Douglas Todd: Idea of federal apology splits Italian Canadians

2019/08/27 Leave a comment

For some context. One of the files I worked on under the Conservative government was the historical recognition program which provided funding to communities who had been affected by wartime internment or immigration restrictions (Chinese, Ukrainian, Italian, Indian and Jewish Canadians).

Italian Canadian stakeholders were difficult and in the end, then Minister Kenney, engaged Conservative Senator Di Nino to help steer the discussions regarding projects to be funded. (For more details, see Multiculturalism: The Case of Historical Recognition in my book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias:Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism):

Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already offered his apologies to many different Canadian minority groups, some Italian Canadian media outlets have been aroused to express anger that their ethnic group has not yet received one from him.

The Italian-language media, which has 25 different outlets in Canada, has been simmering this summer about Trudeau, who has made it clear he will formally apologize only after the Oct. 21 election for the internment of a relatively small portion of Italian-Canadians during the Second World War.

“Almost 80 bitter years later, the federal government appears ready to apologize to Italian Canadians for the humiliation, suffering, arrest and internments of hundreds in 1940. … While some say better late than never, others wonder why he did not do it right after he came to power,” said Lo Specchio newspaper.

“The fact Justin Trudeau has ‘promised’ just before the fall election to apologize in Parliament for the internment of Italian Canadians … raises questions about the prime minister’s sincerity,” said Corriere Canadese newspaper.

“Anti-Italian prejudice must end,” declared one writer in Il Cittadino Canadese.

Trudeau’s promised apology has become a key political issue in ridings with large Italian and other ethnic groups.

And it’s sparked debate among Italian Canadians and others over whether such an apology is warranted, since the detention of 586 suspected Fascist Italian Canadians was different in many ways from the mass internment of 22,000 Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.

Andres Malchaski, co-founder of an organization that monitors electoral issues among Canada’s ethnic communities, said many Italian-language newspapers are pushing for Trudeau to say he’s sorry because, like other ethnic groups, they’re “using apology and redress issues to establish their political and cultural identity in Canada.”

Italian Canadians are “particularly aggressive … because they have a history of political participation and leadership and a need to defend that space against other ethnic lobbies,” said Malchaski, whose website, diversityvotes.ca, monitors hundreds of ethnic-language media outlets in Canada.

About 1.6 million Canadians are of Italian ethnicity, including almost 100,000 in Metro Vancouver, 280,000 in Greater Montreal and 490,000 in the Toronto region. Malchaski says many are involved in nomination competitions in ridings which have a changing mix of ethnic voters.

In his four years in office Trudeau became the focus of academic studies for his frequent “apologism,” for the way he regularly, often tearfully, expresses regret for historical wrongs to certain groups, including Sikhs, Indigenous people in B.C., Jews, Inuit and LGBTQ people.

As a result many Italian Canadian media outlets are suspicious about why he’s holding off until after the election to apologize for what occurred in Canada during the Second World War, when Canadian soldiers joined the Allies battling against Nazi Germany, imperial Japan and Fascist Italy.

Part of the reason for Trudeau’s delay could have to do with the uncertainty and controversy that continues to burn among Italians and the wider public over whether to apologize to offspring of the those Italian Canadians detained as suspected collaborators with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s Fascists.

Canada was “not wrong or malicious” to try to protect the country by detaining certain Italians in the country at a time of war, says Patrick Luciana, an Italian Canadian who is a senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s Global Cities Institute.

“To have done otherwise would have shown an extraordinary dereliction of duty to Canada and its people …. What government wouldn’t take precautions against potential enemy subversives?” Luciana recently wrote, noting such precautions were the norm among Allied countries.

“How can we as Italian Canadians ask for an apology when 5,000 Canadian men and boys are buried in cemeteries throughout Italy, who died to rid ‘our’ ancestral home of fascism and naziism?,” Luciana said.

“If we want anything, it’s to avoid having this episode in our history forgotten. But that’s in our hands, not the government’s.”

Another prominent Canadian historian, Jack Granatstein, told Postmedia he thoroughly endorsed the views of Luciana, who argued it’s insulting to ask for an apology today from the descendants of Canada’s leaders in the 1940s, who were predominantly Anglo-Saxon.

Historians often make many distinctions between the targeted Italian Canadian arrests in Eastern Canada and the way that, after the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong and Pearl Harbour, most Japanese Canadians were removed from the West Coast, had their property confiscated and were interned.

Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father, opposed collective apologies in general. And at least two other Italian Canadian scholars – Franca Iocovetta and Roberto Perin, who edited the 2000 book, Enemies Within – have also expressed skepticism about the Italian redress campaign, according to Christopher Moore, a contributing editor to Canada’s History magazine.

“In the 1930s, there were pro-Fascist organizations in most Italian-Canadian communities, often sponsored by Italian consulates loyal to Mussolini’s Fascist regime. The roughly 600 Italian Canadians interned, out of some 112,000 Italians Canadians, were mostly associated with these pro-Fascist organizations,” Moore said.

On the eve of the Second World War, the Italian Canadian population was split by duelling pro- and anti-Fascist organizations, noted Moore, a prolific writer and former Vancouver resident whose father wrote a biography of Angelo Branca, a leading B.C. lawyer, judge and Italian community leader.

Moore says Branca’s standing among Italian Canadians was “eventually enhanced by his determined resistance in the 1930s to the encroachment of the pro-Fascist movements.”

Regardless of whether Canadians support or oppose an apology, Machaski, whose website translates the Italian-language media into English, said the fight of some Italian Canadians “for an apology is more of a fight for political space for the community than a campaign for redress that might kindle old animosities.”

