Articles of interest: Multiculturalism

2023/12/08 Leave a comment

Poll not surprising given events as debates over Israel Hamas war affect diaspora communities and risk social cohesion and inclusion among other articles.

Poll finds support for deporting non-citizens supporting hatred, terror; mixed feelings over Canada’s ‘diversity’

Of note and not surprising given the events:

It was only two months ago that Canada saw large, disproportionately immigrant-led demonstrations calling for the expulsion of “gender ideology” from public school curricula. As Enns said, there is a social conservatism among immigrant communities that isn’t always sympatico with Canada’s various progressive frontiers.

Source: Poll finds support for deporting non-citizens supporting hatred, terror; mixed feelings over Canada’s ‘diversity’

Highlights of the Leger poll:

MOST CANADIANS SEE THE STRENGTH THAT DIVERSITY BRINGS TO THE COUNTRY, BUT FEEL THERE ARE PITFALLS AS WELL.

  • 56% believe that some elements of diversity can provide strength, but some elements of diversity can cause problems/conflict in Canada.
  • Three-quarters (75%) believe that an individual who has non-permanent status while in Canada and publicly expresses hatred toward a minority group or expresses support for any organization listed by the Canadian government as a terrorist group should not be allowed to stay in Canada.
  • While 69% think that Canadian universities should be places where dissenting opinions can be aired and discussed in a civil and constructive manner, 48% actually believe they are places where this happens.

Source: Diversity in Canada

Tasha Kheiriddin: Canada, the land of imported ethnic conflicts

Of note:

In other words, leaders in all strata of civil society — politicians, business, and academia — have a lot of work to do if we want to diversity to enrich Canadian society instead of tear it apart. That starts by focussing on what Canada stands for, honouring its history and achievements, and ceasing the relentless ideological takedown of our country as a colonial, oppressive state. The reality is that most newcomers came here to escape regimes that perpetrate far worse oppression than Canada ever did. It’s time our leaders stood up and said so.

Source: Tasha Kheiriddin: Canada, the land of imported ethnic conflicts

Lederman: The war in the Middle East is creating new divides in CanLit

Sound advice:

Open letters may be performative, but they are also of value. People who are justifiably angry and anguished feel compelled to do something, say something. Writers and other artists especially feel the need to voice their views. But if a letter dismisses the value of human lives on either side – or calls into question (or ignores) sexual assault, please think about what you’re signing. Or posting.

Source: The war in the Middle East is creating new divides in CanLit

Khan: The loss of the Afzaal family reminds us what happens when hate goes unchecked

Agree:

During these unsettling times of rising Islamophobia and antisemitism, the verdict is a stark reminder of what happens when hate goes unchecked. We must be vigilant against the proliferation of ideologies that seek to drive us apart, while ensuring that each member of our society is not fearful for their personal safety.

The human spirit has the resiliency to overcome evil with good. Yumna’s school mural reminds us of the virtues we all share as we strive toward a just, compassionate society. That is her legacy. What will be ours?

Source: The loss of the Afzaal family reminds us what happens when hate goes unchecked

Chris Selley: The fever to cancel Egerton Ryerson has broken

Yes indeed:

I have argued before that Ryerson makes an absolutely ideal subject for a discussion about how to treat otherwise benevolent historical figures who espoused unfortunate views — which is to say most of them. Instead we got a mad rush to rename. The HDSB’s Ryerson Public School in Burlington became Makwendam Public School. “Pronounced muck-kwen-dum,” the board explained, it “is the … word for ‘to remember’ in the Anishinaabemowin language.”…

Clearly, however, the issue has come off the boil. No one is hounding the Toronto District School Board to rename Ryerson Community School, or the City of Ottawa to rename Ryerson Avenue, or the United Church to rename Ryerson Camp in Vittoria, on Lake Erie. And that’s symptomatic of a moral panic: It goes from zero to 60 and back to zero just as quickly.

Blessed are those who who can stand firm on their principles, and on the historical record, in the face of the statue-toppling iconoclasm that overcame Ontario two years ago. Blessed and vanishingly few

Source: Chris Selley: The fever to cancel Egerton Ryerson has broken

Africans are being slaughtered, but with no Jews to blame, the left shrugs

An inconvenient truth:

But at the “civil society” level, the reason is simple: the conflict doesn’t fit the left’s anti-colonial narrative. The oppressors are not white or white-adjacent. This crisis cannot be blamed on capitalism, the United States, or Jews. There is nothing for the left to gain, politically, by calling out a community that is part of its own coalition. So just like feminists stay silent when Jewish women are raped, progressives fail to stand up for Black Africans when they are massacred.

The crisis in Sudan exposes “intersectionality” for what it is: a big, fat anti-semitic lie. The hypocrisy is beyond belief. And the Masalit are the ones to pay the price.

Source: Africans are being slaughtered, but with no Jews to blame, the left shrugs

Au-delà de l’affaire Bochra Manaï 

The dangers of appointing activists:

Quand Bochra Manaï a été nommée commissaire à la lutte au racisme et aux discriminations systémiques à la Ville de Montréal, Valérie Planteassurait les Montréalais qu’elle avait été sélectionnée au terme « d’un processus très rigoureux » qui était « garant de la qualité de la personne qui avait été choisie » et que cette dernière savait qu’elle servait désormais une « institution » et comprenait bien « son [nouveau] rôle ».

Beaucoup de Montréalais s’inquiétaient en effet du fait que la principale intéressée s’était surtout fait connaître comme porte-parole du Conseil national des musulmans canadiens et qu’à ce titre, elle avait publiquement pourfendu la loi 21 sur la laïcité de l’État et le Québec tout entier, devenu, selon elle, « une référence pour les suprémacistes et les extrémistes du monde entier ». Pouvait-on vraiment penser que quelqu’un qui tenait quelques semaines plus tôt des propos aussi provocants et aussi peu objectifs (elle était allée jusqu’à associer la loi 21 aux attentats de Québec et de Christchurch, en Nouvelle-Zélande) allait se muer instantanément, par la magie d’une nomination, en commissaire impartiale ?

Le noeud du problème est là. On recrute des militants politiques pour en faire des fonctionnaires censés être objectifs et impartiaux et on s’étonne ensuite qu’ils soient demeurés avant toute chose… des militants.

Source: Au-delà de l’affaire Bochra Manaï

As incidents of hate speech rise, when can employers legally sanction workers? 

Useful info:

Incidents of Antisemitism and Islamophobia are drastically rising in Canada in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war and the employment-related legal implications are quickly emerging as many workers openly express their personal views and attend protests or rallies. What happens when their employers, or others, take offence?

Source: As incidents of hate speech rise, when can employers legally sanction workers?

Colby Cosh: Court of Appeal rejects idea that math test is racist

Good decision even if largely on process grounds:

The Court of Appeal has taken a very dim view of almost all of this, partly because the concerns about the test turned out to be completely overblown. Aspiring teachers were always allowed to keep writing the test as often as they liked until they passed. Privatized provision of the test meant that opportunities to retake were never more than a few weeks apart. And teachers could take a crack at the MPT at any point in their course of studies; they didn’t have to wait until they were facing the immediate pressures of the job market.

The divisional court didn’t take any of this into account before hitting the Charter of Rights detonator, even though the evidence then before it was statistically slender and concerned only first attempts at the MPT. (Moreover, in voluntary field trials of the test, many candidates didn’t provide racial labels at all, creating possible — nay, virtually inevitable — bias issues in those statistics.)

Source: Colby Cosh: Court of Appeal rejects idea that math test is racist

Amira Elghawaby victime d’actes islamophobes

Threading the needle on the Israel Hamas war but clarity on Merry Christmas:

Lorsqu’elle a pris connaissance de l’offensive surprise du Hamas contre Israël, au matin du 7 octobre,  Mme Elghawaby a été « choquée » par ces événements « douloureux », raconte-t-elle.  Mais le silence qu’elle a maintenu sur la place publique dans l’immédiat a été dénoncé par plusieurs.

