Trevor Phillips suspended from Labour over Islamophobia allegations

2020/03/11 Leave a comment

Never been a fan of some of the statements of Phillips, including the examples cited in the article. But expulsion only draws further attention to some of the weaknesses of Labour:

The former UK equality watchdog chief, Trevor Phillips, has been suspended from the Labour Party over allegations of Islamophobia.

The Times newspaper reported the anti-racism campaigner is being investigated over past comments dating back years.

Mr Phillips, ex-chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said Labour was in danger of collapsing into a “brutish, authoritarian cult”.

Labour said it takes complaints about Islamophobia “extremely seriously”.

A spokeswoman added: “[The complaints] are fully investigated in line with our rules and procedures, and any appropriate disciplinary action is taken.”

Mr Phillips was among 24 public figures who wrote to the Guardian last year declaring their refusal to vote for Labour because of its association with anti-Semitism.

He could be expelled from the party for alleged prejudice against Muslims.

Mr Phillips has been suspended pending investigation over remarks, including expressing concerns about Pakistani Muslim men sexually abusing children in northern British towns, according to the Times.

It says the complaint also covers his comments about the failure of some Muslims to wear poppies for Remembrance Sunday and the sympathy shown by some in an opinion poll towards the “motives” of the Charlie Hebdo attackers.

The paper said many of his statements are years-old but that Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby suspended him as a matter of urgency to “protect the party’s reputation”.

‘A kind of racism’

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Phillips stood by his previous assertions that Muslims were “different”, adding: “Well, actually, that’s true. The point is Muslims are different and in many ways I think that is admirable.”

But he criticised the party for taking offence, saying: “I am kind of surprised that what is and always has been an open and democratic party decides that its members cannot have healthy debate about how we address differences of values and outlooks.”

Mr Phillips went on to describe the decision by Labour to adopt the definition of Islamophobia agreed by an all-party parliamentary group on British Muslims as “nonsense”, as Muslims were “not a race”.

He added: “My objection is very simple. That definition said…that Islamophobia is rooted in a kind of racism – expressions of hostility towards Muslimness.

“First of all, Muslims are not a race. My personal hero was Muhammad Ali, before that Malcolm X.

“They became Muslims largely because it is a pan-racial faith. This is not a racial grouping, so describing hostility to them as racial is nonsense.”

Mr Phillips was the founding chair of the EHRC, which is currently investigating anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, when it launched in 2006.

He has previously made documentaries about race and multiculturalism, and now chairs Index on Censorship – a group that campaigns for freedom of expression.

Asked if he would change his language as a result of the suspension, Mr Phillips pointed to this new role, adding: “Frankly, it would be a bit odd if I suddenly decided because I had been kicked out of the club, I couldn’t express my beliefs.”

Source: Trevor Phillips suspended from Labour over Islamophobia allegations

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Yakabuski: Trudeau government’s deliverology experiment ends with a whimper

2020/03/11 Leave a comment

While all governments have both bureaucratic and political level tracking systems, deliverology being just one approach, the success or failure is often determined more on the lower priority files than the high profile screwups that Yakabuski highlights.

And execution has been the Achilles heel of many governments:

One of the great ironies of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is that it has proved so ineffective in the one area where it so emphatically promised to outdo its predecessors.

It was always presumptuous on the part of Mr. Trudeau and his former principal secretary, Gerald Butts, to suggest they would run a more effective government than any of those that came before them. But by dropping the ball so spectacularly on so many key files, Mr. Trudeau’s Prime Minister’s Office set itself up for the failure that has now befallen it.

There were self-satisfied chuckles of schadenfreude across the civil service this week as Mr. Trudeau announced the departure of Matthew Mendelsohn as the deputy secretary to the federal cabinet heading up the government’s “results and delivery” unit. With Mr. Mendelsohn’s return to academia, the Trudeau government’s much-hyped experiment in “deliverology” has ended in a whimper.

Mr. Trudeau thanked Mr. Mendelsohn for his “service to Canadians,” but cited not a single accomplishment made by the results and delivery unit that he and Mr. Butts had so championed. Nor did he name an immediate successor to Mr. Mendelsohn, a top official in former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty’s government who is joining Ryerson University in Toronto.

Mr. Mendelsohn, in Twitter posts, tried to put a positive spin on his tenure, insisting that the “new governance, processes and routines we established helped the government overcome implementation obstacles and hit most of the key targets it identified four years ago.”

Still, the Prime Minister’s silence on the successes (or lack thereof) of the unit Mr. Mendelsohn headed contrasted sharply with the hubris that spewed out of the Butts-led PMO in 2015, which promised to revolutionize policy making and implementation in the federal capital.

Mr. Trudeau’s government spent at least $200,000 to pick the brain of Sir Michael Barber, flying the British consultant and “deliverology” guru to cabinet retreats at resorts in New Brunswick, Alberta and Ontario. Sir Michael was handed a mandate from the Privy Council Office to “provide ongoing information, recommendations and advice on a tailored program to guide departments to meet commitments and deliver on priorities.”

Unfortunately, Sir Michael’s services did not come with a money-back guarantee. And in the end, they may have bought only grief for Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Butts, who resigned last year in the wake of the scandal involving alleged pressure from the PMO on former attorney-general Jody Wilson-Raybould to offer SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement.

To anyone who has worked in government, the whole concept of “deliverology” smacked of warmed-over administration theory repackaged by former bureaucrats-turned-consultants seeking to monetize their insider knowledge of the public service. And career bureaucrats do not take kindly to know-it-all political appointees telling them how to do their jobs.

The Trudeau PMO “imposed another layer of administration on some public servants. Their departments had been abiding by evaluation and performance policies for more than 40 years,” former Ottawa Citizen reporter Kathryn May wrote last year in Policy Options. “With deliverology, the public service still did all that work, and now they also had to report the progress on all the government’s goals to a ‘delivery unit,’ which, along with ministers and the Prime Minister, monitored and tracked these priorities.”

The Trudeau PMO has never seemed clear on its own priorities. So how could it expect the senior bureaucracy to be clear on them? At both the micro-policy level (electoral reform, balancing the budget by 2019) and macro-policy level (reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, supporting economic growth while fighting climate change), the Trudeau government has continually sent mixed signals to the bureaucracy about how seriously it takes its own promises.

