Contact tracing must not compound historical discrimination

2020/05/01 Leave a comment

Good discussion of some of the issues involved:

Governments seem likely to adopt tracing apps as a part of the new normal in the fight against infection during a pandemic. This week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Ottawa had “a number of proposals and companies working on different models,” and that “there are possibilities around using voluntary measures.” Unfortunately, the use of these tracing aps will not be genuinely optional or voluntary for most users. Perhaps more importantly, the technical frameworks that are currently under development must be configured in such a way that the historical discrimination of minority groups is not compounded by governments’ implementation of tracing policy.

Research suggests that these apps will be installed on mobile phones and designed to work in concert with smartphone operating systems to alert the phone’s owner if they have been in close contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19. The apps will probably rely on the opt-in COVID-19 tracing technical frameworks that were jointly announced by Apple and Google, and let individuals reveal their COVID-19 status as well as potentially inform them about people or places that carry higher risks of infections.

A significant amount of attention has been given to the privacy and security issues associated with these apps as well as whether the tracing apps will be sufficiently accurate to warrant using them in the first place. If governments approve their use, there may be strong legal or social pressures for individuals to use them and so it is critical for policymakers to start developing equitable policies and not justify the adoption of apps on the basis that individuals have opted-in to their use.

Opt-in mechanisms are intended to give individuals control over how their personal information is handled. Apple’s and Google’s operating systems already let individuals choose whether to share their information when they install a new game or productivity app on a device. These companies’ health surveillance functionalities will replicate this existing freedom of choice model. COVID-19 related proximity information will not be collected or shared without a smartphone user having first consented to the activity.

Meaningful consent to these companies’ health surveillance must involve giving individuals a certain level of understandable information about a tracing app’s data practices. However, policy-makers cannot be focused exclusively on a narrow understanding of consent. They must go further.

Government compulsions to opt in

Governments may decide that contact tracing apps can help to contain COVID-19’s spread once sufficient testing is available for both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases. If public safety officers are tasked with enforcing social distancing or self-quarantine orders they might demand that individuals reveal their COVID-19 status. The possibility of such an encounter with law enforcement officers, in particular, will implicitly encourage Canadians to use tracing apps. With an unlocked phone in hand, officers may go on fishing expeditions to search for potentially unlawful communications or activities.

Officers asking about individuals’ COVID-19 status may be particularly concerning to minority groups subjected to carding or to enhanced and often illegal searches. Members of over-policed groups may also feel particularly compelled to opt in to using COVID-19 apps due to concerns about how police will treat them if the apps are not installed.

Moreover, tracing apps may not be optional if individuals must reveal their COVID-19 status before entering government buildings or using public services or spaces. In such circumstances, it is conceivable that individuals would be compelled to use the apps to obtain licenses, use public transit or pass through public parks.

Private business and compulsions to opt in

Private organizations will likely have clients reveal their COVID-19 status before entering a store. If you must show your status to enter a grocery store, it is no longer optional. Sometimes clients may be unable to reveal their status – they may not own a phone or have lost it and be unable to purchase another – or they may not want to reveal their status on the basis of potentially negative consequences. For example, clients of food banks may be unwilling to reveal their COVID-19 status at all and be motivated to present fake information to avoid the chance that they will be prevented from accessing a food bank for food.

Employers may also want to know their employees’ COVID-19 status to protect or manage their workforce. Any employee who has been in contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19 might be barred from the workplace until they undergo self-quarantine or receive negative test results. Where employers lack robust stay-at-home policies or if accessing a worksite is a condition of continuing to receive a salary, there is a risk that individuals will attempt to evade health surveillance.

Towards inclusive policy options

Canadians have demonstrated a relatively high-degree of trust in their political and health leaders throughout the pandemic. However, trust in law enforcement bodies and health bodies is considerably lower for some. The technological infrastructure being developed by Apple and Google will not resolve these historical tensions. If governments choose this path, then they must face these tensions directly.

First, governments should not empower police to view individuals’ COVID-19 status but, if they do, they must prevent officers from turning status checks into smartphone fishing expeditions. As well, public officials who review an individual’s tracing app should be required to record and publicly report the gender and ethnicity and provide an explicit rationale for assessing their COVID-19 status.

