Kingwell: We are all students of The Plague

2020/09/28 Leave a comment

Kingwell on reading the plague during COVID:

Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague has enjoyed renewed success during the 2020 pandemic, to the point where it is no longer easy to get a hold of a copy in person or by mail. When I set it as the first text in a small seminar I’m teaching this fall, Ethics and Literature, I knew it would prove both timely and provocative.

The syllabus for this course was fixed some months ago, but since then two significant facts have been added to the resonance of the novel. The first is that this class, a limited-enrolment course for first-year undergraduates, is happening entirely online. The second is that, owing to a visit to the United States to help with my in-laws’ acute but non-COVID-19 medical care, I’m in quarantine right now.

This isn’t onerous. During initial lockdown and even over the more liberated summer months, I spent most of every day at home, with books and screens for company. My spouse and I would meet in the evening to cook dinner and drink some wine. We might go for a walk, or sometimes meet someone in the park nearby. No ballgames, plays, restaurants, or travel.

But a grim truth of Camus’s story is how much it matters whether you are homebound by choice or by decree. Likewise, the routine boredom of his setting, the sleepy town of Oran, becomes a fearsome restlessness under cordon conditions. The denizens, lacking long-distance communication – even the mail is halted for fear of infection – fall back upon themselves in attitudes that run from religious mania and suicidal tendencies to resolute fortitude and various degrees of self-delusion.

There are also many instances of bureaucratic incompetence and heartlessness, of just the sort we have come to expect from authorities in our own plague days. Attempting to cross into the U.S., I was challenged to justify my existence in a manner as stonily ruthless as anything in Kafka. “What do you need him for?” my American spouse was asked incredulously. (To her credit, her first response was, “Well, he’s my husband.”) I managed to say nothing during this hostile exchange, even though I really wanted to point out that, barring family duty, I had no desire to visit the insane, disease-riddled, conspiracist-authoritarian wasteland that used to be America.

The most unsettling period was between this first “interview” and the second stage of inspection, which we endured in a parking lot without our passports. Like many Canadians, I take for granted the magical niceness of the Canadian passport, which usually opens doors without a pause. At that moment, I felt the tiniest twinge of stateless anxiety, the feeling that you are nothing absent highly contingent credentials. We got across, finally, and spent the next 10 days dealing with hospitals, caregivers, medical supply companies and big-box stores that sell everything from baby monitors and special pillows to probiotics and painkillers.

One of the students in my seminar is in quarantine, too. Another is in Delhi, attending the class late at night. The rest are scattered around Toronto and distant parts of Canada and the U.S. There is no such thing as a perfect technology, but our online meetings have been upbeat and fun considering how depressing the subject matter is. A shared story creates community. The students are especially fond of the chat function on our video platform, adding a running commentary to the main conversation that I find funny and they find engaging. So far so good.

In their weekly papers and comments during class, though, a darker mood emerged. Camus’s novel offers many obvious parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic, not least the initial refusal of citizens and authorities alike to take it seriously. Then, as the pestilence takes hold more firmly, comes a creeping sense that life may never be the same again.

One of my students wrote, “I’m constantly questioning whether it’s possible for us to go back to the way things were, or if the pandemic will ever end at all.” Another said: “Before the plague, the people of Oran are imprisoned by their habits but, during the plague, they are prisoners to their city and furthermore imprisoned within themselves. … [T]he irony of the situation is that they yearn to go back to being prisoners of their habits, almost as though suffering from Stockholm syndrome.”

This is Camus on the larger point: “[N]ow they had abruptly become aware that they were undergoing a sort of incarceration under that blue dome of sky, already beginning to sizzle in the fires of summer, they had a vague sensation that their whole lives were threatened by the present turn of events.” A plague is many things, sometimes only incidentally a potentially fatal disease. It is above all a social condition and a challenge to self – and maybe an opportunity for reflection. One needn’t be an absurdist to appreciate how Camus demonstrates the lurking meaninglessness of ordinary life when it is unmoored from familiar lines, habits and experiences of time.

Consider perhaps the most interesting character in the novel, the loner Jean Tarrou. In one of his notebooks we find this query: “How contrive not to waste one’s time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.”

Later, speaking of his choice to affirm life over death, he says this: “[O]n this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.” Not all plagues are physical, after all. Unwasted time is a form of resistance, especially when the hours drag. Lively minds in action, struggling with new realities and old books, my seminarians remind us all how to cope when life feels stalled and out of joint. The cardinal virtues are patience, humility and compassion – because, in philosophy class or out, we’re all plague students now.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-we-are-all-students-of-the-plague/

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#COVID-19: Comparing provinces with other countries 23 September Update

2020/09/24 Leave a comment

Highlights:

Deaths per million: Philippines ahead of British Columbia

Infections per million: India ahead of  Canada, Prairies ahead of Pakistan

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Immigration services to reopen gradually after pandemic shut down many programs

2020/09/23 Leave a comment

Useful overview:

Immigration officials are beginning gradually to resume in-person services after the pandemic forced many programs to shut down, frustrating immigrants whose lives were put on hold.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) shut down immigration tests and citizenship ceremonies in March to protect the health and safety of staff and clients. The department started offering some virtual services over the last few months. Starting this week, it is opening in-person services by appointment only.