When it has sprung into action, the Trudeau PMO has typically made a mess of it. The SNC-Lavalin affair, which started out with a straightforward move to bring Canadian law on deferred prosecution agreements in line with that of other developed countries, nearly destroyed Mr. Trudeau’s government all because the PMO failed to abide by its own deliverology credo.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the Trudeau government’s most notable successes – the implementation of the Canada Child Benefit and medical aid in dying, and the negotiation of new health-care funding agreements with the provinces – were overseen by low-key ministers who kept their eyes on the ball rather than their Twitter feeds. Social Development Minister Jean- Yves Duclos and Jane Philpott, Mr. Trudeau’s first health minister, were focused on results, not retweets.

Overall, however, execution has proved to be the Achilles heel of this government. It has proved inept at buying fighter planes or fixing the Phoenix pay system. It promised a bigger role for Canada in global affairs but has earned a reputation abroad for being fickle and stingy. The Canada Infrastructure Bank extends its record for overpromising and underdelivering.

Indeed, the scariest words in Canadian English may have become: “I’m from the Trudeau government, and I’m here to help.”

Source: Trudeau government’s deliverology experiment ends with a whimper

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ICYMI: A Quebec ban on religious symbols upends lives and careers

2020/03/11 Leave a comment

Raises visibility of Quebec not in a good way:

A Muslim lawyer who wears a head scarf has put aside her aspiration to become a public prosecutor.

A Sikh teacher with a turban moved about 2,800 miles from Quebec to Vancouver, calling herself a “refugee in her own country.”

And an Orthodox Jewish teacher who wears a head kerchief is worried that she could be blocked from a promotion.

Since the Quebec government in June banned schoolteachers, police officers, prosecutors and other public sector employees from wearing religious symbols while at work, people like these three women have been grappling with the consequences.

François Legault, the right-leaning Quebec premier, says the law — which applies to Muslim head scarves, Sikh turbans, Jewish skullcaps, Catholic crosses and other religious symbols — upholds the separation between religion and state, and maintains the neutrality of public sector workers. The government has stressed that the vast majority of Quebecers support the ban.

“I would not feel comfortable being faced with a judge or lawyer in court wearing a head scarf here, because I would worry about their neutrality,” said Radhia Ben Amor, a research coordinator at the University of Montreal, who is Muslim and said she moved from Tunisia to live in a more secular country.

But the law has prompted vocal protests and legal challenges, as well as condemnation by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Critics say it flouts freedom of religion, breaches constitutional protections and excludes minorities who choose to wear symbols of faith from vital professions. They also say implementing the law will be fraught because it can be hard to discern a religious symbolfrom a fashion accessory or nonreligious garb.

The English Montreal School Board said the law was forcing it to turn away qualified teachers. It said at least one teacher had removed her head scarf while at work to keep her job.

The Coalition Inclusion Québec — a group that includes Roman Catholics, Jews, Sikhs and Muslims — is challenging the law in court, along with three teachers, including two Muslims and a Roman Catholic.

Perri Ravon, a lawyer who has worked on two of the lawsuits against the ban, said that at least for now, “the law is disproportionately affecting Muslim women because the hijab is an outwardly visible religious symbol.” She noted that a Catholic cross was less conspicuous since it could be concealed in a blouse or a shirt while at work.

Nonetheless, the Catholic teacher named in one of the suits, Andréa Lauzon, who wears a visible cross and medallion of the Virgin Mary, said in court papers that her faith and identity were inextricably bound, and that her constitutional right to freedom of religion was being breached.

The ban has its roots in Quebec’s historic evolution into an abidingly secular society with a visceral distrust of religion, stemming from the so-called Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, when Quebecers revolted against dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.

Jean Duhaime, emeritus professor of religion at the University of Montreal, said that even before the recent law, the wearing of crosses in the public sector was stigmatized and discouraged in Quebec society.

He said Catholic opponents to the ban were in solidarity with other religious groups, adding that many proponents of the law saw Muslims wearing head scarves as “the phantom of religion reappearing in Quebec while viewing the hijab as an instrument of patriarchal domination.”

Here are four women whose lives and careers have been affected by the ban (see article).

Source:  A Quebec Ban on Religious Symbols Upends Lives and Careers

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Opposition MPs question purpose of Canadian consulate in Chandigarh, India, that sends work to New Delhi

2020/03/10 Leave a comment

Don’t see what the fuss is about. Distinction between front and back office functions fairly common. Decision to open Chandigarh was political as reported in article and, if I recall correctly, Global Affairs was not happy with the decision.

The office had a wall highlighting some of the fraudulent practices when then IRCC Minister Kenney visited it:

Opposition MPs on the House Immigration Committee are accusing the government of “deception” and “lack of transparency” after learning by “happenstance” two weeks ago that visa applications filed in the Canadian Consulate in Chandigarh, India, are processed in New Delhi, raising questions about the need for the consulate office when that work is done in the capital city.

In a House Citizenship and Immigration Committee meeting on Feb. 27, Conservative MP Kyle Seeback (Dufferin-Caledon, Ont.) asked departmental officials if they had any statistics on how many visa applications the Chandigarh office receives and the success rate of those processed there, compared to the New Delhi office. He said he asked this question because he had received numerous complaints from his Indo-Canadian constituents about the low success rate in getting visas in Chandigarh.

Mr. Seeback cited a specific example in which a visitor visa application was denied because the applicant had no travel history, when the applicant’s passport clearly showed that the same individual had a U.S. visa and had a travel history.

“Is there any review that takes place with respect to visa officers that are clearly making mistakes when they are rejecting a temporary resident visa, and there’s a procedure for a Member of Parliament or individual to raise that issue and see if there is any redress that would happen in the department?” Mr. Seeback asked, according to the transcript of the meeting.

In response, a senior departmental official told the committee that “for the last couple of years,” visa applications filed with the Chandigarh office were being processed in the New Delhi office. This was a surprise to many committee members; the idea behind opening the full service consulate office in Chandigarh in 2003 was to help Indians in the Punjab province and the neighbouring area to get service without having to travel eight or nine hours to get to the capital, where they often had to queue at 4 or 5 a.m. to get in.

In addition to the residents of Punjab, the residents of neighbouring province Haryana also visit the consulate office in Chandigarh, as it’s a shorter commute than New Delhi.

“So, I was absolutely shocked by that answer,” Mr. Seeback told The Hill Times. “I’ve spoken to other Liberal Members of Parliament who did not know that this was the case, and they were shocked that this was the answer given. As far as I know, this was not announced, and no one is aware of the fact that people in Punjab who go to Chandigarh to apply for a visitor’s visa, … they are effectively going to [be processed in New Delhi].”

