Pope Francis vs Donald Trump: Each one has a guide to fake news — and they couldn’t be more different

2018/01/26 Leave a comment

Pope Francis captures the essence of fake news:

So finally, here is the pope’s solution. “We can recognize the truth of statements from their fruits,” he wrote, “whether they provoke quarrels, foment division, encourage resignation; or, on the other hand, they promote informed and mature reflection leading to constructive dialogue and fruitful results.”

Full text below:

A writer in the New York Times once called Pope Francis “the anti-Trump,” which we guess would make President Donald Trump something like the antipope.

The essay’s premise was that the two often agreed on the same world problems but proposed antithetical solutions. Example: “Both pope and president are critics of a neoliberal globalism” – but while Francis wants people to help desperate migrants who are the victims of capitalist greed, Trump wants to wall out immigrants so Americans can get richer.

But that’s the New York Times, which Trump has accused of peddling “fake news.” Actually he’s applied that label to almost all mainstream outlets by now, and went so far as to rank them according to fakeness.

Lo and behold, on Wednesday, Francis released a papal message titled “Fake news and journalism for peace.” And while, like Trump, he think it’s a big problem, his take on it could hardly be more different.

Whereas the president would tell you what is fake news (CNN is, he says; Fox News is not), the pope would rather you figure it out. In fact, his message is more or less a how-to guide.

Francis gives only one example of fake news in his treatise. He is the pope, so no surprise, it’s from the Bible.

“This was the strategy employed by the ‘crafty serpent’ in the Book of Genesis, who, at the dawn of humanity, created the first fake news,” Francis wrote. He means the serpent in the Garden of Eden, who tricked Eve and Adam into eating forbidden fruit by making up a story about how great it would turn out.

“The tempter approaches the woman by pretending to be her friend, concerned only for her welfare, and begins by saying something only partly true,” Francis wrote. ” ‘Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?’ ”

False premise. “In fact,” Francis wrote, “God never told Adam not to eat from any tree, but only from the one tree.”

Eve tries to correct the serpent, and in doing so, falls for his trap. It’s a bit like when you argue with a Facebook troll and get sucked into a long comment thread, eventually saying things you never meant to.

“Of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, ‘You must not eat it nor touch it, under pain of death,’ ” Eve tells the serpent, very specifically.

“Her answer is couched in legalistic and negative terms,” Francis wrote, “After listening to the deceiver and letting herself be taken in by his version of the facts, the woman is misled. So she heeds his words of reassurance: ‘You will not die!’ ”

And then, like with a chain email, Eve shares the serpent’s news with Adam, who turns out to be just as gullible. And while they don’t die when they eat the fruit, they do get the human race kicked out of paradise forever.

That’s how fake news worked back in Genesis, Francis wrote, and it’s not much different and no less dangerous in the internet age.

So, he asked, “How can we recognize fake news?”

He listed a few characteristics of the genre: Fake news is malicious. It plays off rash emotions like anger and anxiety. “It grasps people’s attention by appealing to stereotypes and common social prejudices,” Francis wrote.

But in most respects, fake mimics truth. On the surface, they can be hard to tell apart. For example Trump once retweeted a video titled “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” The video was real, but police said the attacker wasn’t even a migrant.

So finally, here is the pope’s solution. “We can recognize the truth of statements from their fruits,” he wrote, “whether they provoke quarrels, foment division, encourage resignation; or, on the other hand, they promote informed and mature reflection leading to constructive dialogue and fruitful results.”

Fake news is as fake news does, in other words. It “leads only to the spread of arrogance and hatred,” Francis wrote.

So if you’re feeling those things while browsing Facebook, or find yourself in a flame war, be especially wary of what you just read. Ask yourself if there might be another side. Listen to those who disagree with you, instead of yelling at them.

“The best antidotes to falsehoods are not strategies, but people,” the pope wrote. “People who are not greedy but ready to listen, people who make the effort to engage in sincere dialogue so that the truth can emerge; people who are attracted by goodness and take responsibility for how they use language.”

If you’re wondering, no, the pope does not mention Trump in this message. Not that Francis mentioned him by name either during the 2016 campaign, when he told reporters, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”

But the contrast between these two men’s notions of fake news is glaring. If Trump’s appeals, you can find it on his Twitter account. If what Francis wrote makes sense to you, you might try it out the next time your scroll through Twitter.