Il a fallu attendre une dizaine de jours avant qu’elle ne publie une déclaration, une prise de parole qui ne mentionnait pas explicitement les attaques du Hamas. « Les communautés musulmanes me mentionnent que nous ne pouvons pas laisser le conflit israélo-palestinien rouvrir un chapitre aussi douloureux. L’héritage de cette période sombre est ravivé aujourd’hui », avait-elle alors fait valoir, faisant référence au « profond traumatisme » vécu au lendemain des attentats du 11 septembre 2001 aux États-Unis par les communautés musulmanes et arabes.

… Noël férié, du racisme ?
Est-ce que souhaiter « joyeux Noël » est raciste ? Sa réponse est claire : « Non, pas du tout. C’est beau d’être dans une société pluraliste. On a plusieurs religions et on veut comprendre tout le monde et leurs fêtes. » Elle mentionne en appui une chronique qu’elle a écrite dans les pages du Toronto Star en 2018, intitulée « Est-il acceptable de dire “joyeux Noël” ? Oui », où elle affirmait que dire « bonnes vacances » pour éviter toute référence religieuse n’était pas « une panacée » pour l’inclusion. 

Jeudi après-midi, le Bloc québécois a déposé aux Communes une motion condamnant la position de la Commission canadienne des droits de la personne. Elle a été adoptée à l’unanimité par les élus, à l’image de celle déposée la veille à l’Assemblée nationale du Québec.

Source: Amira Elghawaby victime d’actes islamophobes

Yakabuski: Rights commission’s humbug view of Christmas is just the gift the CAQ needed

Indeed. What were they thinking (or not):

…But hark! Out of the dark November sky, by what could only have been the grace of some higher power, this week emerged the gift of fate that Caquistes had been needing. It came in the form of a Canadian Human Rights Commission discussion paper that the CAQ seized on as a frontal attack on Christmas, allowing it to present itself as the defender of the faith against the woke zealots.

“Honestly, we’re going to continue to celebrate Christmas, and we’re not going to apologize for celebrating Christmas,” CAQ Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette insisted after the National Assembly voted 109 to 0 to approve a motion denouncing the CHRC paper. The offending tract referred to statutory holidays related to Christianity as examples of the “present-day systemic religious discrimination” that is “deeply rooted in our identity as a settler colonial state.”

Source: Rights commission’s humbug view of Christmas is just the gift the CAQ needed

Douglas Todd: It’s dangerous to bring modern-day blasphemy laws to the West

Valid concern:

Canadian senators have recommended it. An Australian state has already done it. And some Danish politicians are preparing for it.

They are all pushing new laws that would, in different ways, make it a criminal offence to mock a religion. Some now call it “religious vilification” — even while it used to be known as “blasphemy.” The subject is in the air more than ever this fall because of hot-blooded enmities arising in the wake of the Hamas-Israel war.

Canadian Sen. Salma Ataullahjan this month said she wants legislation to combat “mischaracterization of religious Islamic concepts.” Chris Minns, premier of New South Wales in Australia, just brought in a fine of up to $100,000 for anyone who “severely ridicules” a religious belief. Denmark votes in December on whether to ban “improper treatment of scriptures,” particularly Quran burnings.

As much as I personally oppose the ridiculing of religious beliefs or symbols, I also believe legislators need to approach this crucial issue of free expression with extreme caution. It is dangerous for any society to forbid people from casting profane aspersions, however offensive, on that which others consider sacred.

Source: Douglas Todd: It’s dangerous to bring modern-day blasphemy laws to the West

If diversity is our strength, then why are diaspora news outlets being silenced?

There’s a dangerously naïve sentiment among some that Canada’s pluralism is immune from erosion. 

But in reality, Canadians from virtually every nation on the earth, of every political persuasion and religion, living side by side in peace is not something that magically happens. It takes constant work, strong leadership and information to understand the context of plural (e.g. cultural, regional, etc) goals and grievances and to resolve tensions peaceably.

Non-biased, smart journalism has a big role to play in this regard. But with Canadian mainstream media outlets closing regional offices and firing international bureaus en masse, there’s virtually no consistent mainstream coverage of how Canadian policies or politics are being felt by Canadian diaspora groups. Instead, the primary source of coverage many rely upon to understand factors that might impact different groups are stories found by using Google to search for minority community media outlets, often called Canadian “ethnic media” or “diaspora media.”

However, after December 19, 2023, thanks to the Canadian federal governing Liberal’s bill C-18, that capacity will be eliminated. December 19 is the day the bill comes into force, and the megalithic search engine Google said they would begin blocking search results for all Canadian news sources, including ethnic media. Google’s move will come months after Facebook’s parent company, Meta, blocked access to Canadian news sites across its platforms

Source: If diversity is our strength, then why are diaspora news outlets being silenced?

After ‘Sinicization’ of Islam in Xinjiang, China is closing and destroying mosques in other Muslim areas: report 

Telling:

“I do think it’s been quite shocking to see the lack of outrage from Muslim governments, which are quite rightly critical of what is happening now in Palestine and have also come to the defence of the Rohingya in the past,” Ms. Pearson said. “What we want to do is really open the eyes of Muslim-majority countries to what is happening in China.”

Source: After ‘Sinicization’ of Islam in Xinjiang, China is closing and destroying mosques in other Muslim areas: report

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Chris Selley: Teaching kids about the Holocaust won’t cure us of our antisemites

2023/11/04 Leave a comment

Valid caution:

In 2019, the Pew Research Center polled Americans on their knowledge of the Holocaust and their attitudes toward Jews. The results were intuitive: The more people knew about Hitler’s rise to power, and about how many millions of Jews were murdered, the “warmer” their feelings were.

“Warmer feelings” seems to be the basic goal British Columbia and Ontario have in mind in beefing up Holocaust education in elementary and secondary schools, after Hamas’s Oct. 7 pogrom in southern Israel led to celebrations on the streets of Canadian cities, and later the targeting of Jewish-owned businesses for protests and various other antisemitic acts.

“If we really want to fight hate in this province, if we really want to stand up to antisemitism, it is critical that we learn from the past,” B.C. Premier David Eby said this week. “We know how threats and hate can accelerate into violent acts and into horrific outcomes. We must ensure that the same horrors are not repeated.”

“By including new mandatory learning in Holocaust education in elementary and secondary schools, we are ensuring students are never bystanders in the face of hate and division,” Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce averred.

It would be very difficult to argue against Holocaust education, unless you think students needn’t know about seminal events in human history. (Astonishingly, only Ontario and B.C. mandate any at all. Expect that to change.) But as a means to a greater social end, Holocaust education isn’t necessarily as effective as people might hope.

A cautionary note from the Pew survey: The “warm feelings” gap between the informed and uninformed really wasn’t very big. The people who were most informed about the Holocaust measured 67 out of 100 on Pew’s “feeling thermometer.” The least informed were at 58.

And another cautionary note from the British Centre for Holocaust Information: Just because you teach kids something doesn’t mean they’ll believe it or remember it. In a 2016 survey of nearly 10,000 English secondary-school students, the centre found that “despite the Holocaust being a staple in the curriculum for almost 25 years, student knowledge and conceptual understanding is often limited and based on inaccuracies and misconceptions.”

Just over 10 per cent of students believed “no more than 100,000 lives were lost (in the Holocaust),” the study reported.  “Most (students) had little understanding of why (the Jews) were persecuted and murdered,” with most assuming it was simply a matter of Nazis abhorring “difference” of all kinds. The understanding of antisemitism specifically — past and present — was so weak that “68 per cent of students (were) unaware of what ‘antisemitism’ meant.”

Teaching about the Holocaust in isolation from antisemitism, from Jewish history, and from Jews in the modern world, is one of the key pedagogical pitfalls American essayist Dara Horn identified in a fascinating recent piece at The Atlantic. Horn quoted Charlotte Decoster of the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum: “Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”

“When anti-Semitism is reduced to the Holocaust, anything short of murdering six million Jews — like … taunting kids at school, or shooting up a Jewish nonprofit, or hounding Jews out of entire countries — seems minor by comparison,” Horn argues.

“Holocaust education remains essential for teaching historical facts in the face of denial and distortions,” she concludes. “Yet over the past year, as I’ve visited Holocaust museums and spoken with educators around the country, I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism.”

