As Abdoul Abdi’s parent, Canada is guilty of child neglect: Balkissoon

2018/02/17 1 Comment

One of the better articles on the failures involved in looking after Abdi:

Before last year, an immigrant child could not apply for Canadian citizenship. Their legal guardian had to do it for them. Abdoul Abdi has been here since 2000, but his citizenship paperwork was never filled out by his parents. Since he was 7, that role has been filled by the Nova Scotia government.

In January, Mr. Abdi, now 24, completed a five-year sentence on multiple charges including aggravated assault. As a non-citizen convicted of serious crimes, he’s facing deportation. Having forcibly assumed the responsibility of raising him, the government is now trying to shrug off the repercussions of its own negligence.

Mr. Abdi fled Somalia at the age of 3 along with his five-year-old-sister, his two aunts and his mother. They spent three years in Saudi Arabia where Mr. Abdi’s mother died while waiting to see if they would be accepted as refugees to Canada. The children’s aunt, Asha Ali, became their legal guardian.

The family arrived in Nova Scotia as survivors of a brutal war; all had witnessed family members being killed. They didn’t speak English, and Ms. Abdi says she and her brother experienced harsh, racist bullying. So Ms. Ali – who grew up in a country where only 30 per cent of children are enrolled in primary school – took them out of class.

Soon, instead of providing the vulnerable refugee family with assistance getting settled, the Department of Community Services put both children in foster care.

At first, the Abdi children were kept together, in a home both say was emotionally and physically abusive. Ms. Abdi was eventually moved after her teachers saw her bruises, but her little brother stayed. He spent his youth moving between 31 different foster and group homes.

Mr. Abdi experienced the worst of Canadian foster care. Though the importance of schooling was given as the reason for his apprehension, in the province’s care, he only achieved a grade six education. He was first arrested as a teenager, which is unsurprising. Interacting with the criminal justice system is twice as likely for foster kids as other youth, which is particularly upsetting since black and Indigenous children are also overrepresented in the system throughout Canada.

“Once in state care, instead of mediating issues, black children see police called in for typical conflict situations,” says Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. She says that normal stuff that other adolescents get parental guidance on – like being intoxicated, or petty theft – become a reason black foster children interact with police.

On Twitter, social work professor Idil Abdillahi used the hashtag #PoliceAsParent to discuss Mr. Abdi’s case and the care-to-prison pipeline. “A young person is late for curfew – call the police. A young person doesn’t do chores – call the police,” wrote Ms. Abdillahi, who works at Ryerson University.”The police were his co-parents, how could he not have involvement with them?”

Her hashtag brought to mind the Toronto police officer who, last August, bought a shirt and tie for a teen caught stealing one before an interview. The teen then got the job. Imagine if Mr. Abdi’s state-appointed parents had been loving, not punitive.

Foster children without citizenship are not uncommon. Mr. Abdi’s lawyer, Benjamin Perryman, says that Nova Scotia doesn’t attempt to make its children Canadian until they turn 18. And since a finding of guilt on a youth criminal charge makes them ineligible for citizenship, convicted children endure a double punishment – first their sentence, then being kicked out of the country that pledged to take care of them.

Mr. Abdi’s aunt, Ms. Ali, tried to apply for the children’s citizenship when she got her own, but couldn’t since she was no longer their legal parent. So, while in prison, 16 years after he got to Canada, Mr. Abdi was deemed inadmissible to the country by the Canadian Border Services Agency, ordered “back” to a place he hasn’t been since he was a toddler, one so dangerous Canada advises its citizens not to travel there.

Last fall, a federal court overturned the original deportation order, but another soon followed. On Thursday, a federal judge presided over an emergency hearing to temporarily halt the current order. Mr. Perryman hopes a ruling in his favour will come before Mr. Abdi’s Immigration and Refugee Board hearing on March 7.

Otherwise, he’s certain to receive an official deportation order, stripping him of his landed immigrant status. That would mean Mr. Abdi won’t be allowed to work, a condition of his release: he’s currently in a halfway house in Toronto, where his family now lives, but CBSA first put him in solitary confinement, and he might have to return there.

Mr. Perryman is also attempting to launch a full constitutional challenge, arguing that denying Mr. Abdi his citizenship while he was in government care was a violation of his human rights.

That’s clearly true, and just one of many ways Canada has mistreated this prodigal son.

via As Abdoul Abdi’s parent, Canada is guilty of child neglect – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with ,

The race for these seats in Italy’s parliament is likely to run through Toronto

2018/02/17 Leave a comment

Never been convinced of the merits of overseas constituencies as it raises issues of dual loyalties:

Mario Cortellucci is a real estate magnate in Vaughan, Ont., part the Italian cultural centre north of Toronto. He makes prosciutto and raw milk cheese and owns so many Norval Morrisseau originals he’s considering opening a museum dedicated to the late Indigenous artist. In his office, three of the paintings are on the floor, propped up against a wall among other hallmarks of a seemingly full life: a model of a suburb he’s been working to build for decades, photos of his children. But Mario Cortellucci is now, at 68, embarking on a second act. He, along with several other Italian-Canadians, is campaigning to enter the turbulent world of Italian politics in Rome.

Italy’s election next month will include races around the world, since Italy’s parliament has seats for politicians representing the diaspora in North America-Central America, Europe, South America and Asia-Africa-Oceania. Italian citizens living in the North and Central America region elect two members of the chamber of deputies (the lower house) and one for the senate. And while the number may seem insignificant among nearly 1,000 seats in both houses, tight elections in the past have seen some in Italy question why ex-pats in far-flung parts of the word should have any influence, said Western University political scientist Pietro Pirani.

A good amount of that influence comes from Canada, he said, particularly in Toronto. Canadian residents make up a quarter of the more than 400,000 constituents in the North American riding. Not everyone votes, however. And Toronto’s heavily-organized Italian community means local candidates have a better shot.