Ask yourself if what you read makes you feel hateful, or like quarreling. Ask if the pope might find it fake.

And you could ask the same of everything you read, including this article, which brought Trump into the pope’s message, even though the pope did not.

Indeed, Francis wrote toward the end of his essay, “If responsibility is the answer to the spread of fake news, then a weighty responsibility rests on the shoulders of those whose job is to provide information, namely, journalists, the protectors of news.”

Just as everyone should check their emotions against the news, he wrote, the news should avoid inciting them.

Source: Pope Francis vs Donald Trump: Each one has a guide to fake news — and they couldn’t be more different

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How to fix Canada’s ‘Ghost Immigrant’ fraud problem: David Lesperance

2018/01/26 Leave a comment

Worth considering and more analysis: replacing the physical presence residency requirement with a tax residence requirement.

In a more globalized world, where people are more mobile and where Canada tries to attract highly skilled and thus mobile immigrants, this may be appropriate test.

Look forward to reader reactions.:

As has been widely reported, Canada is experiencing an influx of wealthy “Ghost Immigrants” who are securing permanent residence, purchasing properties in Canada, and then returning to their home countries. Unfortunately, a large number of them are not paying anywhere near their legal worldwide tax obligation to Canada, yet are fraudulently claiming to meet the physical presence requirement of maintaining permanent residence and qualifying for citizenship as well as reaping the many other benefits of Canadian life.

There are a number of lessons that Canadians and their government can learn from the Fu v. Zhu case:

1. The problem is widespread

Dodging taxes is not an uncommon thing for people to try to do. What’s unusual in this case is that these individuals chose to expose themselves rather than having been uncovered by an investigation. This is the dumb end of the spectrum of fraudulent behaviour. This same dumb end is occupied by dozens of applicants who used the same address or hundreds of immigrants who hired the same notorious firm to engage in assembly line, cookie cutter fraud.

2. It’s not a new problem

Fraudulently claiming to be physically present in Canada is a scam dating back decades. In 1991 I presented a “Scoundrel’s Guide to Circumventing the Canadian Immigration and Citizenship Act,” to the Federal Parliamentary Immigration Subcommittee. This guide described many of these very same methods to circumvent the physical presence requirements of maintaining permanent residence and qualifying for citizenship. In our current social media world, these same techniques would work just as effectively. At the same time I presented my guide, the newspapers were focused on a high profile case regarding Toronto lawyer Martin Pilzmaker who promoted these same schemes during the 1980’s.

3. Tighter border controls aren’t the answer

Canada Border Service investigations require enormous resources. Investigations to date uncovered only the most unsophisticated and lazy offenders, with the consequences usually being only a minor fine and a suspended sentence. In reality it would take massive investigative resources to even attempt to catch the smarter physical presence frauds. If there were an increased investigative push, rest assured that all would migrate to the more sophisticated hard-to-detect techniques. Therefore, throwing ever greater sums of money at CBS investigations of the current physical presence law is a waste of time and not in Canadian taxpayers’ best interest.

4. Audits would work better

Successful audits by CRA are revenue generators. The reality is that the CRA has not been enforcing worldwide taxation and this news has spread throughout the immigrant community. In a 1996 report, the CRA claimed that it was simply too difficult to audit these cases in the first place and to collect the taxes owed.

However over the last two decades there have been some significant changes which render this viewpoint obsolete:

  1. Data-mining techniques that allow cross-referencing of employment/business and asset information that the immigrant supplied to Canadian immigration officials when applying for status with their later claimed worldwide income;
  2. Canada signing a tax treaty (with an exchange of information clause) with Hong Kong in 2012;
  3. Even though Canada has had a tax treaty with China since 1986, the recent anti-corruption movement within China means that this treaty has gained significant potential usefulness to the CRA in the last few years;
  4. CRA introducing a Whistleblower program in 2013  in response to the dramatically increased international importance of whistleblowers to tax evasion collections starting in the mid 2000’s. This means that there are now a multitude of potential informants (in banks, accounting, real estate firms etc.) who can and will supply financial information on tax evasion;
  5. Social media and on-line information make lifestyle audits easier and more accurate, especially with today’s computing power compared to 1996; and
  6. Canadian assets (namely highly inflated real estate in Canada) have increased significantly, which means that there are now significant seizable assets within the easy reach of the CRA.

