Apart from the header, valid questions although I am not convinced the DEI programs necessarily “exacerbate ethnic conflict in Canada:”
…The question is: how long will this remain the case? And, even more importantly, what counts as evidence for disadvantage? Who gets to decide whether current-day disadvantage comes from discriminatory treatment or not?
The reality is that different social groups have different social outcomes. As Thomas Sowell pointed out years ago, it would be bizarre to think that they wouldn’t. The question is: are these differences a result of choices, cultures and random chance — or are they a more nefarious expression of discrimination, either systemic or outright?
One of the odd things to happen in our intellectual circles — our universities and even our law schools — is that this question is rarely asked with an open-ended curiosity as to what the answer might be.
One wonders whether it even comes up when employers or universities set about establishing discriminatory affirmative action programs. Or, more likely, are they working from a consensus within the institution that there really are disadvantaged groups — and that this is obviously caused by discrimination?
We should be clear: it’s entirely possible that disadvantages are caused by subtle forms of discrimination that continue despite Canada’s now very equal legal system. It’s certainly possible — and the idea ought to get a fair hearing.
But in many progressive circles today, it’s now considered rude to even ask the question — to wonder whether social and economic differences between groups might be caused by something other than prejudice.
This is why the topic of viewpoint diversity — in our universities, our law schools, in the world of expertise — isn’t the esoteric topic it might seem.
Even as the wider Canadian society seems to be retreating from the excesses of cancel culture and woke shibboleths (good news on that front), the staffing of our knowledge institutions, our universities and our law schools still overwhelmingly comes from those on the left — from the same groups who assume that socioeconomic variation is, de facto, linked to discrimination.
These are the people who get to decide when — if ever — the only legal form of systemic discrimination allowed in Canada (affirmative action) will ever end.
There’s plenty of evidence coming out of think-tanks and even Statistics Canada that the Canada of 2025 has moved a long way from the Canada of 1981, where affirmative action was justified. The most economically well-to-do Canadians are not those of European ancestry — despite the popular perception to the contrary. The groups of Canadians with the highest income — and highest levels of educational attainment — are those of South Asian and Chinese ancestry. Whites tend to come in the middle of the pack, while Black Canadians and Indigenous people are lower down the economic scale. If affirmative action is going to continue, the public needs to be reassured that those justifying its existence, at the very least, keep up to date with which groups are up and which are down — though even this framing shows how divisive such policies would be.
There’s also plenty of evidence that the “race conscious” programs allowed by the Charter — and pushed by DEI advocates — actually exacerbate ethnic conflict in Canada.
There could, of course, be evidence that continued systemic discrimination justifies affirmative action. But it would help to know that the organizations instituting these types of progressive discrimination are at least open to the idea that Canada can, and will, move on.
Seems like the discourse South of the border on DEI has emboldened right leaning media in Canada, with three articles in the National Post over the last week or so. Most of these ignore the necessity to improve representation and assume that “old stock” backgrounds are inherently stronger than other backgrounds. However, there are legitimate concerns regarding viewpoint diversity.
This week marks the 10th Christmas Canadians have endured under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government — 10 years of our Dec. 25th-born prime minister acting as if he’s our very own personal Jesus, without the humility, common sense, or moral clarity his birthday might suggest. From the get-go, Trudeau’s been a means to an end for Liberal party power — a famous name, flowing hair, a convenient professionally-good-looking object many lonely Canadian wives cast their adoring gazes upon — but otherwise, intellectually and morally vacuous. Thankfully, there is a solution. Pierre Poilievre will bring the common sense and moral clarity Canada so desperately needs.
On Christmas eve, Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Opposition, tweeted out a promise to Canadians and we should hold him to it: “I will defund wokism and fight antisemitism. And stand with our friends in Israel against terror.” It included a link to a statement from a telephone interview he gave last week to the Winnipeg Jewish Review.
Pull the other one. Recent propaganda sheets such as The Bulletin of the Canadian Association of University Teachers and Academic Matters, the journal of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, which purport to represent professors like myself, are awash with racist DEI and tout a slavish fealty to obsessive and damaging social justice ideology. If you belong to the editorial team of either of these absurd political pamphlets, please drop me from your mailing list.
There is hope for students. Jordan Peterson has lately launched his academy, which, though limited to the social sciences so far, has breached the universities’ monopoly and comes at a bargain price. And the content is excellent, featuring such stellar authorities as Andrew Roberts, James Orr, John Vervaeke, Eric Kaufmann and a host of others. I’ve signed up.
Time is running out for legacy universities across Canada. I have a fancy next year we will see the same wave of comedy meltdowns that followed Trump’s re-election, just this time by an army of capitulating academics. “We didn’t mean to indoctrinate you with our untested ideology — Please give us more money.” Clink-clink. Too bad. It’s not in the cards.