“If you want to be elected in North America, you have to come from Toronto,” Pirani said. “The largest and most organized community in North America is from Toronto.”

Not always, however. The outgoing senator is from Chicago. And the preceding one, Basilio Giordano, was from Montreal. Among the Canadians running for spots this year, there’s a sense that past politicians from the region were more concerned with the prestige and pomp than actually assisting Italians abroad.

“Just warm up the seat and they don’t do much,” Toronto-born senate candidate Tony D’Aversa said. “This isn’t about status, this is about doing your job.”

“A lot of them went to beautiful Rome and forgot about the people,” Cortellucci, a senate candidate with Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition, said on Wednesday. Cortellucci says he doesn’t need the salary – he’s donating it if he wins. Instead, he said, he’s running because he was asked at Italian community functions and feels an obligation to the Italian immigrants who he’s worked with through his over 50-year career in Canada.

But his affiliation with Berlusconi’s coalition somewhat muddles the message, since the group has seen much criticism for having staunchly anti-immigrant factions. For his part, Cortellucci says he’s more concerned with the politics of Italians in North and Central America. Plus, his campaign manager Giacomo Parisi said, “He comes from an immigration family.”

“Mr. Cortellucci is a strong believer in immigration.”

Italian-born parliamentarians are skeptical of their ex-pat colleagues.

Italian candidates abroad often are only nominally affiliated with their party, Pirani said, though it’s unavoidable that voters will usually be more familiar with party brand than the name.

“Their role is mostly narrowed to the ways they can improve the lives of Italians abroad,” he said.

Toronto-born Francesca La Marca, with Italy’s Democratic party, has served as one of two North American representatives in the chamber of deputies since 2013. She’s running again in the March election and fully denies the idea that the five-year term was nothing more than a pleasant Roman sojourn. She said she encountered suspicion and scepticism from her Italian-born colleagues and even some of her younger constituents who emigrated more recently from Italy.

It took spending 70 percent of her time in Rome rather than North America, showing up to votes and introducing a bill to earn respect, she said, to the point that colleagues in the lower house began to consider her as the “Canadian ambassador” – turning their heads in her direction whenever debate landed on Canada, or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“It would be easy to say you get a nice fat paycheque and you’re always travelling around,” she said. But in reality she has to pay out of pocket for hotels and meals on trips around her riding, spanning from Panama to Canada.

“Again,” she said, “I’m not complaining.”

Source: The race for these seats in Italy’s parliament is likely to run through Toronto

Filed under Citizenship, Dual Citizenship Tagged with , ,

DIA suggested tightening of the rules after Peter Thiel citizenship | Stuff.co.nz

2018/02/17 Leave a comment

More background on the advice involved and the way the government was played:

The Department of Internal Affairs suggested a tightening of the rules around ministerial grants of citizenship after the case of tech billionaire Peter Thiel came to light.

Then-minister Peter Dunne was interested in the proposed reforms, which included an open citizenship register, but did not manage to enact them before leaving Government.

It emerged in early 2017 that Thiel, a controversial backer of US President Donald Trump, had gained New Zealand citizenship despite spending only 12 days in the country as a resident. Potential citizens usually have to spend at least 1350 days in the country over a period of five years.

In 2011 then-Internal Affairs Minister Nathan Guy had granted him the citizenship using a special clause in the law giving ministers discretion to waive the rules in “exceptional circumstances” that were in the public interest.

Guy was advised to grant the citizenship under the clause as Thiel was a skilled and philanthropic investor.

Peter Dunne was receptive to the advice, saying ministers should be comfortable with their citizenship decisions making it to the front page of a newspaper.

Thiel had offered to assist with the establishment of an Auckland-based technology company and a “landing pad” in San Francisco to help New Zealand technology companies break into the US market. His lawyers pointed to his large investments in New Zealand technology companies and donation to the Canterbury earthquake recovery.

Guy said it had been in New Zealand’s economic interest to provide the citizenship and that Thiel had been a “great ambassador” for the country – despite Thiel keeping his citizenship secret for six years.

Soon after the citizenship came to light the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) briefed then-minister Dunne on steps he could take to tighten up the process and make it more transparent.

“There is an opportunity to make changes that will help address possible perceptions of undue influence, and better ensure public confidence in the citizenship process,” officials wrote to Dunne.

Suggested changes included an “open citizenship register,” a writing into law of which factors could be used when considering “exceptional circumstances,” and even setting out specific exception for activities such as vast financial investment.

Another option would be a periodic independent assessment of all of these decisions, which are relatively rare, by the Auditor General.

Speaking on Thursday, Dunne said he was interested in some of the changes but decided to wait until a planned review of citizenship laws after the election.

“The chances of getting any legislation prepared and passed before the election were practically zero,” Dunne said.

Asked if said changes would have gotten assent from the National Party, who led the Government, Dunne said he hadn’t gotten to the stage of asking them yet.

“I was certainly not opposed to it…the circumstances of the case do give us a wake up call be absolutely transparent and as upfront as we can be,” Dunne said.

“In the wake of the Thiel debacle a lot of stuff arose not so much about the exercise of ministerial discretion, but frankly how his case got so far advanced. This is someone who spent 12 days in the country.”

Dunne thought independent assessment of the decisions was a good idea but suggested the Ombudsman vet the decisions rather than the Auditor General. He also had concerns about the implications of an open citizenship register for those fleeing persecution.

He said any minister should be able to give reasons for their decision and should be comfortable with it possibly ending up on the front page of a newspaper.

New Internal Affairs minister Tracey Martin said she too was keen on tightening up the process and making sure it was transparent.

“I think there is a conversation that needs to be had around transparency. Particularly when the rules are so clearly altered by the minister or ignored by the minister,” Martin said.