Given these changes it is now in the Canadian taxpayers’ best interest to increase tax audits in this area. This would send shock waves through the hearts of those engaging in fraudulent behaviour. This effort does not require any legislative change… simply a refocus by the CRA of its resources.

The second equally important action would be to replace the current unenforceable physical presence requirement in Canadian immigration and citizenship law. In the future, “tax residence” should be the criteria for maintaining permanent residence and fulfilling naturalization requirements for citizenship.  This action can possibly be done at the Ministerial level under the power granted under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, as opposed to requiring a parliamentary vote.

The immediate impact of these combined efforts would mean that current (and future) immigrants will be forced to make a clear choice. If they wish to maintain their permanent residence status or qualify for citizenship, they will need to declare themselves Canadian tax residents and pay full Canadian tax on their worldwide income. If they try to under-report the amount of their worldwide income, then their case will immediately be audited by CRA. If CRA finds they have engaged in tax evasion, they will suffer the double whammy of tax evasion and also being stripped of their immigration status or denied citizenship, because of fraud. All family members who engaged or assisted in this fraud would suffer a similar fate.

As a result of these changes a large number of people who are currently gaming the system will realize that there will be a real chance that they will be exposed to the full brunt of Canadian taxation. They will then decide that permanent residence status or citizenship is not worth that price and voluntarily relinquish immigration status. Furthermore, under Canadian law they will be required to sell their Canadian residential property to an unrelated arms length party, in order to make themselves clearly non-resident in Canada for tax purposes. This will have a significant impact on an over-inflated real estate market when these properties go up for sale.

If this is so logical, why hasn’t Canada done this before? This same proposal is basically the same one I made over a quarter of a century ago in that hearing room on Parliament Hill. The reason that it was not adopted then, and hasn’t been adopted since, is that Canadian politicians and voters have a lovely but unrealistic sentiment that new immigrants and new citizens should be physically present in Canada, rubbing elbows at Canadian Tire and Tim Hortons. According to this mythology, in this way these newcomers magically become “Canadianized.”

In reality, becoming “Canadianized” is a choice people make, not an automatic natural result of being physically present in Canada. There are plenty of immigrants who are long-time Canadian residents who are not much engaged with their neighbours; there are plenty of others who do not live within Canada’s borders but who maintain deep connections to broader Canadian society. (I still vividly remember greeting a client and his family when they landed in Canada for the first time after moving from Dubai. Their 8 year old son immediately started quizzing me about the Toronto Maple Leafs, as he had spent the last two years watching every game and reading about Toronto sports teams. He was quite disappointed to discover that, having grown up in Windsor, I was a Red Wings fan.) Being physically located within Canada’s borders has, in reality, remarkably little to do with genuine citizenship.

Furthermore, it has always been, and will continue to be, extremely expensive and intrusive to enforce physical presence rules, with little actual benefit. At a minimum, increased enforcement would mean massive disruption for all Canadians, since measures such as exit controls would be required. This would further inconvenience the Canadian traveling public, while having no appreciable impact on fraud reduction.

Another benefit of replacing physical presence with a tax residency regime is that Canada will suddenly become attractive to a large number of international entrepreneurs who, as a result of their normal business travel, would never meet the current physical presence requirements and are not willing to engage in fraudulent behaviour. However, they would be willing to trade their current tax situation for the favourable one that Canada offers. Canada’s lack of estate, gift or wealth taxes makes us very attractive to American and European businesspeople who are currently exposed to these taxes in their home country.

Without a doubt, becoming “Canadianized” is a worthwhile requirement to maintain immigrant status and qualify for citizenship. However, I would argue that making sure that a) the individual pays their fair share of taxes; and b) knows the history, culture, social norms and legal obligations of Canadians (through a more rigorous Citizenship test) are more effective and efficient ways of ensuring that they fulfill this requirement than the current, easily-circumvented and ineffective physical presence regime.

Source: How to fix Canada’s ‘Ghost Immigrant’ fraud problem

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New citizenship guide to warn against ‘abhorrent’ practice of female genital mutilation

2018/01/26 Leave a comment

Good. Now the question remains how this will be presented and what language will be used.

Hopefully, the guide will place this in the context of spousal and child abuse, sexual assault, and a short summary of the evolution of women’s rights in Canada, without the identify politics label of “barbaric cultural practices.”

While one would have hoped that the government would have done this in any case, one has to give credit to Conservative Immigration Critic Michelle Rempel for pressing the issue:

Canada’s updated citizenship guide will include a warning to newcomers about the illegal practice of female genital mutilation.