Students have also suffered as a result of the ideological monoculture that now reigns on most university campuses. During the “great awokening” of 2020-2021, many students who refused to conform were subjected to attacks from their classmates and even formal disciplinary proceedings, as was the case with a student at my own faculty who dared to make Facebook posts mocking the Canadian federal public service’s affirmative action-style hiring policies.
Still more concerning incidents took place over the past year that appear to confirm the confluence between wokeism and antisemitism that Poilievre referenced. According to reports, Jewish students at multiple universities were subject to harassment on campus, their only apparent crime being that they were cast as members of an “oppressor” group and thus held to be personally complicit in “genocide” under the prevailing “woke” intersectional framework.
So, while some hold out hope that Canadian universities can bring themselves back in line with prevailing public opinion, there are significant reasons to doubt that this is possible, at least in the short term. This is highly unfortunate, given that it could cause them to lose funding.
While universities play an essential role in Canada’s intellectual and cultural life, the value that should be ascribed to that role is directly dependant on their ability to act in a manner that is conducive to the overall public good. We can hope against all hope that Canada’s universities will get their houses in order, but we should not be surprised if they face a reckoning instead.
HESA valid critique of the Dummitt/MLI study:
Look, this is a bad study, full stop. The methodology and question design are so obviously terrible that it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that its main purpose was to confirm the authors’ biases, and clearly whatever editorial/peer review process the Macdonald Laurier Institute uses to oversee these publications needs major work. But if a result is significant enough, even a bad methodology can find it: might this be such a case?
Maybe. Part of the problem is that this paper spends a lot of effort conflating “viewpoint diversity” with “party identification diversity”, which is absurd. I mean, there are countries which allocate academic places based on party identity, but I doubt that those are places where many Canadian academics would want to teach. Further, on the specific issues where people apparently feel they have a need to “not share their opinions” on issues concerning race and gender, there are in addition to a censorious left a lot of bad faith right-wing concern trolls too, which kind of tempers my ability to share the authors concern that this is a necessarily “bad thing”. And finally, this idea that the notion of being an academic means you should be able to say whatever you want without possibility of facing criticism or social ostracism – which I think is implicitly what the authors are suggesting – is a rather significant widening of the concept of academic freedom that wouldn’t find universal acceptance.
I think the most you can say about these issues really is first that viewpoint diversity should be a concern of every department, but that to reduce it to “party identification” diversification or some notion of both-sidesism (anti-vaxxers in virology departments, anyone?) should be seen for the grotesquerie that it is. Second, yes, society (not just universities) is more polarized around issues like gender and race and finding acceptable and constructive common language in which to talk about these concepts is difficult, but, my dudes, banging on about why someone who happens to have a teaching position is absolved from the hard work of finding that language because of some abstract notion of academic freedom is not helpful.
Valid questions. See the article for the complete list:
…There’s no indication that the professors or students at my universities or others want some advice. But if they had asked for direction, here are a series of questions I would want them to consider:
The first is a simple one: why does this conflict motivate you so much? Tens of thousands of people are being killed in Sudan in a longstanding civil war yet, as far as I can tell, this isn’t drawing your sympathy or anger. Why is it that the only Jewish state in the world is the one that attracts your ire, while other oppressive regimes escape sanction?
On Gaza itself, there is an even more basic conundrum: why are there no bomb shelters in Gaza? How is it that those who planned the raid on Israel, who knew that their attack would almost certainly elicit devastating retaliation, didn’t plan on ways to protect their own citizens?
It’s not for lack of resources. There are miles and miles of bomb proof tunnels all throughout Gaza. Why are these protective bunkers used to hide militants and not protect civilians? In London during the Blitz, Britain did all it could to protect its people. The same goes for Ukrainians today. Why is Hamas failing at the most basic part of government?…
Suspect some of these ideas are being seriously considered by the Conservative Party in planning for a likely change in government. In an ideal sense, this would lead to a new thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis, reversing some of the excesses of the current government while recognizing that greater attention to diversity and inclusion issues was needed to address representation and other gaps.
However, it is more likely that the temptation will be to wade into such “cultural war” virtue signalling given its appeal to their base and the lesser importance of these issues to Canadians compared to housing, healthcare, infrastructure, foreign interference etc. Checking and rating candidates for political viewpoints raises any number of issues whether with respect to right or left-wing views.
But Kaufmann and Dummitt should know better the risks of simply replacing one dominant ideological tendency with another rather. Interesting that they choose that approach rather than arguing for a “merit-based” or more balanced approach., suggesting the intent is as much ideological than arguing for of …Kaufmann outlines a 12-point plan but I’ll simplify it to four points and a coda.
