ICYMI: With Selective Coronavirus Coverage, China Builds a Culture of Hate

2020/04/27 Leave a comment

Of note:

Trevor Noah, the host of “The Daily Show,” has won praise on the Chinese internet for his searing criticism of the Trump administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. So has Jerry Kowal, an American who makes Chinese-language videos chronicling the dire situation in New York.

China’s response to the virus has its own sharp-eyed critics at home, and they have found a vastly different reception. One resident of the virus-struck city of Wuhan who writes under the name Fang Fang documented despair, misery and everyday life in an online diary, and has endured withering attacks on social media. Three citizen journalists who posted videos from Wuhan in the first weeks of the outbreak disappeared and are widely believed to be in government custody.

The pandemic unfolded dramatically differently in China from the way it has in the rest of the world — at least, if one believes state-run Chinese media. Chinese news outlets used words like “purgatory” and “apocalypse” to describe the tragic hospital scenes in Italy and Spain. They have run photos of British and American medical workers wearing garbage bags as protective gear.

A lot of the same miseries happened in China, but those reports were called “rumors” and censored.

For the Communist Party, keeping up a positive image for the Chinese public has long been an important part of maintaining its legitimacy. That facade was broken during the outbreak in late January and February, as dying patients flooded hospitals and medical workers begged for protective gear on social media. Some people started asking why the government suppressed information early on and who should be held accountable.

The death of Li Wenliang, the whistle-blowing doctor in Wuhan, on Feb. 6 galvanized many Chinese people into demanding freedom of speech. Online sentiment became much more skeptical, and many young people openly challenged the party’s message.

Then the United States and other countries bungled their own responses, and China’s propaganda machine saw an opportunity.

Using the West’s transparency and free flow of information, state media outlets chronicled how badly others have managed the crisis. Their message: Those countries should copy China’s model. For good measure, the propaganda machine revved up its attacks on anybody who dared to question the government’s handling of the pandemic.

For many people in China, the push is working. Wielding a mix of lies and partial truths, some young people are waging online attacks against individuals and countries that contradict their belief in China’s superior response.

These tactics aren’t new. Many Chinese children of my generation read a newspaper column for students called “Socialism Is Good. Capitalism Is Bad.” Each week, it described the wonders of China alongside the hardships of capitalist societies. The lesson: Socialist China takes care of its people, while people in the United States go hungry and the elderly die alone.

Even if the stories were true, they didn’t represent the full picture. Chinese children like me pitied Americans even when almost all of China lived in poverty. How much would we have envied them if we had known that most could eat meat whenever they liked?

Such campaigns became much easier to sell when China’s economy took off, and we could see the country’s progress for ourselves.

Now that mission is getting tougher. Even before the pandemic, China’s economy wasn’t growing the way it once had, and the government has been intruding more and more into everyday life. China’s propaganda machine has ramped up the volume to deliver its message, encompassing all of Chinese official media and the country’s social media platforms.

If that newspaper column existed today, it would be called “China Is Great. Whoever Says Otherwise Is Our Enemy.” And it would be impossible to avoid.

The website of Global Times, a tabloid controlled by the Communist Party, added Chinese subtitles to a video from Mr. Noah’s show that featured President Trump and many Fox News personalities, showing how for weeks they played down the risks of the coronavirus.

The subtitled video was widely distributed by Chinese official news outlets. Many of them used the same headline: “Blood is on their hands and they should all be sued!”

The Chinese official media and online commenters loved Mr. Noah even more after Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist, said on his show that the ebbing of cases in China was “very good news.” Global Times subtitled a clip of the praise, which has been viewed nearly 18 million times and liked a quarter of million times on the tabloid’s official account on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform.

“Trevor has the correct value system,” said a comment on a social media article that not only posted the video but translated many angry comments by American viewers. “I love this guy,” another reader commented in English.

“Is he ‘kissing the ass’ of China?” another social media blog postasked rhetorically. “No, he’s just telling the truth.”

Many of the same people praising Mr. Noah have been slinging arrows and rocks at Fang Fang, whose real name is Wang Fang, for telling the truth about China.

Her diary was moderate and personal, and a place where many of us turned for comfort during the darkest hours of China’s epidemic. But after Harper Collins announced plans to publish it in English, tens of thousands of online users descended on her Weibo account, saying she was a traitor for supporting the enemy’s narrative.

In a commentary, Hu Xijin, the Global Times editor, wrote that Fang Fang’s diary would be used by political forces abroad and that the Chinese people might have to “pay the price for Fang Fang’s fame in the West.”

The online backlash has been so severe, Fang Fang wrote on Weibo, that it reminds her of the Cultural Revolution, the decade of political violence and chaos that she saw as a child. The only comfort, she wrote, is that “this type of Cultural Revolution is only conducted in cyberspace.”

More obscure people have also been subjected to hate. A woman in Wuhan who lost her daughter received what she described as a “Fang Fang-scale online attack” after she shared her grief on the internet and questioned whether the tragedy could have been avoided.

One user, who claimed to be a Wuhan resident, too, reprimanded her. “You can only represent the 1 percent who are dead,” the user wrote. “You can’t represent Wuhan. Do not disturb the 99 percent of us who are enjoying life.”

State-run media stands ready to elevate those who reinforce Beijing’s message.

Mr. Kowal, the American video blogger, won millions of views on Bilibili, a video site popular among young Chinese people, for his virus-related content out of New York. His videos also got him a 50-minute live appearance on China Central Television, the state broadcaster, to talk about the field hospital in Central Park and the shortage of personal protective equipment.

But such messages aren’t welcome when they’re about China. Three of Mr. Kowal’s Chinese counterparts, Chen Qiushi, Fang Binand Li Zehua, had tried to do the same thing in Wuhan during the peak of the outbreak. Their videos can’t be found online in China; they were able to upload their videos only to YouTube, which is blocked in the country. All three men have since vanished.

In his last video, which streamed his four-hour standoff with the state police outside his door, Mr. Li, a former CCTV anchor, compared young Chinese people to the protagonist in “The Truman Show,” the Jim Carrey movie in which the title character’s whole life is a lie.

But the lie they are living in is worse, because it is fueled by hatred. A generation of people is learning to hate not only people like Fang Fang but foreigners as well.

After Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, was admitted into intensive care with Covid-19, mocking comments from Weibo users — like “Can I laugh?” — received thousands of likes. When the United States surpassed China as the country with the most confirmed infections, many Chinese commenters gloated, “Congratulations!”