In advance of this fall’s election, Malchaski is on to something when he maintains the campaign to make sure Trudeau says he’s sorry is mostly about trying to conserve a sense of Italian identity among younger generations and to hold onto some political influence.

Source: Douglas Todd: Idea of federal apology splits Italian Canadians

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Trudeau government outlines five-year, $148-million plan to attract more foreign students to Canadian universities

2019/08/27 Leave a comment

Nice to see the government set out publicly the countries targeted which will allow evaluation of the success of diversification. The line “We don’t want to be poachers of talent, we want to be partners” appears ingenuous.

Courageous for a government to encourage Canadians to study abroad given that a certain percentage will likely remain in other countries to pursue opportunities.

Concerned that more than half of the international students in Canada come from just two countries, China and India, the federal government has pledged nearly $30-million over the next five years to diversify global recruiting efforts in the postsecondary sector.

The government is targeting countries with a large and growing middle class that may not yet have the higher-education capacity to educate all their students, or where the prospect of a Canadian education in English or French holds appeal.

The government said the initial focus of its marketing efforts will be in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Morocco, Turkey, France and Ukraine. It will also aim to attract students to schools outside of Canada’s largest cities, bringing economic benefits to provinces and regions that have tended to receive fewer immigrants.

“We’re really pleased with the countries [the government] has chosen,” said Paul Davidson, president of Universities Canada, the national lobby group that represents 96 universities across the country.

“We don’t want to be poachers of talent, we want to be partners.”

The government’s efforts to broaden the source countries of international students are part of a five-year, $148-million international education strategy released last week.

The strategy also allocates $95-million to encourage Canadian students to study and build ties abroad, particularly in Asia and Latin America, rather than the common destinations of the U.S., Britain and Australia.

“The higher-education community has been looking for this for about 20 years,” Mr. Davidson said. He cited statistics that show only 11 per cent of Canadian undergraduate students study in another country, lower than in some other wealthy nations.

Mr. Davidson said particular efforts will be focused on opportunities for Indigenous and low-income students, as well as those with disabilities who historically have been less likely to venture abroad for study.

The strategy fits neatly with the government’s skills agenda, Mr. Davidson said. The hope is that a future work force with an international outlook, contacts and cultural fluency in new markets will be a source of strength for Canada. Similarly, some of the international students who study in Canada are expected to apply for and be selected as permanent residents, bringing with them knowledge and networks that extend beyond Canada’s borders.

“International education is an essential pillar of Canada’s long-term competitiveness,” Jim Carr, Minister of International Trade Diversification, said in a statement. “Canadians who study abroad gain exposure to new cultures and ideas, stimulating innovation and developing important cross-cultural competencies. Students from abroad who study in Canada bring those same benefits to our shores.”

Last year, India surpassed China as Canada’s top source of foreign students. There were more than 172,000 study permit holders from India in Canada on Dec. 31, 2018, and more than 142,000 from China, each representing slightly more than a quarter of the total of 570,000. Although those countries will continue to figure prominently as source countries for Canada, there is risk associated with such concentration.

There were fears at the height of Canada’s diplomatic conflict with China over the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou that China would prevent or discourage students coming to Canada in such large numbers. Many universities expressed anxiety about that possibility last December, having seen a similar scenario play out in Canada’s relations with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis recalled hundreds of students studying in Canada after their government objected to a Canadian government tweet. Some schools lost significant amounts in tuition revenue as a result.

The economic contribution of education has grown rapidly in recent years. International students spent more than $21-billion in Canada in 2018, according to a study by Global Affairs Canada, and had a larger economic impact than exports of auto parts, lumber or aircraft.

The number of foreign study permit holders in Canada has more than doubled since 2012.

Source: Trudeau government outlines five-year, $148-million plan to attract more foreign students to Canadian universities

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How a false W5 story 40 years ago became a watershed moment for Chinese-Canadians

2019/08/27 2 Comments

Good historical reminder:

It still baffles me, the casual racism of the newscast.

The opening remarks of W5 host Helen Hutchinson sounded the alarm, her voice dripping with concern about a “scenario that would make a great many people in this country angry and resentful.”

In universities across the country, “foreign” students were taking the place of real Canadians in professional schools such as medicine, dentistry and pharmacy.

The camera panned to a pharmacy class at the University of Toronto showing the six Chinese students who were supposedly taking up space from Canadians. The problem was the featured “foreign students” were Canadians who were either born in Canada or had become citizens.

The statistics were also misleading: W5 said 100,000 foreign students were crowding Canadian schools when the reality was less than half that, with only 20,000 in universities. Besides, in some professional faculties such as pharmacy you had to be an Ontario resident to apply. Foreign students were not eligible.

Forty years ago in September, it didn’t make sense to the professional journalists on the nation’s most watched investigative news program that a student of Asian descent could also be Canadian.

The intention was clear: real Canadians couldn’t get into professional schools because of foreigners. A white student was interviewed who said she had good marks but couldn’t get into pharmacy because outsiders were taking her place.

But how could they have got it so wrong?

The story had an all too familiar angle. Earlier racist legislation used in the defence of a turn-of-the-century head tax against the Chinese community had warned that foreigners were taking away jobs or opportunities from Canadians. The W5 story was a new spin on the same wedge issue. Get ready to build that wall. Go back home to where you came from.

It did have one major but unintentional effect: it united a community. The segment would be a watershed moment for Chinese-Canadians, awakening a social and political consciousness that reverberates to this day.

Four decades later the media has evolved: seeing not one, but two Asian anchors nightly on CBC’s The National is a revelation.

But we are still grappling with issues of race. In an era when the president of the United States can use racism as an election platform, doubling and tripling down on telling four American congresswomen of colour to “go back home,” the lessons of W5 are worth repeating.