In a statement provided to CBC News, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen called it an “abhorrent practice” that is against the law in Canada.

“While the content for the new guide is still being developed, Canadians can be assured that the new document will include information on Canada’s laws against gender-based violence, including FGM,” he said.

“We would normally not comment on a product still under development, but given the interest in this specific issue, I felt it was important to update Canadians on where we stand.”

The issue has become politically charged, with the Conservatives suggesting the revamped guide would drop a reference to the practice.

Immigration critic Michelle Rempel has repeatedly pressed Hussen on the topic, and sponsored an e-petition in the House of Commons that calls on the government to ensure the new guide condemns the practice.
Petition E-1310, which is open until Feb, 3, now has nearly 25,000 signatures.

On Nov. 28, 2017, Rempel urged people to sign the petition in a tweet that said: “Trudeau is removing references to female genital mutilation as being a harmful practice from Canada’s citizenship guide.”

Rempel was citing a report from The Canadian Press, which said a draft copy of the revised citizenship guide removed the reference to FGM. The current guide, brought in by the Conservatives in 2011, stresses that men and women are equal under the law in Canada.

“Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, “honour killings,” female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence,” it reads. “Those guilty of these crimes are severely punished under Canada’s criminal laws.”

via New citizenship guide to warn against ‘abhorrent’ practice of female genital mutilation | CBC News

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Islamophobia won’t be the central focus of parliamentary committee’s M-103 report, sources say

2018/01/26 Leave a comment

After all the posturing and positioning (and some hysteria) during the M-103 debates, it appears the heritage committee will be framing its recommendations in a broader context. Stay tuned to see what the report says and the degree to which the report is a consensus report or not:

The parliamentary committee tasked with preparing a report on racism and religious discrimination as required by M-103, the Liberal government’s controversial anti-Islamophobia motion, is about to make its recommendations public. But after months of debate over the definition of Islamophobia and the use of the term in a motion intended to address all forms of racism, sources say Islamophobia won’t be a central focus of the M-103 report.

The report’s recommendations largely don’t single out Islamophobia, say some sources with knowledge of the heritage committee’s discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the report. “It’s certainly not the focus of the report,” one said, adding that Islamophobia is referenced, “but not at great length.”

Another source said that while the report does mention the debate over the definition of the term, it doesn’t “go on and on and on about it.”

M-103 was a motion tabled in December 2016 by Liberal MP Iqra Khalid, but only gained steam after the shooting in a Quebec City mosque last January that left six Muslim worshippers dead. The motion called for the government to “condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination” and for the heritage committee to conduct a study on how the government could eliminate discrimination “including Islamophobia.”

Though a motion and not a piece of legislation — and though M-103 did not call for the creation of new legislation to address Islamophobia — it quickly became a political lightning rod, with many Conservatives arguing it would stifle free speech, as, they said, the term Islamophobia is poorly defined. A Conservative counter-motion calling for a general study of religious discrimination without singling out Islamophobia was defeated by the Liberals before M-103 was passed in March.

When the heritage committee began its work in September, some members said they’d been contacted repeatedly about the motion by constituents, some of whom expressed fears about Sharia law.

Debate continued over the wording of the motion throughout the committee’s public hearings, leaving Liberal members at times clearly frustrated and at pains to explain that the motion wasn’t just about Islam. “I personally feel we spent a lot of time on this issue of the terminology as opposed to addressing the root cause of the problem,” Liberal MP Arif Virani said during an October hearing.

There have been other signs that the Liberals have wanted to take the focus off Islamophobia, despite the motion’s connection to an attack on Muslim worshippers. “We’re not following the motion word for word,” Liberal committee chair Hedy Fry told witnesses in September. “We’re not having to slavishly follow anything in this motion.”

During the same hearing, NDP MP Jenny Kwan conceded that the language of the motion was “perhaps not the best.”

The heritage committee blew past its 240-day deadline for tabling its recommendations back in November. Sources say debate over the word Islamophobia continued into the committee’s roughly 10 hours of private meetings in December as the report was being prepared.

On Dec. 11, for instance, Conservative MP Scott Reid said on social media that he planned to move a motion to include a suggestion in the report that M-103 should use “anti-Muslim bigotry” instead of “Islamophobia.”

“The Conservatives were focused on the word, and after a while it became bordering on ridiculous,” one source said. Another said the in camera meetings were “complete madness.”