Gauging real sentiment in an authoritarian society is impossible. But the belligerent online environment has made many people uneasy.

Cui Yongyuan, a well-known former talk show host, in a recent article compared the online warriors to the fighters in the anti-foreigner, anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion in 1900.

“There are more and more Boxers online,” he wrote. “The Qing dynasty became the enemy of the world because of the Boxers’ evil behavior. One need not look far for a lesson.”

Source: With Selective Virus Coverage, China Builds a Culture of HateThe state propaganda machine highlights other countries’ mistakes while suppressing China’s, fueling anger toward foreigners and domestic critics.

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UK: Huge ‘immigration health surcharge’ fees paid by foreign NHS workers being reviewed, Priti Patel says

2020/04/27 Leave a comment

Always was an indefensible policy with the current COVID-19 pandemic highlighting the point (the UK has one of the higher number of deaths due to the pandemic in the EU):

The immigration health surcharge fees paid by foreign healthcare workers– despite working in the NHS themselves – are being reviewed, Priti Patel has said.

The home secretary revealed she had bowed to pressure to look again at the fees, in the light of the “extraordinary contribution” made by medical staff from overseas during the coronavirus pandemic.

Until now, ministers had held firm that the surcharge – due to soar from £400 a year to £624 this October – is a fair way for all migrants to contribute to the likely cost of their NHS care.

At the daily Downing Street press conference, Ms Patel was asked whether it was right to “scrap” the surcharge for overseas NHS staff, “given they too are fighting this pandemic”.

She replied that it was “under review”, adding: “We are looking at everything, including visas and surcharge.

“We are looking at everything now in terms of what we can do to continue to support everyone on the frontline of the NHS.

“We are speaking about the healthcare professionals, the medics, the doctors and nurses and allied healthcare professionals who have come to the UK.”

The possible cut, or removal, of the surcharge was revealed as Ms Patel played down hopes of an early easing of the lockdown as the death toll in hospitals passed 20,000.

She called it a “deeply tragic and moving moment”, warning “we are not out of the woods yet” – and telling people to stick to social distancing instructions.

“Quite frankly that is not right now. It is clear that it is not right now.”

The health surcharge was hugely controversial, even before the current crisis. There is no right of deferral, or ability to pay annually. Instead, it has to be paid in advance for the entire duration of an applicant’s visa or residency permit.

Meanwhile, nurses and junior doctors in training have starting salaries of between £18,000 and £23,000.

They are already paying tax and national insurance, like British nationals, and are therefore being “charged twice” for NHS treatment, campaigners have protested.

Nevertheless, only last month, when he announced his Budget, chancellor Rishi Sunak said it was necessary to ensure that “what people get out, they also put in”.

Once the UK leaves the Brexit transition period – at the end of the year – the government insists it will be paid by all EU citizens, as well as those from the rest of the world.

Around one in every seven NHS workers is foreign-born – a dependence that has attracted growing attention as they have been on the frontline of the fight against coronavirus.

Dame Donna Kinnair, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said it would welcome a U-turn to exempt nurses from the surcharge.

“The current crisis only serves to highlight the unfairness of charging overseas nurses working in the UK for healthcare services,” she said.

The concession comes ahead of Boris Johnson’s expected return to work in Downing Street on Monday, raising Conservative hopes of an end to the refusal to discuss how the UK will escape the lockdown.

The prime minister is expected back, three weeks after being taken to hospital when his coronavirus symptoms worsened – where he needed oxygen in intensive care, to ensure he survived

Conservative backbenchers have laid bare their frustrations at ministers batting away calls to set out options for easing restrictions, claiming it would underline the ‘stay at home’ message.

On Saturday, Philip Hammond, the former Conservative chancellor, asked if such a plan should be “published now”, replied: “Yes, I think that is the next step.

“I understand the prime minister is going to be back in harness in Downing Street at the beginning of next week and I very much hope that will signal a clear step change.”

Source: Huge ‘immigration health surcharge’ fees paid by foreign NHS workers being reviewed, Priti Patel says

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Canada is releasing immigration detainees at ‘unprecedented’ rates amid COVID-19 fears

2020/04/27 Leave a comment

Seems like calls have been listened to. Will see if the opposition raises this as a question period or committee issue:

The number of immigration detainees held in provincial jails and immigration holding centres across Canada has dropped by more than half since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, according to data provided to Global News.

And recent decisions from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada(IRB), the administrative tribunal that presides over immigration refugee matters, show how fears over COVID-19 are playing a significant role in some rulings to release immigration detainees.

On March 17, there were 353 immigration detainees held in provincial jails and immigration holding centres across Canada, according to data from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

By April 19, that number dropped by more than half to 147 detainees, 117 of whom were being held in provincial jails. The remaining 30 were held in one of Canada’s three immigration holding centres located in Toronto, Laval, Que., and Surrey, B.C.

“We would never normally see such a dramatic drop in detention (detainees) in such a short period of time. That’s unprecedented,” said Swathi Sekhar, an immigration and refugee lawyer based in Toronto.

A number of legal and advocacy groups have been calling for the release of immigration detainees and people held in jails and prisons who are not deemed risks to public safety due to the rising number of COVID-19 cases in these facilities, and the conditions there that make it difficult to isolate and control the spread of infection.

The majority of the immigration detainees held in jails are located in Ontario, which has been grappling with COVID-19 cases in its correctional facilities. Thousands of inmate in Ontario jails have been released in recent weeks as the province grapples with the outbreak.

Thirty-three of the 117 immigration detainees held in provincial jails as of April 19 were detained at the Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton, a combined maximum-security jail for remanded prisoners and a medium/maximum-security jail for convicted offenders serving sentences of less than two years.

Foreign nationals and permanent residents can be detained — sometimes indefinitely — by CBSA officers if the person is deemed unlikely to appear for an immigration proceeding like a hearing, if the person is deemed a threat to public safety or if the person’s identity is under question. Most detainees are held on the grounds that they are unlikely to appear for proceedings or because of questions over their identity.

Immigration detainees are held on administrative and not criminal grounds like a typical jail or prison inmate. Immigration detainees can be held in one of Canada’s three immigration holding centres, which resemble medium-security prisons, or in provincial jails across the country, depending on the circumstances of their case, or if there is no immigration holding centre in that part of the country.

Last month, the Canadian government enacted an emergency order under the Quarantine Act that prohibits entry by individuals into Canada for the purpose of claiming refugee protection.