I have sympathy for the view that the pendulum has shifted too far and that a rebalancing is needed but not convinced that some of these ideas are workable or lead to an improved syntheses:
Insist on politically neutral institutions
Conservatives should take the high ground and insist on politically neutral institutions. In everything from the CBC/Radio Canada to university research funding and heritage institutions, the government should enshrine political neutrality. This means not disseminating politically divisive concepts like “white privilege” or claiming that psychological “harm” can override free speech.
Even though some conservatives might not agree, the BBC in the U.K. could be a model. I used to live in London and attend live tapings of topical radio comedy shows. For every joke they did about one political party or idea, they had to have another taking on the other side. It was sometimes over the top—certainly, the comedians poked fun at it—but the emphatic insistence on equal treatment mattered. Right up and down the public service, a new conservative government should insist on politically neutral institutions and the end of spreading woke ideas “on the sly” through the seemingly neutral dissemination of leftist ideas. If an overwhelming majority of the public accepts these ideas—only then should they be taken up by public institutions.
Redo DEI to include political viewpoints
Kaufmann thinks that while it might be tempting to get rid of DEI this probably isn’t feasible. What is possible is to insist that it be done right. Any institution that wants to hire based on categories of identity must include political viewpoint as an equity category. Many of our institutions, especially but not only universities, are now left-wing monoliths. A Conservative government should insist that this obvious lack of diversity be tackled right alongside other issues.
A Conservative government should also insist that DEI be done accurately. That is, it can’t be done by comparing the share of a certain group’s place in a profession, like engineering, with their share in the general population. It should instead be based on that group’s share in the applicant pool. We should try to identify where the problem arises. Are discrepancies happening because of actual discrimination in hiring or are there just not enough applicants? If there aren’t enough applicants, deal with that problem (if indeed it is a problem). We shouldn’t expect every group’s share of the population to be exactly replicated in every field of work. Only if we have evidence of discrimination should discriminatory hiring quotas be implemented.
Focus on national belonging
Different groups of Canadians will find different parts of the Canadian story more meaningful. Maritimers will likely be more interested in our seafaring heritage. African Canadians might take more pride in Canada’s place as one part of the Underground Railroad (though others will of course be fascinated too). But our national heritage institutions should stop focusing on what divides us and instead embrace what brings us together.i
It doesn’t mean overlooking our blind spots. However, it does mean interpreting them correctly. A Conservative government should insist that those dark places in the Canadian record be considered from a global perspective. We should get rid of woke parochialism which exclusively focuses on Canadian and Western sins. When dealing with issues like colonialism and violence, heritage institutions must be made to interpret these parts of our history in line with the existence of worldwide non-Western forms of slavery, imperialism, and violence including among pre-contact Indigenous peoples.
This means embracing a “retain and explain” cultural policy where the assumption should be that names, statues, and other honorifics are retained except in very exceptional circumstances. What’s more, explanations cannot be one-sided accounts but must interpret figures and events within their global context.
Remember it’s about the people
Given that so many of our institutions have been taken over by woke activists and their liberal sympathizers, a new Conservative government should make it a priority to restaff the boards and institutions to achieve political diversity. Time and again, conservative governments are stymied because the actual people in the public service align with non-conservative beliefs. This means working on two fronts.
First, find and appoint non-woke political candidates to cultural and public service institutions across the country. The goal is political balance. Second, and this is where Kaufmann really focuses, conservatives need to build pipelines to ensure that when a government goes looking for people, they can find qualified and trained individuals. This means creating a Federalist Society for the public service—the equivalent of that highly influential American conservative legal organization that funnels law students and ideas into the American legal system. Similarly, we need an Austrian School for culture—a conduit for woke-critical ideas in our university world that can generate an idea base that can serve as the cultural equivalent to what the Austrian School did for economic liberalism.
Coda
Finally, a coda. All of the above will help and can be put into action. But Kaufmann also has one final and important bit of advice that can be done right now. Stop using the woke language. Rip off the velvet glove and expose the radioactive illiberalism that lies beneath.
This means insisting on using evocative words and images. Unless there is specific evidence that a particular institution has been discriminatory, when that institution hires based on DEI quotas this should be called out for what it is: anti-White or anti-Asian or anti-male or anti-heterosexual prejudice. Unmask the language of equity to show the discriminatory and vengeful impulse at its heart.
Don’t accept the language of “gender-affirming” care when we are talking about giving adolescents drugs that might chemically castrate them. When people want to bind young girls’ breasts or surgically remove them, describe it for what it is: gender-based violence. Use vivid imagery like pictures of the outsized prosthetic breasts of the Toronto area teacher who caused such controversy recently. Canadians support liberal non-discrimination. They want a country that accepts all its citizens. But they also can smell when something is foul and conservatives need to be sufficiently brave and clear to point out when woke ideas are illiberal.