In his response to Mr. Seeback’s question, the immigration official also said the decision making has been “shifted to Delhi,” but did not provide any specifics as to when the change happened, whose decision it was, who was consulted, and why this information was not publicly shared. He said only “complex” cases are handled in Chandigarh, but it was unclear what he meant by “complex” cases.

It’s not clear whether residents of Punjab and neighbouring areas are being forced to travel to New Delhi again for interviews as part of the application process.

“I do want to mention quickly that we do not process visa applications in Chandigarh, everything is now done in Delhi,” Harpreet Kochhar, assistant deputy minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, told the committee. “That has been happening for a couple of years. The decision making has shifted from Chandigarh to Delhi. [Only] complex cases are done in Chandigarh, but most of the decision making has shifted to Delhi,” Mr. Kochhar told the committee, according to the meeting transcript.

He conceded that sometimes officials make mistakes in their application reviews. But Mr. Kochhar added that sometimes individuals have visas for the U.S. or other countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, but have not actually travelled, which means they do not have travel history. Also, he said, the department has its internal quality control processes in place to evaluate how officers are processing applications. Mr. Kochhar said the unsuccessful applicants have the option to reapply.

“I do accept that at times there are mistakes. We regularly do a quality control check on our applications. We have an internal system of doing that, as well as the clients are more than welcome to reapply. We will reconsider if they reapply,” he said.

Mr. Seeback, who in the past represented the riding of Brampton West, said he was planning on questioning Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino (Eglinton-Lawrence, Ont.) on this subject in the coming weeks.

In an emailed response to written questions, a spokesman for Mr. Mendicino said the change to process visa applications from Chandigarh in New Delhi was made to speed up the processing times. He said the department is transitioning to a more centralized system to expedite the application review system.

“Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has been moving towards a more integrated, modernized and centralized system in order to speed up application processing and to improve client service,” wrote Kevin Lemkay, press secretary to Mr. Mendicino, in his email. “The department moves applications around its global network to ensure they are processed as efficiently as possible, which means applications may not be processed at or decided upon by decision makers at the office closest to where a client lives, or where an application is submitted.”

Mr. Lemkay also said that regardless of where the applications are filed, all applications are processed under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. He wrote that in 2018, 393,000 visas were issued to Indian nationals, an increase of more than 50 per cent compared to 2017.

“Applications may be distributed throughout IRCC’s networks to provide optimal processing times and to improve client service. Regardless of geography, all decisions are made in accordance with the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and Regulations,” he said.

Neither Mr. Lemkay nor the department would say where the personal interviews for visa applications are done, or what is the precise role of the Chandigarh office. They also did not say what Mr. Kochhar meant by “complex” cases” that are processed there. The Hill Timesreached out to Mr. Kochhar for an interview request, but his office referred all questions to the departmental communications office.

“While the majority of temporary resident applications are processed in New Delhi, many are also processed in Chandigarh,” Mr. Lemkay said in his email. “Clients can submit their temporary resident applications to the nearest Visa Application Centre.”

Former Liberal cabinet minister Herb Dhaliwal—who played an instrumental role in opening up the Chandigarh office while in Jean Chrétien’s cabinet—questioned why Canada still has its office there if applications are being handled in New Delhi, in an interview with The Hill Times. He also said if the interviews are done in New Delhi, then it defeats the purpose of establishing the consulate office.

Mr. Dhaliwal said he was lobbied by members of the Punjabi community while a B.C. MP and cabinet minister to ask the government to set up an office in Chandigarh, as it was a long and expensive commute for their relatives and friends to apply for visas in New Delhi. The Punjabi community is an influential part of the Liberal Party’s voter base.

In 2003, Mr. Dhaliwal accompanied Mr. Chrétien to inaugurate the office.

“What exactly does the Chandigarh office do now?” questioned Mr. Dhaliwal.

None of the Liberal MPs from the Immigration Committee responded to interview requests from The Hill Times.

NDP MP Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, B.C.) said that it was news to her that applications filed at the Chandigarh office are processed in the capital city. She said she looked up the Immigration Canada website after the committee meeting to see if there’s any indication as to where the applications filed with the Chandigarh office are processed, but didn’t find any information. Ms. Kwan said the government should be more transparent about this information, as an applicant has the right to know where his or her application would be reviewed.

“The government, with this change in not informing the public or anyone else for that matter, and the way in which they’ve set up the website to make you believe that things are still business as usual, is deceptive at best,” said Ms. Kwan, who is also a member of the Citizenship and Immigration Committee.

“The government, you know, in going forward with this without sharing basic information to the public about it, I think, is inappropriate. What are they [Chandigarh office] doing? It seems according to their website, the only thing they’re doing is to accept applications. Is that the only thing they’re doing? I have no idea, we don’t know. And there’s no transparency from the government on this.”

She said the lack of information leaves unanswered questions as to what does the change means for an applicant.

“In the very minimum, they should make it clear on their website, like people should know, right, and you cannot find that information out,” said Ms. Kwan. “And then more to the point, you will not know what it means.”

Source: Opposition MPs question purpose of Canadian consulate in Chandigarh, India, that sends work to New Delhi

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It’s not a competition: Scotland’s skills and the post-Brexit immigration system

2020/03/10 Leave a comment

More on UK government’s immigration plans and the worries about the impact on caregivers:

In her policy statement to the House of Commons in February, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, described the UK’s new immigration system as one that “prioritises those who come to our country based on the skills they have to offer, not on the country they come from”.The new points-based approach will be “fair” but “firm”, she said, and give top priority to highly skilled workers – “the brightest and the best” – to come here and drive innovation, grow the economy and, where necessary, support our public services.

Through this new system, Patel said, the UK will develop “a true meritocracy where anyone with the skills who wants to come here will have the ability to do so”.

The question for businesses in Scotland, though, is, which skills?

Representatives of the social care and hospitality sectors were quick to express their significant concerns about the impact that a restriction of so-called ‘low-skilled’ EU migrants could have on their businesses and the wider Scottish economy.

The Federation of Small Businesses Scotland, for example, has warned that around one in five small businesses could close or be forced to radically change their business models in order to survive.

But beyond economics, the immigration debate has also sparked a more fundamental discussion on the nature of skills and their relationship with pay and qualifications: who gets labelled ‘high’ or ‘low’ skilled and what type of skills does Scotland really need right now?