Still, another source said it was important to debate the term. “And I think that just based on the variety of evidence that we had before the committee, that goes to show you that it was a discussion people felt it was important to have.”

Ultimately, sources suggested, the report acknowledges disagreement about the word Islamophobia, but the recommendations don’t focus on anti-Muslim hate over any other type of discrimination.

That would be in line with many of the recommendations put forward by witnesses last fall, which included better collection of hate-crime data, better education, more training for police officers, and an updated national action plan against racism. Few of those recommendations singled out any ethnic or religious group.

The committee is expected to release its report shortly after the House of Commons returns next week.

Source: Islamophobia won’t be the central focus of parliamentary committee’s M-103 report, sources say

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The Trump Standard Won’t Outlast His Presidency: Noah Rothman on Evangelical Support

2018/01/26 Leave a comment

Interesting commentary by Rothman on evangelical support for Trump, and the compromise this has entailed:

…In an interview with Politico, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins confessed that the community of moral leaders on the right gave Trump a “mulligan” for the debauchery in which he engaged before he became a political figure. He said that the religious right is “tired of being kicked around” by the left and are “glad” there’s “somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.” What about turning the other cheek, Perkins’s interlocutor asked. “You know, you only have two cheeks,” he replied.

Perkins is getting a lot of grief for that, but his honest assessment of the transactional nature of the evangelical community’s moral compromise is illuminating. “That support is not unconditional,” he said. “If the president for some reason stopped keeping campaign promises and then engaged in that behavior now, the support’s gone.” In other words, if Trump stops delivering for them in office, this community of formerly self-righteous moral scolds reserves the right to rediscover their principles.

Many have offered theories as to why these and many other evangelical leaders compromised themselves for Trump. Less attention has been paid to whether the moral majority’s acceptance of Trumpian turpitude represents a depressing new normal. Is this the standard of ethical degradation to which all will be held in the future? If Perkins’ admission is reflective of unspoken sentiments broadly shared on the right, the answer is no. Trump’s is a standard to which only the politically valuable are held.

There was some justified fear that the Trump standard was being broadly applied in November when the right’s moral gymnasts engaged in a collective defense of Alabama justice Roy Moore. They joined with the institutional GOP to ratify Donald Trump’s support for the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate despite his contempt for the law, the Constitution, and the credible allegations that he had abused underage girls. But once Moore lost, his utility was spent. As Breitbart’s Alex Marlow confessed, the accusations against Moore were credible, but the impulse to protect Trump—not Moore, per se—from his detractors was more important than moral rectitude. This, too, was transactional.

Conservatives might be tempted to retreat into a persecution complex. After all, defending Trump’s repeated indiscretions is a full-time job and one that the left seems conspicuously able to avoid. The Trump standard is the Bill Clinton standard, they might say, and it’s about time that Republicans held a mirror up to Democrats and their enablers in media. Stringent moral standards were shackles by which the right constrained itself, thus allowing the left to operate with impunity. Good riddance.

But the Trump standard and the Clinton standard seem reserved for presidents. Anthony Weiner, David Wu, and John Edwards did not benefit from the Clinton standard. Al Franken and John Conyers’ appeals to precedent didn’t salvage their political careers. Similarly, even in just the last 12 months, personal indiscretions were enough to cut short the political careers of Republicans like Blake Farenthold, Joe Barton, and Tim Murphy.

Some might push back against the notion that we can draw broader conclusions from these politicians’ experiences because Rep. Patrick Meehan and Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens have managed to hold on despite the sex scandals engulfing their careers. Their careers might withstand calls for their resignations; time will tell. But their experiences reinforce the fact that there really are no universal moral standards. There are only individuals. And the actions of those individuals are condemned or condoned as a result of calculated cost/benefit analyses, not morality. It was always ever thus.

If this doesn’t sound like cause for optimism to you, buck up. Presidential politics is unique because the stakes at the presidential level are so high. Both parties tend to reflect their titular leaders, but presidents are transitory figures. The Republican Party’s status quo ante was Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, Bob Dole, and so on; men of moral fortitude who had no stomach for conspiratorial thinking, nativist acrimony, or degeneracy. A reversion to the mean is perfectly imaginable.

