Elizabeth May says there’s ‘no room’ for racism in Green Party after NDP defector’s comments

2019/09/07 1 Comment

Let’s not kid ourselves by denying that racist attitudes don’t exist and that the comments by Richardson were more in that line than himself endorsing those views.

The question is more whether the “undertone” is more on the discomfort side or more xenophobic and racist.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May issued a statement Wednesday saying “there is no room for any kind of racism” in her party after a recent convert made comments about NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.

On Tuesday, more than a dozen former New Brunswick NDP candidates threw their support behind the provincial and federal Greens. One of the defectors — Jonathan Richardson, the former federal NDP executive member for Atlantic Canada — said racism was one of the reasons for the party’s lack of success in finding candidates with an election call imminent.

He said he travelled around the province to meet NDP members and found there’s “a bit of racism undertone,” particularly in the northern part of the province.

“From when I was up in the [Acadian] peninsula, I would say that a lot of that region that most people would be a bit worried about somebody who wasn’t, you know, wasn’t Caucasian, and that’s going to take some time to show people that, you know, Canadians come in all cultures and diversities,” he said. “But for right now I think that that racism still exists.”

Singh is a practising Sikh and wears a turban.

Singh said all national party leaders should be celebrating Canadian diversity and that May needs to explain why she has let the former New Democrats into her party.

“She’s taking in candidates that have kind of openly expressed their concern around someone looking differently and that being a challenge,” Singh said in Toronto on Wednesday evening. “If she is accepting people that are suggesting things that are not accepting of people’s diversity, then the Green Party has a lot to answer for.”

“I think our political leaders should embrace the diversity of our country and should be willing to say you can look like whatever you are as long as you share the values and beliefs that are going to make peoples’ lives better.”

NDP MP Charlie Angus tweeted that “the fact that some N.B. NDP jumped ship because they wouldn’t run under a progressive leader who comes from another religion is sickening.”

Karl Belanger, a former national director of the NDP, also weighed in, tweeting that it’s “not a good look, New Greens.”

May issued a statement Wednesday saying Richardson’s comments “were taken out of context and have led to accusations of racism against the party.”

“One of the core values of Greens around the world is respect for diversity and human rights,” she said.

“There is absolutely no room for any form of discrimination in the Green Party. We have zero tolerance for sexism, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia or hate speech of any kind. Canada’s strength lies in its diversity.”

New Brunswick Green Party Leader David Coon said he hasn’t had a chance to speak to Richardson since he made the comments, but he contends they’ve been “overblown” and “exploited” by people trying to “blunt the impact” of 14 NDP candidates joining the Greens all at once.

“What I heard him say basically was he ran into some people who had ignorant attitudes and held prejudices against people of colour or people of different religions,” he said.

“It’s not a news flash racism and prejudice exists in Canada, and it’s abhorrent and we need to work to stand up to it and stamp it out.”

Coon said he travels the province regularly and, in his experience, “most” New Brunswickers are “very accepting.”

The NDP hasn’t held a seat in the New Brunswick legislature since 2005. Its last MP in the province was Acadie-Bathurst’s Yvon Godin, who retired in 2015.

Richardson told CBC News Tuesday there are other factors behind NDP’s diminished standing in New Brunswick — including the fact that Singh hasn’t set foot in the province since winning the leadership in 2017, the election planning committee’s focus on “urban areas that are diverse,” and a lack of staffing.

Coon said he doesn’t believe racism has played a role in the NDP’s troubles in the province. He contends the NDP has been struggling in New Brunswick since Elizabeth Weir stepped down as provincial party leader in the mid-2000s.

“So it’s been a long process where they’ve found significant challenges in resonating with the people of our province. And so I think that it’s not just one issue,” he said.

New Brunswick Liberal Leader Kevin Vickers said he “couldn’t disagree more” with Richardson’s comments, which he said imply that New Brunswickers are “inherently racist.”

“The New Brunswick I know welcomes and embraces people of all backgrounds,” he said in a statement.

“These comments are wrong, embarrassing for the province and should be embarrassing for Green Party Leader David Coon.”

Coon, whose Green Party is enjoying a boom in support, securing three seats in the 2018 provincial election, said Richardson will have to take responsibility for his words. “It’s his point of view and he’s the one who’s going to have to defend that.”

Late Wednesday, Richardson posted the text of his speech on Facebook, “for those out there who are wondering and asking questions.”

Richardson said he will not be answering questions from the general public or media, but would be “happy to have a conversation” with any of his friends.

Source: Elizabeth May says there’s ‘no room’ for racism in Green Party after NDP defector’s comments

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There’s a good reason the immigration debate in Canada is calmer than in the U.S.