Second, policy-makers must work with organizations representing historically disenfranchised groups to develop policies which ensure members of the public can reliably access government buildings and services. Anti-poverty, homeless and addiction advocates should be consulted to determine how government services and infrastructure can continue being offered to persons who may lack access to smartphones or for cases when they may be COVID-19 positive or potentially infected.

Third, governments could subsidize the costs associated with an employee’s self-isolation or self-quarantine. Not all employees have paid sick leave that extends to self-isolation or benefits that cover the entirety of an employee’s sick leave over the course of recovering from COVID-19. Without generous sick leave policies, employees may be motivated to find ways to be at work even if their app indicates they are ill.

Fourth, any government-sanctioned tracing app must provide information for Canadians to meaningfully opt in to any health surveillance. Privacy commissioners and health officials could be tasked with ensuring that apps clearly and accurately explain an app’s anonymization measures, how COVID-19 risk assessments are generated and disclosed and the effectiveness of the app in tracing the spread of the disease.

It’s clear the apps that use Apple’s and Google’s technical frameworks are unlikely to be truly voluntary or opt-in. While neither company’s promised frameworks are presently available for developers to use, this does give policy-makers time to design ones that are inclusive. It is time they start their drafting and planning for this hypothetical tracing app future so that, if it does come to pass, any policies will avoid compounding historical discrimination.

Source: Contact tracing must not compound historical discrimination

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UK: The Guardian view on immigration and Covid-19: old myths are exposed

2020/05/01 Leave a comment

Good editorial:

Covid-19 has accomplished in weeks something that UK governments spent a decade failing to do. It has drastically cut labour migration. Lockdown prevents the gathering of real-time data, but it is a reasonable assumption when international travel has stopped that net migration is currently happening at a rate well below 100,000 per year.

That was the target adopted by David Cameron in 2010 and pursued aggressively by Theresa May at the Home Office and in Downing Street. It was never met before being abandoned last year. What happens next is uncertain. This week would have seen the government’s post-Brexit immigration bill return to the Commons, but the timetable has been discarded, not least because parliament’s digital systems are not yet ready for remote voting.

There is no indication that ministers are reconsidering the new regime, which is based on a points system designed to select “skilled” workers over “unskilled” labour. The distinction is meant to favour what ministers call “the best and brightest” while deterring those whom decades of political rhetoric have cast as undesirable. The charges against that latter group are various: poaching jobs from British-born citizens, depressing wages, failing to observe cultural norms and generally upsetting people with conspicuous otherness.

The vilification reached its apogee in the campaign to take Britain out of the EU. The promise to “take back control” of borders had strong emotional appeal, but was never rooted in the reality of modern Britain, where migrants of all skill levels and income brackets keep the economic and social wheels turning. That awkward fact was always bound to emerge over time, but it has been revealed abruptly by the pandemic.

Farmers are already warning that fruit will rot in the fields without seasonal labour normally provided by EU citizens. Attempts to entice UK workers to fill the gap are failing. Immigrants have kept public transport running, delivered goods and, most poignantly, kept the NHS and social care services operational. They have put their lives at risk for a country that has been, at best, ambivalent about their entitlement to live here at all.

Source: The Guardian view on immigration and Covid-19: old myths are exposed

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Turkish students increasingly resisting religion, study suggests

2020/05/01 Leave a comment

Perhaps as a reaction against Erdogan’s efforts?

Twenty-two-year old Esra, from Mersin, is even more bored than usual this Ramadan. Universities are shut and Turkey has taken the unusual step of placing under-20s, as well as over-65s, under a curfew, because many Turkish families live in intergenerational households.

As a result, Esra can’t see any of her friends. And a few days into the Muslim month of fasting, like many young people, she is now feeling even more suffocated by the religious restrictions imposed by her pious parents.

“They normally don’t know how I dress when I’m not there but even in the house now wearing tight jeans bothers them and they’re commenting on it,” she said. “They think I am fasting but I’m not. I have water in my room.”

Despite more than a decade of efforts by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) to mould a generation of pious Turks, the country’s youth appears to be turning away from religion.