“This new order has reduced the number (of) asylum seekers remaining in Canada or being detained,” a CBSA spokesperson said in an email. “Also, since a lot of our admissions into (immigration holding centres) or provincial facilities are directly related to traveller volumes, it is not unexpected to see the overall number of admissions go down.”

“CBSA officers are asked to focus efforts to explore all viable alternatives to detention for all cases, where there is no public safety concern.”

Recent detention review decisions provided to Global News from the IRB show how COVID-19 is being factored into determining whether or not to release someone from immigration detention.

One IRB decision from April 3 involves a Colombian man who had been detained in the Toronto immigration holding centre since Jan. 23 because he was deemed a danger to the public and unlikely to appear for his removal from Canada to Colombia. However, he was released on a bond in large part due to the risk of being exposed to COVID-19 while in detention. He was ordered to abide by a number of strict conditions as part of his release.

The IRB decision-maker, Jacqueline Swaisland, stated that the man, Angelo Rincon, has a history of non-compliance with immigration laws “at least in three countries” and has also violated criminal laws in Canada and the United States. This includes a conviction for possessing a controlled substance for the purpose of selling, another conviction related to a number of break-and-enters in the Greater Toronto Area last year and possession of property obtained by crime.

The decision-maker said that while Rincon was deemed a danger to the public due to his criminal history, “I find the danger that you pose to be at the low end of the spectrum” because of the limited sentences he had received for his convictions, his “stated remorse under sworn testimony” and “the fact that there has been no violence in the commission of any of the offences you have been involved in…”

In determining whether to release Rincon from detention, Swaisland stated that Rincon had already been held in detention for more than two months, something that weighs in his favour, and “with respect to anticipated length of detention [it’s] agreed by all parties that at this point it is unknown because of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“And it could be long given Canada is currently not enforcing removals and given that Columbia is not permitting the repatriation of even (its) own nationals and it is not clear how long that will go on for given the current COVID-19 pandemic,” Swaisland stated.

Last month, the CBSA temporarily halted deportations of people whose refugee or immigration claims had been rejected, with the exception of serious criminal cases that will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

The decision goes on to note that Rincon’s counsel provided “significant documentation” on the risks that someone in detention faces and his own fears associated with his potential exposure to the virus in the facility due to an underlying condition. TVO reported last month that an employee at the Toronto holding centre had contracted COVID-19 and had been in self-isolation.

“I find that the risk that you face are not at the same level of detainees in correctional facilities (particularly) given that there is such a limited number of the detainees currently being housed at the immigration holding centre, 15 as of today and given the significant steps that are being taken to reduce the risks to individuals being detained at the holding centre currently,” Rincon’s decision states.

“(But) even though the immigration holding centre is taking significant precautions, they are not perfect. And you still have a high risk of exposure and significant restrictions on your ability to self-isolate in a manner that the documentary evidence seems to suggest that is required with this virus.”

COVID-19 is also cited in an IRB decision from March 30 involving a Chilean woman who had been detained at the Toronto immigration holding centre since March 17 because she was deemed unlikely to appear for her immigration proceedings. The decision states that the woman may be released from detention as long as she abides by a number of conditions, including living at a shelter and reporting regularly to the CBSA.

Her identity and some of the details of the decision are redacted, as she has a pending refugee claim, which is subject to privacy rules. The decision notes that the woman’s refugee claim is on hold for the time being, and proceedings will resume “once the pandemic is addressed and the Immigration and Refugee Board begins to hear and process claims again.”

“You are now waiting for your (refugee) hearing which under normal circumstances can be a long process and everything is delayed now due to the pandemic,” the decision-maker, Julia Huys, said to the woman.

Huys goes on to describe the elevated risk of exposure to COVID-19 among detainees.

“I am taking note that the conditions in the immigration holding centre may be better than provincial jail but I find only slightly,” Huys said.

“So detained people will come into contact with many others including detainees, other detainees, guards, staff, and movement in and out of people … from the immigration holding centre. And I am also taking very seriously the fact that there has now been a case of COVID-19 at the immigration holding centre with one of the staff.”

An IRB spokesperson said in an email to Global News that it’s “open to decision-makers to consider any relevant factors in determining whether detention is justified, including COVID-19 and its potential risks to detained individuals.”

The IRB also noted that its immigration division is “entertaining requests from parties for early detention reviews, for example to consider alternatives where the person detained may have a vulnerability that places them at elevated risk from the virus or any cases with an alternative to detention.”

Source: Canada is releasing immigration detainees at ‘unprecedented’ rates amid COVID-19 fears

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How Canada’s crucial data gaps are hindering the coronavirus pandemic response

2020/04/25 Leave a comment

Good long read on data gaps. Have excerpted the intro and the section on the lack of visible and ethnic minority data:

Gaps in key health and economic data are hindering Canada’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving Canadians in the dark about who is being infected or struggling with the devastated economy, say researchers, politicians and scientists.

These blind spots could blunt the federal economic rescue effort, hide inequities in deaths from the disease and slow our emergence from self-isolation in the months ahead. Experts are urging provincial and federal leaders to open up more streams of data immediately, as doing so might save lives and livelihoods.

Canada has a long-standing problem of information gaps, The Globe and Mail found in a year-long series, and that has left us vulnerable during public health crises before. A government audit found that during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, data deficiencies left the Public Health Agency of Canada “unable to answer basic questions such as the rate of spread” of the virus.

….

Nationally, the ethnicity of those who have been infected or have died is unknown. Because of data gaps, the death toll likely is being underestimated.

On the economic front, Canadians don’t know how many in each province are applying for employment insurance every week (as the United States does by state). They don’t have up-to-date numbers on bankruptcies, mortgages in arrears, how workers in the gig economy are faring, the extent of layoffs or the degree to which the federal government’s plan for an enhanced wage-subsidy program has spurred rehiring.

Arjumand Siddiqi, the division head of epidemiology at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, said she and her colleagues are eager to help analyze the fast-moving crisis to a greater extent, but have been stalled by a lack of detailed figures on the demographics and locations of confirmed cases, among other things.

“We have the will, we have the expertise, but we don’t have the data,” she said. “It would be good to know what is actually happening.”

One of the most pressing gaps, Dr. Siddiqi said, is information about the ethnicity of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 or died of the disease. No Canadian province makes this data available, in keeping with a long-standing national aversion to publishing statistics about racial disparities in health. (Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, Eileen de Villa, has announced that the city is exploring ways to collect race-based coronavirus data on its own.)