2019/09/07 Leave a comment

Pretty weak argument on its own. I think the large number of irregular or illegal immigrants in the USA, given its southern border, is a much larger factor in popular discourse, along with our selection system which priories more highly skilled immigrants:

In recent years the world has been rocked by the movement of tens of millions of people fleeing war, disaster and other forms of conflict. Canada has helped relieve some of the pressures that come from such large movements of people by accepting refugees, asylum-seekers and also ordinary immigrants. Far from conflict zones, surrounded by oceans, and sharing its only border with a country that is not usually a significant source of refugees, Canada has been able to be very deliberate in its calculation of how many people it chooses to admit as citizens. In general, the choices made have served the Canadian economy well by reversing what would otherwise have been a steady decline in our population and our prospects for economic growth.

So far at least, and unlike the U.S. experience, Canadian immigration policy has not become very political. One reason the two countries’ politics on this issue have differed may be their differing national fertility rates. The figure shows the fertility rate in Canada and the United States for each year from 1920 to 2018. The fertility rate measures the average number of children that would be born to each woman over her child-bearing years given prevailing age-specific fertility rates. Also shown, as the horizontal dashed line, is the population replacement rate — the fertility rate required for the population to replace itself. The replacement rate varies over time and by country due to changes and differences in mortality rates. It probably has fallen in both countries since 1920 but it is currently judged to be roughly 2.1 children per woman.

The large swings in fertility rates between 1920 and 1960 strongly suggest economic conditions affect the decision to have children. The onset of the Great Depression in 1930 coincided with a significant drop in the fertility rate in Canada, a drop that started much earlier in the U.S. The post-war baby boom saw fertility rates in both countries increase by nearly 1.5 children. Peaking in 1960, the fertility rate plummeted across North America for the next 15 years before levelling off — by the mid-1970s in the U.S. and the mid-1980s in Canada. U.S. fertility rates have since risen and now hover near the replacement rate. In this country, however, they remain well below the replacement rate.

That U.S. fertility rates are higher than ours may surprise many Canadians. Families here have greater access to supports and benefits in the form of parental leave provisions, extended employment insurance benefits, and full health-care coverage. Continuing low fertility rates in Canada suggest other influences must also be important.

But whatever the reason for it, our low fertility rate highlights the need for high levels of immigration to maintain and grow the population. After the dramatic fall in fertility rates in the 1960s, the federal government introduced a number of reforms to immigration policy, beginning in the mid to late 1970s. Since the early 1990s, Canada has settled between 200,000 and 300,000 immigrants each year. The government recently announced annual targets over the next three years that average 340,000 new immigrants per year. This level of immigration will enable Canada’s population to grow despite our low fertility rate.

The data presented in the figure may help explain why in recent years the debate over immigration hasn’t been as sharp or divisive here as in the United States. For Canada, maintaining a significant level of immigration and also a high level of trust in the process by which we invite foreigners to apply for citizenship is crucial for maintaining our economic growth.

Source: There’s a good reason the immigration debate in Canada is calmer than in the U.S.

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Viktor Orbán trumpets Hungary’s ‘procreation, not immigration’ policy

2019/09/07 Leave a comment

Sigh. Not one or the other. Policies to assist families with the costs of having and raising children by themselves will not fully address demographic pressures:

Procreate or face extinction: that’s the message from central European leaders to their shrinking populations, as across the region rightwing governments implement so-called “family first” policies to incentivise childbearing.

Hungary’s government is holding an international summit on demography in Budapest this week, being attended by several regional leaders and delegations from dozens of countries in an attempt to trumpet their investment in family policies.

The country’s nativist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said it was conceivable that Hungary, with a population of just under 10 million that is shrinking due to low birthrates and emigration of Hungarians to EU states further west, could simply disappear.

“It’s not hard to imagine that there would be one single last man who has to turn the lights out,” he said at the opening of the conference on Thursday.

Orbán, who has based his political campaigns in recent years on anti-refugee and anti-migration sentiment, said other European politicians saw immigration as the solution, but he firmly rejected this, tapping into the far-right “great replacement” theory.

“If Europe is not going to be populated by Europeans in the future and we take this as given, then we are speaking about an exchange of populations, to replace the population of Europeans with others,” said Orbán. “There are political forces in Europe who want a replacement of population for ideological or other reasons.”

Orbán’s words were backed up by one of the guests of honour at the summit, the former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, who saluted the Hungarian leader for having “the political courage to defy political correctness”.

Abbott said dying populations, not climate change, were the biggest threat to western civilisation, and lashed out at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle for recent remarks that they would not have more than two children due to the effects on the environment. “Having fewer children in western countries will hardly make the climate better when so many children are being born elsewhere,” said Abbott.

A fear of rising populations in other parts of the world was the dominant theme during the opening morning of the Budapest summit, despite the presence of delegations from many developing countries. The tone was set by an artistic performance that opened the forum, portraying hordes of people from the south and east advancing on Europe.

“Europe has become the continent of the empty crib whereas in Asia and Africa they face demographic challenges of the opposite type,” said Katalin Novák, Hungary’s minister of state for family, youth and international affairs.