What all of this means is that modern social conservatism can look a lot different from the Liberal attack-ad caricature. A new Conservative government could stand for policies that treat all Canadians equally, could enshrine politically neutral public institutions, and could show pride in our national history and culture. These aren’t just defensible shield issues; they are worth going on the attack to promote.
Starting up my blog again, highlighting some of the articles I found of interest.
Past Imperfect: J. L. Granatstein’s prescient warning
Agree, both the good and the bad:
Also regrettable is that Granatstein did not offer a more pointed rationale for learning history. He argued that an understanding of the subject was “the prerequisite of political intelligence” but without going further. The cost of not knowing history is much deeper, in my view. It creates a real disquiet and robs the community of its ability to find nuance in any dispute. Indeed, one could argue that the incoherence of a vast array of policy areas in this country — from cultural and global affairs to housing and homelessness — can be explained only by a general loss of historical consciousness.
To talk historically about any episode — a court case, a medical issue, a construction problem, even a love dispute — is to inquire about “what really took place last time.” It naturally invites subtlety, attention to context, and storytelling that can lay the groundwork for compromise. It calls for clarity in sequencing events and necessarily examines what’s behind the story: “Well, we didn’t have the tools” or “Our thinking was wrong” or “We simply didn’t know.” It can build respect and, not least, modesty. But it can also bridge solitudes and open the road to cooperation, better understanding, and perhaps even reconciliation and forgiveness. No one who studies history seriously can be insensitive to the anxieties and cruelties of humanity or unimpressed by its resilience, creativity, and kindness.
But that sort of discipline has been evacuated from popular culture. For over a dozen years now, history departments have seen their student numbers decline. Consequently, new hires are even rarer than before. Governments seldom consider the failures and successes of previous policies; museums dedicated to the past are shrivelling without money for new exhibits and programs. Historians, terrified of being misunderstood, refuse to engage in public debates that could bring nuance to policy issues. Canada is not in a state of post-nationalism but is rather a place of hiber‑nation — a country that has fallen asleep and forgotten its past.
This is dangerous. Historical awareness bolsters democracy and democratic instincts. Take away history and you undermine the ability to discuss, to debate, and to share knowledge on how things evolved. Without such skills and knowledge, democracy as we know it will wither and die
Local citizenship judge wins Community Impact Award – Thorold News
A reminder of the power of in-person ceremonies:
The ceremonies to which she is referring are citizenship ceremonies. For just over five years Ivri has been a citizenship judge with Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada. In an average week in this role she swears in between 1,200 and 1,500 new Canadians.
In the relatively short time that she’s been one of nine judges in the Niagara and Hamilton offices of the department, she has welcomed more than 100,000 newcomers to Canada. Besides her family – husband Eldean and children Elijah, Zachariah, Ezekiel and Michaiah – she says it’s the most rewarding thing she’s ever done.
Ivri herself comes from an immigrant family. Her mother Valerie came to Canada to visit an uncle in 1967, leaving behind her husband Roosevelt and their son back in Jamaica. On leave from her job as a customs officer there, Valerie went to a Canadian immigration office to extend her visa. An officer there suggested she instead apply for citizenship, so she did.
Shawn Taylor: Are Immigrants Falling out of Love with Canada? (And is it Because We Feel the Same?)
Overly negative but not without merit:
The evident decline in Canada’s citizenship rates may say more about the attitudes and habits of existing Canadians than those of newly-arriving immigrants. The federal bureaucracy’s failure to meet its own published service standards is certainly a self-inflicted wound. As is the proposal to solve this problem by eliminating much-loved citizenship ceremonies. The effect of both situations is to debase the perceived status of Canadian citizenship by emphasizing the transactional over the transformational. Then there’s the Roxham Road debacle, which offers migrants the opportunity to illegally sneak into our country via a dead-end road rather than at a regular border crossing and still be recognized as refugee claimants, with all the official support and standing this entails. If Canadian citizenship is supposed to be so valuable, it seems foolish to further cheapen the reputation of the entire immigration system in this way.
Beneath these obvious failures of governance and policy, however, lurks an even deeper and more insidious problem. As Bernhard explains, becoming a citizen is akin to joining a team with all other Canadians. A “club,” so to speak, that is exclusive to those who wish to be identified as Canadian and who intend to participate in its promotion and maintenance by voting and performing other civic duties. If we accept such an analogy, then it clearly matters how we advertise and promote this club to new members. So what sort of stories do Canadians tell about their own country these days? And do they amount to an effective marketing strategy?