She said public confidence in the system had been “rocked” by the Thiel case but she hoped the public would have confidence in her as a new minister.​

via DIA suggested tightening of the rules after Peter Thiel citizenship | Stuff.co.nz

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Andy Yan, the analyst who exposed Vancouver’s real estate disaster: Terry Glavin

2018/02/16 Leave a comment

A Glavin rant, not without reason. The interactive graphic is particularly effective:
Andy Yan is a 42-year-old East Vancouverite who came up out of the proud working class ranks of Van Tech high school, toiling on weekends in the kill tank at the old Hallmark Poultry Factory on Clark Drive. He set out on a career in urban regeneration and applied demographics that took him to projects in New Orleans, New York City and San Francisco.

Nowadays he’s the director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University, and while he’s too modest to boast about it, along the way he’s picked up a couple of exceedingly rare civic distinctions.

The first is the enduring enmity of all the politicians, real estate speculators, white-collar currency pirates and money launderers who have turned Vancouver into a global swindler’s paradise for real estate racketeering, a city that is now also one of the world’s most hopelessly pathetic urban landscapes of housing affordability. The second thing Yan has earned is an unfettered and unimpeachable right to say “I told you so.”

Three years ago, Yan was anxious to get a handle on the role foreign capital was playing in Vancouver’s weirdly convulsing real estate market. At the time, Yan’s main gig was his work as an urban planner with Bing Thom Architects, on contract as an urban planner. When Yan published the results of his research in November, 2015, it came as a shock, for two main reasons. It seemed to conclusively prove what everybody knew but nobody was supposed to say out loud. And it broke a taboo that was enforced so absurdly that Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson resorted to dismissing Yan’s research as racist.

Yan found that buyers with “non-Anglicised Chinese names” had picked up two-thirds of 172 houses sold over a six-month period beginning in September 2014 in Vancouver’s posh west side neighbourhoods. Contrary to public perception, however, the buyers weren’t just showing up with “bags of cash” to make their buys. Some of Canada’s biggest banks were in on it. Roughly 80 per cent of the deals involved a mortgage, and half of the mortgages were held by two banks – CIBC and HSBC.

Canada’s banks have mastered the manipulation of clandestine back channels around China’s currency control regulations—the same routes that well-connected Chinese multi-millionaires have been using to shift up to a trillion dollars’ worth of yuan out of China every year. What wasn’t clear about what was happening on Vancouver’ s west side, however, was who the real buyers were, exactly. The new homeowners’ most commonly stated occupation: housewife or homemaker.

Fast forward three years. The weirdness that Yan documented in Point Grey, Dunbar, Kerrisdale and Shaughnessy has rapidly spread southward and eastward, decoupling the bonds linking incomes with housing values across Burnaby, Richmond, Coquitlam, all the way out to Surrey and White Rock on the Canada-U.S. border. Metro Vancouver’s real estate market is now a dystopian tableau of panic buying, tax fraud, property flipping, overseas pre-construction condominium sales, stone cold speculation and elaborate, multiple-account money transfer rigmaroles that are the conduit of choice for drug cartel tycoons. Not even the heaviest regulatory hands at the controls of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state seem capable of shutting the networks down.

It’s not just about shady Chinese money—not by a long shot. Vancouver’s old establishment property developers and real-estate companies fed the frenzies and made a killing. Along the way, they greased the skids by pouring buckets of money into Gregor Robertson’s now-dying Vision Vancouver civic party and Christy Clark’s Liberal Party. Robertson is now a sad figure, his legacy a shambles, his term up in October, and even his celebrated relationship with his glamorous girlfriend, the Chinese pop star Wanting Qu, fell apart last year. Qu’s mother, a Communist Party official in Harbin, remains on trial on charges of embezzling $70 million in a land swindle. Christy Clark is history, too. Her government was toppled last year by John Horgan’s New Democrats. With at least 60,000 Chinese immigrant investors sloshing their money around Metro Vancouver real estate over the past few years, federal politicians, too—Liberals, mainly—have been more than happy to rake it in at cash-for-access soirees and in generous donations to election campaign war chests.

In these ways, in Vancouver’s political circles, and in polite company, one simply didn’t mention the way the city’s housing market was being restructured to serve as an offshore investment bolthole for billions of dollars’ worth of shadow currency being spirited out of China, Iran, Russia and other such kleptocracies. But back in 2015, when the profoundly caucasian Mayor Robertson attempted to dismiss Yan’s findings—“I’m very concerned with the racist tones that are implied here,” Robertson said—it was a smear too far.

Yan’s great-grandfather was allowed into Canada only after being obliged to pay the infamously racist head tax Ottawa put in effect to keep out working-class Chinese immigrants. Students, merchants and diplomats were exempt. The head tax was in place until 1923. Yan wasn’t going to put up with Robertson’s backchat, and by that time, Vancouver’s ethnic Chinese community leaders had similarly lost their patience. White real estate moguls and politicians like Robertson persisted in proclaiming their anti-racist bona fides and purporting to be the champions of Vancouver’s Chinese community by shutting down public debates about the region’s housing catastrophe. Brandon Yan, a civic activist and volunteer on Vancouver’s planning commission, put it best: “Let’s leave it to the rich white dudes to decide what’s racist, right?”

Vancouver’s “condo king” Bob Rennie—a primary financial backer of Robertson’s NDP-tilting Vision Vancouver team and also the chief fundraiser for the NDP’s adversaries in Christy Clark’s Liberals—had cultivated a particularly brazen habit of it. “So you had these whispers about racism being used to shut down a dialogue about affordability and the kind of city we want to build here,” Andy Yan explained. “It’s a kind of moral signalling to camouflage immoral actions. It’s opportunism, and it’s a cover for the tremendous injustices that are emerging in the City of Vancouver and across the region. It’s a weird Vancouver thing. It’s very annoying. It’s kale in the smoothies or something.”