“This testing phase will allow us to assess our protocols and procedures and ensure the safety of our staff and our clients. The lessons learned will help us plan for reopening services more widely in the future,” says the IRCC’s website.

Limited services being offered at specific locations include citizenship, services related to permanent residence, asylum claims and biometrics.

Clients must wait for government officials to schedule appointments before visiting an IRCC site and should not call IRCC to try to arrange a date themselves, the department says.

William Ojeda and his family have waited an agonizing three years to renew their permanent residency, a time frame he said is unreasonable. They are now unable to re-enter Canada from Mexico.

“Being unable to be in Canada, and the uncertainty and anxiety of almost three years checking the IRCC website pretty much daily after the initial reasonable delay, and worrying for the well-being of my kids has been really, really hard,” he wrote in an email from Guadalajara.

Odeja, his wife and their eldest daughter were born in Mexico, while his two younger daughters were born in Canada and are citizens.

‘Three years lost’

“We have never broken a law … we live, by choice, by Canadian written and social laws and yet we feel treated as second class immigrants,” he said.

“If the decision is favourable, of course, it would be a happy ending and all the uncertainty, anxiety and fear will blur over time. If negative, it would be all for nothing, with three years lost on our life plan, which is in Canada.”Ojeda said the delay in processing his file predated the pandemic. COVID-19 has created a bigger backlog in many cases, however.

Conservative immigration critic Raquel Dancho said she’s heard from countless families affected by what she calls the “administrative ineptness” of IRCC.

“The lack of a plan throughout the pandemic has failed refugees and immigrants who wish to come to Canada,” she said.

“The Liberals have failed to ensure a fair and compassionate immigration process for the world’s most vulnerable. Frankly, it’s unacceptable and those that depend on the immigration system deserve better.”

NDP MP Jenny Kwan said MP offices have been “inundated” with immigration applicants’ desperate pleas for help. She said several of her MP colleagues have reported that immigration cases consume up to 90 per cent of their constituency casework.

“It’s apparent that there has been little to no movement on IRCC offices resuming their work up to now. The limited capacity of the restart will still mean that too many people are still just going to be stuck in the system with ongoing delays,” she said.”People are still being asked to continue to put their lives on hold. Is it a wonder that families desperate to reunite with their loved ones feel that their cries for help are just falling on deaf ears? The problems with the backlog are so deep that this limited restart will do little to reassure those stuck in the system.”

Efforts to speed up processing

Mathieu Genest, spokesperson for Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino, said the department has been adapting its systems to speed up the processing of applications while protecting the health and safety of staff, clients and Canadians. IRCC has prioritized applications from Canadians and permanent residents returning to Canada, as well as people performing essential services.

Staff now have more resources and streamlined processes for working remotely, he said.

“The expansion of the resumption of in-person services will depend on the results of and lessons learned during this pilot, as well as regional health guidelines, available capacity and virtual alternatives, among other considerations,” he said.

IRCC has introduced safety measures at its locations — including a self-assessment questionnaire that must be completed before an appointment and again before entering the premises.

All employees and clients are required to wear masks, maintain physical distance and follow signs directing the flow of foot traffic. People who appear ill will have to reschedule their appointments.

Source: Immigration services to reopen gradually after pandemic shut down many programs

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How The Pandemic Is Widening The Racial Wealth Gap

2020/09/19 Leave a comment

Good data-based analysis:

Joeller Stanton used to be an assistant teacher at a private school in Baltimore and made about $30,000 a year. In mid-March, when the pandemic was just starting, her school closed for what was supposed to be two weeks. “Up to that point, we were under the impression that it wasn’t that serious, that everything was going to be OK,” Stanton recalls.

But as schools in Maryland switched to virtual learning indefinitely, Stanton was let go from her job. She received her last paycheck in March. “I had about $300 savings that was basically gone by the end of March,” she says.

She says she applied for unemployment but was denied initially. And by April, she had no money to pay for rent and utilities, and was struggling to put food on the table for her two children.

Stanton, who is Black, is caught up in a huge wave of economic stress hitting Americans, especially people of color.

Sixty percent of Black households are facing serious financial problems since the pandemic began, according to a national poll released this week by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. That includes 41% who say they’ve used up most or all their savings, while an additional 10% had no savings before the outbreak.

Latinos and Native Americans are also disproportionately affected by the pandemic’s economic impact. Seventy-two percent of Latino and 55% of Native American respondents say their households are facing serious financial problems, compared with 36% of whites.

“The thing that immediately struck me was how large the gap was by race for the people who said they were facing serious problems,” says Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute.

The pandemic’s disproportionate financial impact on communities of color reflects — and is worsening — existing racial disparities in wealth, she adds.

Struggles with income, housing, food

“The three groups that are being just ravaged by this epidemic are reporting unbelievable problems of just trying to cope with their day-to-day lives,” says Robert Blendon, professor emeritus of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who oversaw the poll.

Thirty-two percent of Latino and 28% of Black respondents say they’re having problems paying rent or mortgages. About a third of respondents in both groups were struggling to pay credit cards or other loans. And 26% of Latino and Native American respondents say they struggle to afford food, while 22% of Black respondents do.