But there is reason to suspect race may be a factor in determining who is being infected and dying from the virus, Dr. Siddiqi said, both because of the prevalence of various underlying health conditions in some racialized communities, and their over-representation in low-wage jobs such as nursing, delivery and retail, which make them highly prone to exposure to the virus. Early U.S. data indicate that black Americans are being admitted to hospital and dying from COVID-19 at a disproportionate rate.

“We are very clear that we want to know who is at risk,” Dr. Siddiqi said. “But we’re just very hesitant – and that’s kind of putting it mildly – to add race to the set of dividing factors that we’re willing to entertain.”

This blind spot extends to Indigenous people, whose health care is largely provided by the federal government. NDP MP Charlie Angus would like to change that. In a letter to Health Minister Patty Hajdu last week, he urged the government to start keeping data on COVID-19 cases among Indigenous people, saying, “It would be irresponsible at this time to turn a blind eye to the movement of COVID through vulnerable populations.”

“It seems bloody obvious that you would want to track this and make policy based on this information,” he said in an interview. “I think there’s a naive arrogance in the principle of saying: ‘We’re not the United States, we don’t have their problems, we don’t discriminate like that.’ ”

Even government-funded groups such as the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) have begun calling for race-based data around coronavirus cases. The organization now supports the idea of health care providers asking a common question about the race of COVID-19 patients and says it would be willing to compile the data.

“The COVID pandemic is certainly exposing gaps in important data flows within and between health care systems in Canada,” CIHI spokeswoman Alex Maheux said.

…

Source: How Canada’s crucial data gaps are hindering the coronavirus pandemic response ‘We have the will, we have the expertise, but we don’t have the data’: Nationally, the lack of coronavirus-related health and economic data is stalling efforts to analyze the fast-moving COVID-19 crisis

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John Ivison: Scheer’s lame response to fringe Tory intolerance proves his lack of leadership again

2020/04/25 Leave a comment

One almost has the impression that Ivison uses his condemnation of Scheer’s non-response to Derek Sloan’s xenophobia and accusations of dual loyalty with respect to Theresa Tam as a backhand way to criticize Theresa Tam’s actual performance (which is legitimate unlike Sloah’s comments):

It’s not so much the bigotry as the hypocrisy that is so exasperating.

Derek Sloan’s comments on Theresa Tam were clearly xenophobic, drawing immediate approval of renowned white “nationalists” like Paul Fromm.

The Ontario MP and Conservative leadership candidate asked in an online post and in an email to potential supporters whether Canada’s chief medical officer “works for Canada or China?”

The coded Canada-first language was a thinly disguised appeal for support from the intolerant fringe of the Conservative Party (Tam was born in Hong Kong).

But Sloan has no hope of winning the party’s leadership. He is currently confounding the maxim that there is no such thing as bad publicity and very soon he will fade into foot-notoriety.

My vexation is with the Conservative party establishment.

Even though leader Andrew Scheer is a lame duck, he is still responsible for the credibility of a venerable political party that professes to represent all Canadians.

In a multi-ethnic country where visible minorities make up a quarter of the population, no party tainted by racism can win power.

Yet when Scheer was asked to denounce Sloan’s statement, he turtled, saying he did not want to comment on the behaviour of a leadership candidate. That didn’t stop then interim Conservative Rona Ambrose dumping on Kellie Leitch’s bogus “Canadian values” test in the last leadership go-round.

If Scheer doesn’t see the need to decry comments from a sitting member of caucus that tars all Conservative MPs and the party with the brush of intolerance, he should go now.

In truth, his tone-deaf response is entirely in keeping with the deficiencies that saw him ousted in the first place: an apparent inability to articulate a contemporary conservatism that might appeal to the tesserae that make up the modern Canadian mosaic.

Sloan’s prejudice was calculated to appeal to an element that engages in a collective judgment of races and faiths.

In doing so, he succeeded in obscuring legitimate criticism of Tam, the World Health Organization and the Communist Party of China.

Tam’s performance has been controversial — and not just in hindsight.

In late January, she told Canadians there was no reason to be “overly concerned” about COVID-19.

She was part of a WHO emergency committee that concluded it was too early to declare a “public health emergency of international concern” on January 23.

After Canada had confirmed its first case, Tam’s concern seemed to be more focused on stigma being directed at people of Chinese and Asian descent.

At the end of January, she was reassuring Canadians that the health risks were low and that asymptomatic people arriving in Canada did not need to be quarantined.

At a health committee meeting, she was asked by a Liberal MP and physician, Marcus Powlowski, about reports the disease is communicable during the incubation period, to which she replied “people with mild symptoms don’t transmit very readily”.

She subsequently resisted the mandatory quarantining of incoming travellers, the closing of borders and the use of face-masks — all public policies that were later reversed.

“It’s going to be rare but we are expecting cases,” she told the health committee, the day before the WHO finally declared a global health emergency.

Tam can be accused of complacency. She can be denounced for blindly following Tedros Adhonam Ghebreyesus, who finds himself in disrepute for failing to alert the world earlier about COVID-19’s virulence. The WHO’s director general is accused of subordinating his responsibility to protecting China from scrutiny, ignoring warnings about human-to-human transmission and even applauding Chinese president Xi Jinping for “timely and effective measures in dealing with the epidemic”.

But Sloan didn’t just question Tam’s competence, he queried her loyalty. He did it for leadership votes from conspiracy theorists and survivalists, who fear gun bans, internment and a UN invasion.

His leader should have insisted on an apology or a resignation from caucus. Instead it was left to two rookie Conservative MPs, Eric Melillo and Eric Duncan to make clear that questioning Tam’s allegiance crossed a line.

Sloan’s comment offered “a platform to extreme theories and does not represent our party,” said Melillo.

“I may have questions and constructive concerns at times about Dr. Tam and (her) team during these evolving and challenging times. But I will never question her loyalty to Canada and to the best interests of Canadians,” said Duncan.

Many Conservatives will be grateful to two of the party’s newest MPs for offering a beacon of hope and decency.

Source: John Ivison: Scheer’s lame response to fringe Tory intolerance proves his lack of leadership again

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New Trump Immigration Order Does What Congress Rejected In 2018

2020/04/25 Leave a comment

The pandemic as opportunity. Good explanation of what is covered and what is not covered:

Donald Trump has issued a proclamation that would block indefinitely immigrants in categories the administration failed to eliminate in a bill before the U.S. Senate in February 2018. Economists consider the justification for the president’s action devoid of serious analysis and unconvincing. U.S. citizens will no longer be able to obtain immigrant visas for a parent, adult child or sibling, and the proclamation contains a lit fuse in the form of a 30-day review of H-1B and other temporary visas. In effect, the Trump administration has used the COVID-19 crisis to rewrite immigration law without passing a bill through Congress.