Indeed, it strikes me that the worst things I’ve heard Canadians says since Oct. 7 have come from conspicuously educated people who surely know what the Holocaust was. “How beautiful is the spirit to get free that Palestinians literally learned how to fly on hang gliders,” Harsha Walia jaw-droppingly effused on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery. She has a law degree from UBC. She was director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, for heaven’s sake, until she cheered the burning of churches on First Nations.

It seems safe to say, knock wood, that Canada isn’t quite as deep into this problem as some of our peer nations. By the Anti-Defamation League’s definition, eight per cent of Canadian adults harbour antisemitic views. In France it’s 15 per cent, in Belgium 22 per cent, in Spain 26 per cent. We don’t have France’s soul-crushing banlieues — ghettoes fine-tuned to turn bitter, unemployed young Muslim men into extremists. We have freedom of speech: We let pro-Palestinian activists say their piece, disturbing as it might be, rather than turning the water cannons on them.

Pew found that simply knowing something of another faith (or none) significantly warmed feelings toward that faith: Atheists scored just 38 degrees on the “feeling thermometer” among Americans who don’t know any, and 51 degrees among Americans who do. Catholics enjoyed the same 13-per-cent jump. Those with personal connections were 10 degrees warmer to Hindus, Jews and Mainline Protestants. Canada is a country where people of many faiths and of no faith work and socialize together — even those who might have been raised with prejudicial attitudes toward others. That ought to help.

But of course, it only takes one pathetic, bigoted freak to lose the plot before something horrific happens. Sticking to our values is all we can do, in my view, and that should absolutely include well-designed Holocaust and antisemitism curricula. But no one should assume it’ll be enough. This problem didn’t emerge on Oct. 7, after all. Oct. 7 simply shined a blinding light on it

Source: Chris Selley: Teaching kids about the Holocaust won’t cure us of our antisemites

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Chris Selley: In Canada, even Muslims can be conservatives

2023/08/03 Leave a comment

As can any group. Ibbitson and Bricker made the point about many immigrant-origin communities being more socially conservative in their 2014 book, The Big Shift but this has not hampered the Liberal government in the three subsequent elections, suggesting less important than other issues.

But valid that all parties need to be more careful in their ethnic and religious vote targeting to avoid greater divisiveness just as they also need to ensure inclusive messaging. Not an easy balance…:

Canada’s media-political universe continues to indulge one of the more fascinatingly insulting ideas in recent memory: That some socially conservative Muslims are lining up in opposition to LGBTQ- and especially gender-related school activities — drag queen story times are a prominent example — because they’ve been duped or manipulated into it by non-Muslim conservatives, especially those awful Americans.

There’s a far simpler explanation, of course: Muslim conservatives are leery-to-outraged by such things for the same reason non-Muslim conservatives are, namely some combination of religious and cultural norms, the shock of the new, and good old-fashioned gut instinct.

In addition, many Muslim-Canadians have their roots in countries where homosexuality is forbidden, never mind celebrated at elementary schools. It would be downright shocking if they had arrived pre-installed with Trudeauvian social values.

But some Canadian liberals just can’t seem to accept this.

“To some, the recent protests have been an example of conservative Muslims pushing back against causes championed by the left — which have in the past included standing against Islamophobia — amid concerns that prevailing progressive ideals conflict with their religious teachings,” the Toronto Star reported this week. “To others, it has tones of political manipulation, with members of a minority group being used to mask a larger push toward intolerance.”

“For white supremacists, expanding their base this way, or even appearing to grow support for their ‘causes’, offers (an) advantage,” Star columnist Shree Paradkar observed. “(I)mages with visibly Muslim people in their midst make for an effective cover.”

Paradkar called the situation “heartbreaking,” which epitomizes the condescension inherent in this narrative: After all Canada has done for these people, they take up with … with … conservatives? Woe!

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has ushered this idea from the country’s faculty lounges and opinion pages into the mainstream, lately lecturing real live Muslim Canadians in the flesh about the error of their ways. “Misinformation” about school curriculums and activities is “being weaponized by people who are not doing it because of their interest in supporting the Muslim community,” he recently admonished parishioners at a Calgary mosque. “These are people on the far-right who have consistently stood against Muslim rights and the Muslim community.”

There it is again — this idea that Muslims are defaulting on some kind of debt.

It’s an Upper Canadian twist on the narrative that’s taken hold in Quebec in recent years: Where Quebec nationalists and conservatives would rather Muslims abandon their hijabs and embrace French-style secularism (because it’s such a success!), liberals in the Rest of Canada are happy for Muslims to worship and dress as they please, just so long as they don’t fraternize with social conservatives or take up social-conservative causes.

This is not the multiculturalism that the Liberals market to potential immigrants — the freedom to believe and worship and influence Canadian society as they choose. It’s more akin to blackmail: “We support you. We stand with you. It’d be a shame if we stopped, wouldn’t it?”

I’m using a very loose definition of “social conservative” here, incidentally. A Léger poll for the Conservative Party of Quebec, published in May, found 38 per cent of Quebecers felt drag queen story times were inappropriate for children. Many if not most would bristle at being called socially conservative. And most would not show up outside a school to protest about it.

But there’s no good reason Muslims shouldn’t pursue so-con causes in Canada unabashedly. And if they make “unlikely allies” with their non-Muslim so-cons, as the media often put it, I submit that’s for one very bad reason: The paranoia over Islamic terrorism and mass Muslim migration that took hold in some quarters after 9/11, which thankfully in Canada has proven unfounded. If that’s now far enough behind us that conservative Muslims and non-Muslims can make common cause in pursuit of common interests, I dare say we might even be looking at a good-news story.

Surely Canada would be better off if its parties and candidates stopped courting ethnic and religious voters en bloc, as if membership in a certain community ought to determine one’s position on housing policy, or the GST, or carbon pricing, or all the other things that affect our day-to-day lives. It would be a big change for Conservative strategists as well as Liberal ones, but we would be much stronger for it as a nation.

Source: Chris Selley: In Canada, even Muslims can be conservatives

Filed under LGBTQ, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , , ,

Chris Selley: There’s a treatment for Quebec’s  linguistic paranoia, but Ottawa is thwarting it

2023/06/06 Leave a comment

Of note (and given the recent StatsCan report, Unemployment and job vacancies by education, 2016 to 2022, highlighting the disconnect between immigration policy, which favours university-educated immigrants, and immigrant employment, which favours lower-skilled immigrants, not as effective as presented):

Considering every federal party essentially believes in giving Quebec whatever it wants, and considering the Quebec government’s concern over the French language surviving under the federal Liberals’ increased immigration targets, a recent report from the Institut du Québec (IDQ) paints a frustrating picture of a longstanding grievance between the provincial and federal capitals.

The Coalition Avenir Québec government wants more foreign students, especially francophones — it’s spending millions on various overseas-recruitment programs, and encouraging foreign graduates to stay in the province — but the federal immigration department is in many cases unwilling to grant them visas. “Nearly half of foreign students accepted by a Quebec university and (who satisfy) Quebec’s conditions are still refused a student visa by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC),” IDQ director-general Emna Braham and chief economist Daye Diallo report.

The refusal rate for applications from African nations — a major source of francophone students — is a whopping 72 per cent, compared to a 19-per-cent refusal rate for Asians and 11 per cent for Europeans. For no good apparent reason, the refusal rate is lower across the board for Ontario-bound foreign students — fully 20 points lower than Quebec’s for African applicants.

IRCC explained to the IDQ its reasoning: It’s afraid the foreigners won’t leave after they graduate.

But … Quebec doesn’t want them to leave, and the rest of Canada shouldn’t want that either. A prosperous, confident and confidently francophone Quebec is something we all want, and given the province’s lacklustre birthrate and unique skepticism of bilingualism, francophone immigration might be the only way that’s likely to happen.

“There is a real need to clarify the objectives and to put in place procedures that will ensure that the right hand talks to the left hand,” the IDQ’s Braham told The Canadian Press. Too right: The CAQ government and the IRCC are essentially playing different sports on the same pitch. A ministerial directive to the IRCC bureaucracy could be as simple as, “for heaven’s sake stop rejecting so many Africans.”