While the politicians and their friends in the property industry were making speeches about diversity and the importance of having sensitive feelings, foreign ownership grew to account for more than $45 billion dollars’ worth of Metro Vancouver residential property. Within Vancouver city limits, 7.6 per cent of all residential properties are now owned directly by individuals “whose principal residence is outside of Canada,” by the definition of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Roughly one in ten Vancouver condos are owned by non-residents. And that’s just the owners we know about.

Transparency International reckons that perhaps half of Vancouver’s most expensive properties are owned by shell companies or trusts, with the nominal owners commonly listed as student, housewife, or homemaker. Roughly 99 per cent of the single detached houses within Vancouver’s city limits are now valued in excess of $1 million. More than 20,000 Vancouver homes are vacant, year round. Vancouver’s rental vacancy rate is hovering just below one per cent.

“I’m always careful about using biomedical analogies,” Yan told me the other day, “but what was like a little skin ailment, if you will, over the last 10 or 15 years, has become a full fledged cancer.” Over just the past four years, throughout Metro Vancouver, homes worth $1 million or more have risen from 23 per cent of the housing market in 2014 to 73 per cent of the market now. Yan has been putting together a series of maps that show how the $1 million “red line” has been moving inexorably across the region, deep into the suburbs. “But what those maps don’t do is they don’t factor in transportation costs,” Yan said. “The top two expenditures of any Canadian household is shelter and transportation. God help you if you factor in child care. The whole map might as well be red. A number of factors have all come together to produce this catastrophic situation, but what was a small concentrated pattern in the west side of Vancouver has now metastasized to hit every single part of the region, and it’s similarly metastasized into the rest of the economy.”

As for where things are headed, Horgan’s NDP government has raised expectations, mainly because of Attorney-General David Eby’s avowed determination to chase dirty money out of Vancouver’s housing market and bust up the gangland playground B.C.’s provincially-licenced casinos have become—money laundered through casinos has also been pouring into residential property acquisitions. In Tuesday’s throne speech,  delivered by Lt.-Gov. Judith Guichon, Horgan’s government directly addressed tax fraud, tax evasion and money laundering in the real estate market, hinting that a speculation tax is in the works. Next week, the New Democrats release their first full budget. The housing file, however, falls mainly to the more timid Carole James, former NDP leader and now deputy premier and finance minister. Preliminary indications aren’t particularly promising.

With short-term AirBnB rentals swallowing up long-term rental inventory, Yan was less than impressed with James’ solution, announced last week: short-term rental outfits will now pay the eight per cent provincial sales tax, and two or three per cent in municipal taxes. “That’s like taxing cigarettes to pay for lung cancer treatments,” Yan said.

Developing appropriately punitive taxes to discourage property-flipping and offshore pre-construction sales – those are obvious fixes. But knowing how to fix things requires a clear understanding of what’s wrong, Yan says, and closing the “bare trust loophole” that allows property owners to hide their holdings is a must-do. Ontario closed the loophole back in the 1980s. Clark’s Liberals promised to close it, but they never did.

In the meantime, Yan is focusing on converting hidden-away data into publicly comprehensible information. Some key information Yan has drawn from a trove recently released by Statistics Canada’s Canadian Housing Statistics Program, for instance, shows that simply building more condominiums won’t do. A condo building boom in Metro Vancouver has kept the property developers happy, but there’s no evidence that the boost in supply has lessened demand or beaten back prices. Nearly one in five condos built in Vancouver since 2016 were snapped up by non-residents.

To a certain extent, there’s nothing new here,” Yan said, pointing to the Guinness family’s financing of the Lion’s Gate Bridge in the 1920s, and the opening up of the British Properties on Burrard Inlet’s north shore. “But what is new is the hyper-commodification of residential real estate, mixed in with an intensification of global flows of people and capital. It’s just a statement in fact. We’re talking about the globalization of the Chinese economy and its impacts.”

Yan says there may be some solution—a mix of remedies, new laws, purpose-built rental housing, tax adjustments and so on—that does not mean a collapse in Metro Vancouver’s real estate prices. Channelling foreign investment in such a way as to serve the public interest might be possible. “But whether this comes out as a bubble-popping isn’t the point. That’s a secondary concern to the kind of society we want to build. “We need to go back to civic virtues.

“We need to talk about the sacrifices we are willing and we need to make for the greater good of the community. We need to have a discussion about what the public good is, and what we are willing to sacrifice to make it happen.”

Source: Andy Yan, the analyst who exposed Vancouver’s real estate disaster

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Federal stand in Russian spy case would breed citizenship ‘uncertainty’: lawyers

2018/02/16 Leave a comment

Interesting but unconvincing argument:

The federal government’s rationale for trying to deny Canadian citizenship to the Toronto-born son of Russian spies leads down an “absurd and purposeless” path, the young man’s lawyers argue.

They’re asking the Supreme Court of Canada to dismiss the government’s application for a hearing of the legal issues at the heart of the strange espionage saga that has left Alexander Vavilov, 23, in limbo.

Accepting the federal position “would result in uncertainty about an individual’s fundamental right to citizenship,” Vavilov’s counsel say in a brief filed with the high court.

The Supreme Court will announce in coming weeks whether it’s going to hear the case, though no date has been set for the decision.

The government is appealing a ruling that returned Canadian citizenship to Vavilov after it was revoked by Ottawa.

Vavilov, 23, was born in 1994 as Alexander Philip Anthony Foley to Donald Heathfield and Tracey Ann Foley. The following year the family — including an older boy, Timothy — left Canada for France, where they spent four years before moving to the United States.

The FBI turned up at the family’s Boston-area home eight years ago. In all, 11 people — four of whom claimed to be Canadian — were indicted on charges of conspiring to act as secret agents on behalf of the SVR, the Russian Federation’s successor to the notorious KGB.

Heathfield and Foley admitted to being Andrey Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova.

The FBI said Bezrukov had based his cover identity on the birth record of a baby with the surname Heathfield who died in Montreal at the age of six weeks in early 1963.