The presidential proclamation contains nearly identical provisions on legal immigration to those of a White House-designed bill the U.S. Senate rejected on February 15, 2018, which it voted down on a “cloture motion” 60-39.

The legislation, like the proclamation issued on April 22, 2020, would have eliminated the ability of U.S. citizens to sponsor a parent, as well as adult children and siblings (the family preference categories). It also ended the Diversity Visa lottery. (See page S1036 here.) The U.S. unemployment ratein February 2018 was only 4.1% when the administration attempted to stop immigrants from entering the United States in the same categories as were included in the April 22, 2020, presidential proclamation.

Originally, based on early discussions, the 2018 legislation was to represent a compromise between Democrats and Donald Trump to provide permanent legal protection for individuals brought to America as children, particularly those granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). However, press reports indicate White House adviser Stephen Miller intervened to ensure any administration-supported bill contained a “wish list” of immigration restrictions that Democrats would be unlikely to support. Miller is credited with drafting the new proclamation.

“Congress considered and rejected legislation that would have cut the same family-based visa categories that President Trump targets in the executive order,” said Lynden Melmed, a partner at Berry Appleman & Leiden and former chief counsel for USCIS, in an interview.

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The ‘Ferociously Contested’ Story of How Blackness Became a Legal Identity

2020/04/25 Leave a comment

Interesting historical account:

How did Africans become “blacks” in the Americas?

Those who were forced into the ships of the infamous slave trade probably thought of themselves using ethnic and territorial terms that have been lost to us. But across the ocean, enslavers and local elites lumped Africans of many different backgrounds into a single category of debasement, “n—–s,” and sustained this category through laws that regulated freedom.

But the creation of racial identity through legal means took some surprising turns.

From the beginning, enslaved people and free people of African ancestry used those same laws to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. They created spaces for communities where “blackness” and freedom were not only possible, but foundational.

Although free people of color were few in number compared to enslaved people, and lived on the margins of plantation societies in many ways, the contests over their identities, status, and rights were the terrain on which race was made. Legal contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims of citizenship would be tied to racial identity.

By the early 18th century, Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (all colonies themselves, of the Spanish, British, and French Empires, respectively), had legal regimes that constituted blackness as a debased category equivalent to enslavement. But 150 years later, by the mid-19th century, the social implications of blackness in each of these regions were fundamentally different.

In Cuba in the 1850s, a free man of color could marry a white woman, attend public school, and participate in a religious association that gave him opportunities to be part of public life. But, in 1850s Louisiana or Virginia, a free man of color saw his churches and schools being shut down, faced prosecution for marrying across the color line, and ran the risk of being kidnapped, imprisoned, and even re-enslaved for remaining in the state in which he was born.

In Louisiana or Virginia, when a person sought to prove in court that he was not a person of color, he would bring evidence of civic acts, because citizenship and whiteness were so closely linked in political thought and legal doctrine that a citizen must be a white man, and only a white man could be a citizen. In Cuba, similar conduct was not necessarily incompatible with blackness.

The key to understanding these divergent trajectories lies in the law of freedom. Different approaches to freedom were rooted in various legal traditions. The right to manumission, for example, was firmly entrenched in the Spanish law of slavery, and so in Cuba manumission, or release from slavery, was not tied to race, a crucial difference from both Louisiana and Virginia.

One turning point in this story was the Age of Revolution. The populations of free people of color, who claimed freedom in rising numbers, exploded in all three jurisdictions, and the example of the Haitian Revolution inspired the enslaved as it struck fear in the hearts of enslavers.

In Cuba in the 1850s, a free man of color could marry a white woman, attend public school, and participate in a religious association that gave him opportunities to be part of public life. But, in 1850s Louisiana or Virginia, a free man of color saw his churches and schools being shut down, faced prosecution for marrying across the color line, and ran the risk of being kidnapped, imprisoned, and even re-enslaved for remaining in the state in which he was born.

But the expansion of freedom meant different things in the Spanish empire and in the U.S. republic. Communities of people of color in Cuba and Spanish Louisiana owed their existence to legal understandings and customary practices anchored in traditions of the ancien regime. Enslaved people who managed to purchase their freedom or, more rarely, obtained manumission through other means, became members of highly stratified societies. Black freedom did not imply social equality and republican rights.

By contrast, in Virginia during the Age of Revolution, the expansion of manumission, and the increase in freedom lawsuits, were tied to questions of citizenship, and of black participation in the new political order under conditions of equality. Enslaved and free people of color alike infused these questions with a sense of urgency, as they made use of every available legal loophole to purchase or make claims for their own freedom. Their actions produced dramatic results: by the early 19th century, the proportion of free people of color in Virginia had increased significantly.

Virginia’s white citizens witnessed these trends with horror and petitioned to outlaw manumissions. It was, literally, a reactionary request: to restore the colonial law of freedom. The 1806 law requiring freed slaves to leave the state fell short of that goal, but marked the first step towards a social order in which blacks could only exist as slaves.

After Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, whites’ political will to exclude free blacks intensified. Slaveholding states in the U.S. South responded to threats of rebellion, and to Northern abolitionists’ demands for immediate emancipation, with a defense of slavery as a positive good: the best possible condition for debased “Negroes.” To galvanize the support of non-slaveholding whites, Southerners cemented white solidarity by defining citizenship and voting rights along racial lines.

This movement created a paradox: egalitarian democracy would go hand-in-hand with the expansion of racist practices and ideologies. As slaveholders appealed to non-slaveholders with the promise of broad citizenship rights for all white men, free people of color became increasingly anomalous, and even dangerous to the polity. That is why colonization efforts that sought to remove free blacks to a distant location in Africa prospered in 19th-century Virginia and Louisiana (which changed hands to the United States in 1803), but not in Cuba.

That is also why Virginia and Louisiana acted in the 19th century, especially in the 1850s, to end the possibility of manumission, self-purchase, or freedom suits. By 1860, free people of color in Virginia and Louisiana were increasingly forced to leave the state upon emancipation or to live under threat of prosecution. A few even chose “voluntary” re-enslavement in order to remain with their families.