The two-day summit was also attended by Czech prime minister, Andrej Babiš, and Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, who both said boosting birthrates was a priority for the long-term development of their countries. Vučić said his country was losing the equivalent of the population of a medium-sized town each year. “Serbian people have one expression for negative population growth: the white flag,” he said.

Source: Viktor Orbán trumpets Hungary’s ‘procreation, not immigration’ policy

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Glavin: Beijing casts shadow of fear across Canada

2019/09/06 Leave a comment

Terry Glavin and Ian Young have valid points along with a good thought experiment to underline them. The distinction between “Canada’s Chinese community” and Chinese Canadians is an important one:

Serving mainly the city’s ethnic Chinese community, Vancouver’s Tenth Church, in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, has been a venerable Vancouver institution, a refuge for the poor and the marginalized, since the 1930s. During a prayer service on Sunday, Aug. 19, a braying, flag-waving mob gathered outside. It took 20 officers from the Vancouver Police Department to guard the church doors, block passing traffic, and escort the frightened parishioners, at the conclusion of the service, through a gathered crowd of more than 100 people.

That same weekend, in Montreal, another crowd of shouting flag-wavers crashed the Pride parade after bullying organizers into barring a group of LGBTQ Chinese-Canadians from participating in the parade. Leading up to the event, on social media, the bullies had talked about following members of the ethnic Chinese group after the parade, to beat them up. The bullies went on to march alongside the annual Montreal parade in their own column, belting out a fiercely nationalistic song in a disruption of the conventional moment of silence honouring the gay community’s dead from homophobic murders, and from the time of the AIDS crisis.

In the case of the Vancouver incident, the mob was made up of people who had showed up earlier in the day, waving Chinese flags, to disrupt a rally in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement that had assembled outside the Vancouver consulate of the People’s Republic of China. The flag wavers heard about the prayer service, which was devoted to Hong Kong’s protesters, and followed the church-goers from the rally.

At the time, a thought occurred to me. Why wasn’t this a Canada-wide, above-the-fold national news story? That little puzzle is easily solved. Most of the churchgoers were not white people, and neither was the mob. They were all mostly ethnic Chinese. If the mob had been made up of preposterously nationalistic, flag-waving white people, it would have been a shocking story about a horrible, racist incident in Vancouver. But if the Christians had been mostly white people, and the mob mostly ethnic Chinese, the incident would have been lurid grist for racist teeth-grinding mills and radio hotline shouters from coast to coast.

In the case of the Montreal Pride incident, a similar thought occurred to the South China Morning Post’s Ian Young, who has developed a habit of breaking big stories overlooked by Canada’s mainstream news media. Based in Vancouver, Young ended up reporting the most complete story about what had happened in Montreal, and his thought experiment went like this: What if a mob of flag-waving American right-wingers had threatened violence and bullied the Pride organizers into expelling an ethnic Chinese group that wanted to honour Hong Kong’s LGBT community? What if the right-wingers had then crashed the parade with their own marchers, and the song they belted out during the solemn moment of silence was the Star-Spangled Banner?

You can probably imagine how widely and thoroughly a story like that would have been reported, and the sorts of stirring speeches our politicians would have made about it. But the bullies in Montreal were from the same pro-Beijing cohort as the bullies in Vancouver, and the song they sang was March of the Volunteers, the anthem of the People’s Republic of China.

You can’t say that the event in Montreal was racist, or even necessarily homophobic, exactly, just as it can’t be said that what happened in Vancouver was categorically racist, or even a straightforward case of religious bigotry. But it is exceedingly difficult to argue that something kindred to racism is not at least involved to some degree, in the way the news media fails to pay attention to the phenomenon of Beijing’s bullying and influence-peddling in Canada. And in the way our politicians, from all the political parties, if only most egregiously the Liberal Party, pander and placate in these matters.

It may not be exactly racist to resort to the term “Canada’s Chinese community,” but it will get you off on the wrong foot, and if you’re not careful, whatever your intentions, you may end up at least serving a fundamentally racist purpose.

There at nearly 2 million people of Chinese descent in Canada, but until very recently, owing to migration facilitated mainly by the scandal-plagued and now-shuttered federal Immigrant Investor Program, Canada’s ethnic Chinese came almost exclusively from the five Cantonese-speaking communities at the mouth of the Pearl River and adjacent areas around Hong Kong. Among Canada’s immigrants classified as ethnic Chinese, there are at least hundreds of thousands of people that Beijing describes in the argot of Communist Party propaganda as the “five poisons”: Taiwanese, Tibetan and Uighur nationalists, followers of Falun Gong religious practices, and democrats.

Increasingly, these Canadians are living in fear. If they aren’t careful about what they say, their family members back in China will end up being badgered, blacklisted, or worse. This fear is particularly acute among Canada’s Uighurs, whose fellow Muslims in Xinjiang have been interned, as many as 2 million of them, in re-education camps.

