors and says COVID-19 has caused lots of financial havoc.
“I’m not been able to service as many people as I have been because a lot of people are afraid to let people in their home,” Bowers says.
She’s been working 8 hours a week instead of her typical 30 to 35 hours. But Bowers considers herself lucky since since she and her adult children live with her mother. She says everyone chips in but Bowers says, “the food pantry is a real help to the family because I am not able to buy food.”
In Chicago’s Latinx neighborhoods, there’s the same push by RERRT to educate people about the pandemic with bilingual messaging. There’s also a focus on workplaces where there’s been a cluster of coronavirus cases. Unions are part of the outreach effort.
Efrain Elias is vice president and residential division director of SEIU Local 1. The union represents janitors, security officers and others.
“These are workers who are heading to the front line of this crisis to keep the public clean, safe and healthy every day and our workers are not able to stay at home,” Elias says.
In a neighborhood near Chicago’s downtown, the sound of a vacuum cleaner dies down as Javier Flores goes over the day’s cleaning schedule with his maintenance crew at a nearly 200-unit residential building.
“Thank God, we haven’t had any cases here or any type of incidents what so ever,” Flores says. Both he and his wife are considered essential employees. She is a cook for the Chicago Public Schools and prepares free breakfast and lunch for students that families pick up.
The couple live with their two young daughters in Chicago’s Belmont-Cragin area. With nearly 3,000 confirmed cases, it’s one of the Latinx communities with the most coronvirus cases in the state. It also makes Flores anxious.
“My youngest daughter started coughing, telling me her throat hurt,” Flores says, “and I can’t avoid just thinking about, man, COVID-19?”
His daughter turned out to be fine. Flores says he hopes the city’s racial equity work will help make that true for so many others in communities of color hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In contrast to Ontario’s Premier Ford who walked back his initial comment. Consistent with his general positions on multiculturalism and diversity, restrictive approach to immigration, and the head covering ban for public servants and teachers:
A day after demonstrators in Montreal criticized Francois Legault for his refusal to acknowledge systemic racism in the province, the Quebec premier held firm on his position.
Legault told reporters in Montreal on Monday he’s committed to implementing a plan to stamp out racism in the province and expects details in the coming days.
Thousands marched in Montreal on Sunday in an anti-racism rally, with some expressing frustration with Legault’s stance.
But Legault said he doesn’t want to get drawn into a war over the term “systemic,” nor does he want it to turn into a trial of Quebecers – the vast majority of whom Legault says aren’t racist.
The premier conceded that racism exists and called for a “quiet evolution” on the matter to deal with it – evoking the province’s Quiet Revolution in the 1960s that brought about social and political change in Quebec society.
Legault noted black members of his own caucus have recounted their own experiences with racism, and he repeated a promise to go beyond rhetoric and establish a provincial policy to fight racism.
“For me, we have Quebecers of different colours, different origins, but we are all human beings and we’re all equals, no exceptions,” Legault said. “But we must face the reality and the problems lived by some of our fellow citizens, and we must act.”
Demonstrators Sunday said Legault’s refusal to acknowledge the systemic nature of racism – biases, policies and practices entrenched in institutions – is missing the bigger picture.
“I don’t understand why people are trying to stick on one word. I think what is important is to say and all agree that there is some racism in Quebec, and we don’t want that any more,” Legault said on Monday.
He said the province could have cancelled Sunday’s march and one the previous weekend for public health reasons, but he decided they should be allowed to go ahead. Legault noted that francophones and women in Quebec have made advances to overcome discrimination, and he said the same must happen for racial minorities.
Fo Niemi, executive director of the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations, a civil rights advocacy group, said it is important to recognize that racism isn’t always direct and can be subtle.
Niemi noted that courts have recognized systemic discrimination and systemic racism for more than three decades, but there’s a level of intellectual confusion surrounding it.
“Systemic racism is not a general indictment of a society as a whole, and it’s important to stop using systemic as a tool to generalize or accuse an entire society in a sweeping manner,” Niemi said.
More bad news regarding Hong Kong institutions and Chinese government repression:
The heads of the governing councils of Hong Kong’s eight publicly funded universities have backed a plan announced by Beijing last month to impose a national security law on the city, in an act that many academics see as ‘doing Beijing’s bidding’.
Some fear such statements on policies from Beijing emanating from universities could lead to the politicisation of institutions in Hong Kong, which are already polarised between pro-democracy and pro-Beijing groups.
China’s view is that increasingly violent protests over the past year in Hong Kong are a threat to national security. But when it was first revealed last month, the national security law took Hong Kong and the world by surprise – in particular because it would be imposed directly by Beijing on Hong Kong, in contravention of treaties allowing Hong Kong to keep freedoms separate from mainland China under the policy of ‘one country, two systems’.