Bezrukov and Vavilova were among those sent back to Moscow — part of a swap for prisoners in Russia.

Alexander finished high school in Russia, studying in English.

He changed his surname to Vavilov on the advice of Canadian officials in a bid to obtain a Canadian passport. But he ran into trouble at the passport office and in August 2014 the citizenship registrar informed Vavilov the government no longer recognized him as a citizen of Canada.

The registrar said his parents were employees of a foreign government at the time of his birth, making him ineligible for citizenship. The Federal Court upheld the decision two years ago.

Last June the Federal Court of Appeal set aside the ruling and threw out the registrar’s decision. It said the provisions of the Citizenship Act cited by the registrar shouldn’t apply because Vavilov’s parents did not have diplomatic privileges or immunities while in Canada.

In its application to the Supreme Court, the federal government says the registrar’s original decision was “rational and defensible.”

The appeal court’s interpretation, on the other hand, means the legislative provisions in question deny citizenship to children of foreign intelligence agents posted to an embassy and benefiting from diplomatic privileges, while allowing citizenship for children of undercover intelligence agents engaged in surreptitious espionage.

In their filing with the Supreme Court, Vavilov’s lawyers say the government’s view of the Citizenship Act is unreasonable and would lead to absurd outcomes.

Aside from diplomatic or consular officers, many foreign governments employ people in Canada through a wide range of state-owned enterprises including banks, airlines, energy companies and other national ventures, they point out. The government’s stance would expand the exception to citizenship by birth to encompass all children born to parents working for such employers.

“This would mean, for example, that children born to employees of foreign private oil companies operating in Alberta would be Canadian, while those born to employees of state-owned oil companies would not,” the submission reads.

“Similarly, children born to employees of foreign private airlines working at Canadian airports would be Canadian, while children born to employees of state-owned airlines working in those same airports would not.

“These results are absurd and purposeless.”

Limiting the exception to citizenship to children born to foreign officials or employees who enjoy diplomatic immunities and privileges provides far greater certainty, Vavilov’s lawyers conclude.

In a reply, the government characterizes the examples as “hypothetical scenarios” that “would undoubtedly be more complex and benefit from this court’s guidance in the present case.”

Timothy Vavilov, 27, also went to Federal Court after being stripped of Canadian citizenship, and the outcome of his case could ultimately hinge on the result of his brother’s proceedings.

Source: Federal stand in Russian spy case would breed citizenship ‘uncertainty’: lawyers

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with

Get ready: A massive automation shift is coming for your job

2018/02/16 Leave a comment

Still waiting for some of the entities proposing increased immigration (e.g., Barton Commission, Century Initiative) to factor this into their thinking. The Conference Board has at least acknowledged the issue:

The robots are coming to take our jobs and Canada must do a lot more to deal with it.

That’s not the prediction of a doomsday prophet, but of the world’s leading business consultant, the managing director of global firm McKinsey & Co. and chair of the Canadian government’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth, Dominic Barton.

Okay, admittedly Mr. Barton didn’t exactly say the robots are taking over the planet. But he is warning that automation – robots, driverless cars, artificial intelligence, technological transformation – will disrupt millions of Canadian jobs, not far in the future, but in the next dozen years.

Put another way: If you are 30 or 35 now, there’s a good chance that not just your job, but the kind of job you do, will be eliminated – at the most inopportune time of life, when you are 40 to 55, perhaps with a mortgage and kids.

The council that Mr. Barton heads is calling for a national “re-skilling” effort that would cost $15-billion a year – per year – to help Canadians cope. He doesn’t think all that money can come from government, but he thinks it’s going to have to come from somewhere.

“The scale of the change is so significant. What are we doing to really get at that?” Mr. Barton said over the phone from Melbourne, Australia. “We’re talking a really big issue.”

This issue is a massive sleeper test for the government. It’s a test for all governments, really, but in this country it’s a test of ambition for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. It could well be the biggest societal issue of our time. Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s next budget will be delivered in less than two weeks. Will it even begin to reflect the scope of the issue?

To be fair, Mr. Morneau’s last budget talked a lot about job training, and it put some modest sums into it. Mr. Morneau, who ran a human-resources firm, was talking about these issues before he was elected as an MP. But there isn’t yet a government response from Ottawa that hints at the scale of Mr. Barton’s warning.

He is talking about vast change, soon. There are driverless cars now, he noted. That makes it easy to see the prospect of truck drivers thrown out of work en masse. (The courier firm FedEx has hinted its driverless vehicle plans aren’t so far away; the company has 400,000 employees.)

It’s not just truck drivers or factory workers who could see their jobs washed away by technological change. It includes knowledge workers, such as well-paid wealth managers who could find their current jobs automated. The Advisory Council estimated 10 to 12 per cent of Canadian workers could see their jobs disrupted by technology by 2030. “That’s two million people,” he noted. Mr. Barton thinks the estimate is conservative.

That’s different from when a company goes bankrupt or a plant closes, and laid-off workers go look for the same job at another company. Technological change will wipe out occupations. People will need to do new kinds of work, and they will need new skills. Technology might also create millions of jobs, but if Canadians don’t have the skills, a lot of those jobs might go to the United States or China or Sweden.

If you’ve watched the way voters in the United States and elsewhere have responded to disruptions of well-paying manufacturing jobs and good job opportunities, how it has fuelled divisive politics, an anti-trade backlash, and anti-immigrant nativism, just imagine how society could be roiled by two million middle-aged Canadians looking for work without much idea how they’re going to start over.

The Advisory Council argued that it has to be met with a major revamp of job training and lifelong education and a $15-billion injection of resources.

It’s an enormous sum, about three-quarters of the cost of the military. It’s too much for federal and provincial governments to pay alone, he argues, but business will have to be given incentives to do more education and training. Individuals, even those who feel squeezed saving for retirement, will have to save for lifelong learning, perhaps with tax-sheltered learning accounts. They won’t have a choice, he believes, “because it’s coming.”