The “Campus Giveaway” story should be a required part of the curriculum of every journalism school. Because those lessons, it seems, aren’t easily learned.

Maclean’s in 2010 essentially recycled the “Campus Giveaway” story with a “Too Asian” cover story that controversially followed the plight of white students who didn’t want to study at a university with, well, too many Asians.

And in 2014, CTV seemed to learn nothing from past transgressions after I broke a story about racist tweets from a producer of one of its sitcoms, Spun Out. The network decided, as it did decades earlier, to stonewall on accepting responsibility, hoping it would just go away.

It’s a reminder that inclusivity is a work in progress. The Star most recently struck a diversity task force looking at how we report and how to include more diverse sources in our reporting, especially with the upcoming election. Unconscious bias is real.

But Asian Canadians have much to thank CTV for decades later.

The W5 show ignited a firestorm of protest from a once silent community, which picketed the broadcaster demanding an apology. It brought together the community in a way that events never really had before.

There is so much wrong with the program it’s hard to figure out where to begin. That includes outrageous shots of a Chinese-Canadian students association meeting with a voice-over stating, “There are so many foreign Oriental students it’s like there are two campuses … at this meeting not one Canadian student attended.”

The story also attracted the key support of political leaders such as Bob Rae and Stephen Lewis, who narrated a devastating rebuttal of the show.

On a personal level, it encouraged me to apply to journalism school. It made me understand that voices matter. Change is a slow burn. When I started at the Star, Canada’s largest circulation newspaper, I was the first staff writer of Chinese descent, which was surprising since it was 1987, not 1887.

CTV’s bungled attempt to create division and controversy under the guise of investigative journalism helped fire up a generation of superstar leaders including Dr. Joseph Wong, who would earn an Order of Canada for his community work, and Susan Eng, who would end up as the chair of the Toronto police services board. Significant community and political leaders such as former MP Olivia Chow; Dora Nip, the president of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario; and the civic firebrands and sisters Amy and Avvy Go rose from the ashes of protest.

The influential civil rights group the Chinese Canadian National Council was also formed because of the show. The organization, headed by the dynamic Wong as the first national president, would crucially go on to fight for other issues, including a redress for head taxes on Chinese Canadians and to support other marginalized communities. To mark the 40th anniversary of the W5 program, Wong said the CCNC would be rebooted, with a particular interest in youth, social justice and equality issues.

CTV did eventually apologize, months later, under threat of a lawsuit.

“Right after the program was broadcast our critics, particularly Chinese-Canadians and the universities, criticized the program as racist: they were right,” said CTV executive Murray Chercover at the time. “There is no doubt that the distorted statistics combined with visual presentation made the program appear racist in tone and effect.”

Given the heated and divisive rhetoric over immigration at home and abroad, it’s a lesson worth remembering decades later.

Source: Tony Wong: How a false W5 story 40 years ago became a watershed moment for Chinese-Canadians

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Ethnic media election coverage 18-24 August

2019/08/26 Leave a comment

Latest weekly analysis of ethnic media coverage. For the analytical narrative, go to diversityvotes.ca Ethnic media election coverage 11-17 August 2019:

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

When an Influx of French-Canadian Immigrants Struck Fear Into Americans

2019/08/26 Leave a comment

From a time when Canada had large scale emigration and a reminder of francophone fears of assimilation, as was the case with most who emigrated to the USA.

And a certain irony: Quebec’s fear of the “other,” as seen in its endless debates over identity, immigrants and integration, are the same issues that played out with respect to the large numbers of Quebec immigrants in the late 19th century.

In 1893, Clare de Graffenried, special agent of the United States Department of Labor, published an article in The Forum describing an invasion of America’s northeastern border. For 30 years, Graffenreid observed, hundreds of thousands of French Canadians had been pouring into states like Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, finding work in the region’s burgeoning industries. “Manufacturing New England, Puritan and homogeneous no longer, speaks a French patois,” she wrote.

Furthermore, Graffenreid continued, French Canadian workers huddled in “Little Canadas” of “hastily-constructed tenements,” in houses holding from three to 50 families, subsisting in conditions that were “a reproach to civilization,” while “inspiring fear and aversion in neighbors.”

Within the two years after Graffenried’s piece appeared, both of my grandfathers were born in Maine’s Little Canadas. A century later, when I began researching these roots, I uncovered a lost chapter in U.S. immigration history that has startling relevance today—a story of immigrants crossing a land border into the U.S. and the fears they aroused.

Inheriting an ideology of cultural survival from Québec, the French Canadians in the U.S. resisted assimilation. This led a segment of the American elite to regard these culturally isolated French speakers as a potential threat to the territorial integrity of the United States—pawns, conspiracy theorists said, in a Catholic plot to subvert the U.S. Northeast.

While French-speaking people had lived in North America since the 1600s, the French Canadians Graffenried discussed crossed the U.S. border during the late 19th century, mainly to earn a living in New England’s cotton mills. Cotton textile manufacturing began in earnest in the region during the War of 1812, and by mid-century, it was the U.S.’s largest industry in terms of employment, capital investment, and the value of its products. When the United States blockaded Confederate ports during the Civil War and prices for raw cotton soared, New England’s mills shut down or slashed hours. Textile workers turned toward other industries, joined the army, or headed west.

After the war, with cotton shipping again, the mills reopened, but the skilled textile workforce had scattered. The corporations launched a campaign to recruit workers, and Canada’s French-speaking province of Québec answered the call. Before the Civil War there had been a trickle of migration from Québec to the Northern states, but when hostilities ended, trainload upon trainload of French Canadians began to settle in neighboring New England. By 1930, nearly a million had crossed the border in search of work.