The fear is spreading in Canada, now that Hong Kong is in turmoil. It is restraining Canadians from exercising their rights to free speech and freedom of assembly in the Chinese-language news media — now controlled almost entirely by wealthy pro-Beijing interests — and in their decisions about whether to risk raising their voices or attending rallies in support of pro-democracy Hongkongers. It is spreading on university campuses — Beijing closely monitors the activities of Canada’s nearly 80,000 Chinese student-visa holders — and Beijing’s United Front Works Department now effectively controls hundreds of Chinese community and business associations, big and small, across Canada.

In these ways, Beijing is asserting its international reach to undermine the inviolable human rights of hundreds of thousands of Canadian citizens, and by the reckoning of the Geneva-based Human Rights Watch organization, the problem is getting worse. Earlier this year, Amnesty International and a coalition of diaspora groups presented the Canadian Security Intelligence Service with an exhaustive study that describes in detail the threats and harassment Beijing and its operatives in Canada are spreading.

“Definitely, people are afraid to speak out,” Ivy Li of the Canadian Friends of Hong Kong told me. “But it is a dilemma. People are also afraid of backlash, that Canadians in the mainstream will think all Chinese Canadians are involved in infiltration, or are working for Beijing, and will be suspect.”

Li, who emigrated from Hong Kong decades ago, said she has personally experienced hostility owing to perfectly well-justified concerns about Chinese money-laundering and the gross distortions created by Chinese capital investment in the real estate market. “But Canadians are very considerate, and we want our society to be more fair and just, and so this fear of being accused of racism, it is part of why mainstream society, especially the media, allows the pro-Beijing supporters to play the racism card.”

The role racism plays in these necessary debates is obviously complex, but even the most virtuous Canadian politicians have been happy to see Chinese immigrants as cash cows, and to regard Chinese Canadians as voting blocs, Li tells me, “and as Chinese diaspora first, rather than as Canadian citizens first.

“This allows Beijing to own at least part of us in Canada, and it means we are left to fend for ourselves against the Chinese government. And that is racist.”

Source: Glavin: Beijing casts shadow of fear across Canada

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The Multicultural Myopia: More on marketing

2019/09/06 Leave a comment

Clever tagline but with some good perspective and analysis, particularly second and third generation Latinos and Asian Americans:

According to the official U.S. Census Bureau’s projections, next year, 2020, will be the year when the majority of our country’s population of 17-years-olds and under will come from a minority background, most of them from a Latino, African-American or Asian-American ethnicity.

Moreover, also according to the same projections, what starts with our younger population is a trend that will continue over the next two decades, age group by age group, culminating at some point between 2040 and 2050, when the entire nation will become a so-called minority-majority country.

Not surprisingly, driven by this significant demographic transformation, we have also been witnessing a backlash to the idea of a multicultural America with probably its most visible face being the attacks on the value immigrants bring to this country. This couldn’t be more ironic, given the fact that this country was shaped by immigration, whose values of resilience, hard work, perseverance, optimism, and the search for a better life to their families, permeates the fabric of our society for many centuries to come.

In my experience as a business leader and multicultural marketing expert, I am frequently asked how corporations should navigate the balance between catering to the new demographic changes in the marketplace while avoiding getting caught up in the heated political debate and the divisiveness we are experiencing in our society. My answer is that as business leaders, while we must pay attention to what’s happening in the short term, it is imperative that we look and plan for the next five, ten, twenty years and that the demographic changes we are experiencing today won’t change in the next two decades, no matter which political party is in power.

The demographic forces shaping the changes we are facing today are less driven by immigration policies, as they are more impacted by the organic population growth, mostly from Latinos and Asian-Americans residents. While we expect that the population growth rate from minority groups to slow down over the next few decades, their growth rate it will still be significantly higher than the white Caucasian population growth rate, which may even be facing negative population growth, following a pattern seen in some countries in Western Europe and in Japan.

In my opinion, not recognizing the transformational power of these demographic changes in almost every aspect of our society and, most importantly, the impact they will have on business is what I call “Multicultural Myopia,” to paraphrase an expression coined by Professor Theodore Levitt’s work to explain a short-sided approach to marketing that doesn’t focus on consumers.

Research has shown that multicultural consumers have demonstrated slightly different behaviors, preferences and attitudes towards brands and services in a vast array of industries, including consumer goods, healthcare and financial services, to name a few. These behaviors may offer opportunities for different products and services, changes in packaging, sales channels, customer services, distribution, pricing, to name a few.

Moreover, significant studies conducted by industry leaders like Nielsen, Kantar, Simmons have all confirmed that the new generation of multicultural consumers does not adhere to the old assumption of “natural assimilation,” fully adopting a monolithic Anglo culture as seen by many early 20th century immigrants. As a matter of fact, we are seeing signs of the opposite trend: not only younger, U.S.-born, multicultural consumers seek to retain important aspects of their cultural heritage like language and culture, but are also exerting a significant influence power into shaping America’s mainstream culture. This can be seen in their choices of food, music, fashion and sports, for instance. The number one music genre watched on YouTube? Latino Music.