Among households that reported they lost income, survival is even more of a challenge. For Black respondents, 40% say they’re struggling to pay rent or mortgage, and 43% say they’re having trouble paying utilities. For Latino households that lost income, 46% say they’re struggling to pay mortgage or rent. About a third of both Black and Latino respondents who lost household income said they’re struggling to pay for food.

The fact that many minority groups are also experiencing higher rates of coronavirus infections makes it even harder for them to cope financially, Blendon adds.

“You have people who don’t have savings, they can’t pay bills,” he says. “And then you’re going to tell them, ‘Well, somebody in the household tested positive, nobody can go work.’ How are they going to keep their lives going?”

Stanton’s sister, who works for the city government, got COVID-19 earlier this year and had to isolate in her basement. “She had a cough, and she couldn’t eat because her taste buds were completely gone,” Stanton says. “I would cook meals, and I would take it to the basement, put it down on the floor for her.”

Luckily, she says, no one else in the family — including her 82-year-old mother and her 7-year-old son, who has asthma — got infected.

But Stanton says she has lost a sister-in-law to the disease and had a friend in coma for six weeks on a ventilator. She knows of many others in her community who have died.

And most of her co-workers and friends are out of work.

Worsening existing disparities

Even during the economic recovery of recent years, minority groups were lagging behind, says Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute. “There were significant racial disparities in wages, significant racial disparities in unemployment, significant racial disparities in the kinds of jobs people held.”

Black, Latino and Native American workers were more likely to have jobs that were lost during the pandemic, Wilson says. A Harvard University analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Pulse Survey, released in July, found that 58% of Latino and 53% of Black households experienced loss in earnings early in the pandemic. Wilson’s own research has shown that Latino workers have been particularly affected by job losses during the pandemic.

Wilson adds that people in these groups are also more likely to have jobs that didn’t allow them to work from the safety of their homes, therefore putting them more at risk of getting infected. And they’re also less likely to have substantial savings. As a result, it makes it harder for them to weather times of economic downturn, she says.

Wilson says she worries that the pandemic is worsening racial disparities.

“We’re going to see coming out of this pandemic an expansion of the racial wealth gap,” she says. “We saw the same kind of thing in the Great Recession in 2007-2008 — in particular then with the extensive foreclosures in communities of color and the loss of housing wealth.”

“You just pray”

The pandemic forced Stanton to give up her rental home back in April. But she says she was fortunate not to end up homeless, thanks to her sister.

“My sister helped me get a storage unit,” Stanton says. “I moved my furniture into a storage unit. And I moved in with my sister, me and my two kids — my 11-year-old daughter and my 7-year-old son.”

She is grateful to have a roof over her head, but money, she says, is still tight.

She now gets $280 a week from the state of Maryland as unemployment, but it doesn’t go far.

“The first thing I buy is any personal hygiene items me or my kids need,” she says. She buys food, above what food stamps get her; she pays her phone bill and covers her sister’s utility bills. “That’s my only way of telling her, ‘Thank you,’ to show her that I appreciate what she’s doing.”

What little she has left, she buys a treat or two for her children, who have mostly been stuck indoors since the pandemic began: “Just trying to keep them happy,” she says.

But she’s far from happy herself. She hasn’t been able to find a new job because of the nature of remote learning. “They don’t need an assistant right now because the kids are not physically in the building,” she says.

And even if she did find a job, she worries she’d have to use pay to cover child care. Her kids are now also learning virtually from home and need constant supervision.

Stanton says the only way she copes with her daily struggles is through faith. “A lot of prayer and a lot of patience,” she says. “I try not to let things bother me because I don’t want to become depressed. So, you know, you just pray. I hope this is all over soon.”

Source: How The Pandemic Is Widening The Racial Wealth Gap

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Ontario families living in more racialized neighbourhoods less likely to send children back into classroom, Globe analysis finds

2020/09/19 Leave a comment

Interesting possible explanations for a counter-intuitive effect, as I had thought that it would be those with higher socioeconomic status that would be best able to support remote learning:

As some of Ontario’s largest school boards scramble to accommodate a mass migration to remote learning, an analysis by The Globe and Mail shows families living in more racialized neighbourhoods are less likely to send their children back into the classroom.

The Globe analyzed the percentage of remote learners for hundreds of schools across the Greater Toronto Area, identifying patterns related to income, race, density of housing and COVID-19 cases. The data reveals regional and neighbourhood differences, suggesting the government’s back-to-school approach of offering a choice between online learning and in-class instruction could be forcing people with the fewest resources into unfamiliar learning environments.

“The numbers of parents opting for online due to concerns about the back-to-school plan is understandable to protect their child, but the potential impact on educational inequities between in-school and out-of-school learning for students is deeply concerning,” said Carol Campbell, an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She added that early evidence indicates the students with the most negative experiences of remote learning in the spring were students living in low income households, students with special education needs and those learning the English language.

The four boards analyzed by the Globe – Toronto District, Peel, York Region and Hamilton-Wentworth – represent more than a quarter of the student population in the province. Ontario’s approach is similar to Alberta’s, while the B.C. government has allowed boards to offer the remote learning option to families.