Source: Turkish students increasingly resisting religion, study suggests

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Taxing Canadian expats not the silver bullet for generating post-COVID revenue

2020/04/30 4 Comments

My latest, in response to Canada needs to start taxing Canadians who live abroad:

Chandra Arya, the Liberal MP for Nepean, Ont., recently argued for changing the current residency-based taxation approach to the U.S. citizenship-based taxation (CBT) approach, understating the complexity involved in making such a change and overstating the potential benefits.

(Similarly, Andrew Caddell argued in his April 22 Hill Times column that “the three million Canadians abroad should contribute, through a 10 per cent tax on income; that could bring in at least $30-billion per year.”)

Some of the arguments are, on the surface, convincing. Why should Canadian expatriates, after not paying Canadian taxes for their years working abroad, return to Canada to benefit from medicare and other benefits on their return as retirees? Ironically, Arya uses similar “Canadians of convenience” arguments as those used by the previous Conservative government under then-immigration minister Jason Kenney. He is part of a Liberal government that extended voting rights to virtually all expatriates, most of whom pay little or no Canadian taxes.

But we have to start with a better understanding of the numbers of Canadian expatriates, whether foreign or Canadian-born. He, like too many, uses the Asia Pacific Foundation estimate of three million, which includes all ages and permanent residents. A more accurate, albeit imperfect estimate, is closer to two million adult Canadian citizens.

But how many of these maintain strong connections to Canada or are likely to return to Canada to take advantage of Canada’s generally strong social safety net? The answer is we do not know and there is limited data available.

However, we have some proxy measures that give an order of magnitude to those keeping their close Canadian ties.

The average annual number of immigrants who left Canada between 1996 and 2011 is about 100,000, according to a Statistics Canada study, with between 25 and 40 per cent being temporary emigrants, depending on the census period. For 2006-11, 35.6 per cent of emigrants move to the USA. There is no data regarding their citizenship status or the length of time they spent in Canada prior to emigrating.

The number of adult Canadian passport holders abroad was about 725,000in 2015. The number of Canadians registered with Global Affairs Canada for consular services is about 346,200, as of April 26, the department said.

In 2017, the number of Canadian expatriates who file Canadian non-resident taxes was about 92,000.

And we also know that some immigrants return to their country of origin upon retirement, and that about 181,000 persons received CPP, according to December 2019 numbers, but there’s no data regarding their citizenship status.

So Arya’s arguments are based on “[a]necdotal evidence [that] suggests citizens are returning to Canada to enjoy these benefits after spending their productive lives elsewhere,” and his assertion “for a small but growing number, the objective is to acquire citizenship and leave again.”

Like all anecdotal evidence, there is some truth, but the extent of that truth, and whether it would warrant such a major and disruptive change in Canadian taxation, is questionable.

The other major flaw lies with citing the U.S. citizenship-based taxation approach as the model to emulate, without asking the necessary questions regarding why the U.S. is the outlier, compared to other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Citizenship-based taxation is less appropriate for a world of increased mobility and dual citizenship. Moreover, residency-based taxation is intrinsically easier to administer, including with respect to double taxation issues.

The introduction of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and its assorted implementation difficulties and inconsistencies highlights even more the complexities of CBT, leading a small, but not insignificant, number of Americans to renounce their U.S. citizenship.

This should serve as a major caution to advocating for a major change to our taxation system, one that is out of step with all OECD countries, save the U.S.

Would the alleged benefits of increased tax revenues materialize? If so, would they exceed the expected massive costs of completely revamping our tax system? How effective would expatriate tax compliance be, and what would be the costs of enforcement? And just as the U.S. approach resulted in modest income from “accidental Americans” (citizens of another country unaware of their U.S. citizenship) being caught by FATCA, how could we be sure that such a change might result in “accidental Canadians?”

Clearly, better data on the number of expatriates, permanent and temporary, and the degree to which they return as retirees and take advantage of Canadian medicare and other benefits would be useful. But like so many citizenship and immigration issues, any change aimed at a subset of the population, has to be weighed against the impact on the wider population.

Similarly, a fundamental shift from residency-based to citizenship-based taxation should take place in the context of a broader review of taxation policies, rather than a fundamental, but piecemeal, proposal. Any such review should aim at ensuring that taxation reflects current and anticipated societal needs.