“The story of Canada that our major institutions tell has increasingly become one that focuses on only the most negative aspects of our country, such as oppression, racism, discrimination and dispossession,” observes Christopher Dummitt, an historian at Trent University’s School for the Study of Canada in Peterborough, Ontario. Common examples of this new tendency are factually-dubious claims, often from officially sanctioned sources, that Canada has committed and continues to commit genocide against the Indigenous population, is systemically racist towards black people, was once a slave country, and on and on. “It is a deliberate distortion of our actual history,” says Dummitt in an interview.
This sense of national self-loathing has become so encompassing that official multiculturalism, once billed as an unquestionable Canadian value, is now considered evidence of an “unjust society premised on white supremacy,” as two University of Calgary education professors absurdly argued last year. Even professed supporters of Canadian identity, such as ICC co-founder Ralston Saul, now casually declare that “Canada has failed on many fronts.” As for how such a perspective might work as a branding exercise, Dummitt says, “If the story about Canada is that it was an institutionally corrupt nation beset by the original sin of colonialism, then why would anyone want to become a citizen of that?”
Dummitt has been pushing back against the now-pervasive narrative that Canada is, at its core, morally bankrupt. In 2021 he organized a rebuttal signed by many eminent Canadian historians condemning the Canadian Historical Association’s (CHA) unilateral declaration that Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples was “genocidal.” In making such a claim, Dummitt’s rebuttal stated, the CHA was “insulting the basic standards of good scholarly conduct.” He has also spoken out against the practice of tearing down statues honouring Canada’s founding fathers, and is currently fighting Toronto’s plans to scrub the name of 18th century British parliamentarian Henry Dundas from its streets and public squares on the (entirely bogus) assertion that he was an ally to the slave trade. “We need to call out these nonsensical claims,” Dummitt states determinedly. “And we need politicians who are willing to celebrate the Canadian nation in diverse ways.”
With this sort of self-hatred being expressed by current citizens, is it any wonder immigrants are having second thoughts about joining Club Canada
Peter Shawn Taylor is senior features editor at C2C Journal. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.
On Nov. 7, the same day that Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa resigned amid corruption allegations pertaining to lithium contracts, federal officers in Brazil raided the Portuguese Consulate in Rio de Janeiro.
The Brazil raids were not connected to the Lisbon investigation, a spokesperson said. Instead, according to Brazilian police, they were part of a separate investigation into the falsification of documents in collusion with applicants seeking Portuguese visas and citizenship. Since the 1990s, amid periods of economic downturn and social instability, large numbers of Brazilians have struck out for Portugal. When the country began its “golden visa” program in 2012, wealthy Brazilians became the second largest group to take advantage of it.
Portugal’s golden visa grants European Union access to foreigners in exchange for investment. From its inception in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, it has faced backlash, and the criticism has only grown more vocal in recent years. Chiefly, it is blamed for contributing to a severe housing crisis that has made affordable housing unattainable for most Portuguese.
In early October, Costa’s Socialist government finally passed a law that took aim at the issue, removing the real estate investment pathway from the golden visa program. Previously, people who invested in a qualifying property worth at least 280,000 euros (about $305,000) were eligible. The change, almost a year in the making, has ricocheted around the world of global elites, many of whom had come to regard Portugal as a foothold into Europe. Although more than 30,000 foreigners have benefited from Portugal’s golden visa, its benefits for the Portuguese themselves are less clear.
German State Saxony-Anhalt: No citizenship without supporting Israel’s existence
Hard to see how this will work in practice:
The decree instructs authorities to pay close attention to whether an applicant exhibits antisemiticattitudes and states that “obtaining German citizenship requires a commitment to Israel’s right to exist.”
In a letter to local authorities, the Saxony-Anhalt state Interior Ministry said naturalization is to be denied to foreigners who engage in activities directed at Germany’s liberal democratic order as outlined in the country’s Basic Law. The denial of Israel‘s right to exist and antisemitism are included among such activities.
Local authorities have been instructed to deny an applicant’s naturalization request if they refuse to sign the declaration. A refusal is also to be documented in the individual’s application filing for future reference.
Further interest by conservatives on self-administered citizenship oaths, along with concerns over declining naturalization rates, the latter reflecting a longer-term trend, the steep increase in citizenship fees under the Harper government, and the shutdown and slow recovery of citizenship in 2020 and 2021. Dual citizenship prohibitions appears to be less of a factor except for Chinese immigrants.