If such a reversion is in the cards, no one who compromised their stated values in the Trump era should be allowed to forget the bargain they made. Yet this presidency has exposed a valuable truth: too often, ethical considerations are situational and conditional—particularly in politics. If American moral decline is going to be arrested, the country’s self-styled moral leaders must confront that fact and realize the extent to which they’ve contributed to the plunge.

Source: The Trump Standard Won’t Outlast His Presidency

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CBC Ottawa Morning Interview on “Talking About Immigration”

2018/01/25 Leave a comment

My interview prior to the Riddell Forum on Political Management armchair panel on “Immigration Policy in an Era of Political Polarization” on January 23rd:

Talking About Immigration

 

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A Conservative Case for Identity Politics – The New York Times

2018/01/25 Leave a comment

Jon A. Shields, an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, makes a convincing argument:

How should professors respond to the trend of identity politics that is now roiling American college campuses? Although I am a conservative professor, I recommend making a concession to it by explicitly assigning writers of different races and social backgrounds. Let me explain.

When I was in college, I took a class in logic. There I learned that one should never reject an argument because of the characteristics of the person making it. Instead, one should assess the argument itself on its rational merits. And while I agree that the power of an argument should not depend on the person making it, nonetheless, it does.

I learned that lesson during my first year as a visiting professor at Cornell University. I taught a course on American evangelicals, which attracted a mix of secular and religious students. When we discussed “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” a 1994 book by Mark A. Noll about anti-intellectualism in the evangelical tradition, my evangelical students were critical of it. But they were willing to take the book’s thesis seriously because the author was an evangelical.

Perhaps Mr. Noll’s identity shouldn’t have mattered. His historical evidence and the power of his arguments would be worth considering even if he were Catholic, Jewish or secular. But his identity did matter. It mattered because my evangelical students could not simply assume bad faith on the author’s part. They knew Mr. Noll cared about evangelicals as a group of people. Instead of dismissing Mr. Noll as a bigot, my students thoughtfully engaged with his work.

Since then, I have taken identity into account every time I have assigned new books for one of my courses. I currently teach a course called Black Intellectuals, which is focused on debates around racial inequality in the post-civil rights era. It tends to attract progressive students who, in analyzing racial inequality, are drawn to arguments that stress structural obstacles to equality and the enduring power of white racism, especially in our criminal justice system. The course features black authors who do defend that view, but I also teach the work of others who depart from it in some measure, including heterodox thinkers like Thomas Chatterton Williams and conservatives like Jason Riley. Much like my conservative evangelical students at Cornell, my progressive students at Claremont McKenna College are less likely to assume these contrarian black thinkers are acting in bad faith or are motivated by bigotry — even when the thinkers criticize hip-hop culture or defend white police officers. So the students engage the challenging arguments and ideas instead.

As conservatives have long observed and psychologists have since confirmed, human beings are hive-minded animals whose moral judgments are shaped more by sentiments than by reason. Thus, when we are confronted by arguments we disagree with, we can easily find reasons to reject them. The search for disconfirming evidence, however, can sometimes be short-circuited, especially when we feel close to the person making an argument we disagree with. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt concluded in his 2012 book, “The Righteous Mind,” if we have “affection, admiration, or desire to please” other people, we lean toward them and attempt to “find the truth” in their arguments. Social proximity matters.

If we want our students to consider the work of authors they’re inclined to disagree with, we professors must take the identity of those authors into account. This doesn’t mean scrubbing all white men from our syllabuses. But when we design an education for our students, we should remember that humans are partial, tribal beings — not rational automatons.

Some readers — especially those on the right — may suspect that embracing identity in this way will only embolden campus radicals. But that objection ignores an important truth: Practicing the new identity politics in the right way can subvert the dogmas that drive its excesses. When students read books by a broad intellectual range of evangelical or female or black authors, for example, they learn that there is no single evangelical or female or black perspective. Disagreements about ideas transcend these social categories.

The left has often placed too much faith in the power of human reason. Conservatives make the same error when they insist that the identities of intellectuals should never matter. The fact is, they do. And they would, even absent new movements on campus.

via A Conservative Case for Identity Politics – The New York Times

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No sign of bias against government job-seekers with ethnic-sounding names, pilot project finds

2018/01/25 Leave a comment

Given the overall employment equity numbers, and how representation at both the all employee and executive levels has continued to increase, not overly surprising but nevertheless helpful to have tested for bias:

Hiding ethnic-sounding names from resumes has no real bearing on who’s picked from the pile of applications for jobs in the federal public service, according to a pilot project on blind hiring.