They arrived in extended family groups, establishing French-speaking enclaves throughout New England in small industrial cities like Lowell, Massachusetts; Manchester, New Hampshire; Woonsocket, Rhode Island; Lewiston, Maine; and elsewhere.

These Little Canadas, often wedged between a mill and a Catholic church, formed a cultural archipelago, outposts of Québec scattered throughout the Northeast in densely populated pockets. By 1900, one-tenth of New Englanders spoke French. And in the region’s many cotton mills, French Canadians made up 44 percent of the workforce—24 percent nationally—at a time when cotton remained a dominant industry.

French-Canadian workers often lived in overcrowded, company-owned tenements, while children as young as eight years old worked full shifts in the mills. Contemporary observers denounced the mill town squalor. When 44 French Canadian children died in Brunswick, Maine, during a six-month period in 1886, most from typhoid fever and diphtheria, local newspaper editor Albert G. Tenney investigated. He found tenements housing 500 people per acre, with outhouses that overflowed into the wells and basements. Tenney excoriated the mill owners, the prominent Cabot family of Boston. Conditions in the tenements, wrote Tenney, “show a degree of brutality almost inconceivable in a civilized community. … A sight even to make a Christian swear.”

Brunswick was not the only mill town with poor living conditions. Journalist William Bayard Hale visited Little Canada in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1894. “It would be an abuse to house a dog in such a place,” Hale wrote. Some Fall River tenements, continued Hale, “do not compare favorably with old-time slave-quarters,” a not-so-distant memory in the 1890s.

Other immigrants also faced pitiable conditions, but the French Canadians were unique because they thought of themselves as Americans before they came to the U.S. “The French Canadian is as American as someone born in Boston,” said Civil War hero Edmond Mallet, “it is all the nationalities that emigrated here that truly constitutes the American people.” Mallet was part of the small, educated French Canadian elite in the U.S., which included priests, journalists, professionals, and business owners. In their view, “American” was not a nationality, but a collection of “all the nationalities” living under the Stars and Stripes. In keeping with this understanding, they coined a new term for their people living in the U.S.: Franco-Americans.

Franco-American journalist Ferdinand Gagnon argued in an 1881 hearing at the Massachusetts State House that French Canadians were among the original constituent elements of the American Republic. He cited “Langlade, the father of Wisconsin; Juneau, the founder of Milwaukee; Vital Guerin, the founder of St. Paul, Minn.; Menard, first lieutenant governor of Illinois,” among his compatriots who had founded “nearly all the large cities of the Western States.”

While Gagnon encouraged French Canadians to pursue U.S. citizenship, for him naturalization implied a narrow contract. If naturalized citizens obeyed the laws, defended the flag, and worked for the general prosperity, he felt their duties were discharged—language, religion, and customs could remain in the private sphere. Gagnon’s concept of citizenship was based on Québec’s history, where French Canadians had maintained a distinct cultural identity despite British rule since 1763. The Franco-American elite expected their people to maintain their identity in the U.S. just as they had done in Canada.

But U.S. opinion demanded of the naturalized citizen something more than a merely formal participation in civic life, and Franco-American efforts to preserve their culture soon aroused suspicion and enmity. By the 1880s, elite American newspapers, including The New York Times, saw a sinister plot afoot. The Catholic Church, they said, had dispatched French Canadian workers southward in a bid to seize control of New England. Eventually, the theory went, Québec would sever its British ties and annex New England to a new nation-state called New France. Alarmists presented as evidence for the demographic threat the seemingly endless influx of immigrants across the northeastern border, coupled with the large family size of the Franco-Americans, where 10 or 12 children was common, and many more not unknown.

Anti-Catholicism had deep roots in the Northeast. The region’s Revolution-era patriots had numbered the Quebec Act of 1774 among the British Parliament’s “Intolerable Acts,” not least because it upheld the Catholic Church’s privileges in Canada, establishing “popery” in North America. In the mid-19th century, supporters of the Know Nothing movement led attacks on Catholic neighborhoods from New York City to Philadelphia. In New England, among other incidents, a Know Nothing-inspired mob burned a church where Irish and French Canadian Catholics met at Bath, Maine, in July 1854. In October of that year, Catholic priest John Bapst was assaulted, robbed, tarred and feathered, and driven out of Ellsworth, Maine. While the Know Nothings faded away, in the late 19th century the nativists regrouped as the American Protective Association, a nationwide anti-Catholic movement.

In this climate, the supposed French Canadian Catholic subversion of New England became national news. Between about 1880 and 1900, as immigration peaked, it attracted coverage in daily newspapers; think pieces in outlets such as Harper’s, The Nation, and The Forum; articles in academic journals; and books in English and in French. The New York Times reported in 1881 that French-Canadian immigrants were “ignorant and unenterprising, subservient to the most bigoted class of Catholic priests in the world. … They care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.”

In 1885, the paper reported that there were French Canadian plans “to form a new France occupying the whole northeast corner of the continent”; four years later, it outlined the purported borders of New France: “Quebec, Ontario, as far west as Hamilton, such portions of the maritime provinces as may be deemed worth taking, the New-England States, and a slice of New-York.”

And in 1892, the New York Times suggested that emigration from Québec was “part of a priestly scheme now fervently fostered in Canada for the purpose of bringing New-England under the control of the Roman Catholic faith. … This is the avowed purpose of the secret society to which every adult French Canadian belongs.”