“The whole sector was extremely dismayed at the continued equation of low skill being of low value and of the equating of low skill with social care activity,” Dr Donald Macaskill, the CEO of Scottish Care, told Holyrood.

“My concern is that both some of our politicians but also the wider public think of the job of caring as something which anybody could do,” he said.

“That is simply not the case.”

Scotland’s care sector has particular reason to be concerned about the changes being proposed by the Home Office because it’s a sector that is already facing a skills and employment crisis.

Independent care providers are reporting significant vacancy rates. Skills Development Scotland (SDS) estimates there were 12,346 vacancies across the sector in 2018 and a ‘density of skills shortages’ of 28 per cent.

Shortages in rural areas, where the effects of an ageing population are most pronounced, have put care provisions under “unprecedented” strain. The Western Isles Health and Social Care Partnership is reporting that one in six frontline adult social care positions is vacant.

While this is already the case, the new immigration policy could stand to exacerbate these problems. Between six and eight per cent of frontline care home workers are from outside of Scotland. Up to 16.5 per cent of agency nurses, who often work in care homes, come from EU countries.

And whether by pay or by skill, many of these workers stand to fall short of the new system that aims to reduce the number of “cut-price EU workers”.

Prospective migrants would have to negotiate on a set of criteria including a salary threshold, language abilities, academic qualifications and, crucially, the points value attached to their particular set of skills.

The general salary threshold will be set at £25,600, which is down from the initial £30,000 suggested by the Conservatives a few months ago, after the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) warned that such a high bar would make it difficult to recruit new teachers and NHS workers from abroad.

Such a salary threshold represents far too high a bar for many of the most critically required jobs in adult social care, where the average salary of a frontline worker is £17,500.

But with the right skills, the threshold could drop – as long as the skillset or industry qualify for a “tradeable points” mechanism in the system.

“For example,” Patel said, “a PhD in a relevant subject will earn extra points, with double the number of points for specialists in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.”

The emphasis on STEM disciplines reflects the government’s desire to sell the UK as a nation that is at the “cutting edge of life-changing innovation and technology”, somewhere the “finest international minds” would be attracted to live.

There will be concessions made to the system to reflect the need for workers in certain areas, such as a special visa tier for NHS workers. A separate scheme for seasonal agricultural workers will also be introduced.

And shortages for very specific roles included on the MAC Shortage Occupation List, like nuclear scientists and Gaelic-medium teachers, will continue to get easier access.

But care workers are set to fall short of all of these standards, for pay and, seemingly, for skill level.

This is the thing that Macaskill takes most exception to.

“In order to be a frontline social carer, you have to be registered with the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC),” he says.

“You have to be qualified and that qualification has to be at SVQ level and over a period of time, you have to demonstrate that you are continuing in your professional development.

“And you have to have the necessary core skills. What are those core skills?

“They are the ‘softer skills’ and I suppose some of my critiques of the political statements and the immigration proposals is that they are very much based on what are called ‘hard, cognitive and technical skills’. They’re related to the earnings level that some of those skills attract.”

Care workers in Scotland are paid at least the Scottish Living Wage, unlike other parts of the UK, but the industry is still considered low paid. Still, the contribution of the care sector to the wider Scottish economy is hard to underestimate: the SSSC estimates the sector to be worth £3.4bn to the economy, and that’s before taking into account how adult social care alleviates the care burden and allows people to continue working in other sectors.

This is not a competition, it’s about validating skills and abilities which are of paramount significance to the wellbeing of a nation

The Scottish Government’s proposals for a Scottish visa to allow a tailored migration approach that would “[welcome] people with the range of skills we need to work” was rejected out of hand by the UK Government hours after it was published.

The First Minister has since offered to lead a delegation, made up of business and care sector representatives, to Westminster, to put the case for greater flexibility to the Prime Minister personally, but there has so far been no response. The Scottish Conservative party is continuing to meet with stakeholders before announcing a position on immigration that is likely to clash with the UK Government’s as well.

In the meantime, the discussion around the definition of low and high skills continues.

“What I’ve been calling for is a reorientation for what we mean by skills,” Macaskill said.

“And skills of compassion, empathy, communication, the ability to relate and the ability to deal with the various challenges, the ability to enable and encourage – all those that we have traditionally thought of as softer skills are, I think, as valuable to any society as technical skills and higher academic skills.

“This is not a competition, it’s about validating skills and abilities which are of paramount significance to the wellbeing of a nation,” he said.

The Future Skills Action Plan was launched in September 2019 following a commitment announced by the First Minister in the 2018-19 programme for government (PfG) to recognise “the importance of skills to improving Scotland’s productivity and economic growth”.

In the ministerial foreword to the plan Jamie Hepburn, Minister for Business, Fair Work and Skills, described Scotland’s need for a skills system that is “characterised by agility and flexibility”. The core vision of the plan is for a future where “Scotland’s highly skilled workforce ensures we are an ambitious, productive and competitive nation”.

The plan discusses the need to respond to the challenges associated with Brexit as well as climate change, including the need to develop a specific Climate Emergency Skills Action Plan to turn the existing skills across industries in Scotland toward creating an environmentally sustainable economy.

SDS and the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) are currently working on this plan. Both bodies have received a funding boost in the 2020-21 Scottish budget, with a 4.7 per cent raise for SDS to a total £224.8m and a £40m increase for SFC to £1.88bn.

Further measures to this end include £10m of additional funding for those already in work, through doubling the Flexible Workforce Development Fund and a £2m fund for innovation and skills in the transition to offshore wind power.

The limit to the potential of Scotland’s tech economy continues to be a digital skills shortage that runs all the way through from education to the present workforce.

“We need about 12,500 people every year and we produce about 5,000 from the usual sources,” Polly Purvis, the former head of ScotlandIS warned last year. Her successor, Jane Morrison-Ross, has said there are currently 13,000 vacancies across the sector.

In high schools, there has been a long-term decline in both the number of pupils taking computing as a subject and in the number of computing teachers – both still well below the levels of a decade ago.

For the current workforce, the Scottish Government launched the £1m Digital Start Fund to reskill workers, particularly those returning to work or who join from disadvantaged backgrounds, with skills like software development and cyber security much in demand.

Launching the scheme, then minister for digital economy Kate Forbes said: “Technology is forecast to be the fastest growing sector in Scotland by 2024, but success is dependent on skills. This is a big opportunity not only for tech businesses, but also to future employees.”