Understandably, but unfortunately, Shawn Taylor then argues that it is more the “sense of self loathing” and negative narratives that explains the decline with little to no evidence (no public opinion research that I have seen substantiates this claim). He then praises the existing citizenship guide, Discover Canada, developed under the Harper government, which was a vast improvement over its predecessor but overly reflected the ideological bias of that government:
New Canadians may soon face a brand-new obstacle on their path to citizenship. Beyond interminable delays and hefty fees, by June they could also find themselves having to prove they’re not a robot by clicking on every image that contains a motorcycle. Or a parking meter. Or a horse
Last month Ottawa announced plans to eliminate the long-standing requirement that citizenship applicants publicly swear (or affirm) Canada’s Oath of Citizenship at an official ceremony before receiving their citizenship papers. Such oath-taking ceremonies have been a requirement since 1947. And while they went virtual during Covid-19, they’ve always been public events overseen by a citizenship judge or other designated Crown representative.
Now, with massive waiting times afflicting the entire immigration system, the federal Liberals are proposing to speed up this last stage in the process via a “secure online solution.” Immigrants will simply have to left-click their computer mouse to complete their oath and thus become citizens of Canada. It seems an uninspiring culmination to what should be an important, if not life-changing, event.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government unveiled this time-saving proposal quietly in the Canada Gazette on February 25, but it has since attracted plenty of high-profile outrage from Canada’s Liberal elite. Former Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson said she was “horrified” by the idea of doing away with citizenship ceremonies, calling them the “mark of a civilized society.” Sergio Marchi, federal immigration minister during the Jean Chrétien years, called it “a misguided idea” that would add “insult to injury!” (Exclamation in original.) Former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi added that it was “a terrible idea.”
“Becoming a Canadian citizen is a transformational event,” explains Daniel Bernhard, CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), in an interview. “This is truly a special ‘once in a lifetime’ occasion – you can get married more than once, you can have more than one child but you can only become a Canadian once. We should celebrate it as such.” Bernhard worries that turning the final stage of citizenship into a “box you tick” will degrade its significance by making it indistinguishable from any run-of-the-mill online transaction.
The ICC, founded by Clarkson and her husband John Ralston Saul in 2005, is an advocacy group focused on integrating and celebrating new Canadians. To this end, it hosts lavish citizenship ceremonies in iconic locations, such as Toronto’s Pearson International Airport or in national parks, and encourages existing Canadians to attend in order to create a broader sense of community engagement. “Everyone is invited to the party,” Bernhard says. “We want to extend a collective welcome and make it a moment for reflection and celebration. Citizenship isn’t just something on your passport. It should exist in your heart as well.”
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is actually over-staffed when it comes to processing immigration applications. ‘IRCC is estimated to have 65% more staff than would be required to meet the goal’ of its own service standards, the PBO reports.Tweet
It is, of course, impossible to know what exists in Ottawa’s heart. But the federal government appears determined to make the citizenship process dramatically less special – downright banal, in fact. And for reasons that are of its own creation. While the federal government’s current service standard states that a citizenship application will be processed in 12 months, new applicants are currently being told it will take two years to complete, including a three-month wait to schedule a citizenship ceremony.
What’s causing the delay? Waiting times have exploded across the federal bureaucracy, and it can’t be blamed on a lack of resources. According to a recent report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is actually over-staffed when it comes to processing immigration applications. “IRCC is estimated to have 65% more staff than would be required to meet the goal” of its own service standards, the PBO reports.
Set against such evidence of bureaucratic ineptitude, it seems downright satirical for Ottawa to suggest that new Canadians will “enjoy time savings…[of] approximately 90 minutes” by not having to sit through a formal citizenship ceremony they would likely have remembered for the rest of their lives. “This government has a problem providing the basic service of immigration applications,” snaps Bernhard. “The ceremony is not the problem.”
An Even Bigger Citizenship Problem
When it comes to the state of Canadian citizenship, however, Bernhard has bigger worries than the mere loss of public formalities. Top of the list is the fact new arrivals to this country appear to be falling out of love with the idea of becoming Canadian in the first place. Earlier this year, ICC asked Statistics Canada for an update on the rate at which immigrants become citizens.
In 1991, 68.6 percent of immigrants holding a permanent residency card achieved citizenship between five and nine years of arriving. (Permanent residents can apply for citizenship after spending five years in Canada.) This figure rose above 75 percent in the next two censuses. It has since fallen dramatically. In 2016, only 60.4 percent of permanent residents became citizens within the stated time period. And according to the latest 2021 census data provided by Statcan, it’s now down to 45.7 percent. In other words, fewer than half of recent immigrants are choosing to become Canadian citizens once they’re eligible.
Falling out of love with Canada? According to recent Statistics Canada data, fewer than half of recent Canadian immigrants choose to apply for citizenship after their five-year wait period is up.