The advisory council was appointed by the Liberals, and Mr. Barton has the ear of Mr. Trudeau and his inner circle. The Liberal government has adopted a lot of the council’s recommendations, to varying degrees, in its strategy to foster economic growth. But Mr. Barton noted the one with the biggest estimate impact is that massive re-skilling initiative. So far, governments are working on the same scale to face up to the impact of automation, but they will have to face it sooner or later. It’s coming.

via Get ready: A massive automation shift is coming for your job – The Globe and Mail

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A Citizenship Question on the Census May Be Bad for Your Health – The New York Times

2018/02/16 Leave a comment

Context matters. While having a citizenship question should be a no brainer, introducing it at a late stage during aggressive ICE immigrant round-ups, and ongoing gerrymandering and other ways to depress non-white voters, make the critiques understandable:

As the Census Bureau finalizes the questions for the 2020 census, key voices in the Trump administration are pressing for surveyors to ask one critical question: Are you a United States citizen?

Advocates of the so-called citizenship question say it is merely clerical, an effort to ascertain how many noncitizens reside in the United States. But the question would have broad ramifications, not only for the politics of redistricting that will emerge from the census but for an issue that goes beyond partisanship: public health.

The fear is that immigrants — even those in the country legally — will not participate in any government-sponsored questionnaire that could expose them, their family members or friends to deportation. But low response rates from any demographic group would undermine the validity of the next decade of health statistics and programs, health experts warn. Scientists use census data to understand the distribution of health conditions across the United States population. In turn, officials use the data to target interventions and distribute federal funding.

“Data is the lifeblood of public health; it needs to be transparent and objective,” said Edward L. Hunter, the former chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Washington office and now the president of the de Beaumont Foundation, which focuses on public health. “The census will have cascading effects upon every rate, every percentage, every trend we monitor over time. It’s very unsettling for people who need to use that data.”

The debate is heating up as a critical deadline approaches: The Census Bureau says it must submit a final list of the 2020 census questions to Congress by March 31.

In a December document first reported by ProPublica, the Department of Justice argued that inquiring about citizenship status in the decennial census was critical to enforcing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which protects against racial discrimination in voting. Measuring the total number of citizens of voting age in a region is vital to understanding voting rights violations, the department argued.

On Monday, 19 Democratic and independent state attorneys general and one governor, John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado, sent a 10-page letter to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, arguing that the change to the census could “risk an unconstitutional undercount.” The decennial census has not had a citizenship query since 1950, they said.

And, they argued, “adding a citizenship question at this late date would fatally undermine the accuracy of the 2020 census, harming the states and our residents.”

The Justice Department is standing by its request.

“The Justice Department is committed to free and fair elections for all Americans and has sought reinstatement of the citizenship question on the census to fulfill that commitment,” a Justice Department spokesman, Devin M. O’Malley, said in a statement.

Even without the citizenship question, minorities have been undercounted in the national census, with undocumented immigrants and their legal relatives among the least responsive. Amid a fiery immigration debate — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids nationwide — the inclusion of a citizenship inquiry could make it worse.

“It’s all about trust,” said Mr. Hunter, who earlier in his career oversaw confidentiality policy at the C.D.C.’s National Center for Health Statistics. “The government is legally bound not to reveal the identities of individuals who participate — and yet at a time like this, you would need the individual to believe that.”

When census results are released, scientists often measure the impact of a disease by comparing its prevalence to the total population. With skewed census data, public health officials may invest in solving a problem that does not exist — or worse, may overlook one that does.

“This is completely foundational,” said Michael Fraser, the executive director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “We take for granted that we have a really accurate understanding of who lives in this country: their ages, ethnicities, where they live.”

Dr. Fraser added, “The bottom line is, if we are handed baseline numbers that aren’t accurate, everything we do for program planning and what we do for implementation will be inadequate.”

via A Citizenship Question on the Census May Be Bad for Your Health – The New York Times

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Immigration Department makes major headway on spousal sponsorship backlog | Toronto Star

2018/02/16 Leave a comment

Cute timing but the reduction in backlogs welcome:

Immigration Canada has worked hard to play Cupid in the past year by reuniting Canadians with their significant others abroad.

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen hosted a news conference at a Mississauga dessert shop to update his department’s dramatic reduction of the spousal sponsorship backlog.

According to Hussen, the number of spousal immigration applications in the queue has dropped to 15,000 from 74,900 a year ago, and the average processing time has also been sharply reduced to 12 months from 26 months.

“The Government of Canada is committed to family reunification. We understand how important it is to reunite couples. It also makes for a stronger Canada,” said Hussen.

“Canadians who marry someone from abroad shouldn’t have to wait for years to have them immigrate or be left with uncertainty in terms of their ability to stay.”

The minister attributed the success to a focused working group, dubbed the “Family Class Tiger Team,” that was created in spring 2016 to develop innovative mechanisms and redesign application kits and workflow to reduce processing times.

The special team reviewed spouse and partner related forms, guides, websites, tools and processes in order to improve the client experience and achieve faster processing times for most applicants. The team wrapped up in December 2016.

Since then, the Immigration Department’s spousal application package has been revised. At the time Hussen’s predecessor, John McCallum, announced the government intended to reduce the backlog of spousal sponsorship cases by 80 per cent and shorten processing times to 12 months.

Changes to the application kit were made following the announcement, condensing the previous 14 checklists down to four new ones.

On Wednesday, the department said the process will be streamlined further next month.

Starting on March 15, officials said spousal applicants will be asked to submit their background form and police certificates as part of their initial paper application package, instead of later in the application process to help move the process “quickly and efficiently and avoid unnecessary delays.”

The government’s spousal backlog reduction has surprised many, including veteran immigration lawyer Lorne Waldman.