The Globe’s analysis revealed that 78 per cent of families in Toronto’s high-income neighbourhoods chose to send their children to the classroom compared with 64 per cent of families in low-income neighbourhoods. Similarly, more than 80 per cent of families in Toronto neighbourhoods with a low-racialized population opted for in-class learning, and only 60 per cent of families who live in high-racialized neighbourhoods did the same.

The Globe’s analysis divided neighbourhoods into four quarters, respectively, based on their median household income and percentage of visible minorities in the neighbourhood. The demographic and economic information was based on the 2016 census.

Kwame McKenzie, chief executive of the Wellesley Institute, a Toronto think-tank, said family decisions are often influenced by neighbours and friends.

“Complex social trends can be less complex than we think because people are connected,” Dr. McKenzie said. “Yes, there are the stats [on COVID-19] but do not underestimate the importance of social connections. We look and see what other people are doing and talk to people before we make decisions.”

At Crescent Town Elementary School in east Toronto, about half of students have opted for online learning this year. The school is in the Taylor-Massey neighbourhood, which is low-income and has a medium-to-high visible minority presence. About 77 per cent of residents live in apartment buildings that are more than five-storeys tall, which Razia Rashed, a parent who sits on Crescent Town’s school council, said is a major contributing factor. Living in a dense neighbourhood has made families nervous, she said: they’re worried about community transmission, especially if they have to ride the elevator twice daily to take their children to and from school.

Much of the neighbourhood is composed of immigrants from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, and Ms. Rashed said many parents in the community have more closely followed news and stories from relatives in their countries of origin, rather than domestically, about the toll COVID-19 has taken (the worst outbreaks in South Asia have been in India and Bangladesh).

“How it is back home matters,” Ms. Rashed said.

In Toronto, online learners are also over-represented in low income neighbourhoods, in contrast to Brampton – a hot spot for COVID-19 and one of the country’s most diverse cities – where high income neighbourhoods have the lowest rates of in-class learning. Many parents are working from home and are opting to keep their children there as well. Brad Teeter, the principal of Eldorado Public School in Brampton, said students also live in multi-generational homes with elderly grandparents who are more vulnerable to infection.

His school, part of the Peel District School Board, is in a high-income neighbourhood with a large East Indian population and just over 40 per cent of students have opted for virtual learning.

In his conversations with families, Mr. Teeter lets them know about the health and safety measures in his school, and he knows parents are wrestling with difficult decisions. The Peel board has delayed the start of its live online school to the week of Sept. 21 after seeing enrolment jump to 64,000 students, an increase of more than 10,000 in the past week.

“We would love to see every kid in the building … [but] there’s still, I think, a lot of COVID fears that are happening and parents are making decisions in the best interests of their families and safety for the kids and each member of the family,” Mr. Teeter said.

Satinder Gill, whose three children attend school in Brampton, said the decision to have them learn online was difficult. She and her husband did not want to compromise the health of her in-laws, who live with relatives next door, or her parents living close by. In her Punjabi Indian culture, she said that the “extended family plays a very big role.”

“Our kids are exposed to many people in the family and we love that about our culture. That makes these types of decisions very difficult to make,” Ms. Gill said.

Sonia Reid, whose daughter attends Heart Lake Secondary School, also in Brampton, said the family’s plans called for her daughter to attend school in-person, but then Ms. Reid grew worried as she watched people in her area become less cautious, coupled with a rise in COVID-19 cases. She said that among her group of friends, only one has decided to send their child into the classroom.

“All those little things, and watching the numbers go up, I definitely knew that starting in September, I had to switch her to completely online,” Ms. Reid said.

Overall, a significant portion of Ontario students are not returning to the classroom. That number is most stark in Brampton, where only 56 per cent of elementary students will be in school, compared with Hamilton where 83 per cent of elementary children will learn in classrooms. In Toronto, meanwhile, preliminary data showed that 69 per cent of elementary children and 75 per cent of high school students are returning to the classroom. The Toronto and Peel boards have said this week that thousands of families have been switching to online learning in recent days amid rising COVID-19 rates.

In Ontario, families have been given a choice between in-person and virtual learning. Alberta school districts, too, have offered families an online option. The B.C. government said school districts have flexibility to provide remote learning options, but there is confusion among parents and school officials as to what that means. In Montreal, school districts did not provide a school-by-school enrolment breakdown of online and in-class learning. Online options in Quebec are only for children with medical exemptions and those forced to stay home because of illness or quarantine. The English school board said it had given about 400 medical exemptions that allow children to receive online learning among 19,600 students. The Centre de services scolaire de Montréal has 363 students online among its 77,500 students.

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Ottawa appoints new management to ‘strengthen’ pandemic surveillance system

2020/09/16 Leave a comment

Needed given short-sightedness of PHAC-decisions regarding pandemic preparations:

The Public Health Agency of Canada has installed new management to oversee and “strengthen” the country’s pandemic surveillance system, a once-globally renowned unit whose capabilities were curtailed less than a year before the COVID-19 crisis hit.

In a statement provided to The Globe and Mail, the department said Brigitte Diogo, a senior official with 25 years of experience in government, has taken over as the vice-president of the Health Security Infrastructure Branch. The division oversees the government’s pandemic early warning and surveillance unit, known as the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, or GPHIN, among other operations, such as an emergency stockpile of medical supplies.