The Scottish Government also sees upskilling as a means for tackling issues such as child poverty. The 2019-20 PfG announced a £500,000 Family Learning Scotland Programme to help parents gain new skills and take up learning and training. The programme is designed to be integrated with the expansion of early learning and childcare to “allow parents to build on their skills and gain better work”.

And for young people, the apprenticeship route into careers is expanding. The Scottish Government says that over 37,000 apprenticeships were in training in 2018-19 with an expected 30,000 new starts projected for 2020-21.

With Scottish Apprenticeship Week running last week, from 2-6 March, SDS was encouraging councils, schools and employers to take part in raising awareness of apprenticeships as a more practical alternative to further education, leading to a wide range of careers, from technology to care.

SDS Director of National Training Programmes Katie Hutton said: “Scottish apprenticeships are increasingly becoming a vital means for industry to shape its workforce.

“More and more individuals are recognising the benefits of work-based learning, with opportunities to gain skills in careers for the future.

“Scottish Apprenticeship Week shines a light on the major contribution apprenticeships make across all business sectors and the difference they make to the lives of thousands of people across the country.

Source: It’s not a competition: Scotland’s skills and the post-Brexit immigration system

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International Women’s Day: With Shoes And Stones, Islamists Disrupt Pakistan Rally

2020/03/10 Leave a comment

Sigh….

Demonstrators belonging to Islamist groups attacked an International Women’s Day rally in the Pakistani capital Islamabad on Sunday, hurling rocks, chunks of mud and even their shoes. The demonstrators, who were at a rival rally held by hardline Islamist organizations, were particularly enraged by one slogan the women’s day rally adopted: “mera jism, mera marzi” – “my body, my choice.”

Riot police set up large cloth barricades to dive the rival rallies, which flanked either side of a main road. But the police were also there to protect the women’s day protesters, after the hardline men and women threatened violence.

As the protest was winding down, dozens of men tried to push through the barricade, including a man who held a little girl aloft on his shoulders. According to a video uploaded to Twitter by a BBC reporter, police used batons to push them back. Still, for the next few minutes, they hurled projectiles that scattered the women’s day protesters, as journalists huddled behind concrete road dividers.

The hardline groups, their surrogates and conservative talking heads, took to the airwaves preceding the rally to condemn Pakistani feminists, accusing them of encouraging anti-Islamic vulgarity by raising a slogan that hinted that a woman had the right to do as she pleased.

The tensions even boiled over on a live talk show, where a screen writer swore at a prominent Pakistani liberal after she interrupted him by chanting the slogan. “Nobody would even spit on your body,” he shouted in a clip widely shared on social media.

Conservative lawyers petitioned the courts in Pakistan’s three cities to try ban the women’s marches. One prominent Islamist opposition leader, known as Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman, threatened protesters on Feb. 29, warning them not to chant “my body, my choice.” “God willing, we will also come out into the streets, and we will destroy you,” he warned. And a senior teacher at Jamiat Hafsa, a hardline women’s seminary in the Pakistani capital, told NPR her students would halt the march by organizing a rival “modesty march.”

“This is a march to stop that march,” said the woman, who uses the name Bint Azwa (the women at the seminary often use first names or fake names to avoid being identified by security institutions that monitor their activities). “We are not going to let those women march the streets of our country, our neighborhood, with those vulgar chants.”

The violence underscored how hardline Islamist groups played upon conservative outrage over the slogan “my body, my choice,” to assert their presence in the Pakistani capital – and demonstrate their muscle.

The opposition leader Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman has struggled to find a toehold in Pakistan’s freewheeling politics since his party was forced into opposition. The hardline Jamiat Hafsa was violently shut down in 2007, after a standoff that killed more than 100 people. The women returned to the seminary only this February, and have dared security forces to remove them again.

On Sunday, dozens of the seminary women turned up at the counter-rally, clad in long black robes, headscarves and face veils, segregated from dozens of men who stood in a nearby park. They stood in military-style rows, their fearsome appearance only jarred by blue, green and pink bows pinned to their shoulders, to identify which bus they should return on, explained one 25-year-old, who only gave her first name, Rubina.

“We don’t want women to make choices for their bodies. The choice rests with God,” she said. Nodding toward the women’s day march, she described the women there as “naked.” “These people don’t even wear dupatas,” she exclaimed, referring to the shawl that Pakistani women traditionally drape across their chests to signify modesty.

On the other side, at the women’s march, hundreds of men, women and transgender Pakistanis clustered. Some waved the red flag of a leftist party. Others held up signs, including “my body, my choice,” but they denounced so-called “honor” killings, where men murder their female relatives for bringing alleged shame onto the family. Some demanded to know the fate of female political activists who mysteriously disappeared.

“Pakistan is getting more and more divided over time,” said Ambreen Gilani, a 41-year-old development consultant, gesturing to the Islamists across the road. The opposition to the women’s march helped motivate another protester to turn up, Sukaina Kazmi, a chemical engineer. She gestured to her Muslim headscarf, “Our religion does not teach us any of the things they are standing up against, our religion actually does fight for women’s rights,” she said.

As the protesters regrouped and walked away from the dozens of men trying to assault them, one organizer, Anam Rathor, said the violence underscored why they were demonstrating. “This proves our point, and this movement is growing. And now we will have more people. The reason why they are throwing stones is because they are afraid of us and that makes us happy.”

Source: International Women’s Day: With Shoes And Stones, Islamists Disrupt Pakistan Rally

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End of Quebec course on religion and ethics seen as win for nationalists

2020/03/10 Leave a comment

Good overview of the various perspectives. But always felt that course was useful effort to increase understanding:

Since 2008, elementary and high school students in Quebec have taken a mandatory course aimed at cultivating respect and tolerance for people of different cultures and faiths.

But after years of relentless criticism from Quebec nationalists and committed secularists who say the ethics and religious culture course is peddling a multiculturalist view to impressionable young Quebecers, the provincial government is abolishing the course.

In a statement announcing the move, Education Minister Jean-Francois Roberge said it was a response to “abundant criticism from experts and education stakeholders.” An aide to Roberge said too much time was being taken up by a section of the course devoted to religions.

It is striking that a course aimed, in the words of the Education Department’s teaching guides, at fostering “the recognition of others and the pursuit of the common good” has proven so divisive.

But critics have long described the course as a type of mental virus, contaminating a generation of young people by making them amenable to Canadian multiculturalism and other pluralist ideas. Education Minister Jean-Francois Roberge says a new class will be taught instead by fall 2022.