Alas, the IRCC bureaucracy is not well known for taking orders. It’s not well known for much except saying “no” to people in the most Kafkaesque ways imaginable. And it should come as no surprise that African applicants to Quebec — and therefore francophone applicants — are taking it on the chin. IRCC is internationally notorious for denying visas to tenured professors from African nations wishing to attend conferences in Canada. Why would it be any less suspicious of their students?

Still, it’s exasperating to see Ottawa block an avenue toward real progress in Quebec — a route out of the anti-religious and linguistic paranoias that have come to dominate nationalist politics over the past 15 years. Those paranoias have combined to create a sort of demographic gridlock: The CAQ government wants all future immigrants to speak French before they arrive, for example, but there are only so many francophones who want to emigrate to Quebec, and many of them are very religious. Many, though certainly not all, are Muslims. Few will want to jettison their faith and culture en route to Canada like an oversized bottle of shampoo.

That will always rankle the miserable arch-paranoiacs who currently drive this agenda — the ultra-nationalist voices who dominate Quebec City talk radio and the Quebecor newspapers’ comment pages. “They want immigrants and their children to think and dream in French. And even that isn’t enough,” Quebec journalist Christopher Curtis tweeted very eloquently this week. “They want them to make a show of loyalty, to remove their hijabs and turbans, to hate Trudeau like they do, to feel antipathy towards Ottawa the way they do.”

Sidelining those paranoiacs is a generational project that, polls suggest, Quebec’s younger generations will embrace. (It’s certainly not just immigrants that annoy the nationalist miserabilists. They also can’t stand the way most young white Quebecers speak French, or the way they vote, and to the great extent the youth aspire to bilingualism, the way they dream.) Accepting more young francophone immigrants — as many as possible — can only help.

It’s already happening, despite IRCC. “A growing number of foreign students settle in Quebec once they have obtained their degree,” Braham and Diallo note. “The number of post-graduation work permit holders tripled between 2015 and 2022. … The number of new permanent residents who graduated from a Canadian institution also tripled. … And these new permanent residents are integrating into the labour market better than before, the result (in part) of prior experience on Quebec soil.”

Good news. But in the meantime, other things are happening. Profoundly stupid things.

On Thursday, Montreal and other Quebec municipalities posted new rules prescribed by Bill 96, the pointless anti-Anglo crackdown law that only a couple of Quebec Liberal MPs could find the gonads to oppose.

In order legally to browse your garbage-pickup calendar or adult-swimming schedule in the language of Wolfe, you must now tacitly attest to being an “individual with whom (the municipality) communicated solely in English prior to May 13, 2021”; or a person “declared eligible” by the Ministry of Education to attend public school in English — excluding “children of foreign nationals living temporarily in Quebec,” naturally; or an Indigenous person; or an immigrant, but only one having arrived within the previous six months.

You know what won’t help Quebec move on from this unfortunate paranoid period? That laughingstock idiocy. Nowhere else in the world is like this. Quebec needn’t be like this. If Ottawa won’t push back, it could at least force IRCC out of the bloody way.

Source: https://apple.news/Aopv1ZeK0SmqU09IXj1BkJQ

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

“The Times They Are A-Changin’?” – Immigration debates and discussions

2023/05/29 Leave a comment

A few years ago, it was rare to find critiques of the government’s expanding levels of immigration, and the overall consensus among the provinces, business organizations and lobby groups, media and academics organizations in favour of this approach.

However, over the past year or so, there has been significant commentary questioning the approach given the impact on housing availability and affordability, healthcare and infrastructure. In addition to my 2021 Increasing immigration to boost population? Not so fast, former head of the British Columbia public service, Don Wright, wrote one of the stronger critiques, Will Trudeau make it impossible for Eby to succeed?

National unity and the demographic weight of Quebec in Canada has become a second major critique. A series of articles in Quebecor papers (LE QUÉBÉC PRIS AU PIÈGE PAR OTTAWA) highlighting an accelerating decline of Quebec’s population relative to the rest of Canada, reflecting different immigration rates has provoked considerable political debate and commentary in Quebec and English Canadian media.

While the Quebecor were written in an incendiary manner, the substance was correct. The approaches continue to diverge, there is, IMO, an unhealthy consensus in favour ot the current and projected levels of permanent and temporary migration among federal and provincial politicians, business organizations, academics among others.

Some of the commentary recognized that. Stuart Thompson the The Hub, A new era of immigration politics has started in Canada was one of the first to recognize the potential importance to immigration debates and discussions. Chris Selley chimed in, noting that Ottawa has no answer to Quebec’s anti-immigrant narrative. Campbell Clark stressed that Two solitudes emerging on immigration in Quebec, and noted the lame arguments on both sides of the debate. Formally, the Quebec government reject[ed] Trudeau’s immigration plan, fears decline of French.

The role of the Century Initiative received increased prominence given that these debates were happening around the time of one of its Globe and Mail sponsored conferences. Immigration Minister Fraser’s denial that the government had not adopted the 100 million population goal of the Century Initiative was met with understandable cynicism by Robert Dutrisac, Blanc bonnet, bonnet blanc, Konrad Yakabuski, L’«initiative du siècle» n’est pas l’idée du siècle among others, along with more reporting and analysis, Serons-nous vraiment 100 millions de Canadiens en 2100?.

English media commentary focussed more on the politics, with Chantal Hébert asking whether Hébert: Quebec’s separatists were searching for a way to revive their cause. Is this it? and Konrad Yakabuski, another rare journalist who writes in both English and French media, noting that François Legault’s anti-immigration crusade is coming back to bite him. Andrew Phillips in the Star dismissed Quebec concerns, framing it as a Panic attack in Quebec over immigration threat. Althia Raj, also in the Star, argued that: Pierre Poilievre is courting voters by capitalizing on immigration fears in Quebec, both discounting the substance of Quebec concerns and not questioning the federal government approach.

And of course most English language was focused on the less important issue of the passport redesign (not a fan, but my worry is that the controversy will make the government even more skittish about releasing the revised citizenship guide, Discover Canada, first promised in 2016).

Surprisingly, Andrew Coyne focussed more on Quebec, politics and demography, rather than contributing his usual economic take on issues. Almost a childish approach in 100 million Canadians by 2100 may not be federal policy, but it should be – even if it makes Quebec howl, largely ignoring the negative impacts on housing, healthcare and infrastructure and, more bizarrely, falling into the trap of overall GDP rather than productivity and per capita GDP (which most of his economic-related columns focus on).

All this being said, the Quebec government took advantage of the controversy to announce changes to its immigration program Six éléments à retenir des annonces de Québec en immigration, including increased levels to 60,000 new permanent residents while allowing ongoing temporary resident growth. This slight-of-hand was of course noted by Michel David, Et la lumière fut and Plus d’immigrants pour éviter une « louisianisation » ici ? 

This modest increase will not, of course, make any significant change to the ongoing divergence in population growth between Quebec and the Rest of Canada and Quebec’s relative weight in the country.

A recent Statistics Canada study, Unemployment and job vacancies by education, 2016 to 2022, highlighting the disconnect between immigration policy, which favours university-educated immigrants, and immigrant employment, which favours lower-skilled immigrants, provides another example of how our immigration policies appear more to be “policy-driven evidence” rather than “evidence-based policy.”

Questions on immigration levels have broadened from housing, healthcare and infrastructure impacts to the impact on the Canadian federation given the imbalance between Quebec and the Rest of Canada. A potential sleeper issue, parallel to Quebec’s relative share of the population is with respect to Indigenous peoples, given that high immigration levels dwarf Indigenous growth (visible minorities increased by 26.5 percent, Indigenous peoples by 9.4 percent, 2021 compared to 2016).

As I have argued previously, we need to find a way to have more productive discussions on immigration rather than the various solitudes between the “more the merrier” and “great replacement” camps (where most Canadians are). The disconnect between Quebec and the Rest-of-Canada is a long-term threat to the federation.