“The figures are shocking,” says Bernhard. He considers the trend a fundamental blow to Canadian identity: “One of the ways Canadians see themselves as being unique in the world is in how we welcome immigrants. It is a tradition that goes back to before the founding of Canada.” As proof, he cites an 1840 speech by pre-Confederation Quebec politician Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, who declared that Canada’s strength lay in welcoming “various populations which come from diverse portions of the globe” and making them “like ourselves, Canadian.”
Now, however, the data suggests a decided lack of interest among new arrivals in joining what Bernhard calls “the team that is Canada.” If immigrants decide they don’t really care about signing up for membership in Team Canada, “then we’ve got a big problem.”
Mobile Free Agents or Pressure from Communist China?
Canada has a lot invested in immigration. Earlier this year, the Trudeau government announced new targets for in-migration that are unprecedented in the modern era. After accepting fewer than 200,000 permanent immigrants in 2020, the Liberals now plan to increase intake to 465,000 in 2023 and 500,000 by 2025. Such a tidal wave of new residents clearly is already straining the capacity of the housing market and likely fuelling inflation as well. Nonetheless, immigration enjoys strong support across all political parties and regions, if somewhat tempered in Quebec. This national consensus appears to be holding because the needs of the labour market are so great. But if all these newcomers feel no particular attachment or affection for their new country, then the economic argument for immigration becomes much weaker.
Chinese immigrants must now choose one passport or the other when they arrive in Canada. If they can’t have both, it appears most are deciding to remain Chinese citizens even after they settle permanently in this country.Tweet
Bernhard admits he doesn’t have an answer to why new arrivals seem to be increasingly disenchanted with becoming Canadian, and he’s hoping Statcan will soon offer more clarity on the issue. From his perspective, the worst-case scenario is if these ambivalent immigrants are mostly highly-educated, high-income “free agents” who are prepared to pull up stakes and move to another country as soon as something better comes along.
Bolstering this fear is a recent poll conducted by ICC of new Canadians showing that nearly one-third of 18-34-year-olds and one-quarter of those with a university education considered themselves likely to move elsewhere in the next two years. As these potentially wealthy – and wealth-creating – individuals offer a substantial economic advantage to whichever country they settle in, Canada has a strong incentive to retain them. Getting them to become citizens seems the surest way to lock them down.
Partly easing this fear of mobile free-agent immigrants is a 2019 Statcan study using earlier data that found the decline in citizenship uptake to be largely driven by immigrants with low education and low income. Further, almost the entire drop between 1996 and 2016 was attributable to migrants from one country in one region. “Most striking was the large decline in citizenship take-up among immigrants from East Asia – mainly China,” the Statcan report states. Naturalization rates for all East Asian immigrants fell from 83 percent to 45 percent over this time.
Communist China’s increasingly strident prohibition on dual citizenship may be to blame here, since it means footloose Chinese immigrants must now choose one passport or the other when they arrive in Canada. If they can’t have both, it appears most are deciding to remain Chinese citizens even after they settle permanently in this country. And if government policy in China is the principal factor behind the precipitous decline in citizenship uptake, then there’s little Canada can do to correct the situation
An international perspective is also useful. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) International Migration Outlook 2022 Canada remains near the top of the immigration leaderboard despite recent concerns. We stand third overall in terms of total immigrants accepted, trailing only the United States and Germany. (While the U.S. is often painted as unwelcoming, it has long been the world’s dominant recipient of permanent, legal immigrants. Under President Donald Trump, for example, it admitted more than 1 million immigrants annually until Covid-19 hit in 2020; last year it welcomed over 830,000.)
As well, the average annual rate at which foreign-born residents become citizens across all OECD countries is just 2.2 percent. In Canada, it’s 4 percent – nearly twice as high. While the OECD also notes Canada’s citizenship rate has fallen significantly in recent years, this global perspective does not reveal any grave threat to Canada’s way of life or its ability to attract immigrants. Among the top five immigrant-accepting countries (Spain and the United Kingdom complete the set), all have substantially larger populations than Canada; our status as a generous, welcoming and desirable country appears solid.
The Horror Stories We Tell Ourselves
The evident decline in Canada’s citizenship rates may say more about the attitudes and habits of existing Canadians than those of newly-arriving immigrants. The federal bureaucracy’s failure to meet its own published service standards is certainly a self-inflicted wound. As is the proposal to solve this problem by eliminating much-loved citizenship ceremonies. The effect of both situations is to debase the perceived status of Canadian citizenship by emphasizing the transactional over the transformational. Then there’s the Roxham Road debacle, which offers migrants the opportunity to illegally sneak into our country via a dead-end road rather than at a regular border crossing and still be recognized as refugee claimants, with all the official support and standing this entails. If Canadian citizenship is supposed to be so valuable, it seems foolish to further cheapen the reputation of the entire immigration system in this way.