Free people of color continued to claim freedom in court, and fought tenaciously for the basic rights to a homeland, to remain close to friends and kin, and to live in their communities of origin. Yet they saw their militia and schools shut down, and their churches survived only under white leadership. Increasingly contested battles in court over racial identity attested to the growing anxiety over black citizenship and the need to prove whiteness in order to claim basic rights.

By 1860, Cuba had diverged significantly from Louisiana and Virginia—not in its legal regime of slavery, but rather in its regime of race. Enslaved people in Cuba took advantage of legal reforms that were not intended for their benefit to carve out greater freedoms for themselves. But in Virginia and Louisiana, where the status of communities of color was reduced to something closer to slavery. Race rather than enslavement became the true “impassable barrier,” in the words of Justice Roger B. Taney. In Cuba, where free people of color could be rights-bearing subjects, enslavement was the dividing line.

Laws regulating free people of color also served as a template for post-emancipation societies seeking ways to keep black people in their place. Slavery laws did not translate forward in the same way that regulations based on race did. When Southerners sought to restore the antebellum order after the Civil War, they could not re-impose slavery, but they passed Black Codes whose language echoed the laws regarding free people of color almost exactly. Under the Black Codes, freedmen could enter into contracts, own property, and appear in court on their own behalf. But in myriad other ways, their lives were constricted, just as they would have been if emancipated before 1861.

In the U.S., laws limiting the immigration of free people of color from one state into the other were the first immigration restrictions. These statutes echo into the 20th century—and to the present day—in limitations on the right to immigrate into the U.S. based on racial and national identity. In Cuba, on the other hand, legal racial barriers came under increasing attack even before final emancipation in 1886. In the 1880s, limitations on interracial marriages were eliminated and racial segregation in public services and education was outlawed. These changes were an imperial imperative. As the colonial state of Spain sought to retain control over its restive colony of Cuba, it had to cultivate the political support of the free black population. By 1898, the island’s short-lived political regime of “autonomy” recognized black males as voting subjects with equal rights.

The transition from black slavery to black citizenship was neither linear nor preordained. It was as contentious and ferociously contested a process in Cuba as it was in Virginia and Louisiana. But the new struggles for standing and citizenship took place against the backdrop of significantly different legal regimes of race. From being enslaved to being a citizen, the connecting tissue before and after emancipation for black people was not “from slave to citizen,” but from black to black.

Source: The ‘Ferociously Contested’ Story of How Blackness Became a Legal Identity

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COVID-19 takes unequal toll on immigrants in Nordic region

2020/04/25 Leave a comment

More on racial disparities:

The first person in Sadad Dakhare’s two-bedroom apartment in Oslo, Norway, to show symptoms was his 4-year-old niece. Next, his mother, his sister and he himself fell ill. Then, about a week after his niece became sick, Dakhare heard his 76-year-old father coughing heavily.

Sadad Dakhare (R), his father Mohamed Dakhare Farah and niece Safa Mohamed Hassan (L) who fell ill with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) but have now recovered pose in a photo taken in Oslo, Norway April 23, 2020. Picture taken April 23, 2020. Samsam Muhammed Dakhare/Handout via REUTERS. THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY

He found his father lying in bed, gasping for air. “Just call an ambulance,” the father told Dakhare.

At an Oslo hospital, Dakhare’s father tested positive for COVID-19 and was treated for a few days before he was discharged to finish his recovery at home.

The Dakhare family’s story is a familiar one among Somalis in Norway and other Nordic countries, where the pandemic is taking a disproportionate toll on some immigrant groups. Governments in Sweden, Norway and Finland are taking extra steps to try to slow the spread of the disease in these communities.

Across Europe, little is known about who is affected by the virus because governments are releasing limited demographic information about the sick and those who die. But a Reuters examination of government data in three Nordic countries where more details are available shows that some immigrant groups are among those affected at higher rates than the general populace.

“WORRYING” DISPARITY

In Norway, where 15% of residents were born abroad, 25% who had tested positive for COVID-19 by April 19 were foreign-born. Somalis, with 425 confirmed cases, are the largest immigrant group testing positive, accounting for 6% of all confirmed cases — more than 10 times their share of the population.

Somalis are the most overrepresented immigrant group among Sweden’s confirmed cases, as well. Their 283 positive tests account for about 5% of the nearly 6,000 cases documented between March 13 and April 7. That’s seven times their share of the population. Iraqis, Syrians and Turks also made up disproportionately large shares of positive cases.

In Finland’s capital city of Helsinki, the mayor said it was “worrying” that almost 200 Somalis had tested positive by mid-April. They accounted for about 17% of positive cases — 10 times their share of the city’s population.

More than 100,000 Somalia-born live in the three countries, mostly in Sweden and Norway, one of the largest Somali diasporas in the world. Many arrived as refugees of war in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. Several factors place them more at risk of getting sick, public health officials and researchers say.

VIRUS OUTPACES RESPONSE

It is common in all three countries for multiple generations of Somalis to live, like the Dakhares do, in crowded apartments, making it easier for the virus to spread from one family member to the next. They also tend to work in high-contact jobs — healthcare workers, drivers and cleaners, for example — with a higher risk for exposure.

Language barriers also are at play, and some have criticized governments in Sweden and Norway for failing to move fast enough in communicating about the virus to immigrant groups.

“By the time information translated to different languages was spread sufficiently, the infection rate among minority groups was already very high,” said Linda Noor, a social anthropologist who is managing director of Minotenk, a think tank focused on minority-related politics in Norway. She said a lot of information in Norway was distributed through national health authorities’ websites that are unfamiliar to many people in immigrant communities.

Public health officials in both Norway and Sweden pointed to COVID-19 information they published in multiple languages, including Somali, in early to mid-March. But they acknowledged that they did not reach some immigrants fast enough.

GETTING THE WORD OUT

“I think it is clear from the epidemiological situation, especially looking at the high proportion of Somalis with COVID-19, that we did not reach this group in time,” said Hilde Kløvstad, department director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

Once the virus started to spread, officials realized they needed to be more focused in their outreach, she said, adding that the spread of the virus among immigrant communities is slowing.

In Oslo, officials contacted leaders in immigrant communities, who helped them get the word out via social media, word of mouth, posters and online videos targeting Somalis, said Hanne Gjørtz, head of communications for the city. Health alerts in Somali aired on the radio, and text messages with translated information were sent to Somali residents.

“We saw that this led to increased traffic on our websites,” she said.