A focus on the practicalities – housing, healthcare and infrastructure impacts – is likely the best way forward and may provide a means to reduce the divergence between the “two solitudes.”

Ideally, of course, some form of commission examining demographics, immigration, and these impacts would provide deeper analysis and recommendations than current IRCC consultations or any other internal review.

To end with a quote from another favourite musician of mine:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Chris Selley: In Quebec, laïcité’s endless contradictions may be coming home to roost

2023/04/19 Leave a comment

Thanks to Premier Legault:

Quebec’s adventures in state secularism — laïcité — have always been full of contradictions, hypocrisies and flimsy explanations. Thankfully, if belatedly, in recent days, those have been coming to a head over two main issues: The role of the Catholic church as part of Quebec’s history and heritage — its patrimoine — and the provision of rooms in public schools for students (read: Muslim students) to pray.

Education Minister Bernard Drainville banned schools from providing prayer spaces the week before last, deeming them incompatible with laïcité. The National Assembly passed one of its famous unanimous motions: “The putting in place of prayer areas, regardless of confession, in public school rooms goes against the principle of secularism.”

But then came Easter, when  leading-light nationalist columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté took to the pages of Le Journal de Montréal with a surprising defence of the Catholic church. Catholicism provided “particular impetus” and “poetic breath” to the French adventure in North America, he argued, and a sense of “solidarity” that began under British oppression and remains to this day.

Premier François Legault tweeted out the column, quoting the bit about solidarity. It did not go well. A few hours later, digging out from an avalanche of negative responses both online and off, Legault added: “We must distinguish between laïcité and our heritage.” And that didn’t go well either — which is interesting, because until recently that was an entirely mainstream position.

In 2008, the National Assembly unanimously (of course) affirmed Quebecers’ “attachment to our religious and historic heritage represented by the crucifix” — i.e., the crucifix hanging over the Speaker’s chair in the legislature. “The crucifix is about 350 years of history in Quebec that none of us are ever going to erase,” then-premier Jean Charest averred. (Minor clarification: Then-premier Maurice Duplessis had the crucifix installed in 1936. According to University of Montreal historian Jacques Rouillard, Duplessis “wanted to distinguish himself from previous Liberal governments by showing he would be more receptive to Catholic principles.”) Liberal Premier Philippe Couillard left office in 2018 still defending said crucifix, and he defended crucifixes in hospitals as well. “To be open and tolerant, that doesn’t mean we have to erase our history,” he argued.

Legault seems to be getting far more pushback than his predecessors did. Liberal education critic Marwah Rizqy accused him of violating his duty of neutrality “as premier of all Quebecers in our secular state.” Liberal MNA Monsef Derraji accused the premier of a “lack of judgment.” Other provincial and federal Liberals and New Democrats chimed in disapprovingly, along with businessman Mitch Garber and comedian Sugar Sammy.

Some of Bock-Côté’s colleagues at Le Journal weren’t much impressed either. “If the Church allowed the French-Canadian people to survive in America, this influence was also unhealthy,” wrote staunch secularist Elsie Lefebvre. This went for women and homosexuals in particular, she argued, but also for the whole population, which was deliberately kept poorly educated and backward.

“Far from cultivating solidarity, the Church favored charity for the deserving poor, that is, for people who complied with its precepts,” Réjean Parent argued. “It has not contributed to our evolution; on the contrary, it has delayed it.”

In a very interesting column, Philippe Léger argued that Legault revealed himself as simply not very interested in laïcité. Indeed, Legault hasn’t worked very hard to hide that, often framing Bill 21 — the restrictions on public servants’ religious attire — as a sort of social consensus under which Quebec could draw a line and move on. (Lotsa luck!)

Léger made a critical observation, as well: Younger Quebecers, few of them religious but none having lived under the Pope’s thumb, are far more likely to see all these contradictions as simply irreconcilable, just as many in the Rest of Canada do now. They (and we) are asked to believe a ban on religious symbols in the public service was an inevitable offshoot of the Quiet Revolution, but one whose necessity only became clear half a century later —mysteriously enough, at a time of increased Muslim immigration. They (and we) can’t help but see “the inconsistency of prohibiting a prayer room for Muslim students during the week, and celebrating … Catholic heritage on weekends,” as Léger put it.

Indeed, the prayer-room issue is a great litmus test for exactly what people mean by secularism: Is it a matter of the government privileging certain ways of life over others, or a matter of the government simply recusing itself from matters of religion?

There was controversy here in Toronto a few years ago when a public middle school essentially brought congregational Muslim prayers in-house on Fridays, for the dubious sake of convenience. I felt it was an unnecessary and unfortunate mash-up of an important secular place with organized religion — whereas allowing students room to pray individually and privately strikes me as a simple matter of hands-off personal liberty. Drainville arrived at the peculiar position that silent prayer in public schools where others can see you is OK, but not quiet prayer in a dedicated room.

That’s a very difficult position to defend, and in the past, Drainville and Legault might not have had to bother. Unanimous vote in the National Assembly aside, there has been healthy and fearless pushback against the prayer-room decision as well. It almost seems like Legault’s government might accidentally have triggered the honest secularism debate Quebec so desperately needs, and which Legault so hoped to avoid. It’s excellent news, if true.

Source: Chris Selley: In Quebec, laïcité’s endless contradictions may be coming home to roost

Filed under Interculturalisme, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Chris Selley: Liberal anti-Islamophobia does not include Quebec

2023/02/01 Leave a comment

Valid contrast. One does have to question the Liberal’s vetting process and their political understanding of Quebec as this reaction among the Quebec commentariat and politicians was likely:

One of the more astonishing scenes in Canada’s recent political history occurred over the weekend as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his Quebec lieutenant and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne took turns wagging their fingers at Amira Elghawaby. She had been installed only the day before as Canada’s first official representative to combat Islamophobia, on the eve of the anniversary of the 2017 massacre at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Quebec City.

Champagne said he was “worried.” He suggested Elghawaby should take time to reflect upon what she had done. From his fainting couch, Rodriguez declared himself “wounded and shocked as a Quebecer.”

“I certainly don’t agree with her words and I expect her to clarify them,” Trudeau tutted.

Elghawaby’s crime? Elghawaby’s campaigning against Islamophobia actually extends to Quebec.

The controversy began Friday when La Presse unearthed a 2019 op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen, co-written by Elghawaby and fellow Canadian Anti-Hate Network board member Bernie Farber, lamenting the recent passing of Bill 21 — the Quebec legislation, now in force, banning civil servants in certain positions of state authority (notably teachers) from wearing religious garb on the job.

“Unfortunately, the majority of Quebecers appear to be swayed not by the rule of law, but by anti-Muslim sentiment,” Elghawaby and Farber argued. “A poll conducted by Léger Marketing earlier this year found that 88 per cent of Quebecers who held negative views of Islam supported the ban.”

This is not a controversial statement — certainly not by the standards of those who campaigned against Bill 21, as any reasonable appointee to Elghawaby’s new position would have done, Bill 21 being the most Islamophobic thing going in this country.

The pointless 15-year “reasonable accommodations” psychodrama that produced the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, the Parti Québécois’ failed “values charter” and eventually Bill 21 had some Jewish content, particularly around the issue of kosher food at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital. The Supreme Court’s 2006 decision allowing Sikh students to wear kirpans at school is somewhere in the primordial ooze of this debate.

But no one can honestly deny that the vast majority of the angst was over Islam, and what some of its adherents choose to wear. The notion that the hijab (as opposed to the niqab or burqa) represents a radical, political and evangelical form of Islam is commonly heard in Quebec, and almost never anywhere else in Canada.

The aforementioned 2019 Léger poll found Quebecers’ “net positive” view of Catholics — i.e., positive minus negative – was 66 per cent; of Jews, 55 per cent; of Muslims, 37 per cent. Moving on to personal religious symbols, the net positive view of crucifixes was 59 per cent. The net positive view of kippas was 37 per cent. Of hijabs, 28 per cent. (Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you Bill 21 was a principled extension of the Quiet Revolution. It’s a neat trick, casting off the shackles of the Catholic Church while remaining resolutely pro-crucifix.)