Nadia El-Mabrouk, professor at Universite de Montreal’s computer science department, has been one of the most outspoken critics of the course, which she says defines citizens by their religion.

She suggested in a recent interview the course is partly responsible for the fact that, according to polls, young Quebecers are less likely to support Bill 21, the legislation adopted last June that bans some public sector workers, including teachers and police officers, from wearing religious symbols on the job.

And she’s not alone in that belief.

Jean-Francois Lisee, who lost the 2018 election as leader of the Parti Quebecois, wrote in January that it’s “difficult not to see a cause-and-effect connection” in the fact that young Quebecers who have taken the course “are the least favourable to prohibiting religious signs.”

For Sabrina Jafralie, who teaches the program at a Montreal high school, the decision to abolish the course is another sign of the growing influence of Quebec nationalists on the Coalition Avenir Quebec government.

The curriculum, she said, explains to students that Quebec is filled with people who have different driving forces. It doesn’t teach young people to be religious, she said, it simply explains why other people may be.

“But what the government is trying to do,” Jafralie said, “is in fact replace the ability to investigate and explore religiosity, with their own new religion — which is secularism.”

The course was introduced in 2008 under the Liberal government of the day to replace long-standing classes on Catholic and Protestant moral and religious instruction. Jafralie, who was one of the first teachers trained to teach the new course, says the content comes from a secular perspective.

The course exposes students to religions from around the world, and according to the teaching guides, “attention is also given to the influence of Judaism and Native spirituality on this heritage, as well as other religions that today contribute to Quebec culture.”

But for El-Mabrouk, that is precisely the problem.

The course teaches young people to “recognize, observe, to accept and to tolerate the way people practise (religion),” she said.

The issue, she continued, is that the material puts religious practices on an even footing, whether or not they run contrary to such Quebec values as the equality of men and women.

“The course is based on a vision of living together that is tied to Canadian multiculturalism … but we have changed orientation,” El-Mabrouk said, pointing to the adoption of Bill 21 as evidence.

Francis Bouchard, spokesman for the education minister, said the government recognizes that students should have an appreciation of the major religions to better understand the driving forces of the world.

But in the current program, he explained in an email, religion “took up too much space.” He said the goal of the new course isn’t to remove the religious component completely but to “rebalance” the content with “other concepts to prepare young people for Quebec society.”

Those could include themes about environmentalism, digital literacy and democratic participation, he said.

Roberge launched three days of consultations in February to collect ideas from education stakeholders for the new course’s content. The consultations sparked a scandal after one of the experts invited, McGill University law professor Daniel Weinstock, was blocked from speaking following the publication of an inaccurate newspaper column.

Richard Martineau wrote in the Journal de Montreal that the ethics and religious culture course “shoves the multiculturalist credo down the throats of children.” He then falsely stated that Weinstock — whom he called a “dyed-in-the-wool multiculturalist” — had previously advocated the symbolic circumcision of young girls.

Weinstock’s invitation was swiftly withdrawn by the minister, which led to an uproar among academics and an eventual apology from Roberge after Weinstock threatened legal action.

El-Mabrouk maintains the course should be done away with entirely. Teaching about religion in school is fine — but not in a class that is tied to ethics, she said. Religious material belongs in classes about politics, science or geography, she said, and it should be limited to older students who have the “intellectual tools” to digest the content.

“What is the best way for children to learn to live in a society, to live with one another?” she asked. “It’s having more time for sports, cultural activities, to talk together. It’s in real life situations that children learn to be together.”

But Jafralie says the content of the course reflects the realities of Quebec society, and changing it is a denial of the facts on the ground.

“There seems to be this desire to eradicate this (reality) or shape young people’s values to be more ‘Quebecois’ — and what ‘Quebecois’ is, is defined by (the government).”

Source: End of Quebec course on religion and ethics seen as win for nationalists

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Japan’s ban on multiple citizenship outdated, unconstitutional: expert, plaintiffs

2020/03/10 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see results:

Japan’s Nationality Act, which forbids multiple citizenship, is again in the spotlight after tennis player Naomi Osaka selected Japanese citizenship over American nationality in 2019. Meanwhile, there is an ongoing legal battle being waged by plaintiffs arguing that the law is unconstitutional.

Over 70% of member states of the United Nations permit their people to have more than one citizenship. In a world where it’s become quite common to see individuals from diverse backgrounds and for people to compete on the global stage, some experts are demanding that Japan do the same.

The Japanese Nationality Act stipulates that a child born to a Japanese parent is legally Japanese. Meanwhile, some nations have a system where a child born in such countries to a Japanese parent becomes a dual citizen of that place and Japan.

The Japanese law requires anyone who was born with or obtained multiple nationality before the age of 20 to pick one of them before their 22nd birthday. Those who acquire citizenship of another country after turning 20 must decide which one to keep within a two-year period.

Naomi Osaka held both Japanese and U.S. citizenships but decided to keep her Japanese citizenship before she turned 22. Her choice has been seen as an indication of her desire to compete in the upcoming Tokyo Olympics as a Japanese tennis player.

But because individuals who choose to keep their Japanese nationality are only “obliged to make an effort” to give up other citizenships, there are people in Japan who continue to hold two or more passports. According to a 2018 estimate by the Justice Ministry, about 925,000 Japanese have multiple citizenship.

Furthermore, foreigners wanting to acquire Japanese nationality are required to submit a certificate showing they have forfeited their original citizenship. But those from countries without renunciation procedures can also become dual citizens. On the other hand, Japanese people who choose a foreign nationality “of their own will” automatically have their Japanese citizenship revoked.

Hitoshi Nogawa, 76, a businessperson from Switzerland, is one of eight plaintiffs who have filed a suit against the Japanese government arguing that “depriving people who obtained foreign nationality of Japanese citizenship against their will is a violation of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to pursue happiness and other privileges.”

Nogawa, who effectively lost his Japanese citizenship for acquiring Swiss nationality, said, “I identify as Japanese, but it feels like I’ve become half a person. I feel bad for my ancestors and, in the current situation, I don’t plan on being buried with them.”

Born in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, Nogawa moved to Switzerland in his 20s and established a trading company. In order to bid on a public works project, he needed Swiss citizenship, which he obtained in 2001. He did not encounter any trouble until 2013, when he was told by the Japanese Embassy there, “If you don’t choose one (nationality), it’s going to be a problem.”