“But we are constantly learning,” she added. “It would definitely have been an advantage to have videos and posters in place earlier in this crisis. This has been and still is a crisis of great speed, and it took some time for us to find the right ways to reach different groups.”

Sadad Dakhare (R) and his niece Safa Mohamed Hassan who fell ill with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) but have now recovered pose in this photo taken April 22, 2020 in Oslo, Norway. Picture taken April 22, 2020. Samsam Muhammed Dakhare/Handout via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY.

HITTING THE STREETS

In Rinkeby-Kista and Spånga-Tensta, two Stockholm boroughs where immigrants and their children make up most of the population, rates of infection are more than two times higher than in the city overall. Trying to slow the spread of the virus in these areas, where Somalis are the biggest minority group, the government is offering temporary furnished rental apartments to at-risk-groups, such as elderly people who live in multi-generational housing, said Benjamin Dousa, chairman of the Rinkeby-Kista district council.

Government workers who speak a variety of languages, including Somali, have hit the streets in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods — near libraries, religious buildings, municipal offices, metro stations and grocery stores — to warn people about COVID-19, said officials from government body Region Stockholm.

In a statement to Reuters, Region Stockholm said it could have been faster in distributing multilingual information before the virus began spreading disproportionately among immigrant groups.

“However, we are working in the middle of a situation which is before unseen,” the statement said. “Therefore, it is difficult to be as fast as is needed and to foresee all needs.”

The statement added that the infection rate is slowing in Spånga-Tensta and Rinkeby-Kista.

“SITUATION DEMANDS TEAMWORK”

Helsinki is gearing up for similar outreach.

“The situation demands enhanced teamwork, continued development of multilingual services and effective targeted communications,” said Mayor Jan Vapaavuori. “We have entered into discussions with the Finnish Somali League about new measures to improve the situation.”

Somalis themselves also are trying to spread the word about how to stay safe.

Ayan Abdulle posted an informational video on Facebook, but she found she wasn’t reaching the people who needed the information most.

Abdulle, 29, who was born in Somalia and came to Norway at age 9, heads a non-governmental organization in the city of Bergen called Arawelo, which usually focuses on helping young immigrants apply for jobs and find friends. After the coronavirus outbreak, Abdulle started to focus on the elderly as well, helping them with grocery shopping. When she spoke with elderly Somali women out shopping last month, she learned they were not getting enough information about the coronavirus because they weren’t using social media and not all of them understood Norwegian.

“In Somali culture, most information is spread by word of mouth,” Abdulle said. “Now we are going from door to door and hanging posters informing people about the symptoms and how dangerous the disease can be.”

Source: COVID-19 takes unequal toll on immigrants in Nordic region

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Trump’s immigration move may force IT firms to shift staff offsite

2020/04/24 Leave a comment

Further possible effects for Indian IT services companies and tech in general:

US President Donald Trump’s decision to temporarily suspend immigration could further reduce Indian IT services companies’ reliance on H1-B visas.

While tech majors such as TCS and Infosys are increasingly hiring locally in the US and Europe, changes in delivery models following the Covid-19 pandemic could bring down the need for onsite deployment of Indian techies.

Trump, in a tweet, said he intends to sign an executive order to temporarily suspend immigration “in light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our great American Citizens.”

In the likelihood of immigration suspension, companies may not opt for H1-B visas as the Covid-19 pandemic has caused new headaches. TCS is already working on a delivery model that requires only 25 per cent of workforce to be present in an office. If 75 per cent of techies can do their work from outside office, it would not matter if they are in the US or in India.

“My estimate is that demand for onsite work (which requires H1-B) will come down by 50 per cent once things normalise,” said Harish HV, Managing Partner, ECube Investment Advisors.

While H1-B is a non-immigrant visa, Indians as well as others have been taking this route to get US citizenship. Indian nationals are the biggest beneficiaries of the H-1B visas, which the US Centre for USCIS issues to get “qualified” professionals into the US.

“Trump’s decision, albeit temporary, will have significant implications right from people whose citizenship is under process to H1-B renewals,” said a US immigration lawyer whose clients include Infosys, Mphasis and other tech companies. This development comes in the wake of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) which, last week, gave its nod to extend H1-B visas which have expired or set to expire.

For the fiscal 2020-21, the US received around 275,000 fresh H1-B visa requests, of which 67 per cent were from India, US government data stated. The mandate is for granting 85,000 visas for immigrants.

According to industry estimates, there are around three million H1-B visa holders. While there are no definitive numbers on how many H1-B visa holders apply for citizenship, some lawyers peg that 24 per cent of H1-B visa holders tend to get green cards every year.

Indian software services companies have had it tough in the last few years. Visa rejection rates were around 30 per cent in 2019 and only two Indian companies were among the top ten visa recipients. Companies that BusinessLine reached out to declined to comment on Trump’s tweet since the final policy document has not been released by the US Government.

H1-B visas have been under the lens by US authorities as visa abuse cases have been reported and lawsuits filed against Indian companies, alleging that people of South Asian origin are hired to displace American workers.

On their part, Indian companies have started to hire in the US. However, such restrictions in the current scenario of weak revenue and higher local employees would have an impact in the short term, said an analyst from a brokerage house who did not wish to be quoted.

Shares of TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Tech and Tech Mahindra all closed lower than Monday’s close after Trump tweeted.

Source: Trump’s immigration move may force IT firms to shift staff offsite

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How COVID-19 could reshape the federal public service

2020/04/24 Leave a comment

Too early to tell but the opportunities are there:

The COVID-19 pandemic has handed the public service a grand-scale opportunity to experiment with new ways of operating, including rethinking the need for massive office buildings in Ottawa-Gatineau and embracing digital government more fully. What public servants learn in the next few months by working remotely and in crisis could jolt the bureaucracy into a re-ordering of practices and culture that reformers haven’t been able to do in 25 years.

Public servants rapidly mobilized over the past month to implement a massive financial aid package, abandoning play-it-safe and rules-bound processes to put the needs of Canadians first as they doled out billions in emergency funding.

“It’s not that the crisis is forcing us to reshape the public service, but the post-pandemic world could be the window of opportunity, or necessity, to accelerate the renewal and reforms in institutions,” former privy council clerk Michael Wernick said in an interview.

Alex Benay, the former chief information officer who led the government’s digital agenda until he left for the private sector, wrote the crisis unleashed a “new norm,” the “digital first” government he’s long pressed for.