When put on the defensive, Bill 21 supporters will often point out that the idea has support in the Rest of Canada. It’s true to a point: An Abacus Data poll last year found 30 per cent of Canadians outside Quebec liked the idea. But the figure in Quebec was 53 per cent. And rather crucially, Quebec is the only province where any politician in any party has even proposed such a law, never mind followed through on it to popular acclaim.

Elghawaby, an activist and journalist, has committed other rhetorical crimes, especially from the Quebec-nationalist point of view. In 2021, she declared herself nauseated by University of Toronto historian Joseph Heath’s contention that “the largest group of people in this country who were victimized by British colonialism, subjugated and incorporated into confederation by force, are French Canadians.” She has advocated for prayer rooms in public schools, and for including non-Christian holidays on official Canadian calendars. You could hardly pick two better positions to empurple a nationalist with a newspaper column or a seat in a legislature.

“One wonders how this person, with so many prejudices against Quebecers and clearly incapable of understanding the importance of secularism in the historical and social development of Quebec, could help improve the ambient climate and mutual understanding,” professors Nadia El-Mabrouk and François Dugré argued this weekend in La Presse.

She can’t. Almost certainly, no one can. Discussions in this country about Islamophobia, racism, minority rights and everything in that neck of the woods exist in two hermetically sealed chambers: One for Quebec, and one for everyone else. It’s basically impossible to speak to both worlds at once. But if anyone were capable of it, the minimum they would need is to be appointed by a government willing to support her when one world or the other got a bit offended.

As it stands, both the Quebec government and the opposition Conservatives in Ottawa are demanding Elghawaby’s resignation. The Liberals, having denounced her for no good reason, are making it easier, not harder, for them to do so. And they look as ridiculous doing it in Quebec as in the Rest of Canada. Asked Monday by reporters how he responded to the calls for Elghawaby to resign, Trudeau offered up some typically tawdry bafflegab: “She is there to speak for the community, with the community, and build bridges across. Obviously she has thought carefully over many years about the impacts that various pieces of legislation, various political positions, have had on the community. Her job now is to make sure that she’s helping the government and helping everyone.”

Not for the first time with the Trudeau gang, we are left with two simple but baffling questions: What the hell do they think they’re doing? And why haven’t they heard of the internet?

Source: Chris Selley: Liberal anti-Islamophobia does not include Quebec

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Chris Selley: Asking a baby to get help from Russia is another Ottawa disgrace

2022/06/20 Leave a comment

These kinds of stories are showing up more regularly, given the (small) number of cases and the publicity of the court case and efforts by the lawyer and advocates to generate public attention.

The advantage of the first generation cut-off remains its clarity and simplicity to administer in a consistent manner, in contrast to the previous provisions which were not. But part of the “package” when the change was made over 10 years ago were provisions for statelessness whose implementation would take into account the particular circumstances, implicitly in an understanding if not compassionate manner.

This would appear to be one of those situations where IRCC could have shown more common sense in reviewing the case.

Unfortunately, we can’t be surprised by the obtuseness regarding Russia given Global Affairs and their Minister’s Office regarding the Russia Day embassy reception:

Recent events have called ever more into question Canada’s basic competencies on the world stage, both on the ground and especially in the back office. We made a hash of evacuating our Afghan friends as the Taliban retook the country, then forced many who escaped to wait for months while we churned through their paperwork. The same delays are plaguing many Ukrainians who accepted Canada’s offers of help. Speaking of Ukraine: A senior foreign affairs official’s presence at the Russian embassy’s garden party continues to boggle the national mind. On the much more mundane end of the spectrum: With six months’ notice, IRCC failed to approve a visa for popular Formula One reporter Karun Chandhok in time for this weekend’s Montreal Grand Prix.

Is it sloth? Understaffing? Active malice? It’s difficult to tell. But the story of the Burgess family — father and husband Gregory, mother and wife Viktoriya, and baby Philip, who currently live in Hong Kong — combines all these threads into a perfectly absurd package.

I first spoke to Gregory around six months ago. He is a 46-year-old Edmontonian with deep, permanent roots (and citizenship) in Canada and nowhere else — his great-grandparents immigrated to Alberta from Ukraine in 1894 — but who just happened to have been born in Connecticut. Because his infant son Philip was the second consecutive generation born on foreign soil, our citizenship law does not automatically recognize Philip as Canadian. Gregory and Viktoriya, who is Russian, nevertheless wish to relocate eventually to Canada and think it reasonable they be allowed to do so.

The bureaucrats at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) are having none of it.

Six months ago, the situation was approaching emergency: Gregory’s and Viktoriya’s work visas were soon to expire. Things have stabilized since, Gregory told me this week over Zoom while wrangling a seven-month-old at 6 a.m. “Hong Kong has been very humane to us,” he said, including issuing Philip a Hong Kong identity card. That’s at least proof that a government recognizes his existence, but it offers no path to citizenship.

The Burgesses and their lawyers and advocates quite reasonably insist Philip is stateless as defined in the 1954 UN Convention: “a person who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law.” In keeping with Canada’s international obligations, the Citizenship Act compels minister Sean Fraser to unilaterally grant citizenship in some cases of statelessness, and invites him to in others.

But when Gregory filed an application for Philips’ citizenship on grounds of statelessness, he got an amazing answer: Basically, IRCC wants proof some other country won’t take the kid off their hands.

On June 3, “senior decision maker” E. Nguyen wrote to Burgess asking for “a resual (sic) letter and/or correpondence (sic) from the American authorities advising that Philip … does not have a claim to American citizenship.” (Refusal and correspondence are the mistyped words.)

The answer is a bit complicated, but nevertheless U.S. citizenship rules are clear and easily Googleable: The simple answer is no.

It gets better: E. Nguyen wants the same refusal letter — no word of a lie — from the Russian authorities.

These are the Russian authorities raining death on Ukraine, heavily sanctioned by Ottawa, whose garden parties we must on no account attend. Canada’s travel advisory for Russia flashes bright red: “If you are in Russia, you should leave.”

Oh, and senior decision-maker E. Nguyen requires these documents within 30 days. IRCC would struggle to order a pizza in 30 days.

Even if the Burgess family were content to live in a pariah state run by a warmongering madman, Russia wouldn’t be a realistic option: Russian citizenship rules, also easily Googleable, stipulate Gregory would need to formally agree to Philip gaining Russian citizenship through his mother — but Gregory would have no immediate claim to citizenship himself. What parent would consent to the potential splitting up of his family?

When I wrote about this in January, two people with intimate knowledge of the IRCC bureaucracy and the Citizenship Act objected to my characterization of the second-generation-born-aboard rule as a “dumb law, easily fixed.” I remain convinced: Instead of judging prospective infant citizens by their parents’ accidental birthplaces, we should judge them by their parents’ substantial connection to Canada, just as we do for would-be naturalized citizens.

Admittedly, though, that’s only a fix in law. If it takes two or three or four years for IRCC to determine such “substantial connections,” families like the Burgesses will still be left in the lurch. And many will be in much more perilous situations than the Burgesses are.

In the meantime, there is an easy fix: Sean Fraser, the minister, can grant citizenship to anyone he chooses, any time he likes, as often as he likes. Unfortunately, with more than 24 hours’ notice, IRCC could not manage to respond to my questions, which included “why won’t he?”

Gregory is admirably equanimous about all this. “I don’t want to overdramatize things,” he told me. “It’s not terrible. … We’re OK here and everything’s fine.” But that uncertainty hangs over their heads, and they’re baffled. “I don’t know what the agenda is,” Gregory said. “I don’t know what’s achieved by this.”

Me neither.

There aren’t tens of thousands of Canadians in similar situations as the Burgesses, but there aren’t just dozens either. Whatever resources are being expended fighting seven-month-old Philip Burgess for Canadian citizenship — and a good few other children in the same situation — would surely be put to better use helping our various and shameful citizenship-and-immigration backlogs.

Source: Chris Selley: Asking a baby to get help from Russia is another Ottawa disgrace

And from the Star:

A Canadian with Ukrainian roots has been told his baby boy may have to apply — and be rejected — for Russian citizenship before he can become a Canadian.