Beneath these obvious failures of governance and policy, however, lurks an even deeper and more insidious problem. As Bernhard explains, becoming a citizen is akin to joining a team with all other Canadians. A “club,” so to speak, that is exclusive to those who wish to be identified as Canadian and who intend to participate in its promotion and maintenance by voting and performing other civic duties. If we accept such an analogy, then it clearly matters how we advertise and promote this club to new members. So what sort of stories do Canadians tell about their own country these days? And do they amount to an effective marketing strategy?
“The story of Canada that our major institutions tell has increasingly become one that focuses on only the most negative aspects of our country, such as oppression, racism, discrimination and dispossession,” observes Christopher Dummitt, an historian at Trent University’s School for the Study of Canada in Peterborough, Ontario. Common examples of this new tendency are factually-dubious claims, often from officially sanctioned sources, that Canada has committed and continues to commit genocide against the Indigenous population, is systemically racist towards black people, was once a slave country, and on and on. “It is a deliberate distortion of our actual history,” says Dummitt in an interview.
This sense of national self-loathing has become so encompassing that official multiculturalism, once billed as an unquestionable Canadian value, is now considered evidence of an “unjust society premised on white supremacy,” as two University of Calgary education professorsabsurdly argued last year. Even professed supporters of Canadian identity, such as ICC co-founder Ralston Saul, now casually declare that “Canada has failed on many fronts.” As for how such a perspective might work as a branding exercise, Dummitt says, “If the story about Canada is that it was an institutionally corrupt nation beset by the original sin of colonialism, then why would anyone want to become a citizen of that?”
Dummitt has been pushing back against the now-pervasive narrative that Canada is, at its core, morally bankrupt. In 2021 he organized a rebuttal signed by many eminent Canadian historians condemning the Canadian Historical Association’s (CHA) unilateral declaration that Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples was “genocidal.” In making such a claim, Dummitt’s rebuttal stated, the CHA was “insulting the basic standards of good scholarly conduct.” He has also spoken out against the practice of tearing down statues honouring Canada’s founding fathers, and is currently fighting Toronto’s plans to scrub the name of 18th century British parliamentarian Henry Dundas from its streets and public squares on the (entirely bogus) assertion that he was an ally to the slave trade. “We need to call out these nonsensical claims,” Dummitt states determinedly. “And we need politicians who are willing to celebrate the Canadian nation in diverse ways.”
If there is a piquant irony to how Canadian history is currently being told by and to Canadians, it’s that new immigrants are actually more likely to receive a fair, balanced and generally uplifting vision of their new country than native-born residents. That’s because immigrants must still study for their citizenship test using a guidebook written by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper before our current historical miasma took effect.
“Discover Canada,” unveiled in 2011 by former Citizenship and Immigration minister Jason Kenney, was widely recognized for its nuanced treatment of Canada’s history, governance and culture. It explicitly acknowledges the low points in our past – including the Indian Residential School system and racist policies towards Chinese immigrants – but never claims such events represent the totality of the Canadian experience. The overall (and entirely honest) message is that Canada has always been a remarkably tolerant and welcoming country with a proud heritage of accommodation, democracy and the opportunity to achieve prosperity for all. As a result, Dummitt observes, immigrants who read the guidebook may actually have a better understanding of the true nature of Canada than Canadian students who’ve been force-fed a litany of horror stories about our past in high school and university classrooms.
Precisely because of the guidebook’s even-handedness and generally upbeat tone, however, many groups are demanding it be replaced with something grimmer and much less complimentary about Canada and its past. When the CBC tried to foment outrage over the continuing existence of the Harper-era citizenship guide in 2019, Janet Dench, then-executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, called the situation “incomprehensible” and demanded a new version that “acknowledges the problems in Canadian and current reality, and how that affects Indigenous and racialized people.” In other words, Dench wanted Ottawa to tell newcomers a much more negative – and almost certainly much less accurate – story about the country they were coming to. With this sort of self-hatred being expressed by current citizens, is it any wonder immigrants are having second thoughts about joining Club Canada?
Discover Canada, the Canadian citizenship study guide introduced by the Harper government in 2011, is one of the few remaining official documents that offers an evenhanded and generally uplifting vision of Canada’s history by celebrating our legacy of democracy, accomodation and prosperity.
If we want to make Canadian citizenship more attractive to newcomers, the first order of business should be to project a more uplifting story about what Canada means. And to do that, says Dummitt, “we need to stop telling lies about our past.”
Peter Shawn Taylor is senior features editor at C2C Journal. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.
Multicultural Meanderings 