The request is based on the Nationality Act, which stipulates that people who acquire foreign citizenship lose their Japanese nationality, and requires them to submit a citizenship renunciation notification.

For Nogawa, giving up his Swiss nationality would have posed a problem for his work and discarding his Japanese citizenship would have meant losing his identity. Caught in a dilemma, he refused to respond to the embassy’s request and did not submit the notification. In 2015, he tried to renew his Japanese passport but was rejected. To this day, he has not been able to renew it.

Nogawa and seven others living overseas filed a suit with the Tokyo District Court in March 2018. Six of the plaintiffs, who have already acquired citizenships of different countries, are demanding confirmation that they are in possession of their Japanese citizenship, and two others who seek to obtain foreign nationality are looking for confirmation that they will not lose their Japanese citizenship when they do so.

The stipulation in the Nationality Act that bans multiple citizenship has not been revised since it first went into force under the Meiji Constitution, Japan’s prewar and wartime supreme law. Teruo Naka, a lawyer of the plaintiffs’ legal team says the law “does not correspond to the flow of the times.”

In contrast, the government argues that “people having multiple citizenship could cause friction between nations depending on which country’s protection they come under” among other counterarguments. The Justice Ministry, which enforces the Nationality Act’s provisions, explains that “the withdrawal of Japanese citizenship is not a deprivation, and reacquisition is allowed if necessary.” The suit is proceeding at the district court.

As of 2019, around 150, or 75% of United Nations member states, permit multiple nationalities. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”

Teru Sasaki, professor of transnational sociology at Aomori Public University, conducted an online survey of Japanese citizens in 2019, in which around 60% of the 3,171 respondents supported the option, “Japanese citizens who obtain a foreign nationality should not have to lose their Japanese citizenship.”

The study results suggest that “society is tolerant of multiple nationalities, and there is a gap between the sense of ordinary citizens and the legal system,” said Sasaki.

Employment regulations for some civil servants, including Diet members, require that they have Japanese citizenship, and people who have foreign nationality cannot become diplomats. To permit multiple citizenship, discussions on job restrictions may also be necessary.

Source: Japan’s ban on multiple citizenship outdated, unconstitutional: expert, plaintiffs

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Last election marked shift in the type of growth Canadians are seeking

2020/03/09 Leave a comment

More interesting analysis on the recent election by Andrew Parkin of Environics Institute:

There is never any shortage of public opinion polls on the eve of an election. A steady stream of data sets up the electoral contest by gauging who is starting in a leading position and who is lagging at the back of the pack.

The main limitation of this type of “horserace” data is that it doesn’t help us anticipate what might happen next. To get a good sense of how the campaign might unfold, we need to know more about the public’s mood – what citizens are feeling good about, and what is keeping them from getting a good night’s sleep. Not that broader survey data on issues and outlook can foretell the eventual outcome with any degree certainty. Human actions and reactions will always disrupt the expected course of events, especially during election campaigns. But a good understanding of the wider context of public opinion on the eve of an election should minimize the extent of our surprise at what ultimately transpires.

This applies, for example, to the issue of inclusive growth – the notion that economic growth and the equitable distribution of its benefits should be seen as mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive policy objectives. Talk of inclusive growth has animated international forums such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Economic Forum for much of the last decade. In Canada it was a central preoccupation of the federal Liberal government that was elected in 2015.

While the term inclusive growth has only recently moved into the vernacular, we can still ask whether, as the government sought a second mandate in 2019, the public was feeling more or less included in the country’s prosperity, and whether historic fissures in Canadian society seem to be widening or closing.

At first glance, the data suggest that the public should have been fairly receptive in October 2019 to the incumbent Liberal government’s claim to have made growth more inclusive. At that time the proportion of Canadians citing the economy as the country’s most important problem had declined to 14 percent, the lowest level since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. More Canadians were feeling positive about both the country’s and their own economic situation. The proportion of Canadians saying that it was a good time to find a job in the area where they live had jumped from 36 percent in 2015 to 61 percent in 2018. And the proportion describing their own incomes as inadequate had dropped 10 points (from 39 percent to 28 percent) over the course of the Liberals’ first mandate. As they headed back to the polls, they could hardly have wished for more (figure 1).

All these numbers, however, reflect national trends, and they obscure contrasting regional ones. The modest 5-point increase since 2014 in the proportion of Canadians with a favourable view of the country’s economic situation subsumed the much larger 22-point increase in Quebec, and a counter-acting 22-point drop in Alberta. In fact, over the course of five years (between 2014 and 2019 – a relatively short space of time), Quebec and Alberta had essentially switched places: in 2014 Quebec was the least economically optimistic and Alberta the most optimistic province; the reverse was true in 2019.

In Canada, the issue of inclusive growth is not just about equity across social groups, it is also about equity across regions.  Framed in this way, it was less of a “winning issue” for the incumbent government than they might otherwise have expected (figure 2).

No one who had these Alberta numbers in full view, then, would have been surprised that the Liberals were shut out of the province in terms of seats come election night. But the flip side of the story is also important. Going into the 2019 election campaign, it would have been useful if the opposition parties had thought harder about what they were offering voters in Quebec. This might have prompted them to go beyond a pitch based on the premise of how much harder it was getting to make ends meet. (At the city level, affordable housing and the rising cost of living were top issues for those living in Toronto and Vancouver, but not Montreal.)

A sober review of public opinion data as they pertain to notions of inclusion also helps explain something that didn’t happen during the 2019 election campaign. In the wake of increases in the number of refugees “irregularly” crossing the Canada-US border in Quebec and Manitoba, and the launching of the Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada, which had an overtly anti-immigration platform, the risk that immigration would emerge as a defining (and divisive) election issue appeared high. But it did not become a defining issue, largely because, in spite of some heated rhetoric on talk radio and social media, Canadians themselves have never felt more positively about immigration than they did on the eve of the 2019 campaign.

The proportion of Canadians who say there is too much immigration in Canada was trending downward, as was the proportion questioning the legitimacy of refugee claimants (figure 3). While in 2018 and the spring of 2019 one in two Canadians agreed that too many immigrants do not adopt Canadian values, this was the lowest figure ever recorded (in 1993, three in four Canadian held this view). Perhaps most importantly, heading into the election, in April 2019, only 3 percent of Canadians felt that immigration was the most important issue facing the country (a proportion that was nine times lower as that in the United States).