A report released Tuesday by the Public Service Commission shows visible minorities were short-listed at roughly the same rate through a name-blind recruitment process (46 per cent) as through a traditional process (47 per cent).

“For visible minorities, results indicated no significant effect on the screening decisions of applications,” the report concludes.

The federal government launched the name-blind hiring pilot project last April to reduce bias in recruitment based on the names and ethnic origins of potential candidates.

In a blog post today, Treasury Board president Scott Brison said the pilot project aimed to see if unconscious bias was undermining hiring processes and the government’s efforts to build a more diverse public service.

He called the pilot “ground-breaking” and says it’s in line with the government’s focus on innovation and experimentation.

“The project did not uncover bias, but the findings do contribute to a growing body of knowledge,” he wrote.

“They provide us with insights to further explore in our steadfast support of diversity and inclusion in the public service; two critical characteristics of an energized, innovative and effective workforce, able to meet the demands of our ever-changing world.”

17 departments participated

The pilot project included 17 departments and 27 external hiring processes between April and October 2017. It had a sample of 2,226 applicants, including 685 members of visible minorities (just under 31 per cent.)

Jobs were in the scientific and professional, administrative and foreign service, technical and administrative support, and operational fields.

Applications in the blind process had the name, citizenship, country of origin, mailing address, spoken languages, references to religion, and names of educational institutions removed. The objective was to determine if applicants with ethnic-sounding names were disadvantaged in the screening process.

While the findings did not reveal any bias, the report notes that reviewers were aware they were participating in the blind recruitment project, and that “this awareness could have potentially affected their assessment.”

Because the number of candidates who self-declared as Indigenous (73, or three per cent), or disabled (102, or five per cent,) was small, the analysis was limited to visible minorities.

Among the participating departments were National Defence; Natural Resources; Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship; Global Affairs, the RCMP and Statistics Canada.

Similar studies

The report notes other studies on blind hiring have had mixed results.

A 2011 study in the Australian Public Service found that de-identifying applications at the short-listing stage did not appear to help promote diversity.

“In fact, when all candidate’s information was made available, reviewers discriminated in favour of female and visible minority candidates,” the report reads.

Benefits of name-blind recruitment may be partly dependent on the context of the organization, including whether discrimination is present in the hiring process and whether the organization has policies aimed at improving diversity.

In October 2015, the U.K. Civil Service implemented name-blind recruitment to reduce unconscious bias and boost diversity, but no systematic review of the impact has been carried out yet.

via No sign of bias against government job-seekers with ethnic-sounding names, pilot project finds – Politics – CBC News

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Sheryl Saperia: A fast way to keep extremist influence out of our schools

2018/01/25 Leave a comment

I suspect any government, including a Conservative one, would find it challenging, if not impossible, to implement on a consistent basis. Just developing criteria itself would be hard once they were tested against real world examples, balanced against other foreign and trade policy objectives:

The Trudeau government says countering radicalization is a foundational component of Canada’s national security policy. Indeed, it has established the new Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence. The government should therefore be pleased with the recent introduction of Bill C-371, the Prevention of Radicalization through Foreign Funding Act, which is an excellent complement to its efforts in this area.

Sponsored by Conservative MP Tony Clement, C-371 is slated for a second reading vote in February. Members of Parliament should allow the bill to be referred to committee where it would receive careful study. While the legislation could benefit from several amendments, its intent and essence deserve parliamentary support.

C-371 would enable Canada to establish a list of foreign states that meet specific criteria, such as promoting egregious forms of religious intolerance or engaging in activities that support radicalization. Once that list is in place, all Canadian religious, cultural and educational institutions would be prohibited from accepting donations from those foreign governments.

This restriction would also extend to receiving money from individuals and entities linked to those states (such as the spouse of the foreign state’s leader or an organization controlled by the foreign state). An exception clause would render Canada’s liberal democratic allies, including the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Israel, immune from being listed.

Canadian educational, religious and cultural institutions should not be subject to the pernicious influence of foreign states and individuals that embrace and promote extremist ideologies. By denying these entities ongoing access to Canada’s open and multicultural society, Canadians will be better protected from interference and indoctrination by foreign extremists. Conversely, so long as the patrons of extremist ideologies have an unfettered ability to invest billions of dollars in institutions in Canada and the West in general, the threat of extremism and radicalization will only grow.