Sally Thornton, who previously served in that role, left the government last week, the department said. “After a long and distinguished career, Ms. Thornton is retiring from the federal public service,” Public Health spokeswoman Natalie Mohamed said in an e-mailed statement.

Ms. Thornton declined requests for an interview. Ms. Diogo was also not available for comment, the department said.

GPHIN has been at the centre of controversy since a Globe investigation in late July detailed how the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the government’s pandemic early warning system were reduced significantly in late 2018 and early 2019. That effectively shut down much of its surveillance work on international health threats less than eight months before the outbreak in China began to spread, and appears to have impacted Canada’s ability to gauge the risk of the virus.

Throughout January, February and much of March, the government judged the threat from the outbreak as “low” in its official risk assessments, even after the World Health Organization warned in late January that the risk to the world was high.

In her new role, Ms. Diogo’s mandate will include bolstering the surveillance system, although no specifics were provided.

“Ms. Diogo will lead efforts to maintain and strengthen Canada’s public health event-based surveillance system including the Global Public Health Intelligence Network,” department spokesman Eric Morrissette said in a statement.

In late 2018, believing that GPHIN was too internationally focused and could be put to better use on domestic projects, the department reassigned doctors and epidemiologists in the highly specialized unit to projects that didn’t involve pandemic preparedness. A once-prolific alert system operated by GPHIN, designed to track evolving health threats and inject urgency into government responses, was effectively shuttered when a new edict required that Ms. Thornton approve all such alerts.

With no approvals given, the alert system eventually went silent on May 24, 2019, according to 10 years’ worth of PHAC records obtained by The Globe. With it, much of the unit’s surveillance activities – designed to track early signals of an outbreak and inform government risk assessments – effectively shut down as well.

The alert system remained silent for 440 days, and was restarted only last month, less than two weeks after the Globe investigation. During the intervening months, employees inside Public Health say GPHIN’s intelligence-gathering abilities were a fraction of what they once were. Created in the 1990s, GPHIN had garnered international acclaim for its ability to detect and gather continuing intelligence on outbreaks of diseases such as H1N1, Ebola, Zika and others, helping the government formulate a response if needed.

In addition to GPHIN, Ms. Thornton also oversaw the national emergency stockpile of medical supplies, which came under heavy scrutiny this spring after it fell short of supplying the provinces and territories with badly needed personal protective equipment.

In April, Ms. Thornton testified before the House of Commons Health Committee that the stockpile held a “minimum level” of equipment, and wasn’t designed to handle the surge of a pandemic, raising questions about how it was being managed.

The Globe has made several requests since May to interview department officials connected to GPHIN, including Ms. Thornton. All of those requests were declined.

Last week, Health Minister Patty Hajdu ordered an independent federal review of the problems at GPHIN, saying she was troubled that scientists at Public Health told The Globe they were not being listened to within the department. The Auditor-General has also launched an investigation.

Scientists within Public Health told The Globe that over the past decade, the department has suffered from an influx of senior officials from other areas of the government, such as the Treasury Board, Border Services and others, who lacked sufficient grounding in Public Health. Epidemiologist Michael Garner, a former senior science adviser at the agency, said it became difficult for scientists to communicate urgent and complex messages up the chain of command, because those officials often didn’t comprehend the problems.

Ms. Diogo, who moves over from Transport Canada, has no science background, which may add to such concerns. However, Mr. Morrissette said she has extensive experience working on safety and security policy, and on program design and delivery.

“While a newcomer to the agency, Ms. Diogo understands the merit of a well-functioning, event-based surveillance system including the timely dissemination of information such as alerts, to inform decision-making in addressing public health threats,” Mr. Morrissette said.

According to information from the department, Ms. Diogo was director-general of rail safety at Transport Canada from 2015-20, and director of operations at the Security and Intelligence Secretariat in the Privy Council Office, where she oversaw matters related to national security from 2011-14. She also has a background in risk mitigation while at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the department said.

Source: Ottawa appoints new management to ‘strengthen’ pandemic surveillance system

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Data shows an increase in anti-Asian hate incidents in Canada since onset of pandemic

2020/09/15 Leave a comment

Although collected through online portals with anonymity, of concern and buttressed by official police stats:

More than 600 incidents of hate targeting Asians within Canada have been reported to Chinese Canadian groups since the pandemic began, and one in three of those attacks have been assaults, say the groups.

The data, collected through online portals that have allowed victims to report hate incidents anonymously, are consistent with reports from Canadian police forces that they are also investigating an increase in anti-Asian attacks.

The data, released last week, were compiled by the Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter, Project 1907, the Vancouver Asian Film Festival and the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice. All of the incidents were reported through two online platforms based in Toronto or Vancouver. The reports were received from seven provinces.

Justin Kong, executive director for the Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter, said the data again indicate Asian Canadians have been targeted through the pandemic and racism will continue to taint Canada until there are policies in place to tackle it.

“Those attacks stemmed from historical anti-Asian racism, but also because of the ways in which COVID-19 has been racialized,” he said, adding COVID-19 is seen as a Chinese disease, similar to SARS.

“We saw what happened during SARS, and I guess it became obvious that this was going to go the same way. … That’s why we started collecting the data on the racist attacks.”