Further analysis also reveals that attitudes on immigration in Canada correlate less strongly with economic concerns than they do with general political outlook (that is to say, ideology). So despite the overall brighter mood in 2019, plenty of Canadians were anxious about the economy and their own financial situation as election day approached. But this anxiety propelled them to blame Ottawa insiders, not newly arrived outsiders. In retrospect, then, the table was not set for a heated debate about immigration, and it should have come as no surprise that the more a party pushed this issue to the fore, the worse they did on election night.

Looking back, however, there was one signal in the pre-election polls that might have warranted more attention. While fewer Canadians were expressing concerns about the economy, more were expressing concerns about the environment – and specially about climate change. In fact, by the spring of 2019, climate change had overtaken the economy as the top issue for Canadians for the first time since the onset of the economic crisis in 2008. That said, in spring 2019, the proportion of Canadians singling out climate change as their top issue was only 14 percent – up from 5 percent two years earlier, and tied in order of importance with the similar proportion expressing concern about the quality of government leadership.

At that time, there was no way of knowing whether the share of Canadians preoccupied with climate change was already peaking or just beginning to grow. It took a subsequent survey, conducted during the election campaign, to reveal the answer. We now know that the priorities of Canadians were evolving quickly over the course of 2019; by October, the proportion citing climate change as the country’s top problem had jumped a further 10 points, to reach 24 percent, while the proportion concerned with the either the economy or government leadership continued to fade. This trend was especially pronounced in Quebec, where the proportion preoccupied by climate change doubled from 18 percent to 37 percent between the spring and fall of 2019

So, heading into the 2019 election, Quebecers were less concerned about the economy or the cost of living than other Canadians – a pattern that the pre-election survey data made clear. What could perhaps have been better anticipated was the extent to which this was creating space for climate change to emerge as one of the defining issues of the campaign, in Quebec and beyond.

In retrospect, the election campaign was decided more by the issue of sustainable growth – the question of how to balance economic and environmental imperatives – than by that of inclusive growth, which is perhaps why the opposition parties’ strategy of approaching the carbon tax mostly as a pocket-book issue had limited appeal.

Source: Last election marked shift in the type of growth Canadians are seeking

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‘Feminism is not for Indonesia’: Conservative Muslims’ recipe for women’s empowerment – The Jakarta Post

2020/03/09 Leave a comment

Always interesting to follow Indonesian debates:

Maimon Herawati is an accomplished woman who believes in equal opportunity for women. She finished her Master’s degree at Abertay University in the United Kingdom in 2003, securing tenure as a lecturer of mass communication science in West Java’s Padjadjaran University and then juggling her family life with her social and political activities.

She has participated in various activities in her community, including a “Free Palestine” movement.

Maimon is one of many empowered women who has been politically active but has worked against the feminist movement in Indonesia, including by protesting against a bill that is intended to eradicate sexual violence. Such women have been in a cultural clash against Indonesian feminists on several other issues, like the Pornography Law and, most recently, the family resilience bill.

The two warring groups both have highly educated women as members who express their opinions with confidence, are politically active and have made achievements in their lives. However, at some point, these empowered women who fight for women’s empowerment have parted ways.

Antifeminist groups claim the sexual violence bill is “pro-adultery” since it only criminalizes nonconsensual sex. They said the bill should instead prohibit all extramarital sex, consensual or not.

Objections by the antifeminist group have halted deliberations over the bill, triggering protests from women’s rights activists. The bill’s supporters said they believe that since it defines more types of sexual violence than the prevailing Criminal Code, it would end impunity for sexual violence perpetrators and provide more help to survivors.

Neng Dara Afifah, the author of Muslimah Feminis: Penjelajahan Multi Identitas(Muslim Feminists: Multi-Identity Exploration), said the antifeminist movement had become counterproductive to gender mainstreaming efforts.

“What they are doing is a form of betrayal of feminism, which has allowed them to access the public sphere and eventually express their ideas,” said the Syarif Hidayatullah Islamic State University lecturer.

Maimon disagreed. She said she could be active politically because Islam allowed women to be so. Islam, she said, introduced gender equality some 14 centuries ago, long before feminism did.

Islam, which emerged from Arabian society during the so-called Age of Ignorance, had elevated women’s dignity from being considered merely as property to having the right to inherit and secure their own property, Maimon said. She said she refused to be associated with feminism because “the idea came from the Western world, which is antithetical to Islamic values”.

Maimon said that one of the basic principles of feminism that collides with Islamic principles is the notion of “my body is mine”, meaning women possess full authority over their own bodies, no one else has the right to control them and they can wear whatever they want over their bodies in public. However, in Islam it does not work that way, Maimon explained.

“My body is not mine. It’s a mandate from God, so I cannot just do what I please on my body,” she said.

Another prominent figure among conservative Muslims is Euis Sunarti, a professor of family studies at the Bogor Agricultural Institute. Euis said feminism was problematic for Indonesia because its “liberal” values conflicted with the values of Islam, which were adopted by a majority of Indonesian citizens.

Feminism, she claimed, does not recognize the “division of roles” between men and women, husbands and wives. If a husband works and earns a certain amount of money, the wife should also do the same to achieve the goal of equality, Euis said.

“In fact, it does not have to be that way. If a married couple is committed to building a family and have children, then who should focus more on raising the kids?” Euis asked. She suggested mothers as the ones giving birth should take more responsibility in child-rearing but added that that did not mean mothers could not “actualize” themselves by participating in public affairs.

Women’s rights activist Nursyahbani Katjasungkana clarified that feminism did not put money or power above all, but instead “fights for equal rights between men and women, inside and outside their homes”.

Instead of applying gender stereotypes to domestic roles, Nursyahbani said, feminism actually promoted “cooperation within households” by which both parties were encouraged to play active roles in taking care of domestic affairs, “unlike the rigid role of husbands and wives as stipulated in the 1974 Marriage Law”.

Article 31 of the law regulates that “husbands are the heads of the households and wives are homemakers”. Article 34 further states that husbands are obliged to fulfill the family’s needs, while the responsibility of wives is to properly manage domestic affairs.

“We want to eliminate the rigid legal norms because they’re inconsistent with the social reality, where many women actually act as breadwinners in their respective families,” said the founder of the Indonesian Women’s Coalition and the Legal Aid Foundation of Indonesian Women Association for Justice.

Source: ‘Feminism is not for Indonesia’: Conservative Muslims’ recipe for women’s empowerment – The Jakarta Post

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