“In my experience, there has been some reduction but it has not been as noticeable as the numbers suggest,” he told the Star. “I do not doubt the numbers but simply note that there are still cases that are taking a long time and it depends a lot on the offices.”

Spousal applications from countries such as Haiti, Mexico, Pakistan, Qatar and Sri Lanka still face wait times ranging from 14 to 19 months, above the 12-month global average, according to the Immigration Department website.

Vancouver immigration lawyer Steven Meurrens said one important reason the backlog was reduced was the increased annual quota for sponsored spouses and children coming into the country, allowing more applications to be processed.

Ottawa increased its annual target for spousal reunification by one-third to 64,000 last year from 48,000 in 2014. The quota is even higher for this year and through 2020, at 70,000 a year.

“The Liberals increased targets, which would increase the number of applications that they process in a year, meaning faster processing,” Meurrens noted.

Waldman pointed out that the government’s time frames for processing do not take into account the delays associated with applications that are returned because they are deemed incomplete.

“If my clients sends in a sponsorship and some officer wrongly decides it is incomplete and sends it back, this adds three or more months to the processing but is not included (in the backlog),” he said. “We have had lots of files wrongfully returned and this has caused a lot of hardship to our clients.”

via Immigration Department makes major headway on spousal sponsorship backlog | Toronto Star

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Professor Cancels Course On Hate Speech Amid Contention Over His Use Of Slur : NPR

2018/02/15 Leave a comment

Precious student over reaction or not? Valid use or not?:

Professor Emeritus Lawrence Rosen opened his course last week with a question. The anthropologist, who has spent four decades teaching at Princeton University, was introducing a class called Cultural Freedoms: Hate Speech, Blasphemy, and Pornography — and his question was meant to shock.

“What is worse,” he asked students last Tuesday, according to The Daily Princetonian, “a white man punching a black man, or a white man calling a black man a n*****?”

The student newspaper reports that Rosen, a white man, went on to use the racial slur multiple times in the ensuing discussion, despite increasingly strong objections from some students. Citing student accounts, the Princetonian notes Rosen defended his use of the word as “necessary” and intended to “deliver a gut punch” — but by lecture’s end, several students had walked out in protest.

Now, just one week later, the course is no more. It was canceled by Rosen after a weeklong storm of debate over the incident, including one criticism that the effect of his words — no matter the intent behind them — “can only be described as personal assault, even though the injuries are not visible on the surface of the skin.” A handful of national media outlets caught wind of the simmering controversy, as well.

University spokesman Michael Hotchkiss tells NPR the decision to cancel the course after just one week was Rosen’s, and that the school exerted no pressure on him to do so. Rosen himself did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I respect professor Rosen’s decision about how to teach the subject in the way that he did, by being explicit in using very difficult words — and they are very difficult words,” Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber said at a previously scheduled town hall meeting Monday.

“It’s a tough kind of conversation to have,” he added, “and I think professor Rosen himself has expressed his view — and certainly it is my view — that it is important to have the kind of conversation when people feel uncomfortable about the language and why they might or might not feel that it’s appropriate to use the language.”

Carolyn Rouse, chairwoman of the university’s anthropology department, also defended her colleague in a letter to the Daily Princetonian shortly after news of the incident surfaced. She wrote that this is far from the first time Rosen has begun a course in this way, “breaking a number of taboos” — such as saying a racial slur or having a student wipe her feet on the American flag — in order to elicit a visceral response in students and explore why.

According to its description, the course had planned to explore the power of oppressive symbols and how “freedom of expression is always limited, both by the harm that may be said to occur if unbridled and by the constraints of the dominant culture.”

“This is the first year he got the response he did from the students. This is diagnostic of the level of overt anti-black racism in the country today. Anti-American and anti-Semitic examples did not upset the students, but an example of racism did,” Rouse wrote. “This did not happen when Obama was president, when the example seemed less real and seemed to have less power.”

Yet others, including parent De’Andre Salter, see the matter in starkly different terms. Salter took to the pages of the same student paper to rebut the points of Rouse’s argument the day after it was published.

“Has anyone offended by flag desecration been oppressed, discriminated against, or systemically denied civil rights? In fact, both flag desecrators and those offended by them have been offered more protections than those called ‘n*****’ by their oppressors,” Salter wrote in part.

Timothy Haupt, a lecturer in the writing program at Princeton, argued that though there may be teaching value in drawing out an emotional reaction, the issue rests in how Rosen handled that reaction.

“My main concern here is with Rosen’s response to student discomfort and confusion, which strikes me as profoundly unproductive, because he appears to have avoided (and perhaps indefinitely postponed) an important teaching moment,” Haupt said.

Haupt noted Rouse’s point about students’ heightened sensitivity to examples of racism — but, he countered, “if a shifting context has influenced how students respond to certain course material, doesn’t that suggest that we as educators have the responsibility to adapt our teaching to guarantee a favorable outcome?”

“Rosen could have stepped back, clarified the difference between using hate speech and talking about it, and then asked his class how they felt comfortable representing the term going forward — so that the conversation could continue,” Haupt added. “But that isn’t what happened.”

Still, the university is standing by its longtime professor.

“I both believe the academic freedom is important to make the pedagogical decision and I respect the pedagogical decision that he made,” Eisgruber said Monday, “although I also appreciate it’s a controversial one and I understand why it’s controversial.”

via Professor Cancels Course On Hate Speech Amid Contention Over His Use Of Slur : The Two-Way : NPR

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Year of the Dog exposes growth of Islamic conservatism in Malaysia – CNN

2018/02/15 Leave a comment

More on Malaysia and Islamic fundamentalism and the impact on the Chinese minority:

With the Lunar New Year round the corner, Chinese around the world are preparing to welcome the Year of the Dog.