Mr. Kong acknowledged they weren’t able to verify the reports, and the groups instead have been relying on “a trust system.”

The data, which have been collected since February, show that 83 per cent of the incidents were reported by East Asians, followed by 7 per cent by Southeast Asians. It says 44 per cent of the attacks were reported from B.C. – the highest in Canada – while 38 per cent of the occurrences were reported in Ontario and 7 per cent in Quebec.

Women reported 60 per cent of all incidents. In B.C., women were even more disproportionately affected, accounting for nearly 70 per cent of all reported incidents there.

The data found nearly 30 per cent of reported incidents are assault, including targeted coughing, physical attacks and violence, and that verbal harassment is the most common type of discrimination.

These groups’ findings echo those of the Vancouver Police Department, which has reported a dramatic rise in hate incidents against East Asians.

In July, Vancouver police said they have had 66 hate-motivated incidents against East Asian people reported to them so far in 2020, a huge spike from the seven during the same period last year. A VPD spokesperson said the most targeted community continues to be East Asian.

Toronto Police Service spokeswoman Connie Osborne said, in comparison to 2019, her force has seen an increase in the number of hate-motivated occurrences, including where race has been a factor.

She said many of the 2020 cases are active investigations and the motivation of the offence may change or more offences may be uncovered, so the force can’t provide specific numbers for the year so far. But she added such incidents often go unreported and the number of reports received by police are not an accurate reflection of what people have experienced.

Earlier this year, Korean Montrealer Kyungseo Min compiled testimonies from Asian Québécois of racist incidents since January. In the span of about a month and a half, Ms. Min collected more than 20.

She said some of her findings match those from the advocacy groups. For example, female Asians reported more harassment or violence than men, and the majority of the racism was verbal.

In Alberta, the Alberta Hate Crimes Committee has been running the StopHateAB.ca portal since 2017 to encourage people to report incidents and talk about what happened to them. The portal’s reports include four incidents reported this year of an East Asian Canadian being verbally assaulted in a public space in a tirade related to COVID-19.

Since it began collecting data, the portal has logged 74 incidents of hate in Edmonton, 69 in Calgary and 31 in Lethbridge. There are a handful of reports from other areas of the province. The data were last updated in July.

The groups are calling on the federal government to include an anti-racism strategy in its postpandemic recovery plan.

Mr. Kong said as the pandemic has posed more challenges to racialized communities, he hopes that the government could also come up with policies aimed at helping migrant workers and low-income immigrant workers.

The House of Commons’ standing committee on justice and human rights issued a report just more than a year ago with recommendations for battling online hate. They include recommendations for more funding for police, judges and Crown prosecutors to enable them to better respond to hate complaints as well as better data collection on hate incidents.

The report, submitted in June, 2019, noted a 50-per-cent jump in hate crimes targeting Black people in 2017 relative to the year earlier. However, the report does not refer to hate crimes against those of East Asian descent.

In a response this month, the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Toronto-based foundation, provided several recommendations to the Justice Minister’s office, including placing online hate crimes under federal jurisdiction and developing a more clear and comprehensive definition of illegal hate activities.

Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, the foundation’s director of policy, said it is the responsibility of the justice system to recognize hatred as the poison that it is and confront hate crimes.

“We want to see all hate crimes aggressively investigated by police, regardless of what community is being targeted and what form these crimes take, so that perpetrators are brought to justice.”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-data-shows-an-increase-in-anti-asian-hate-incidents-in-canada-since/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Morning%20Update&utm_content=2020-9-14_6&utm_term=Morning%20Update:%20Isolation%20and%20loneliness%20take%20a%20toll%20on%20mental%20health%20during%20pandemic%20&utm_campaign=newsletter&cu_id=%2BTx9qGuxCF9REU6kNldjGJtpVUGIVB3Y

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COVID-19 disproportionately impacted immigrants and refugees in Ontario, new report finds

2020/09/10 Leave a comment

Better data confirming what we know:

The spread of COVID-19 has disproportionately affected immigrants, refugees and those who live in low-income neighbourhoods in Ontario, a new report has found.

The report released Wednesday by ICES, a not-for-profit research institute focusing on health-related data in Ontario, found that while immigrants and refugees in the province accounted for only about a quarter of those tested for COVID-19 between January and June, they represented 43.5 per cent of all positive cases.

“We document disproportionately higher rates of infection among those who landed in Ontario as economic caregivers, refugees, those with lower levels of education and language fluency, those who currently live in lower income neighbourhoods and with more crowded housing,” Dr. Astrid Guttmann, Chief Science Officer at ICES and lead author on the report, said in a statement.

“Apart from addressing many of (the) root causes of higher risk of infections, very high test positivity in certain groups of immigrants also suggests that there may be important barriers to testing that will be important to address if there is a second wave in Ontario this fall.”

The data was pulled from test results conducted between January 15 and June 13. According to the report, rates of testing were lower for most immigrants and refugees compared with Canadian-born and long-term residents—with an exception for economic caregivers who tend to work in health-care and were prioritized for testing.

The data found that of the 4.4 per cent of Canadian-born and long-term residents tested for COVID-19 in Ontario, 2.9 per cent tested positive.

Of the 3.4 per cent of people who identify as immigrants or refugees who were tested for COVID-19, 8.1 per cent received a positive diagnosis.