Protestant clergy responded by leading well-funded initiatives to convert the Franco-American Catholics. The Congregationalists’ Calvin E. Amaron founded the French Protestant College in Massachusetts in 1885, offering a training course for evangelizing the French Canadians of New England and Québec. Baptist missionaries fielded the “Gospel Wagon”—a hefty, horse-drawn vehicle with organ and pulpit, lit by lanterns at night, preaching Protestantism in French to the Little Canadas of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

New England had become “a magnet attracting the world to itself. … [Québec is] repellant and shunned by the world’s best blood,” thundered the Baptists’ Henry Lyman Morehouse in an 1893 pamphlet. “The one a mighty current. … that has been as the water of life to the civilized world—the other, a sluggish, slimy stream, that has fructified nothing and given to mankind nothing noteworthy … a civilization where mediaeval Romanism is rampant. … Against the abhorrent forces of this Romish civilization we are contending, especially in New England.”

Amaron and Morehouse identified Protestantism with Americanism. For them, it was unthinkable that the U.S. could accommodate a variety of religious traditions and yet retain its political culture.

In retrospect, the fevered discourse about New England’s class of destitute factory workers reveals how little chattering classes in the U.S. knew their neighbors—a people whose presence in North America preceded Plymouth Rock. The “invasion” rhetoric did not discourage Franco-American sentiments in favor of maintaining their identity but intensified them. The Little Canadas continued in vigor for at least another half-century, and slowly dispersed, not due to nativist provocations, but for economic reasons—the decline of New England’s manufacturing base.

Talk of a French Canadian threat waned in the first years of the 20th century, as migration across the northeastern border slowed temporarily. This Victorian episode faded from memory only when U.S. fears were transferred to new subjects: the even more foreign-seeming Jewish and non-Protestant immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, who, in the early 20th century, began to arrive in growing numbers on U.S. shores.

Source: When an Influx of French-Canadian Immigrants Struck Fear Into Americans

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Lack Of Diversity In Genetic Databases Hampers Research

2019/08/26 Leave a comment

Similar issues in Canada:

When Lalita Manrai went to see her doctor for treatment of kidney disease, she noticed that some of the blood test results had different “normal” ranges for African Americans compared with everybody else.

When she asked her doctor which range applied to her — a woman born in India — he said the “everybody else” category was actually based on a study of Europeans, so neither category was right.

Instead, he said, he calculated “normal” for her by averaging the two values.

“It’s ridiculous,” says Arjun Manrai, a medical researcher at Harvard Medical School, who recounted this story of his mother, who died in 2018. But there simply isn’t good information about a lot of medical issues that may vary based on a person’s ancestry. “In this vacuum of information, this was what [the doctor] was doing as his approach to staging her kidney disease,” Manrai says.

It’s important to get those laboratory results right, because they influence a patient’s treatment, Manrai says.

The same problem comes up in other common situations, such as the A1C test that is used to diagnose and manage diabetes, and in genetic variants that can identify people at risk of sudden death from heart disease.

These factual gaps exist because much of the research used to understand these genetic tests and lab values comes from predominantly European populations. Manrai is part of a growing effort to correct the skewed picture that results.

One of the most widely used resources for studying the genetics of disease is the U.K. Biobank, which contains samples from half a million middle-aged British people, 95% of whom are of European ancestry.

“At the time they were recruited and the age group that were recruited, that largely reflected the average across the U.K.,” says Dr. Cathie Sudlow, the biobank’s chief scientist. “So because the study was in the U.K., that’s what we got.”

The biobank has been a boon to scientists who want to identify the genes that are involved in disease. Genes are universal. But the ethnically skewed resource doesn’t work as well to identify the genetic variants that differ based on ancestry.

“There is no one cohort anywhere in the world that can answer all questions for all people,” Sudlow says. So the biobank is working to help develop much more diverse resources.

The U.K. Biobank has helped establish large repositories in Mexico and China. In the United States, Sudlow and her colleagues have been offering advice to the National Institutes of Health, which is gradually putting together a biobank that aims to have a diverse population of a million volunteers.

There are dozens and dozens of collections like this scattered around the world, some in private hands and others accessible to scientists. Nobody knows exactly how many of these collections exist, but “broadly we’re talking about at least millions of people,” says Ewan Birney, co-director of the European Bioinformatics Institute.

He is part of an effort to find ways to link some of these resources together so scientists can quickly see how a discovery in one group applies to people with different ancestries. Birney says even though most of the initial work has been in European populations, a lot of it is relevant to everybody.

“How genetics works in different countries — sort of a surprise — is that very often the genetics is pretty much the same as you move between different countries,” Birney says.

Where biobank study conclusions can be misleading is in the details. The same genes and proteins are involved in diseases such as diabetes, but the variants that can affect a person’s risk of disease differ based on a person’s genetic heritage.

Birney expects that the new and linked databases not only will help identify issues of concern to a particular ethnic group but will identify genes that are important for everybody’s health. He’s particularly eager to learn what comes out of a biobank project taking shape in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Because Africa is the birthplace of humans, there’s the highest amount of genetic diversity inside of sub-Saharan Africa,” he says. “And it’s really clear if you are a geneticist, we should be spending an awful lot more time studying humans there.”

Birney is mindful of simply allowing scientists from rich companies to swoop in on this resource, so right now the African scientists developing biobanks will have an opportunity to study the data first. Birney says it’s “really important that we do that in a way that is empowering and enabling for the scientists who come from these different countries.”

Manrai at Harvard is tapping into data that’s already available, including medical databases curated by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I think understanding ancestry, race, ethnicity is an area that we’re going to see a tremendous amount of work in over the next 10 years,” he says.