A shift to citizenship-based taxation would have major impact and costs. The flawed U.S. example and anecdotal evidence fail to justify such a change or even a study, given that there are more important taxation and related policy questions.

Source: Taxing Canadian expats not the silver bullet for generating post-COVID revenue

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Religious Freedom Watchdog Pitches Adding India to Blacklist

2020/04/30 Leave a comment

https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/04/28/us/ap-rel-global-religious-freedom.html

Not unexpected:

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom is urging that the State Department add India to its list of nations with uniquely poor records on protecting freedom to worship — while proposing to remove Sudan and Uzbekistan from that list.

The bipartisan commission, created in 1998 by Congress to make policy recommendations about global religious freedom, proposed designating India as a “country of particular concern” in the annual report it released Tuesday. That lower ranking for a long-running U.S. ally amounts to a stark show of disapproval of India’s divisive new citizenship law, which has sparked broad worries about disenfranchisement of Muslims.

President Donald Trump declined to criticize the citizenship measure during his February visit to India, where his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi was punctuated by skirmishes between Hindus and Muslims.

The commission, by contrast, is empowered as an independent arbiter to look only at nations’ religious freedom records, apart from their relationship with the United States, vice chair Nadine Maenza said.

Beyond the citizenship law, Maenza said in an interview, India has a broader “move toward clamping down on religious minorities that’s really troublesome.”

A spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, Anurag Srivastava, responded to the report with a statement blasting the commission’s “biased and tendentious comments against” that nation. Noting that some members dissented from the commission’s decision to recommend India for the lowest ranking of religious freedom protections, Srivastava appeared to use the commission’s internal terminology as a dig.

“We regard (the commission) as an organization of particular concern and will treat it accordingly,” he said.

In the cases of Sudan and Uzbekistan, the Trump administration got out ahead of the commission in raising its ranking of religious freedom protections. The State Department decided in December to no longer rank Sudan as a nation “of particular concern” after having taken Uzbekistan off the list earlier.

Following last year’s military ouster of authoritarian leader, Omar al-Bashir, new Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok met with the commission and committed to improve religious freedom, Maenza said.

Among the other significant recommendations in Tuesday’s report was a call for the U.S. government to “exert significant pressure on Turkey to provide a timeline for its withdrawal from Syria.” Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria last fall sparked broad concern about resulting threats to religious minorities in the region.

The commission proposed four other nations join India in the ranks of most egregious religious freedom offenders; Nigeria, Russia, Syria and Vietnam. The State Department’s current list of “countries of particular concern” regarding religious freedom includes China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and Iran.

Inclusion among the nations with the poorest religious freedom records can lead to new sanctions, although the executive branch is also empowered to rely on already-imposed sanctions or issue a waiver.

Sudan and Uzbekistan are currently on a State Department watch list for nations where religious freedom infringement is not as widespread, constant and significant as those in the lowest-ranked tier.

The commission’s latest annual report recommends the addition of 11 more nations that the State Department has not yet put on that watch list: Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, the Central African Republic, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia and Turkey.

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Wealthy Move Their Money To Tax Havens

2020/04/30 Leave a comment

As always…:

Lockdown might impact peoples’ ability to move across borders, but it doesn’t stop money flowing into tax havens around the world.

The economic shocks of coronavirus have meant that offshore financial centres such as Switzerland are back to their old tricks: Banking peoples’ money away from their more risky homelands.

UBS, a Swiss bank and the world’s largest wealth manager, announced its profits were up by 40%. In the first three months of 2020, it saw $12 billion in net new money, nearly treble the amount banked in the previous quarter.

“We successfully managed March’s high volumes and activity across our trading and client platforms, including peaks of three times the normal levels,” Sergio Ermotti, the bank’s CEO, told investors on Tuesday (April 28).

This enabled the bank to gain a higher share of wallet from its clients, Ermotti added.

Pre-coronavirus, Switzerland’s popularity for offshore banking was fading as its banking sector could no longer guarantee client secrecy. However, the country’s notorious stability combined with low COVID-19 infection rates have renewed its appeal among the international wealthy who use its private banking services.

“There are some countries where the risk of your money and your wealth being more at risk than others does potentially also lead to inflows into safe and secure places like Switzerland,” says Anna Zakrzewski, who leads Boston Consulting Group’s Global Wealth Management division.