Refugees alone had the highest positivity rate within that time period at 10.4 per cent.

Chart

The report also found that while testing positivity peaked at the beginning of April among Canada-born and long-term residents, there were two “pronounced peaks of positivity” for immigrants, refugees and newcomers in April and May respectfully.

“The pandemic has sharpened the focus on structural and societal inequalities that have long existed,” the report reads. “These inequities put many racialized and immigrant populations at higher risk of both contracting the infection and suffering poor outcomes.”

The highest rates of positivity in Canada were found in racialized immigrants and refugees from Central, Western and East Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and South Asia, the report found. The rates were also higher for those living in low-income neighbourhoods.

Public health units with larger immigrant populations such as Toronto, Peel Region, Durham Region, Waterloo, Windsor and York also reported a high number of COVID-19 positive patients among that demographic.

In Toronto specifically, 4,027 immigrants and refugees have tested positive for COVID-19 (9.8 per cent of those tested) compared to 3,788 Canadian-born patients (4.9 per cent of those tested).

What data was available and what was missing?

The general findings presented in the report are not necessarily new. Advocacy groups have been calling on all levels of government to support the gathering of race and socio-economic data for months, arguing that marginalized communities are disproportionately contracting or dying from COVID-19.

As a result of these calls, the City of Toronto began collecting race-based data in May.

Toronto Public Health said that of the data collected between May 20 and July 16, 83 per cent of known COVID-19 cases involve members of racialized communities.

It also found that patients with a household income level of $50,000 or less represents more than 50 per cent of reported infections in the city, despite the fact that the 2016 census revealed only 30 per cent of Toronto’s population reported being in that income bracket.

The data released by city officials are based on voluntary questions collected by a local public health unit.

Provincially, officials and politicians have all said they support the collection of race and income-based data, but they have yet to provide any information about the trends they are seeing.

In mid-June, the government proposed regulatory changes that would allow those who test positive for COVID-19 to be asked about their race, income, languages spoken and household size.

The questions are optional and the government said personal privacy would be protected. Since then, not much has been said about the data collection.

The ICES report said they were limited in the creation of the report by incomplete immigration data and could only include information on immigrants or refugees who landed in Ontario from January 1985 to May 2017 and who became permanent residents. They also included second-generation immigrant children under the age of 19 who were born in Ontario to permanent residents.

A “newcomer,” a status defined separately from an immigrant or refugee, is described as an individual who became eligible for OHIP after May 31, 2017

The authors also noted that ICES lacked data on “important risk factors for testing and positivity” such as occupation and living conditions.

“We currently do not have comprehensive data on important outcomes such as hospitalization and death,” the report says. “We have data on demographic and some census-based characteristics but not on the critical structural factors that play an important role in shaping inequities.”

ICES was able to access information on the health-care sector. The report found that employment as a health-care worker, especially among women, accounted for a disproportionate number of COVID-19 cases among immigrants and refugees. Among the 36 per cent of women employed as health-care workers and who tested positive in Ontario, 45 per cent were within that demographic.

Inequities ‘are complex’ and often rooted in racism

The report suggests that the “causes of these inequities are complex and often rooted in social and structural inequities, including systemic racism.”

It notes that a large proportion of immigrants, refugees and newcomers to Canada hold temporary or minimum-wage jobs at facilities where physical distancing is difficult. These positions may also not have paid sick leave or other health benefits.

ICES says that employment in any of these sectors— such as occupations in retail, factories or transportation– “is considered precarious” and could impact testing and quarantine.

Other factors such as language barriers, education and accessibility to quality healthcare could impact whether a person gets a COVID-19 test.

The not-for-profit is calling for more accessible testing options ahead of a possible second-wave in the fall as well as better training and enforcement of safety measures for those at risk of COVID-19 exposure in the workplace.

“A continued focus is needed on securing funding to house those who cannot safely quarantine in their homes or are homeless, as well as for income supplements for workers must quarantine who do not have employer-sponsored sick leave,” the report says.

The report also noted that the findings should be interpreted in the context of Ontario’s testing strategy. Initially, local public health units were only testing those in essential workplaces, those who had recently travelled and for those with acute medical conditions. Later that strategy evolved to include long-term care homes, hospitalized patients, and the general population, including asymptomatic patients.

“This means that some groups are over-represented in the testing numbers and that positive cases include those who were symptomatic at the time of testing, as well as those who were asymptomatic,” the report says.

“This may distort some associations of characteristics with both testing rates and potential to test positive. It also means that there is an unknown number of untested infected individuals in the general population.

Source: https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/covid-19-disproportionately-impacted-immigrants-and-refugees-in-ontario-new-report-finds-1.5097363

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#COVID-19: Comparing provinces with other countries 9 September Update

2020/09/10 Leave a comment

Highlights:

Deaths per million: USA now higher than Sweden, Australia now higher than Atlantic Canada

Infections per million: France now higher than UK, India now higher than Germany and Ontario, British Columbia now higher than Canada less Quebec


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When the great New Zealand immigration tap suddenly went dry

2020/09/08 Leave a comment

Good overview by Paul Spoonley, with some COVID similarities to Canada:

In March 2020, the immigration tap was all but turned off as New Zealand, and many other countries, closed their borders. But few countries have experienced quite the immigration arrival and net gain story that New Zealand has over the last two decades.