Source: Lack Of Diversity In Genetic Databases Hampers Research

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Barr Packs Board of Immigration Appeals with Judges Who Denied Asylum Claims at ‘High Rates’

2019/08/26 Leave a comment

The power of appointments (in Canada, Sean Rehaag has done comparable analysis of IRB board members Refugee approval rates reflect subjectivity of decision-makers, prof says – Montreal – CBC News):

The Trump Administration is making significant moves in an apparent effort to reduce the number of successful migrant applications for asylum at the border. Rather than a ban, which the Trump Administration has explored, U.S. Attorney General William Barr has promoted six immigrations judges to the Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) — all of whom have “high rates” of denying asylum claims, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Friday.

According to the report, the six appointees who were sworn in on Friday will comprise more than 25-percent of the 21-member BIA. In case you are unfamiliar with what this board is for and how powerful it is, don’t worry, the Department of Justice has got you covered [all emphases ours]: 

“The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) is the highest administrative body for interpreting and applying immigration laws. It is authorized up to 21 Board Members, including the Chairman and Vice Chairman who share responsibility for BIA management. The BIA is located at EOIR headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia. Generally, the BIA does not conduct courtroom proceedings – it decides appeals by conducting a “paper review” of cases. On rare occasions, however, the BIA hears oral arguments of appealed cases, predominately at headquarters.

The BIA has been given nationwide jurisdiction to hear appeals from certain decisions rendered by immigration judges and by district directors of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in a wide variety of proceedings in which the Government of the United States is one party and the other party is an alien, a citizen, or a business firm.

BIA decisions are binding on all DHS officers and immigration judges unless modified or overruled by the Attorney General or a federal court. Most BIA decisions are subject to judicial review in the federal courts. The majority of appeals reaching the BIA involve orders of removal and applications for relief from removal. Other cases before the BIA include the exclusion of aliens applying for admission to the United States, petitions to classify the status of alien relatives for the issuance of preference immigrant visas, fines imposed upon carriers for the violation of immigration laws, and motions for reopening and reconsideration of decisions previously rendered.”

“Prior to the new rule, the Attorney General’s own decisions were binding on all of DHS, but the BIA’s decisions weren’t binding on the entire system unless a majority of Board members voted to publish them. Currently, this happens about 30 times a year. By giving the Attorney General unilateral power to designate BIA decisions as precedent with the stroke of a pen, the regulation destabilizes the fair checks and balances in the court process.”

The names of the promoted judges: William Cassidy, Earle Wilson, Keith Hunsucker, Deborah Goodwin, Stephanie Gorman, Stuart Couch.

Cassidy and Wilson respectively rejected 95.8-percent and and 98.1-percent of asylum claims between 2013 and 2018; the national denial average was 57.6 percent, the Chronicle reported. (Both of them have inspired complaints of unfairness.) With the national average in mind, consider the other rejection rates added to the board: Hunsucker, 81.6-percent; Goodwin, 89.4-percent; Gorman, 86.9-percent; Couch, 92.1%. These percentages came from data tracked by Syracuse University — data the DOJ claimed it doesn’t track and can’t verify when responding to the Chronicle story.

“DOJ doesn’t track asylum approval and denial rates for individual immigration judges, and (Syracuse) uses its own methodologies in interpreting the data it receives, resulting in conclusions that we cannot verify,” a DOJ spokesperson said. “Collectively these judges … have nearly 120 years of immigration law (experience) through multiple administrations. Advocates that attack their integrity and professionalism only undermine the entire system.”

Source: Barr Packs Board of Immigration Appeals with Judges Who Denied Asylum Claims at ‘High Rates’

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Bernier picks ridings where PPC has best chance to win in bid to join leaders’ debate

2019/08/26 Leave a comment

Looking at the choices by percentage of immigrants and visible minorities, quite a range. Appears selection criteria weighted towards candidate name recognition and profile (for full riding detail, see diversityvotes.ca):

  • Beauce: 1.4 percent immigrants, 1.1 percent visible minorities
  • Etobicoke North: 58 percent immigrants, 75.7 percent visible minorities
  • Nipissing-Timiskaming: 4.6 percent immigrants, 2.4 percent visible minorities
  • Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia-Headingley: 13.1 percent immigrants, 10.2 percent visible minorities
  • Pickering-Uxbridge: 30.2 percent immigrants, 36 percent visible minorities

People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier has provided five ridings to the federal commission organizing the election leaders’ debate in a last-minute effort to enter the highly anticipated event.

In a letter sent to the Leaders’ Debate Commission, Bernier picks five ridings based on “candidates who are better known in their riding as public figures, and therefore will start this campaign with an advantage that others don’t have.”

It includes his Quebec riding of Beauce and the Toronto riding of Etobicoke North, where Renata Ford, the wife of late former mayor Rob Ford and sister-in-law of Ontario premier Doug Ford, is running.

The commission had asked Bernier to provide it with three to five ridings where he thought People’s Party candidates had the best chance of winning, after saying on Aug. 12 that Bernier did not meet the criteria needed to qualify for the leaders’ debates slated for early October.

Commissioner David Johnston had preliminarily ruled that the People’s Party, as it stood, did not have a “legitimate chance” of electing more than one candidate in the upcoming election.

That determination is based on recent political context, polling and previous general election results. A final list of invited parties will be published on Sept. 16.

The three other ridings are Nipissing-Timiskaming, where local councillor Mark King is representing the People’s Party; Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia-Headingley, where former Conservative cabinet minister Steven Fletcher is running; and Pickering-Uxbridge, where former Tory MP Corneliu Chisu carries the party banner.

Bernier states in the letter that his understanding of the criteria is that “it simply states that our candidates must have a legitimate chance to be elected in the general election, and not at this time in the election cycle.”