Why is this discussion meaningful? Similar to changes in our business environment driven by technological advances, the changes we are witnessing – and will continue to observe at a faster rate in the years to come – will create a fertile environment for growth, innovation and, most importantly, changes in the current competitive positioning of several corporations and brands in America. In short, leading corporations and brands may see significant shifts in their market share positioning, and sales growth trajectory. These movements will be tracked closely by Wall Street, and analysts will start to assess a brand’s value based on their ability to navigate these new demographic changes.

How to prepare for this new multicultural marketplace? Leading companies have been successful by following a few useful strategies: getting alignment at the senior leadership level on a plan that addresses the opportunity; investing consistently over the years versus approaching the opportunity as a tactical short-term project, recognizing the need for a holistic approach that includes investing in consumers; having community engagement; and building a strong recruitment, retention and advancement program for minority employees and suppliers.

As a friend of mine, the author and business expert Rishad Tobaccowala, recently stated when discussing the topic of America’s demographic changes, “If you don’t like change, you may not like irrelevancy either.” The stakes are high, and this is the time for corporate America, and the time has come to consider multicultural marketing as a growth strategy has come. Victors will reap the benefits of a young, loyal and vibrant set of new consumers; the markets will penalize the losers. This is a long-overdue conversation that board of directors and C-suites across our country should have. Who’s taking the lead on the race for market leadership in the decades to come?

Source: The Multicultural Myopia

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Ousted Liberal candidate says party was aware of his online comments for weeks

2019/09/06 Leave a comment

Widely covered and unclear exactly how his comments made it through the vetting process given that they were likely to be uncovered by B’nai Brith and others. And intriguing if Liberals were working on defensive media lines (which could be developed):

Ousted Liberal candidate Hassan Guillet admits to posting online about a Hamas-aligned activist, but says the party was well aware of his comments and were even working on a public relations plan before they withdrew his nomination.

Last week, the Liberal Party dumped Guillet as a candidate in Quebec after a Jewish human rights group accused him of making a number of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements.

In a statement posted to its website Friday, B’nai Brith Canada alleges Guillett congratulated a Hamas-aligned activist, Raed Salah, upon his release from a “prison of occupied Palestine” and prayed that he would one day succeed in liberating “all of Palestine.” The group said he described Salah as “frontier-fighter.”

The group also said it found a since-deleted Facebook post from 2016 in which Guillet allegedly wrote “the Zionists control American politics.”

The group said it reached out to the Liberal Party more than a week ago to make it aware of their allegations against him. The Conservative Party also called for his withdrawal.

Later that day, the Liberal Party said Guillet’s “insensitive comments” don’t align with the party’s values and revoked his candidacy in the riding of Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel.

Guillet held a press conference in the riding on Wednesday, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with supporters. He said the party was aware of the contents of his Facebook page since at least Aug. 8 and already had discussed an action plan that involved reaching out to the Jewish community.

Guillet, a member of the Council of Quebec Imams who gained national attention after delivering a speech in Quebec City honouring victims of the Quebec mosque shooting, said he did congratulate Salah after he was released from prison because he had protested the closure of a Jerusalem mosque, but insisted he wasn’t aware of his background.

Liberals say decision is final

“The party either knew or should have known what it contained. Why, then, if these words were so problematic, why was my candidacy … accepted?” he said. “One is entitled to ask the question, was it incompetence or bad faith?

“I am not anti-Semitic. On the contrary, I campaigned and I will always campaign against all forms of racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.”

Guillet said a member of the Liberal Party approached him Friday and said he could resign for personal reasons — or the party would withdraw its support.

The Liberal Party isn’t changing its mind.

“Following an internal review, the Liberal Party of Canada took the appropriate steps to remove Mr. Guillet as the Liberal candidate for the riding of  Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel. That decision is final,” said party spokesperson Parker Lund in an email Wednesday.

Neither is B’nai Brith Canada.

“Today’s press conference only confirms our position that Hassan Guillet is not fit to carry the Liberal Party banner,” said Michael Mostyn, the group’s chief executive officer.

“We are satisfied with our role in exposing his anti-Semitic statements, and disappointed that he spurned an opportunity to retract them.”

Source: Ousted Liberal candidate says party was aware of his online comments for weeks

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‘See beyond difference’: Japan looks to Aussie example as it opens door to foreign workers

2019/09/06 Leave a comment

Interesting challenges and modest expectations:

The woman tasked with repitching Japan’s strict immigration policy to open the doors to foreign workers for the first time says she wants to avoid the ‘friction’ evident in Australia’s multicultural community.

Japanese MP Yoko Kamikawa said the country has a lot to learn from Australia in ‘drafting a multicultural community’.

“I understand Australia has welcomed a lot of immigrants,” she told SBS News.

“Australia has faced several frictions coming from the difference in the cultures or religions with people from different backgrounds.

“Japan has a lot of things to learn from your country to overcome these challenges.”

Japan started rethinking it’s immigration policy last year, faced with an aging population and a shrinking labour force.