At this point, the drop in arrivals, apart from returning New Zealanders, is of such a magnitude it raises some fundamental questions: when will international mobility, both temporary and permanent migration, restart? And what will – or should – the new normal look like?

How did we get here?

There have been three very distinct periods of population growth and migration since 2000.

Lianne Dalziel, as minister of immigration, oversaw a significant period of immigration policy reform in the early 2000s, after the rather disastrous 1990s. What we gave points for, and what sort of work an immigrant could do after arrival, were not aligned through the prior decade. The politicisation of Asian immigration in the 1996 election did not help.

After 2000 the numbers grew but were then curtailed by the global financial crisis, when the numbers departing New Zealand increased significantly. From 2000 to 2008, the population grew by 407,200 with net migration gains contributing 45.5% to this growth.

Then the GFC years happened. Between 2008 and 2013, population growth was modest (+191,200) and net migration made up less than 5% of this growth. (Remember, there were years in this period when the net loss was nearly 16,000 per year.) But this was then followed by another period of major population growth (480,000, from 2014 to 2019) and net migration gains now made up 65% of population growth.

Fewer babies but many more immigrants

As fertility rates continued to decline, and reached sub-replacement levels in 2017, New Zealand was more than making up for it with migration numbers. The country was adding more than 60,000 people each year as a result of immigration.

The numbers did dip in 2019 but the latest figures for the year to June 2020 are quite staggering. There were 153,900 arrivals (up 8.7%), 74,500 departures (down 16.6%) with a net gain of 79,400 – and that included four months of lockdown migration rates.

The monthly arrivals for June are down 86.8% compared to June a year earlier, while departures are down 87.6%. And we still managed an all time high for the 12 months.

Our annual population growth since 2013 has been high (1.9-2.1%) and the key driver was now immigration, not natural increase. New Zealand stood out in terms of the relative size of these migration flows. Last year, New Zealand had 11.4 migrants (net) per 1000 people. Australia’s rate was 6.2, the US was 3.8 and the UK 2.4.

But there is more

This story is missing one other key ingredient : the size and role of temporary migration.

The MBIE migration data website provides a fascinating picture of the size of the temporary work and study population in New Zealand. Just before the first lockdown at the end of February, the site was showing 220,887 here on temporary work visas with another 82,857 on a study visa (remembering that these students can work up to 20 hours per week on these visas). Even by the end of July, the total number in both categories had only dropped by 23,828.

This might not be the full story. In May 2020, a statement from the then minister of immigration, Iain Lees-Galloway, suggested that there were 350,000 temporary visa holders which included a big chunk of visitors and the skilled migrant resident visa holders.

To say that these numbers are significant is an understatement.

What next?

The government has extended the current stay for the temporary worker and student visa populations under the Covid-19 Public Health response Act and with changes to the Employer Assisted Work Visa. Essentially, the visas have been extended to September 25. (Thai chefs and Japanese interpreters get their own special category of work visas provisions.) This is essentially a hold and wait approach.

In the meantime, migrant arrivals are now dominated by diaspora returnees – New Zealanders are cutting short their OE and returning home in numbers. Over the last year, 45,481 New Zealanders arrived in the country, and the net gain is 16,945. This is in sharp contrast to the major net losses during the GFC and much smaller losses from 2013 through to 2019. Over half of these returnees are coming from Australia.

The Stats NZ figures divide these returning New Zealanders in terms of whether they intend to stay or not. We will see. Covid-19 keeps changing the rules. A key influencer will be a combination of managing, or not, the virus, whether there are jobs and where is it easiest to get support from the state or family/friends. Australia is not a welcoming place for New Zealanders, as the pandemic has underscored.

One thing is certain: population growth over the next year or two will slow dramatically as migration slows. The saving grace will be returning New Zealanders but the numbers involved are still far from clear. They are exempt from meeting the labour market thresholds and the requirement to have a job offer of non-New Zealand citizen arrivals.

There is considerable pressure to open the borders – for short term workers, students or tourists, and for permanent migrants. But when? That depends on the management of Covid-19 within countries, along with a willingness to accept the risks that international arrivals bring, and international agreements about the protocols required of countries, carriers and travellers. The airline industry is suggesting that it might be 2024 before numbers are back to anything like the levels of recent years.

Demographic disruption

The dial has literally gone back to zero in terms of immigration, in sharp contrast to the previous year when the overall numbers and net gain were New Zealand’s highest ever. What is unclear is what the country’s immigration management system or migrant flows will look like as we emerge from a pandemic. Will there be a major reset or will the old normal return?

There is also the demographic future to consider. The fertility rate is in ongoing decline, aided by the delayed fertility that will result from the uncertainty associated with Covid-19. Ageing will mean that almost a quarter of all New Zealanders will be over 65 years of age by the 2030s. And we are seeing population stagnation – and decline – in many regions.

An inverted population pyramid and a smaller prime working age population are going to provide us with significant challenges. Immigration is one of the options to address these major demographic shifts. It will be interesting to see whether our politicians and policy communities see it this way and construct an appropriate immigration model for a future New Zealand.

Source: When the great New Zealand immigration tap suddenly went dry

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