Source: Wealthy Move Their Money To Tax Havens

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Mexico Deports Most of Its Detained Migrant Population

2020/04/30 Leave a comment

Of note, reflecting in part the effect of the Trump administration cutting off Central American access to the American asylum system:

On Sunday, Mexico’s National Institute of Migration (INM) announced the repatriation of 3,653 Central American migrants. The measure comes after growing concern over Covid-19 spreading in INM detention facilities throughout Mexico.

Mexico recently has faced issues attempting to deport Central American citizens back to their home countries. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador closed their borders to citizens and aliens.

The INM said: “In the face of the health emergency caused by Covid-19, the Ministry of the Interior, the National Institute of Migration (INM), acts responsibly and safeguards the integrity of the population in the context of migration by seeking to fully guarantee their human rights.”

Guatemalan nationals were sent back by bus and Honduran and Salvadoran migrants were transported by aircraft to their countries of origin. The International Organization for Migrants administered the flight arrangements to Central America.

In March, the INM had 3,579 foreign nationals housed throughout its 65 detention facilities and shelters. As of Sunday, the number had decreased to 106 migrants — a 97 percent reduction in the detained migrant population.

The remaining aliens gave their consent to stay in Mexican custody. Religious organizations have assisted with shelter accommodations for migrants choosing to stay in Mexico.

The United Nations, the National Human Rights Commission of Mexico, and dozens of other activist organizations supported the mass release of foreign nationals from INM custody.

Additionally, the INM expressed its support of Mexican nationals being repatriated from the United States to prevent the spread of Covid-19 amongst their countrymen.

And Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Relations announced that it had been able to repatriate more than 129 Mexican people from Honduras and 30 from El Salvador.

Source: Mexico Deports Most of Its Detained Migrant Population

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Pandemic pretext: More delays in long-awaited access to information answers

2020/04/30 2 Comments

ATIP is far too often late and, as the examples below indicate, sometimes very late, in responding, with COVID-19 providing further excuses for delay:

Federal departments that have stalled access to information requests for three years or more are now citing the pandemic as the reason for further delays.

Emails are going out to people who make access to information requests, notifying them the requests are now “on hold.”

“We cannot send consultations out because most third parties, other government departments (municipal, provincial, territorial and federal) are closed or reduced to minimum employee capacity,” the department now says.

“So until we are given the green light to start processing consultations again, we won’t be able to process any of the records for your request. But in the meantime, we would like to know if you still wish to proceed with your request or if you wish to abandon.”

Rubin says Health Canada owes him answers to about a dozen requests dating back for years — one from 2014 about adverse pharmaceutical reactions including some deaths, one on drug licensing from 2015, others from 2016 and 2017. They now warn him of “possible delays in treating your request,” due to the pandemic.

“Openness, transparency and accountability are guiding principles of the Government of Canada. However, our ability to respond to requests within the timelines mandated by the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act may be affected” by the pandemic, the department says.

The Finance Department wrote him using the the exact same words.

National Defence says it has reduced staff in the access office and hasn’t enough secure lines to handle his requests remotely. They asked for Rubin’s consent to put the request on hold. Rubin said no.

“You have to push back,” he said. “A lot of people don’t consider this a human right. But it’s not just administrative.”

Public Service and Procurement Canada (PSPC) has several aging Rubin files, and he hadn’t heard about them either, until this month’s message that “PSPC’s network is currently limited to essential and critical services such as pay, pension and procurement. While we are committed to respecting your right of access and are actively looking for solutions to maintain operations, we have little to no capacity at this time.”

One department told him: “despite all our efforts, we will not be able to respond to your ATIP request within the legislated timelines.” The legislated timeline ended years ago.

“Our access to information legislation is so flawed that it’s possible for access to information requests to be delayed and delayed and delayed, which turns the whole purpose of the legislation into a joke,” said James Turk, director of the Centre for Free Expression at Ryerson University.

“The fact that people who haven’t heard for a year or two years are now getting a notice that it’s been delayed because of COVID reveals how badly flawed” it is.

“I like Ken’s remark that oh, it’s good to hear from you.”

He also noted that the lockdown shows the unevenness of government services, as some are cut off from paper documents while others shift to digital documents.