“The election campaign could have a huge impact on this legitimate chance. More so for the other reasons I explained regarding the recent political context, including the high level of volatility and disaffection of the electorate, and the fact that populist parties similar to the PPC have experienced very rapid growth in other Western countries,” Bernier wrote.

He said as the People’s Party is very young, it had little information about the regional distribution of its support across Canada and its concentration in specific ridings. Nor did the party have the money to conduct polls in 338 ridings.

Bernier also included data obtained from Meltwater, a media monitoring company, on how often his name popped up in online and print sources over the last year compared to other party leaders.

The numbers state his name popped up 23,518 times, more than Green Party Leader Elizabeth May and Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet.

As well, data included in the letter shows his name popped up on social media 1.67 million times, more than NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, May and Blanchet.

Bernier also included in his letter columns in publications such as the Toronto Star, National Post and The Post Millennial arguing in favour of his entry into the debate.

Among candidates, Renata Ford, though a political novice, carries name recognition through her politically involved family members.

Meanwhile, King is a council member in North Bay. He was supposed to run for the Tories, but the party removed him as a candidate last month for allegedly using a corporate credit card to purchase party memberships for himself and close family members. He then joined the People’s Party.

Fletcher was a Conservative MP from 2004 to 2015 and had served as ministers of state for democratic reform and transport. Chisu was a Tory MP from 2011 to 2015.

An Aug. 5 Mainstreet Research poll for iPolitics found Bernier to be running neck-and-neck with the Conservatives in his southeastern Quebec riding.

According to the commission’s letter sent to Bernier, the information he provided will now be relayed to an independent pollster before returning to the party for a final comment.

Source: Bernier picks ridings where PPC has best chance to win in bid to join leaders’ debate

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , ,

New Canadians take Oath of Citizenship at ceremony tied to Capital Pride

2019/08/24 Leave a comment

Noteworthy:

As about 50 people became Canadians at a special citizenship ceremony held at the Horticultural Building at Lansdowne Park Thursday morning, 25-year-old Roksana Hajrizi and her mother, Celina Urbanowicz, looked on from the just outside the area cordoned off for officials, volunteers, celebrants and their friends and families.

They watched as Bibiane Wanbji, who six years ago left her husband in Cameroon and brought her four children to Canada to find a better life, smiled at the vastness of the world that had just opened up to her. Having a Canadian passport, Wanbji explained, means she can travel just about anywhere. She hasn’t seen her extended family and friends back in Cameroon since coming to Canada, so that’s a definite destination. So, too, are the U.S. and Cuba, and “the city of love” that she’s always wanted to visit: Venice. “It’s like a passport for the world.”

And although she’s been in Canada for six years already, Thursday’s ceremony left Wanbji feeling a bit different, she said, that she has “more to give in this country, to contribute to build the country.”

Hajrizi and her mother watched, too, as 50 new Canadians, including Haguer Abdelmoneim and her children, Mahmoud, 10, and Youssef, 5, sang their new national anthem. They and Abdelmoneim’s husband came from Egypt in 2014 “for a better education for the kids” and “for a better community to grow in.”

They didn’t just choose somewhere other than Egypt, she added; they specifically chose Canada. “We like the values. It’s a very inclusive country, very welcoming to newcomers.”

Another “new” Canadian, Saiful Azad, who arrived on Canada’s shores from Bangladesh 21 years ago, agrees. “A lot of people don’t understand how important it is to be a Canadian citizen and the opportunities that are given to you here,” he said. “I don’t believe the U.S. is the land of opportunity; I believe Canada is.”

Like Wanbji, Azad, who operates a Greek on Wheels franchise in Hunt Club, cherishes his new-found ability to travel as much as his right to vote. “When you’re a Canadian citizen, people look at you differently and treat you differently. Everyone thinks that Canada is a great country, and I think they’re right.

“People who live here and want to be Canadian citizens should pursue that.”

Thursday’s event was unlike most citizenship ceremonies in that it was one of about 75 sponsored each year by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, a national not-for-profit charity that promotes active and inclusive citizenship.  As at other ICC-hosted citizenship ceremonies, this one opened with intimate roundtable discussions at which soon-to-be Canadians were engaged in conversations with other community members.

A lot of our soon-to-be Canadians have had long journeys and long stories in getting here,” said ICC chief executive and former Ottawa-Centre Liberal MPP Yasir Naqvi just prior to the start of the ceremony, “so we want to talk a little about that. But most importantly we want to talk about what the journey is going to be like after they become Canadian citizens. How are they now going to contribute to the building of Canada? We want to promote active citizenship.”

Thursday’s ceremony was also co-hosted by Capital Pride, a first for both organizations.

“It’s an opportunity for our community and the candidates for citizenship to engage in dialogue about what our community is about and what the experience of being 2SLGBTQ is,” said Capital Pride founding director Sarah Evans. “A lot of newcomers, and even established immigrants, don’t always know a lot about the 2SLGBTQ community, so it’s a good opportunity to build that awareness.”

As she watched from the sidelines, Roksana Hajrizi was keenly aware. Describing herself as a “proud lesbian,” she attended Thursday’s ceremony partly in support of Capital Pride, and also to congratulate those being sworn in as new Canadians. “I am proud and happy for those who are Canadians today,” she said, “and I hope that one day my family and I could be citizens of this great country.”

Truth be told, Hajrizi already feels very much Canadian. She was just three years old when she and her family — her mother, father, Ismet Hajrizi, and younger sister, Camila, arrived in British Columbia from war-torn former Yugoslavia almost 23 years ago. She even has two brothers born in Canada: Sebastrijana, 22, and Daniel, 19.