A new visa program, aiming to lure more foreign workers to Japan took effect in April, and Ms Kamikawa said it was working well so far.

But she flagged room for further improvement.

The visa covers 14 industries that need foreign workers to boost labour forces –  including food services, cleaning, construction, agriculture, fishing, vehicle repair and machine operations.

Ms Kamikawa said, so far, the number of foreign workers entering Japan would be relatively small.

“We estimate that there will be merely 350,000 foreign workers in the next five years,” she said.

“We will improve the system step by step. We are trying to make the best effort to make our system properly workable.”

But there has been resistance to the new visas.

Ms Kamikawa said while some tension was ‘inevitable’, she believed the key to a successful multicultural community was a mutual understanding.

“We have to see beyond the difference in the cultures and the religious differences, especially in the workplace and at the community level,” she said.

“We must try to study from each other and learn from each other.

“The foreign workers should study Japanese culture but at the same time, the Japanese community must understand the people with a different background, from foreign countries.

“Mutual understanding is the key and I strongly believe with mutual understanding it will lead to achieving a true multicultural society eventually.”

Ms Kamikawa said Japan was also looking at ways of ‘improving the process’ for refugee intake.

Japan has accepted just over 40 asylum seekers so far in 2019, which is already double the intake of last year.

“Japan is now looking a process of welcoming refugees and the convention relating to the status of refugees,” Ms Kamikawa said.

“We try to continue to improve these operations and we try to have more refugee intake into our society in accordance with international obligations.”

Source: ‘See beyond difference’: Japan looks to Aussie example as it opens door to foreign workers

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Ross Douthat: Four Things That Are Not White Nationalism

2019/09/05 Leave a comment

His list:

  1. It is not white nationalism to recognize limiting principles on liberal universalism, and a justifiable role for particularity — ethnic, cultural, religious — in many political arrangements.
  2. It is not white nationalism to believe that countries like the United States would be better off with more babies.
  3. It is not white nationalism to believe that growing ideological uniformity in the commanding heights of culture makes American politics more polarized.
  4. It’s also not white nationalism for conservatives to try to find ways to persuade and reel back people on the right who are tempted by bigoted ideas

As always, it is the specifics that indicate whether the beliefs and principles are inclusive or exclusive, positive or negative.

Useful reminder not to automatically label or dismiss:

The American right in the Trump era has a racism problem. It’s fed by a Republican president who race-baits, a media ecosystem whose guardrails have collapsed, the lure of far-right ideas after various center-right failures and the influence of toxic forms of internet community on impressionable minds.

At the same time, the American right in the Trump era faces a liberalism that’s eager to discover and condemn racism where it does not actually exist. Positions that any de-Trumpified conservatism would necessarily hold are conflated with white nationalism, figures who opposed Donald Trump are hammered as enablers of racism, and progressives indulge a political fantasy in which the racist infiltration of the mainstream right is an opportunity to delegitimize conservatism entirely.

The coexistence of these two realities was usefully illustrated in the last two weeks. If you want evidence that bigotry on the right is a bottom-up problem as well as a feature of the president’s birtherism and Twitter wars, just read last week’s SplinterNews exposé on the email group where a cluster of youthful and not-so-youthful right-wingers gathered to play at white nationalism while holding down normal jobs for conservative publications and institutions. What was reported in the piece I can confirm anecdotally: Every extended conversation I have with 20-something conservatives includes a discussion of how to deal with racist flirtations in their peer group.

But if you want evidence that unjust delegimitization is happening as well, consider that in the very same period that the email exposéappeared, a succession of mainstream media outlets served up bogus accusations of racism against prominent and not-so-prominent conservatives.

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Liberal backbencher accuses his own government of ‘pandering’ to Sikh separatists

2019/09/05 Leave a comment

By way on context, Brampton Centre has the lowest percentage of Canadian Sikhs of the five Brampton ridings (7.8 percent), with the other ridings ranging from 13 to 33.8 percent). Other significant religious groups include Muslims and Hindus (8.5 and 9.6 percent respectively, all figures from the 2011 NHS:

MP Ramesh Sangha seemed to place the blame on Sikh Canadian cabinet ministers and other MPs, noting that Trudeau supports the status quo in India

South Asia-related politics is again causing turbulence for the Liberal government, as one of its own MPs charges that his party has been “pandering” to Sikh separatists, threatening Canada’s relations with India in the process.

Ramesh Sangha, who represents Ontario’s Brampton Centre riding, delivered the surprising critique of his caucus colleagues during a recent Punjabi-language television interview. His comments revive an issue that has been an irritant for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for more than two years, flaring up during his ill-fated tour of India last year.

Indian officials have previously accused the Liberals of trying to win favour with Canadians pushing for an independent Sikh homeland — known as Khalistan — in the Punjab region of India. Punjab’s state governor even charged that Trudeau’s four Sikh cabinet ministers are Khalistanis. They have strenuously denied the accusation.

It is less expected to hear such complaints from a member of the government itself — two months before a federal election.