This newspaper asked Environment Canada more than a year ago for internal emails involved in sending out a single news release on climate change. This month, after our request passed its first anniversary, we asked how long it would take.
The answer: They were just about to send us the information, and then the lockdown hit.
The department promises a speedy answer once its office reopens.

Source: Pandemic pretext: More delays in long-awaited access to information answers

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Wells: Let’s reopen Ontario and Quebec. You go first.

2020/04/29 Leave a comment

I am always impressed by the sophisticated understanding of Paul Wells when it comes to how governmental decision-making and his avoidance of overly simplistic arguments of many commentators (he calls out some). Just as he did in The doomed 30-year battle to stop a pandemic, a welcome dose of reality and constraints, where governments have accountability unlike those writing opinion columns:

At last the day came when the politely populist premiers of Ontario and Quebec—the provinces where four-fifths of Canada’s COVID-19 patients reside—announced their plans to roll away their stone and step into the post-pandemic light.

The plans were nearly empty and the premiers looked terrified.

The Ontario document, A Framework for Reopening Our Province, has timelines that mention no date after April 27, which was the day the document was released. It listed three phases: “Protect and Support,” which is what’s been happening; “Restart,” which theoretically comes next; and “Recover,” which in theory will happen someday. The “Restart” phase is described in conspicuously belts-and-suspenders terminology: a “careful, stage-by-stage approach” during which “public health and workplace safety will remain the top priority” and “public health officials will carefully monitor” whether there are new outbreaks “for two-to-four weeks.” The big question: “whether it is necessary to change course” and essentially revert to the current cave days.

This next phase will kick in when cases are durably declining, hospitals can handle any influx of new cases, and public-health tracing can follow any new cases. The second of those boxes, mercifully, has probably already been ticked. The third may never be, because this is such a sneaky virus. Where is Ontario on the first? A reporter asked. Premier Doug Ford couldn’t say.

Quebec, the epicenter of the Canadian outbreak, has a slightly more concrete plan about which Quebec officials seemed commensurately less confident. “If we see that the situation isn’t under control, we’ll push the timetable back,” premier François Legault said. “The watchword will be prudence.”

Another watchword will also be regionalism. Montreal is in the very early stages of a decline in active caseload following what was, and in many ways remains, one of the worst outbreaks in North America. The rest of the province looks more like the rest of the country. So Legault is re-opening elementary schools and public daycares outside greater Montreal in two weeks, on May 11. In the Montreal region they’ll open a week later. High schools stay closed until September.

And even that timetable exaggerates the imminence of a post-COVID social era. Schools will reopen “if and only if” the situation doesn’t deteriorate from now to May 11, Legault said. And school won’t even be mandatory: “Parents who want to keep their children at home won’t be penalized in any way.”

It’s pretty easy to anticipate 72 hours of large-scale game theory beginning on May 9, as tens of thousands of parents use Facebook, Zoom and text messages to ascertain whether they’re better off sending the kids to school or keeping them home. Class sizes will, in any event, be capped at 15, essentially requiring some number of parents to keep their children out.

And after that? When does your local barber shop, dry cleaner, skate sharpener or driver’s license office open? We’ll see. It’s a far cry from the easy certainty of commentators like the  shock jocks on Quebec City radio and the more nuanced impatience of columnists in the Sun papers, which essentially delivered their readership whole to the Ford Conservatives.

It’s an impatience all of us have heard in family conversations. It’s an impatience most of us feel. You know the songbook as well as I do: Look, this is ridiculous, nobody signed on for global economic euthanasia, nobody was told in March that we’d still be here in May and maybe July and maybe January, everybody has to die of something, suicide and obesity and delayed surgery kill people too, and we’re pushing those numbers up as we try to tamp this one down. (Suddenly everyone’s a public-health ninja who knows more about all this than Theresa Tam and Bonnie Henry.)

But it’s quite another matter to be the person in charge when the rubber hits the road. People are full of bravado for society and sometimes less so for their circle. Two weeks seems a reasonably manageable timeframe for a partial resumption of what was, after all, everyone’s everyday life until mid-March. But push it forward and make it personal: How do you feel about sending your own son or daughter back to school tomorrow? Are you ready for a family dinner this weekend? Everyone’s got to die of something, so how about Uncle Ned in late May by drowning in his own pulmonary fluids? That’s a harder call. It helps explain why the plans Legault and Ford released on Monday were, in Ford’s words, road maps and not timetables. And why it left some columnists, whose responsibility extends no further than their keyboards—I know, I live there too—righteously cranky.