“My son is not going to Russia and not becoming a Russian citizen when they’re killing Ukrainians,” says Gregory Burgess.

The bizarre situation has come about for a baby who is technically considered “stateless” because neither he nor his father was born in Canada.

Burgess, 46, has always considered himself a Canadian. He grew up in Edmonton and his Ukrainian great-grandparents arrived in what is today’s Alberta back in 1894.

But Burgess was born in the United States, where his father was then working, before coming to Canada at age seven. He acquired citizenship through his Canadian mother.

That, coupled with the fact that his son was born during the pandemic in Hong Kong, where Burgess is currently working, has meant the baby is not guaranteed Canadian citizenship.

It’s the result of a controversial policy change brought in by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper back in 2009 that was meant to curtail the number of “Canadians of convenience.”

“Canada is my home,” says Burgess. “I don’t have another home. It’s where my family has been for more than a hundred years.”

The so-called “second generation” citizenship cut-off against Canadians born abroad was introduced by the Conservative government after Ottawa’s massive effort to evacuate 15,000 Lebanese Canadians from Beirut during a month-long war between Israel and Lebanon in 2006.

The $85-million price tag of the evacuation effort sparked a debate over “Canadians of convenience” about individuals with Canadian citizenship who live permanently outside of Canada without “substantive ties” to Canada but were part of the government liability.

It’s now complicating things for Burgess.

The expat spent his formative years in Canada and graduated from the University of Alberta.

“My mother got us citizenship. And as soon as my Canadian citizenship was taken care of, one wouldn’t assume that somewhere down the road you become a lesser citizen because of it.”

Starting in 2004, he took up jobs in Asia. He met his now wife, Viktoriya Kharzhanovich, in 2017 when he was working in Shanghai. The following year, she applied unsuccessfully for a Canadian visa to accompany him to his cousin’s wedding.

In 2019, he started to explore the spousal sponsorship process to bring his common-law wife to Canada, just before the pandemic was beginning in China.

The couple moved to Hong Kong from China in June 2020 when he got a two-year employment contract in building information management there. Meanwhile, he and his wife, now 41, decided to start a family.

Due to the arduous paperwork required, they didn’t submit their spousal application until last November. It was during their preparation for the application when his lawyer noticed he wasn’t born in Canada and raised the issue about the two-generation citizenship cutoff for the yet-to-be born Philip.

Kharzhanovich, who had already been refused a visitor visa before, was more than seven months into her pregnancy and did not have an obstetrician and gynecologist or health insurance in Canada. She was also not scheduled for her COVID vaccination until after giving birth to Philip.

“After consulting physicians, researching flights, examining visa options, and studying quarantine rules, we determined that it was not safe or possible to fly to Canada for Viktoriya to give birth there,” says Burgess, who has since joined six other Canadian families in a Charter challenge against the citizenship cut-off rules.

Since neither Burgess nor his wife is a Hong Kong citizen or permanent resident, Philip doesn’t have permanent status in the former British colony, now part of the People’s Republic of China.

“It’s a lot of sleepless nights,” Burgess says. “It’s very important to me that I never lose my job (in Hong Kong) and nothing ever goes wrong because if it does, then that’s catastrophic. And so there’s that stress.

“It’s just constantly trying to get on the paperwork and it seems endless. I keep putting in paperwork or talking to the embassy or consulate. And I’ve been at it for nine months basically.”

At the advice of the Canadian consulate, Burgess applied for a two-year “limited validity passport” for Philip in November, which was ultimately refused by Passport Canada. Burgess’s own parents weren’t abroad serving in the Canadian military or for the federal or provincial governments at his birth in the U.S., hence his baby didn’t qualify.

Earlier this year, as a last resort, Burgess filed an application for a grant of citizenship under section 5 (4) of the Canadian Citizenship Act that gives Immigration Minister Sean Fraser the discretionary power to do so to “alleviate cases of statelessness or of special and unusual hardship or to reward services of an exceptional value to Canada.”

In a response to the family’s request this month, the immigration department gave the couple 30 days to provide proof of Philip having been refused a claim to American and/or Russian citizenship.

“Following a review of his application and supporting documentation, it appears that Philip Alexander Burgess may have a claim to American citizenship through yourself and to Russian citizenship through his mother, Viktoriya Kharzhanovich,” said the letter prepared by the immigration case management branch.

There was no mention or concern raised about Burgess’s and the family’s expiring status in Hong Kong, and the urgency to resolve the crisis.

“I feel like I’m being asked to show that I’m in duress. It’s continually asking, ‘show us it’s a bad situation.’ And I’m like it’s not bad yet, but it’s only because I’m staying ahead of the game,” says Burgess, who does not have an American passport or meet the “substantial connection” requirement to convey citizenship to Philip.

Although Philip is not at the end of his rope and may still acquire Canadian citizenship by naturalization if his father can successfully sponsor his mother and him to Canada, Burgess says he has yet to get an acknowledgment of receipt of his sponsorship application and the family is running out of status in Hong Kong.

Their lawyer, Sujit Choudhry, says Philip’s statelessness is only one of the factors for the consideration of the immigration minister, who should not overlook the “special and unusual hardship” the family is facing under the circumstances.

“The government’s insistence that Gregory seek Russian citizenship for Philip is Kafkaesque,” says Choudhry, who is also representing the other families in the ongoing Charter challenge against the citizenship act before the Superior Court of Ontario. “Canada has advised its citizens to not travel to Russia for geopolitical reasons.

“If Philip becomes a Russian citizen, Gregory will not be able to travel to Russia to take care of him. Canada’s Citizenship Act will produce a profoundly unjust family separation. This law is clearly unconstitutional.”

Source: ‘Kafkaesque’: Will the infant son of a Ukrainian Canadian need to turn to Russia for citizenship?

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , , ,

Chris Selley: A dumb citizenship law, easily fixed, is finally headed to court [not so easily, not so simple]

2022/01/08 Leave a comment

Whenever someone says “simple problem” or “easily fixed,” they don’t fully understand the policy and operational issues involved. Surprising from someone as seasoned as Selley, who normally does his homework before condemning an “idiot law.”

Over reliance on anecdotes, bereft of any understanding of the issues and practicalities involved. No discussion of the problems encountered in the previous retention provisions, which were difficult to administer fairly and transparently. And no discussion of the parliamentary discussions and report that discussed the provision.

Not in the Minister’s mandate letter but issue has been percolating for some time.

Will be interesting to see how courts respond to the lawyer’s argumentation (hopefully stronger than his overblown rhetoric as quoted in the article:

Gregory Burgess certainly presents as a full-blooded 46-year-old Canadian. He has long, deep roots in this country, and none anywhere else: His great-grandparents emigrated from Ukraine in 1894 and settled the Edna-Star colony in Alberta. He was born a Canadian citizen. He attended elementary, secondary and post-secondary institutions in Edmonton. He holds only a Canadian passport, he says, and has never had permanent legal status anywhere else.

But he was born abroad — in Connecticut, where his American father was working at the time. And much to his horror, he recently discovered what that means: His son, Philip, who was born three months ago in Hong Kong — where Burgess works in building information management — has no claim to Canadian citizenship. Indeed, because foreigners’ children have no official status in Hong Kong, Philip is currently stateless.

That’s been the law in Canada for 13 years: No matter how purely and unequivocally Canadian you might be, if you happen to have been born abroad to a Canadian parent, then you cannot pass your citizenship on automatically to your children unless they are born on Canadian soil.

Burgess can apply to sponsor Philip as a dependant-child immigrant to Canada, but there are no guarantees. (There are medical tests to be passed, for example.) And Burgess says the government has mooted timelines of up to two years to arrive at a solution. His Hong Kong work visa expires in six months.

“If my son doesn’t have citizenship, and I have to leave in six months, and my son technically does too — because he will be connected to me; that’s the only reason he would be allowed to stay here — (then) I don’t know exactly what the (Canadian) government expects,” says Burgess, exasperated. “Like, where he’s supposed to go and where I’m supposed to go.”