“Sadly, it took COVID-19 for people to realize that the real problem was not technology, not necessarily the culture…The real ‘enemy,’ so to speak, has been the operating model of government has yet to change to adjust to the new digital realities,” Benay wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.

Crises sparks change, but not always lasting change

It’s not the first time the public service has roared into action to combat a crisis. Its rapid response was reminiscent of the moves it made during the “program review” budgetary cuts of the 1990s, after the 9/11 attacks, and during the 2008-09 financial crisis, which had lasting impacts on government.

These events didn’t, however, fundamentally change the culture of the public service and many argue it went back to its old risk-averse and hierarchical ways as the crisis receded. That culture is hard-wired into public service, built on rules developed to keep governments accountable for the decisions they make with taxpayers’ money.

The public service has been slow to embrace technology that’s changing the private sector at breakneck speed. Bureaucrats have been pushed to innovate, to use digital tools to rethink how they work and deliver services, to take risks, and even to fail as they experiment with new ways of working.

Mel Cappe, who was Canada’s top bureaucrat in the aftermath of 9/11, said today’s public servants rightly opted to get emergency aid out to those who needed it over a “bullet-proof system” that ensured no mistakes at the front-end. The thinking was that errors could be fixed later.

It allowed the public service to take just two weeks to distribute employment insurance payments to 2.4 million applicants, the number it normally handles in a year. Money “going to people undeserving is an error I would rather have than depriving people of the money they need in crisis,” Cappe said in a podcast.

“Work will change and services will change. Why does a call centre have to have a building?” he said in an email. “Our expectations of the role of government have increased dramatically. New programs, new services, new bodies. But we have no idea what or how.”

A smaller, more distributed public service?

Long before the pandemic struck, questions had been raised as to why nearly 42 percent of federal workers are clustered in office towers in the National Capital Region. In the blink of an eye, thousands of bureaucrats are working from home. Many predict it won’t be long before politicians will be asking why these home offices are in the nation’s capital. Why can’t those jobs be across the country?

The public service’s headquarters is in Ottawa-Gatineau – where it occupies about 3.5 million square metres of office space – because that’s where Parliament, ministers and deputy ministers are. The pandemic shows cabinet, Parliament and MPs can meet virtually, so it’s “inevitable there will be push to spread those jobs across the country,” said Wernick

“I think that 10 years from now the public service will be much smaller, more distributed, less concentrated in Ottawa and flatter in hierarchy. It’s been moving in that direction and this will accelerate it,” he said.

Ryan Androsoff, who teaches digital leadership at the Institute on Governance and is a co-founder of the Canadian Digital Service, calls the crisis an “inflection point” for remote work. Forced to work at home, public servants know they can do it.

He argues agents who work at the government’s 221 call centres could work remotely, as could many policy analysts and other knowledge workers. It could lead to a major reduction in federal real estate holdings across the country.

There are bugs to iron out – more laptops and tablets are needed; employees need access to software for video conferencing, cloud and collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams; and above all, they need more bandwidth. Employees not working on the pandemic or other critical jobs have been directed to stay off the network during peak hours because of limited available bandwidth. Protocols would also need to be developed for accessing confidential documents remotely and the setting of productivity goals.

By headcount, the public service is larger in the regions, but there has long been a divide between headquarters and regions. Senior management is in Ottawa, where policy and decisions are made, leaving operations to the regions. Regional workers have often complained they feel out of the loop and like second-class employees.

Technology and distance working will eliminate that divide and allow the government to recruit a workforce that better represents the country to help resolve the regional alienation dividing the country. Androsoff warned, however, that divide could worsen if the region’s operational workers make the switch to remote working, but Ottawa policy-makers go back to the office as normal.

“Moving to a remote and distributed workforce as the norm for everyone opens up all parts of the country to feel they are a part of the central government rather than isolated in regional outposts,” Androsoff said.

“I am a westerner, from Saskatchewan, and in Ottawa you tend to see far fewer people in policy-making or executive roles from the east and west partly because it requires a move to Ottawa.”

Office accommodation for 300,000 employees is one of the government’s biggest operating expenses. It may be cheaper to set up workers at home, but it will also require a new approach to management for some 15,000 supervisors and 7,000 executives.

“It’s never been a technology limitation. It’s the philosophy about managing the workforce that has to change,” said Michel Vermette, a former CEO of the Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada.

“It means making people accountable for what they produce, and the public service has not done that very well. It has substituted office presence for production.  Managers need to think differently; hold people accountable for what they do, not for showing up,” he said.

Vermette said the crisis is showing managers they can trust employees are actually working when not in the office because suddenly “they have no choice and people are demonstrating they can be productive at home.”

It could also help change the culture of endless meetings. Some hope the number of large in-person meetings could be curtailed and call for training on how to run them better. Meetings held online or by videoconferencing should treat everyone the same whether they are physically present at headquarters or calling in.

Improving digital access to services

Under lockdown, people are living even more digitally and will emerge expecting better and speedier digital service — especially after they received almost immediate relief benefits in their bank accounts, said Androsoff. He expects demand for digital services will accelerate and the 32 percent of Canadians who still visit federal offices will decline.

The Liberal government has put a lot of stock in modernizing digital services as a way to restore trust in government. The crisis, however, exposes the risks of aging technology that governments have been warned about for a decade. Systems are outdated; some more than 50 years old, costly to maintain and on the brink of failure.

That’s particularly the case at Employment and Social Development Canada, which with the Canada Revenue Agency, jumped huge technological and approval process hurdles to deliver emergency funding.

Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, argues a “silver lining” is the realization that technology is the backbone of government’s business, not just the back office.

“There will be a big push for improvement in technology because the government is way behind in investments in infrastructure and training,” said Daviau, whose union represents 17,000 federal information technology workers.

“But the downside is whenever there is an economic stimulus, they take it back from the public service, so I worry for the future. There will be a restraint budget. How will the public service be reshaped; what will be cut and what will government decide it can live without? This situation clearly highlights the importance of a public service that can act quickly.”

Government is already racing to figure out how to steer the country into a post-pandemic recovery, which will remain uncertain until a vaccine is found. Many bureaucrats are braced for a cost-cutting budget, whether in 2022 or 2023. They say national and health security will be top spending priorities, and will nudge technology upgrades off the table.

“I share concerns that the inevitable fiscal retrenchment in next couple of years will slam on the brakes,” said Wernick. “We could lose the best parts of the innovation of the public service that has already happened and the appetite for continuing to invest in back office, IT and service improvement.”

Source: How COVID-19 could reshape the federal public service

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