The fact is, it’s hard to plan next steps because disaster continues despite the best efforts to contain it: 57 deaths in Ontario in one day, 84 in Quebec. Many more still to come. The closest parallel to this coronavirus in recent history was the 1918-19 flu outbreak, and that one was worse in the fall than it had been in the spring.

Legault and Ford aren’t even leading the process of deciding what happens next: like good populists, they’re being led by it, and if they looked worried on Monday it’s because they’re well aware there’s a shift change underway in the reopening debate. The debate was led until now by people who gain by sounding bold. They’re finding themselves outnumbered by people with everything to lose. Suddenly waiting doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.

Source: Let’s reopen Ontario and Quebec. You go first.

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Australia’s coronavirus re-boot needs to consider population as well as the economy

2020/04/29 Leave a comment

Similar to some of the commentary in Canadian media, although Australia has had more restrictive immigration for a number of years:

We all know our coronavirus isolation has had a marked effect on our ability to produce GDP income and tax revenue, both so necessary for the proper running of our economy.

But it is also at times like this that we tend to forget that our greatest resource is not our significant mineral wealth or our world-class agricultural produce. It is our people.

And we are a migrant nation, built on the sweat and tears of many successful people, who, on the whole, maintain our exceptional standard of living with their hard work, good education and the burning aspiration of always wanting to do better.

But we are also an ageing country, with our largest demographic now approaching retirement and fewer people in the 20-60 demographic — the age group that produces the clear majority of tax revenue.

Population is on the decline

Last week Acting Minister for Immigration, Alan Tudge, confirmed what we knew to be true since the virus took hold — coronavirus is driving the biggest population decline in Australian history.

Since the beginning of the year, we have lost almost two years of population growth in just three months.

More than 300,000 tourists, students and itinerant workers have fled our shores in an exodus that is certain to deepen our consumer spending slump and put those industries who heavily rely on a migrant workforce.

Some are also predicting that a further 300,000 are set to leave before the end of the year — another blow to our GDP.

This severely impacts our country’s productive tax-generating capacity.

In times of crisis when public spending is at fever pitch, we need to be thinking about how we are going to foot the bill, to help expediate our recovery and get the economy working hard for us again.

How do we turn it around?

This is not a uniquely Australian problem, but a problem we share with many other developed economies including Japan, Britain and Germany.

So, what might be the remedies?

We could simply have more children.

In Australia, we are only averaging 1.7 children per couple, so we are not even replacing mum and dad. This is unlikely to change in the short to medium term.

We can also increase taxation on a smaller and smaller number of people, which is probably electorally unpalatable, not to mention the real possibility of reducing GDP and tax revenue as a result.

Or we can go into austerity and cut spending, also a hugely problematic solution socially and, quite possibly, financially.

Alternatively we can simply import more people in the productive cohort.

A young migrant who goes to school here for four years, then does the HSC, studies at our universities, gets a part time job, starts paying tax, then goes on to full employment some and stays in the tax base for over 40 years, is an ideal candidate.

At a time like this when our economic prosperity is so deeply threated by disease and debt, it might not be altogether intuitive, but it is indeed our best remedy to increase our intake of foreign students, agricultural, nursing and hospitality workers.

Migrants can help us rebuild

Each of these categories are vital to fill for our recovery and continued economic success.

We need the foreign students to rescue our top universities and as for the hundreds of jobs in hospitality, agriculture and nursing, well of course they should be available to our residents first.

But if 30 years of experience is anything to go by, these are not jobs that we have ever been able to fill locally.

And with the new infrastructure boom that will hopefully ensue following COVID-19, we will also need new migrant skills to assist our small but resourceful workforce in creating new economic growth, so vital in re-igniting our economy.

Australia, prior to COVID-19, had 29 years of continuous economic growth.

Perhaps with a bit of vision and new skill base, powered by local and migrant minds and hands, we can make it 30 years.

Source: Australia’s coronavirus re-boot needs to consider population as well as the economy

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