“There is no doubt, there cannot be two opinions that the Liberal party is pandering (to) Khalistan supporters,” Sangha said in the interview on 5AAB, a Punjabi-language channel based in Mississauga, Ont. “One thing is for sure, when we raise this issue, it will raise an anti-India slogan or demand the division of India on some ground. In that, ultimately our relations, the Canada-India relationship will certainly develop cracks.”

The interviewer asked if he thought the party had a “soft corner” for Khalistanis. “It does,” he responded.

But Sangha seemed to place the blame on those Sikh Canadian cabinet ministers and other MPs, noting that Trudeau himself has made clear he supports the status quo in India.

“(The prime minister) said in strong words that we don’t want a divided India, we want a united India and we will work for that,” said the MP. “Sikh ministers, MPs of our Sikh brotherhood, these brothers of mine, they have their own … These are their own views and as long as they demand it, it is viewed that they are separatists. When this view surfaces, India also voices its hard view.”

He said his observations were not based on being friends with Capt. Amarinder Singh, the Punjab state governor, but stemmed from his role with a Canada-India parliamentary association.

“I have observed this issue very closely,” Sangha said.

The MP, a lawyer serving his first term in Parliament, could not be reached for further comment Monday.

A statement from Trudeau’s office did not address Sangha’s remarks directly, but firmly denied the government was sympathetic to the Khalistani movement.

“Canada’s position on a united India is unwavering and we are unanimous as a government on this issue,” said the statement. “Canadians have the right to freedom of expression and speech and they have the right to peacefully express their views.”

Sikh-Indian tensions have played an over-sized role in Canadian politics in recent years, thanks in part to the large concentrations of electorally active Sikh-Canadians in several swing ridings in Ontario, B.C. and Alberta. Almost all those constituencies voted Liberal in the 2015 election.

The government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has voiced concern previously about Trudeau and other Liberals appearing at Sikh-community gatherings that also featured tributes to alleged terrorists, and objected to a 2017 resolution passed by the then Liberal-dominated Ontario legislature that declared a 1984 massacre of Sikhs in India a “genocide.”

Singh, the governor of Punjab, fanned the flames further when he alleged the same year that the four Sikh-Canadian cabinet members were Khalistanis, and refused to meet with one of them, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan.

Singh did sit down with Sajjan and Trudeau on the prime minister’s state visit to India in February 2018, voicing satisfaction at their strong rejection of the separatist movement.

But the issue caused the Liberals more trouble on that trip when it came to light that a convicted Sikh terrorist, Jaspal Atwal, had been invited to two official functions, including one where he was photographed with Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, the prime minister’s wife.

And yet, government attempts to get tough on alleged Sikh extremists have also proven politically tricky for the Liberals.

The latest edition of an annual Public Safety Canada report on terrorism released in December 2018 mentioned Sikh extremism for the first time, sparking outrage among community leaders who felt the citation tarred the religion as a whole. The report’s wording was later changed to talk about unspecified separatist movements in India.

Punjab governor Singh, in turn, criticized that change, and later accused Canada of “covertly and overtly” supporting Sikh extremists, suggesting India might need to pursue sanctions against this country.

Source: Liberal backbencher accuses his own government of ‘pandering’ to Sikh separatists

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Election news has outdated ideas about social conservatives

2019/09/05 Leave a comment

Part of the Policy Options series on the elections with Ray Pennings of Cardus painting a more nuanced picture of social conservatives, noting the range of views and that they are generally not single issue voters.

Also noteworthy, is the increased religiosity of immigrants as various surveys have shown:

It seems surprising that just 15 years ago, Parliament’s vote redefining marriage to include same-sex relationships passed 158-133 with 16 MPs absent. Ninety-three Conservatives, 32 Liberals, five Bloc Quebecois MPs, and one New Democrat (as well as two Independents) cast a “social conservative” (so-con) vote on this question. These dissenters knew they were swimming against strong cultural trends, but were still part of the mainstream in their political parties.

Much has changed since then and the upcoming federal election campaign will test the commitment of Canadians and their political leaders to tolerance and including people whose views may not fit today’s cultural mainstream.

Current trends and the so-cons

For example, the Liberals and NDP today require MPs to take socially liberal positions; it’s no longer acceptable to leave certain issues to individual conscience.  Conservative leaders perform a delicate dance, insisting party policy rejects attempts to re-open issues like abortion or same-sex marriage, while ostensibly defending the free speech and conscience of so-cons within their party.

Given trends during the last two decades, so-cons feel more ostracized and marginalized than ever. Whether it’s on abortion (Morgentaler 1988), LGBTQ issues (same-sex reference 2004, Trinity Western 2018), prostitution (Bedford 2013), or euthanasia (Carter 2015), Supreme Court of Canada decisions have catalyzed significant socially liberal turns.

Few so-cons, therefore, expect politics to answer their concerns. Most political appeals for their votes contribute to a cynical mood at best. They also feel profoundly misunderstood.