But she, her mother and sister are living in Canada without official status, in constant anxiety that they will be deported. They are Roma — her mother a Polish Catholic Roma, her father a Yugoslavian Muslim one. Romas are not welcome in most places, she says, and gay ones even less so.

The United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has noted the discrimination that Roma people face worldwide, an Anti-Gypsyism expressed by “violence, hate speech, exploitation, stigmatization and the most blatant kind of discrimination.”

Hajrizi’s family was denied refugee status, and now she fears for her life and the lives of her sister and mother if they’re forced to leave the country. In 2008, her family, except for her brothers, was scheduled for deportation but was given a reprieve.

Still, Hajrizi’s father, she says, despite being a Serbian citizen, was deported in June to Kosovo, where he lives in a garage with no papers. She, with no birth documents herself, worries that it’s just a matter of time before she and her mother and sister will suffer similar fates, that she will never get to be on the other side of Thursday’s ceremony, that despite living in Canada for very nearly her whole life, she will never know what citizenship is like.

“I believe in my heart that I’m Canadian. I believe in my heart that my sister is Canadian. I believe my mother and farther are also Canadian. We’ve been here for 23 years and our roots have spread through Canadian soils. We have given our time, our compassion, our love, our kindness to our community, to our city. People who know us know that we are a good family.

“My family is being ripped apart,” she said. “My father was taken from us, and now my mother is next. But we will fight to stay in Canada.”

Source: New Canadians take Oath of Citizenship at ceremony tied to Capital Pride

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Polish Ontario newspaper accused of anti-Semitism

2019/08/24 Leave a comment

To watch:

Police in Peel Region have confirmed they are investigating a local Polish-language news outlet following a complaint from B’nai Brith Canada about anti-Semitic content.

The force’s Equity and Inclusion Bureau is “also aware” of the complaint, said spokesperson Const. Heather Cannon.

B’nai Brith laid the complaint after discovering “frequent anti-Semitic and hateful material” in Goniec, a news outlet based in Mississauga, Ont., that publishes a weekly newspaper with a circulation of about 1,000, and maintains a website and YouTube channel.

According to B’nai Brith, the paper has accused “Jews and Zionists” of having “terrorism in their blood,” and has urged readers to “stand up to the Jews,” in response to their attempts to “destroy” Poland.

In a series of “incendiary” articles, the outlet “warns repeatedly of Jewish control over the Polish government through ‘puppet politicians’ in the United States who favour ‘rewriting history’ in the interest of the Israeli government,” B’nai Brith said in an Aug. 15 statement.

Authors on the website have also stated that Jews are “playing their old game” of trying to interfere in various governments, while calling the actions of Jewish organizations “racist” and “satanic,” the Jewish advocacy group alleged.

“We are appalled by the blatant Jew-hatred peddled by this publication,” said Michael Mostyn, B’nai Brith’s CEO. “While there is room for disagreement over policies in modern Polish-Jewish relations, the anti-Semitic content that we are seeing is truly beyond the pale.”

Among other examples B’nai Brith cited was a photograph of Hasidic Jews juxtaposed with the U.S. Capitol building, followed by allegations that Congress is controlled by Jewish forces, as well as a headline saying, You Use WhatsApp – Jews Are Spying on You.

Goniec has also described a film documenting the 1941 anti-Jewish massacre in the Polish town of Jedwabne as “false propaganda of the ‘Holocaust enterprise’ in a plot to initiate reparations for Jewish property that was lost or stolen during the Second World War,” B’nai Brith charged.

Andrzej Kumor, the paper’s editor-in-chief and sole employee, called B’nai Brith’s accusations “unfounded” and said he will co-operate with police.

“I have nothing to hide,” Kumor told The CJN via email. “I was never hateful towards Jews or any other community. I see politics as a power play of different interests. I love the debate and I think that the debate is a cornerstone of (a) free, democratic society.”

He defended the material cited by B’nai Brith.

The headline about Jews spying, for example, “is about the security hole found in WhatsApp, which was exploited by (an) Israeli group with connections to … state security services,” Kumor explained, asking, “Is the headline, ‘The Russians are spying on us’ anti-Russian?”

He said the commentary titled Zionists Have Terrorism in Their Blood (not “Jews,” he noted) is about paramilitary groups in pre-state Israel – the Irgun, Haganah and the so-called Stern Gang – and “the smart political use of terrorism by Jews fighting for their country after the Second World War.”

As for the July 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne, “this crime should be investigated to the very end … to find out how many people died, and other circumstances,” Kumor said.

Several sources agree that at least 340 Jews were murdered in the pogrom, 300 of whom were locked in a barn that was set on fire.

Peter Jassem, past chair of the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada’s Toronto chapter, said it was brought to his attention “on numerous occasions” that Kumor was publishing “anti-Semitic content for years, sometimes explicitly, sometimes as innuendo regularly present in numerous articles written by him and his contributors.”

As for B’nai Brith’s translations, “everything seems to be accurate,” said Jassem. However, the title of one video cited by B’nai Brith “does not mean that Zionists have terrorism in their blood, but rather that they are guilty of terrorism,” Jassem explained. “But when you listen to the video, (Kumor) does say this: ‘Jews or Zionists have terrorism in their blood.’ ” Later in the same video, Kumor says, “It is said that Jews simply invented modern terrorism,” according to Jassem.

He added that both in this article and in an interview Kumor gave to an online Polish television station that Jassem views as anti-Semitic,” Kumor “seems to show  himself as a martyr and a freedom fighter whose mission is to uncover the truth and to defend freedom of speech. He blames Jewish conspiracy for this action against him.” 

Source: Polish Ontario newspaper accused of anti-Semitism

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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