Which countries should be listed under the legislation? There are a number of worthy candidates, but Saudi Arabia and Iran would likely make the cut.

A front-page New York Times exposé from 2016 flatly stated, “Saudi Arabia’s export of the rigid, bigoted, patriarchal, fundamentalist strain of Islam known as Wahhabism has fuelled global extremism and contributed to terrorism.” It referenced both Hillary Clinton deploring Saudi Arabia’s support for “radical schools and mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path towards extremism,” and Donald Trump calling the Saudis “the world’s biggest funders of terrorism.”

The concerns they raised were more explicitly articulated by Farah Pandith, the first-ever special representative to Muslim communities at the U.S. Department of State. Over the course of 2009-2014, she toured 80 countries in her official capacity and concluded that the Saudi influence was destroying tolerant Islamic traditions. “In each place I visited,” she said, “the Wahhabi influence was an insidious presence, changing the local sense of identity; displacing historic, culturally vibrant forms of Islamic practice; and pulling along individuals who were either paid to follow their rules or who became on their own custodians of the Wahhabi world view. Funding all this was Saudi money, which paid for things like the textbooks, mosques, TV stations and the training of Imams.”

While Saudi Arabia promotes Sunni extremism, the Iranian regime works diligently to indoctrinate and radicalize existing Shia communities across the world. In Canada, Tehran has tried to build networks sympathetic to its Khomeinist creed by funding religious institutions, schools and cultural centres. Two of those Iranian cultural centres, located in Ottawa and Toronto, were actually seized in 2014 and the proceeds distributed to victims of various terrorist attacks in a lawsuit against Iran for its sponsorship of terrorism.

Iran had maintained it was not connected to the centres. However, the court found that when the Iranian Cultural Centre in Ottawa had undergone renovation, the applicant identified on the building permit was the “Islamic Republic of Iran.” And the Toronto-based Centre for Iranian Studies, ostensibly a non-government organization supporting those interested in Iranian culture, was found to have been purchased by a company whose sole director was a former cultural attaché at the Iranian embassy in Ottawa. This attaché was also a member of a powerful Iranian family closely connected to high-ranking regime officials.

Bill C-371 will not decisively solve the problem of radicalization. Nevertheless, it is an important tool that can help block outside influences that wish to persuade Canadians to adopt extremist ideologies leading to radicalization and violence.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote in his 2014 memoir Common Ground, “My idea of freedom is that we should protect the rights of people to believe what their conscience dictates, but fight equally hard to protect people from having the beliefs of others imposed upon them.” His caucus now has the ability to affirm this vision by voting in favour of C-371 at second reading.

Source: Sheryl Saperia: A fast way to keep extremist influence out of our schools

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Minister Petitpas Taylor Announces Multiculturalism and ACOA Funding in Moncton

2018/01/25 Leave a comment

An example of the impact of the return of multiculturalism to Canadian Heritage, and the addition of arts and culture to one of the program objectives (G&Cs) as seen in this press release:

Diversity and inclusion are central to who we are. Today, the Honourable Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Minister of Health and Member of Parliament (Moncton–Riverview–Dieppe), announced that the Government of Canada is providing more than $261,000 in total funding to support the Atlantic Ballet Atlantique Canada’s “Atlantic Immigration Summit” project. Minister Petitpas Taylor made this announcement on behalf of the Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Minister responsible for Multiculturalism, and the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development and Minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA).

The “Atlantic Immigration Summit” project will involve a new ballet created and danced by a company formed entirely of immigrants. The project also consists of four open-space symposiums targeting immigrant youth and adults of various backgrounds in order to help foster increased understanding and equal opportunities for all citizens.

The project is receiving funding of $82,500 through Inter-Action, the Government of Canada’s multiculturalism grants and contributions program, as well as $178,930 under ACOA’s Innovative Communities Fund. The Inter-Action program funds community engagement and development projects that promote intercultural understanding and equal opportunities for people of all cultures. The Government of New Brunswick is providing $10,000 towards the initiative.

Projects like this help create bonds between all Canadians by working to eliminate discrimination, racism and prejudice, while also providing opportunities for youth community engagement and uniting people through art, culture or sport. Today’s announcement is part of the Atlantic Growth Strategy’s commitment to drive economic growth in the region through skilled workforce and immigration initiatives.

via Minister Petitpas Taylor Announces Multiculturalism and ACOA Funding in Moncton

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