But in Malaysia, where people of ethnic Chinese descent make up almost a quarter of the population, images of the dog have been omitted from Lunar New Year decorations and merchandise for fear of offending the country’s Muslim majority.
The omission has raised hackles in the Chinese community and caused concern among Malaysians of all faiths, who see it as yet another symptom of the country’s growing Islamic conservatism, driven by the government’s flirtation with hardline Islamist policies and a cultural shift by religious students returning from the Middle East.

Backlash

Sunway Pyramid decided not to display dogs because they wanted to be respectful to what they perceive as Muslim sensitivities, but it suffered for its decision.
Sarah Chew, a communications officer for the mall, said her company has been the target of a backlash on social media for its decision not to display “contentious” cultural emblems, with calls for a boycott of its mall.
Ms Tan, a 40-year-old Malaysian-Chinese shopkeeper in the mall, who declined to give her full name, said: “This is a multiracial country, when they do something like that it shows disrespect to the Chinese race here.”
“If this is the case they should just make this only an Islamic country, but we have Buddhists, Hindus and other… (religions) as well here,” she added.
Several shops selling the customary red and gold new year decorations in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown have kept those featuring dogs inside rather than on display out front.
Last month, Reuters reported that Pavillion Mall, a shopping mall in the heart of Kuala Lumpur which gets about 3 million monthly visitors, also chose not to depict dogs in its decorations, citing religious and cultural sensitivities as a factor in their decision.
Earlier this year, a hypermarket chain around the country was embroiled in controversy when it emerged that Lunar New Year t-shirts being sold there depicted 10 animals in the Chinese zodiac, but not the dog or the pig.
The 2018 Lunar New Year isn’t the only time that animals considered taboo in Islam have caused public furor. There were outcries when Malaysia in 2016 ordered eateries and fast food chains such as Auntie Anne’s and A&W to change the name of dishes such as ‘Pretzel Dog’ and ‘Coney Dog’ to ‘Pretzel Sausage’ and ‘Beef Coney’ or ‘Chicken Coney’.
The reason? The country’s Islamic department said ‘dog’ would confuse Muslims.
Malaysia’s 30-million population is estimated to be 60% Malay Muslim, with prominent Chinese, Indian and other minorities.
Though Islam is Malaysia’s official religion and the country has Sharia courts for civil cases for Muslims, it is constitutionally secular.

Secularism disappearing

Maria Chin Abdullah, a prominent pro-democracy activist, says what’s happening with the Lunar New Year decorations are “just small signs” of growing Islamic conservatism.
“The secularism in our system that we enjoyed seems to be disappearing.”
As evidence, Chin pointed to the increasing frequency with which Malay women now wear the tudung, (headscarf), the Arabisation of Malay vocabulary — for example the word “Eid” being used for the Islamic religious holiday instead of the Malay “Hari Raya Puasa”, and books being banned for espousing moderate forms of Islam.
Other contentious recent issues include a beer festival in Kuala Lumpur that was canceled last year on security grounds, dress codes being imposed on international performers at pop concerts and Christians being prevented from erecting crosses on buildings.
As the Year of the Dog approaches, some shops run by ethnic Chinese in Malaysia are keeping canine models inside instead of displaying them prominently to avoid causing offence in the Muslim-majority country.
“Schools have become less multi-racial and things are becoming scary,” said Chin.
“My own son will come back from school and tell me we can’t touch dogs and ask why I’m not wearing a headscarf.”
Other critics have pointed to the presence in Malaysia of hardline Indian Muslim televangelist Zakir Naik. He is banned in the UK and his views have sparked a criminal investigation in his native India.
Last year, Prime Minister Najib Razak’s government confirmed it had given Naik permanent residency, a decision to which activists have mounted a legal challenge.
Najib’s support for more Islamist policies has grown since his ruling coalition lost the popular vote in the 2013 general election – its worst ever electoral performance – as he seeks to strengthen his hold on the ethnic Malay Muslim vote.
Malaysia’s evolution has raised alarm bells at the UN, which has urged the country to protect its tradition of tolerance from the rise of fundamentalism.
“I have heard worrying reports of attempts at Islamization spreading in many areas of society which could lead to cultural engineering,” said UN human rights expert Karima Bennoune last year following a 10-day fact-finding mission to the country.

‘Conservatism is becoming worse’

The government, which is widely expected to win elections due before August, drew criticism last year for allowing the opposition Pan Malaysian Islamic Party to put forward a parliamentary bill calling for harsher punishments — including more flogging – for moral “crimes”.
Malaysia’s nine sultans, the official guardians of Islam in Malaysia, last year issued a call for religious harmony after what they described as excessive actions.
The move came after the Sultan of the state of Johor forced the owner of a launderette in his state to take down a “Muslim-only” shop sign.
Ahmad Farouk Musa, founder of a moderate think-tank, Islamic Renaissance Front, is yet another who says Islamic conservatism is worsening.
“One of the reasons is that Malaysia sends thousands of students to Saudi Arabia, where they are indoctrinated with hardline intolerant forms of Islam like Salafism and Wahhabism.”
“They bring back intolerant ideas, for example, a hatred of Shias. That never existed in Malaysia before,” he added.
But there’s another fundamental problem that dates back to the birth of the country – its race-based political system.
Parties set up on ethnic lines originated under the country’s former colonial rulers, the British, who imported Chinese and Indian labor to Malaysia, largely keeping Malays in impoverished rural areas.
After Malaysia won independence in 1957, its new leaders granted privileges to Malays, including cheaper land, easier access to tertiary education and preference for civil service jobs, to try to help them reach economic parity with the Chinese community.
This policy was strengthened in 1969 after Malay animosity over increasing Chinese economic and political power boiled over into a race riot in Kuala Lumpur in which scores of people, mostly Chinese, were killed.
Reformists argue the system has made Malays dependent on handouts and has bred demagoguery that thrives on religious and ethnic tension.

via Year of the Dog exposes growth of Islamic conservatism in Malaysia – CNN

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