The so-con label is one that, for the most part, is imposed, not chosen.  The small percentage who embrace the label are divided between purists and incrementalists.  Most voters who fit the so-con profile are silent observers. For them, “so-con” is a reluctant identity, disowned because it is most frequently heard as an epithet or insult. The coverage of so-con issues in politics and media tells a story in which they do not recognize themselves.

CBC and the Angus Reid Institute partnered in 2016 to conduct a comprehensive poll that examined the values, beliefs, priorities, and identities of Canadians. As a result, the poll suggested five basic mindsets among the electorate. The mindset dubbed “faith-based traditionalists,” including so-cons, made up 20 percent of the population, the survey found. The group was over-represented among immigrants in Canada less than a decade and visible minorities. And whereas 11 percent of Canadians said they attended religious services weekly, a third of this cohort did.

In their 2017 book Religion and Canadian Party Politics, David Rayside, Jerald Sabin and Paul E.J. Thomas attempted to map the policy outcomes of religious activism in an increasingly secular context. They concluded that reality was far more complex than the popular narrative assumed. For example, assuming all so-cons hold the same views on such issues as abortion and sexual diversity is somewhat outdated, they noted. Another recent factor (at least since the 2015 federal campaign) is the increased prominence of minority religions, which has added to what the authors termed “a new ‘axis’ of contention…centered on the place of minority faiths in the social fabric.”

So what does all of this mean for media coverage of so-cons and their potential influence on the 2019 federal election campaign?

First, nuance is required in defining so-con issues. Few so-cons expect politics to solve their issues, certainly not in the short-term.  For example, on abortion, a typical church bulletin includes notices about pregnancy support centres, adoption, counselling programs, and other hands-on activities; these far outnumber political messages.

It would also be a mistake to reduce so-cons to single-issue voters on hot-button issues. We know this because those “faith-based traditionalists” in the 2016 poll overlap significantly with the one-fifth of Canadians labelled as “religiously committed” in a 2018 Cardus and Angus Reid Institute study. These two surveys, based on different criteria and tested through at least four polling samples between 2016 and 2018, point to similar conclusions. The “religiously committed” group tended to be more pro-immigrant than the overall population; and were less white and Christian than typically presumed. Forty-nine percent of Canadians born outside the country reported, in the 2018 poll, receiving material support from faith-based communities on their arrival and 63 percent relied on faith communities to form a community or network.

Environmental issues are also significant for many faith communities, given that stewardship of creation is a significant theme in most religious traditions. The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s faith toolkit for churches includes environment among priority concerns. Likewise, poverty relief is a significant concern, demonstrated by hands-on involvement and financial support for faith-based social service agencies.

Looking for signs of respect

Being used as fodder in a political culture war context has a perverse impact. Religious pro-life supporters, convinced that abortion involves something more than a collection of tissue, are expressing love for their neighbour. Some do it caringly, others less delicately. However, the declaration that anyone who veers from a publicly accepted orthodoxy is violating human rights is debilitating to democracy. Remember the Canada Summer Jobs attestation debacle – when the beliefs of potential employers, including anti-poverty groups and church camps, disqualified them from government grants? That sent a loud message that so-cons were unwelcome in public life.

Quebec’s new secularism law takes things even further. Turban-wearing Sikhs, and those of any faith wearing religious symbols, are effectively being banished from provincial public service. While religious freedom in Canada is very different than in countries where believers risk their lives to follow their convictions and worship, denying privileges in society based on people’s beliefs still matters greatly. During the October 2019 federal election campaign, so-cons will undoubtedly look for signs of genuine respect as they consider how to cast their ballots.

Fifteen years has marked a hasty change in the place that so-cons have in Canada. Most so-con Canadians, who like others pay relatively little attention to politics but vote as a matter of responsible citizenship, face an increasingly hostile culture. They view themselves as good citizens, loving their neighbour through their personal relationships and also by donating and volunteering in their faith communities and neighbourhoods. But those stories are rarely reported. So-cons only see themselves in the news when others declare how outdated or unwelcome so-con views are.

That hostility is seen in the numbers. When a Cardus-Angus Reid Institute study in 2017 asked if the presence of religion in public life was a net positive or a negative in society, the results were startling. Those who were religiously committed, regardless of tradition, were more positive about the contribution of others, including those of different faiths. Those who were least religiously committed were reluctant to acknowledge the benefit to society of anyone but themselves.

Sadly, it would seem that the constructive involvement of faith in Canadian public life has taken a back seat to a culture war mentality with so-cons perceiving themselves on the defensive.

The question for political leaders and the media is the extent to which so-cons will be respected players in the 2019 campaign game or be tossed around as a political football. While the resistance offered by a group religiously committed to live by the Golden Rule may be less militant than other political actors, the upcoming campaign will still test Canadians’ commitment to tolerance and inclusiveness toward those whose views may not be in the cultural mainstream.

Source: Election news has outdated ideas about social conservatives

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

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