A resolution was passed in the 28 May session of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), to draft the law to prohibit “acts of subversion, succession, terrorism and involvement with foreign interference in Hong Kong”. It would also allow China’s security intelligence agencies to operate in Hong Kong.
The joint statement released on 1 June by the chair of the governing councils of eight Hong Kong universities said: “As residents of Hong Kong, we enjoy the protection provided by the state, and in turn have a reciprocal obligation to protect the state by supporting the introduction of legislation which prohibits criminal acts that threaten the existence of the state.”
”We therefore support the national security laws which will operate under the principle of ‘one country, two systems’, to better ensure universities can continue to create knowledge through research and learning,” it added.
Council statement followed a more limited statement
But hours earlier, university vice-chancellors and presidents of five of the eight universities – Hong Kong University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Lingnan University and the Education University of Hong Kong – issued their own joint statement which said: “We fully support ‘one country, two systems’, understand the need for national security legislation and value the freedom of speech, of the press, of publication, of assembly and other rights the Basic Law confers upon the people of Hong Kong.”
The Basic Law is Hong Kong’s mini constitution.
Conspicuous by their absence were the signatures of the heads of City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. City University sources said the university administration sought to “separate education and politics” while backing the ‘one country, two systems’ principle.
A separate statement from Baptist University President Roland Chin was a more subdued version. “We highly appreciate the importance of national security and Hong Kong’s stability,” Chin said. “It is our earnest hope that the national security legislation will continue to protect academic freedom and institutional autonomy as promised in the Basic Law.”
Willy Lam, adjunct professor at the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), said: “The council is the highest ruling body in any university so adding the council means doubling down on this protestation of support for Beijing. Usually the [university] president would be enough.”
Lam said he assumed the governments in Beijing and Hong Kong had put pressure on university presidents to profess public support for the national security law. “In the NPC discussion about Hong Kong they emphasised a need to boost patriotic education, so education is very important for the Chinese government. They are very keen to have [university] presidents sign up to this profession of support for Beijing,” Lam told University World News.
“This is standard [Communist] Party strategy to prop up its legitimacy by showing its policies have ‘support’,” said another CUHK academic. “Beijing wants to show that their hated national security law has support of respected academics and academic institutions.”
A proportion of university council members are directly appointed by Hong Kong’s chief executive, who also acts as chancellor of all the publicly funded universities. The two statements came just before a trip to Beijing on 3 June by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam and other top Hong Kong officials, reportedly to discuss the new law.
Carrie Lam said last week her administration would fully cooperate with Beijing on the legislation, which will be enacted in Hong Kong without any input from Hong Kong’s legislature.
Precedents in issuing joint statements
Academics noted that it was not unusual for university presidents in Hong Kong to issue joint statements, though these were usually in relation to issues directly related to university affairs and student activities, particularly during the Umbrella Movement student protests in 2014-16 and student protests over the now withdrawn Hong Kong bill to extradite criminals to China, which saw weeks of unbroken protests from June 2019 to January 2020.
In June 2019, 10 university heads issued a joint statement urging calm as students began their protests against the extradition bill.
Joint statements from university governing councils are rarer, but in October 2019, in the wake of a large number of students being arrested during protests, and attempts by university heads to assist them in various ways, the heads of eight university governing councils in Hong Kong issued a joint statement saying assistance provided by universities to arrested students and staff did not represent any support for their political views.
In September 2017, 10 university presidents and vice-chancellors issued a joint statement condemning “abuses” of freedom of expression after some students put up banners advocating Hong Kong’s independence from China. “We do not support Hong Kong independence, which contravenes the Basic Law,” that statement said.
Beijing demands support
Beijing-backed groups in Hong Kong have been exhorting companies and organisations to publicly support the proposed law, including civil servants, police and immigration officers, as well as canvassing individuals to sign a petition in favour of the law.
“Calling on university administrations to back the law proposed by Beijing is not the Hong Kong way of doing things. This law is not directly part of campus governance. Instead, it is the Communist Party’s common practice of co-opting groups and individuals to show allegiance and support of the party,” said one normally outspoken academic who asked in this instance to remain anonymous. “Hong Kong’s universities are autonomous; they should not be backing political positions decided in Beijing.”
Lokman Tsui, assistant professor at CUHK’s school of journalism and communication, said via Twitter: “As a professor at CUHK I want to express my opposition to the national security legislation. I am concerned it will harm Hong Kong’s freedom of speech, press freedom, academic freedom and the rule of law that underpins these and other freedoms.”
Well-known Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai, who was arrested on 28 February, along with other major pro-democracy figures on charges of illegal assembly, and was later released on bail, referred to the joint statement by the five university heads in a tweet: “This is the end of academic freedom in HK. Higher education was once a paramount institution in defending our freedom to pursue knowledge.”