Philip may have a claim to Russian citizenship through his mother: Burgess met Viktoriya Kharzhanovich in 2017 in Shanghai, where she was a student, later becoming a translator and a quality-assurance manager in the textiles industry; they married in September. But Gregory isn’t sure about his own claim. He and Viktoriya are only just now wrapping their minds around this dilemma, on top of caring for an infant.

In any event, they don’t want to move to Russia — and there is no earthly reason they ought to have to. But Ottawa has already denied their application for a temporary passport for Philip. And in the meantime, even if some country is willing to provide Philip with travel documents, it’s entirely possible they will have to be separated.

In theory, Citizenship Minister Sean Fraser could intervene in a case like this on humanitarian grounds. In practice, citizenship ministers rarely do that.

Now-retired airline pilot Don Chapman has been advocating on behalf of “Lost Canadians” in this situation — and many other equally bizarre situations — for many years. Seemingly no one in Ottawa is willing to go on record in support of the status quo. But despite various tweaks to Canada’s utterly byzantine citizenship laws over the years, this simple problem never gets solved. And now it has finally landed in the courts.

The Burgess family will soon be joining seven others as applicants to a constitutional challenge filed in December in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. Lawyer Sujit Choudhry, who represents the families, argues the law discriminates unjustifiably not just on grounds of national origin, but of gender as well. “It’s quite frankly insulting to my women clients to be told to basically stop working, to arrive in Canada without health insurance, to not have an obstetrician or gynecologist (and have a baby)” just to avoid this ridiculously overbroad and arbitrary law, Choudhry convincingly argues.

The “second generation born abroad” problem dates back to the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. After the then-Conservative government helped evacuate Canadian citizens from Lebanon, a few of the evacuees turned up in the news kvetching about the quality of the service. Some had tenuous connections to Canada. People got angry about “citizens of convenience,” and the government hatched this very blunt solution: Henceforth, no Canadian citizen who wasn’t born in Canada could pass on citizenship to any foreign-born children of their own.

The absurd results are particularly visible within families. Burgess has a younger sister who was born in Edmonton; if Philip was her Hong Kong-born baby, he would automatically be eligible for a passport. And it doesn’t even solve the issue that the Lebanon situation flagged. If Gregory and Viktoriya had made a three-week trip to Canada to give birth and returned immediately to Hong Kong, precisely nothing useful would have been accomplished vis-à-vis Canadian citizenship.

Luckily, there is an obvious solution other than simply letting Canadians pass down citizenship in perpetuity, no questions asked: Part of the process of naturalizing as a Canadian citizen is proving your substantial ongoing connection to the country. Why not simply ask the same of Gregory Burgess and other Canadians who have done nothing wrong except take a job overseas, fall in love and make what they assumed would be a brand-new Canadian?

The lawsuit is one last opportunity for the government finally to pull its thumb out and fix the problem. Arguing for the status quo in court would be especially humiliating for a Liberal government, wedded as it is to the internationalist vision of Canada in the world. But having followed this file for some years now, I’m sorry to say that’s the most likely outcome. If so, I intend to write more about this idiot law and its victims in the new year.

Source: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/chris-selley-a-dumb-citizenship-law-easily-fixed-is-finally-headed-to-court

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , , ,

Selley: Justin Trudeau’s symbolic agenda collides with itself at the Supreme Court

2021/06/22 Leave a comment

Can’t satisfy all groups on a nine-member court (more latitude with respect to all judicial appointments where government, as per the contrast between the 2016 baseline and subsequent appointments highlights. And while symbolism is important, the harder work lies with reducing inequalities and long-standing issues:

A few headlines from the past week: “Justice Mahmud Jamal is first person of colour nominated to the Supreme Court of Canada” (CBC, the Toronto Star, and The Guardian). “ ‘Taunted and harassed’ as a youth, judge Mahmud Jamal receives historic Supreme Court nomination” (CTV and the National Post, quoting Jamal’s application statement). “Judge Mahmud Jamal, who finished high school in Edmonton, nominated to Supreme Court of Canada” (the Edmonton Journal, scoring the all-important local angle).

The first sentence in The Globe and Mail’s story mentions that Jamal is a “frequently cited author on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” We learn later on about his copious qualifications and impressive record as a jurist. But the second sentence explains a conflict: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was “under pressure from minority and Indigenous organizations to make the Supreme Court more diverse.” And so “the Indigenous Bar Association is disappointed.”

The Supreme Court has some pretty spicy meatballs on its plate, not least the future of certain religious practices in certain parts of Quebec’s public service, and will have more spicy meatballs in the future. The retiring Rosalie Abella is no ordinary Supreme Court justice, but rather the standard-bearer for a very activist and flexible brand of judge. We might hear more about Jamal’s approach when he meets with parliamentary committees. But surely it’s odd how much more we seem to care about who he is than about how he thinks or how he might rule.

Justin Trudeau isn’t the first prime minister to be concerned with the symbolism of his appointments, and nor have the Canadian media only recently acquired an interest. Globe and Mail headline writers greeted Bertha Wilson’s appointment in 1982 with “First woman is appointed to Canada’s top court” (March 5). (This was followed by “Woman judge still avoiding press” (March 9) and finally “Woman justice to take oath” (March 26).) Abella’s and Louise Charron’s appointments in 2004 were hailed for approaching near-gender-parity on the top bench.

This is all for the good, to a large extent. In a jury trial, we are ostensibly judged by our peers. We shouldn’t want judges to be members of an exalted class. Ideally, the jurisprudence they create would reflect the full scope of Canadian experiences — of class, race, ethnicity, faith and so on.

But it’s not a stretch to say that Trudeau — Mr. “Because it’s 2015″ — is more obsessed with symbolism than is typical. And sometimes it makes his life far more difficult than it needs to be. On the Supreme Court, his wish to appoint an Indigenous justice runs smack into his pledge never to appoint a justice who can’t manage a hearing in both official languages — which is to say, his wish to placate Quebec nationalists at every possible turn.

“A fully bilingual Indigenous candidate who also meets regional requirements and conventions” is a very tough order to fill, as many articles in the press have explained. Fewer articles have noted how far offside this requirement is with Trudeau’s reconciliation agenda. Trudeau’s new rule for judges doesn’t just discount Indigenous languages entirely; it also demands Indigenous lawyers learn not just one settler tongue fluently, but both! In a recent interview with APTN, Harry LaForme, Canada’s first Indigenous appellate court judge, likened the policy to the assimilation of children at residential schools. It would be very awkward, if only more people noticed.

You see a somewhat different problem when it comes to the unfilled vacancy at Rideau Hall, which is seeing similar demands for a minority or Indigenous appointment. Either would be fine, obviously, just so long as they’re not on a mission to do anything other than be the Queen’s representative on Canadian soil. You can just imagine Trudeau and his advisers struggling with the concept, even after Julie Payette’s flameout and Paul Martin’s near-miss with obvious-separatist Michaëlle Jean. This is a chance to make a splash, to send a message!

But the returns diminish. Real people who need real improvements in their lives cannot be impressed by symbolism. And weakness for symbolism makes us overlook things. It’s a distraction. Many of Trudeau’s detractors, especially to his left, would suggest it has distracted him from actually making significant progress on issues central to his brand, and to which these symbolic appointments are meant to nod.

A pledge to eliminate boil-water advisories on reserves is worthless without eliminating boil-water advisories. Adopting or not adopting the UN declaration on Indigenous rights is worthless without implementing what’s in it. At some point after accepting the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which had a whole section on unmarked and forgotten children’s gravesites, someone was going to have to pony up the money to look for those gravesites. It took until now.

I often argue there are maddeningly few fundamental differences between Liberal governance and Conservative governance in Canada — certainly not nearly enough to justify the intensity of the battles between them. Privileging action and disdaining empty symbolism is one principle Canadian conservatives should guard jealously, even if they don’t always apply it consistently themselves. It’s the only way to help real people with real problems.

Source: https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/chris-selley-justin-trudeaus-symbolic-agenda-collides-with-itself-at-the-supreme-court/wcm/cad4b3f1-d2c4-48a2-93f0-976678296276

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →