Douglas Todd: Mixed motives fuel rise of foreign students

2016/05/24 Leave a comment

Not surprising that universities and other educational institutions view foreign students from an economic perspective and that foreign families consider not only the education but financial (shift money to Canada, invest in real estate) and political benefits (citizenship).

But, as in the case over the debate over housing prices, it raises policy issues:

Immigration Canada data shows about 72,000 foreign students from Mainland Chinese were accepted in 2014, 36,000 from India, 17,000 from South Korea and 13,000 from France. In total, one out of four foreign students in Canada is from China.
Canadian politicians talk in predictable ways about the increasing number of foreign students.

Wilkinson maintains Chinese and other foreign students bring “social, cultural and economic benefits.” And they pay full fees for their own educations, unlike subsidized homegrown students.

The federal Immigration Minister John McCallum often calls foreign students “the cream of the crop.”

But noted specialists in higher education, including Boston College’s Philip Altbach and Ontario’s Jane Knight, say the quality of foreign students is going down as their numbers inflate.

Most foreign students are now second tier, say Altbach and Knight. They’re generally not doing well in the schools in their countries of origin. But many have rich parents.

Given the trend, Knight argues that most Western foreign-student programs have lost their humanitarian origins and become elaborate cash grabs. They make it possible for governments like British Columbia’s to mask that they are tightening education funding.

What are some foreign students in Canada doing when they’re not studying?

Canada’s federal housing agency, looking for new methods to track foreign ownership in the country’s soaring real estate markets, has considering classifying foreign university students as foreign buyers as it steps up its investigation into global money-laundering.

Bloomberg News discovered that Canada Mortgage & Housing Corp., the Crown corporation that tracks housing data, is especially interested in how the red-hot housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver are partly fuelled by foreign students, some of whom live in multi-million-dollar homes near the UBC campus.

In a related study, urban planner Andy Yan, head of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, discovered that in a six-month period in 2015, about 70 per cent of 172 detached homes sold on Vancouver’s west side were purchased by Mainland Chinese buyers.

Yan’s research showed that, of all self-declared occupations among owners of the high-priced homes in the study, 36 per cent were housewives or students with little income.

Five of eight homes owned by “students” were bought outright with cash at an average value of $3.2 million.

Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, a frequent adviser to the federal parliament, said it’s clear that most children from around the world who are able to afford to live and pay full education fees in expensive cities like Toronto and Vancouver are from “elite families.”

One bonus of getting children into Canada as foreign students, Kurland says, is that those who are able can become players in real-estate investment. Students are being declared as property owners of Vancouver residential property because they aid in international money transfers, Kurland said.

Foreign students have the advantage of being able to appear as residents of Canada for income tax purposes, even as their declared earned income would be extremely low.

As principal resident of a dwelling, Kurland said, a foreign student does not have to pay capital gains when his or her home is sold at a profit. “Then, out of the goodness of their heart, they can send the profit back to their uncle in China,” Kurland said with irony.

In addition to aiding the movement of trans-national wealth, however, possibly the more common reason a well-off foreign family puts a great deal of effort into establishing their son or daughter in Canada is that it goes a long way to obtaining a second passport.
Canadian politicians often rank international students as prime candidates for immigration. Roughly three out of 10 foreign students have gone on to become Canadian citizens. And that proportion is expected to rise.

Kurland believes more foreign students from China are being flown to Canada at “younger and younger ages … in part because they’re a no-fit in the Chinese educational system.” They need to establish themselves early in Canada’s educational system if they’re going to make it.

The immigration lawyer, who publishes a newsletter called Lexbase, discovered that Mainland Chinese families have doubled the rate at which they’re sending their children to Canadian elementary and high schools. Four out of 10 foreign students in Canada, including those from Mainland China, now apply for “secondary school or less.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Mixed motives fuel rise of foreign students | Vancouver Sun

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ICYMI – Douglas Todd: The dangers of a ‘postnational’ Canada

2016/03/29 Leave a comment

Douglas Todd wades into the post-nationalist debate and framing Canada in terms of common values, as does PM Trudeau, rather than on an ethnic basis.

Before digging further into the influences behind our over-heated housing markets, however, I’ll make a case for healthy nationalism.

Avoid extremes

The first thing to keep in mind is to not judge nationalism by its extremes.

As G.K. Chesterton once said, condemning nationalism because it can lead to war is like condemning love because it can lead to murder.

In recent years many regions have developed generally positive forms of nationalism, Scotland, the Czech Republic, the U.S., Argentina, Japan, Sweden to name a few.

Healthy nationalism encourages diverse people to cooperate.

“Patriotism is what makes us behave unselfishly. It is why we pay taxes to support strangers, why we accept election results when we voted for the loser, why we obey laws with which we disagree,” writes Daniel Hannan, author of Inventing Freedom.

“A functioning state requires broad consensus on what constitutes the first-person plural. Take that sense away, you get Syria or Iraq or Ukraine or — well, pretty much any war zone you can name.”

Though Canada’s particular style of nationalism is fluid and not simple to define, it’s part of what makes the country attractive to immigrants, who often arrive from dysfunctional regions torn by corruption and cynicism about national officials.

Many immigrants seem to realize that it’s not normally nationalism that foments catastrophic division, it’s religion, race or tribalism.

In contrast, some of the world’s most economically successful and egalitarian countries have a sense of mutual trust and appreciation for good government that is in part based on the glue of nationalism.

People in proud Nordic countries, for instance, often decorate even their birthday cakes with their national flags. At the same time Nordic nations are generous to their disadvantaged and in distributing foreign aid.

Michael McDonald, former head of the University of B.C.’s Centre for Applied Ethics, thinks Trudeau’s belief that Canada is the world’s first “postnational state” emerges out of his concern that it’s dangerous to “affirm a dominant culture that suppresses and marginalizes those outside the mainstream.”

But even though the ethics professor believes it’s important to protect minorities, he isn’t prepared to overlook the value of nationalism.

McDonald believes being Canadian is like being a member of a community, or a big family.

“Some are born into the family and others are adopted. There is a shared family history — interpreted in diverse ways,” McDonald says.

“Not everyone is happy being in the family. Some think being a family member is important and others do not. But we are shaped by our families, and we shape ourselves within and sometimes against our families. So also with our country.”

Transnationalist dangers

Embracing McDonald’s view that Canada is a giant, unruly but somewhat bonded family, I’d suggest Trudeau contradicts himself, or is at least being naive, when he argues Canada is a postnational state.

On one hand Trudeau claims Canada has no “core identity.” On the other hand he says the Canadian identity is quite coherent — we all share the values of “openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice.”

Can it be both ways?

Most Canadians don’t think so. Regardless of what Trudeau told the New York Times, a recent Angus Reid Institute poll confirmed what many Canadians judge to be common sense: 75 per cent of residents believe there is a “unique Canadian culture.”

Less a contradiction than a refinement of what is common to Canadians (imperfectly, of course).

Source: Douglas Todd: The dangers of a ‘postnational’ Canada

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Douglas Todd: Divorce, Shariah and gold coins

2016/03/02 Leave a comment

 I always find Todd’s articles of interest and this one is no exception:

Lawyer Zahra Jenab often comes face to face with couples embroiled in acidic disputes over a small fortune in gold.The West Vancouver family lawyer, who was born in Iran and raised in Canada, works frequently with ex-partners wrangling over thousands of gold coins, which may or may not have been given by the husband in a dowry under Islamic Shariah law.

Canadian courts are increasingly being called upon to rule on religious laws of the Middle East and Asia. But they’re finding it tricky to distribute family property across nations and in an era when dowries contain symbolic promises of Qur’ans along with valuable coins.

Jenab has made her way through hundreds of trans-national divorces in which Canadian family law clashes with traditions from Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, East Africa and East Asia, and her desk is piled with yellow case files.

When separating immigrant women and men ask her why their divorces can’t follow the rules of their old country, Jenab has to tell them: “Because we’re in Canada, now.”

Estranged couples can be devastated when they discover the religious laws of their homelands don’t apply in Canada.

“My heart often breaks for the suffering couple,” Jenab said. “But the driving issue is Shariah property law.”

As trans-national divorce increasingly falls under the scrutiny of Canadian judges, the decisions they’re making about what Shariah says about the distribution of property are “all over the map,” Jenab said.

Unfortunately, an expert witness on Shariah has not emerged to guide Canada’s courts.

The focus of many trans-national divorces in Canada is the often-considerable dowry, sometimes known as a mahr or meher, which is customary in most countries containing the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims.

“The dowry is financial security for the female. It is the man’s promise to provide finances, often in gold. It can be claimed by her at any time.”

When discord tears apart the bonds of matrimony, as it often does in all cultures, conflicts over often-unwritten promises about dowries can become intense.

In some countries where Shariah is enshrined, Jenab says, men can be arrested for not providing the dowry when the wife demands it.

…Property rights are also often not equal in many Muslim countries, where males are favoured.

Trans-national divorces, as a result, are often complicated when spouses work, or hold property, in their country of origin. “That makes the fair division of property hard to enforce.”

Many of Jenab’s clients, women and men, end up wanting both the benefits of Canada’s relatively equal family law and the advantages of their traditional religious culture.

They’re often stunned or angry, she said, when they learn Canadian family law — including the ideal of parents sharing joint custody of children — doesn’t line up with their religious customs.

“It’s difficult to see families struggle as they move out of their marriages, especially the children,” Jenab said. “That’s why I try to talk everyone down from taking a scorched-earth approach.”

http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas+todd+clash+cultures+divorce+shariah+gold/11753275/story.html

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ICYMI: Douglas Todd: Lest we overlook the ‘Asian Holocaust’

2016/03/01 Leave a comment

Good piece by Todd:

Nazi Germany’s invasions and the Holocaust have been thoroughly exposed through an avalanche of books and movies. Germany’s leaders have repeatedly apologized and offered redress. And the German people, including the young, carry the guilt of their forebears’ atrocities.

That’s not the case when it comes to Japan’s war crimes.

Eugene Sledge, a U.S. professor and veteran who advised Ken Burns on his documentary, War, has said: “The best kept secret about World War II is the truth about the Japanese atrocities.”

The full horror of Japanese aggression began manifesting itself first in 1937, when Japanese soldiers launched a brutal, sexually sadistic invasion of the Chinese city of Nanking.

Peter Li, an historian at Rutgers University, continues to think Canada and the U.S. have to be held responsible for Japanese internment camps. But he also doesn’t want the world to turn a blind eye to the devastation wrought by Japan.

“As Auschwitz has become a symbol of the Jewish Holocaust and Nazi atrocities in World War II, the ‘Rape of Nanking’ has become the symbol of the Japanese military’s monstrous and savage cruelty in the Asia Pacific War from 1931 to 1945,” Li says.

“But in comparison to the Jewish Holocaust, relatively little has been written about the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese military in China, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Indonesia, where close to 50 million people died at the hands of Japanese aggression. In China alone, an estimated 30 million people lost their lives.”

Given the hot spotlight on Nazi Germany, it’s little wonder those who want to shift the attention of resistant Westerners to Japan’s war crimes often use the term, “the Asian Holocaust.”

Why have Japan’s war outrages lacked the scrutiny directed at Germany?

The University of Victoria’s John Price is among those who argue one reason for the silence has been U.S. strategy since the war. After Japan surrendered in 1945, the U.S. occupied the country and turned it into an ally in its conflicts with Communist China, Korea and elsewhere. Needing a “friend” in Asia, the U.S. and other Western powers, Price suggests, have not found it in their interest to rub Japan’s nose in its iniquities.

The second reason lies in Western guilt over dropping atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Those explosions helped force Japan to surrender, but at the cost of roughly 100,000 civilian lives.

As a result, in East Asia, controversy burns openly over whether Japan should more fully apologize for starting the war. But in Canada the question rarely comes up.

That’s despite Canada sending thousands of young soldiers to the Asian war, where many were killed or injured or suffered torture and mistreatment.

A person needs a strong stomach to read even a basic Wikipedia page about “Japanese war atrocities.”

Japanese military leaders often ordered troops to “Kill all captives,” says Li, editor of Japanese War Crimes: The Search for Justice. Japanese troops were routinely ordered to decapitate, rape or pour gasoline on citizens and prisoners of war.

When Japan’s soldiers weren’t burying humans alive, they were told to build their courage by plunging 15-inch bayonets into unarmed people. “Killing was a form of entertainment,” says Li. The indignities performed on corpses of victims of rape are too gruesome to cite.

Grassroots efforts to draw attention to the need for fuller Japanese apologies and redress have faced a mountain of obfuscation and denial.

Unlike in Germany, Japan’s responsibility for the war “is not clearly established in the minds of many Japanese today,” says Li. “The Japanese people have introduced the notion of ‘a good defeat’ … and they rarely invoke an enemy, or hatred for the enemy. Somehow the war has become an ‘enemy-less’ conflict.”

Last year, on the 70th anniversary of the war, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed his “profound grief” for his country’s actions.

But Abe continues to send mixed messages, since he has also visited the Yasukani Shrine, which contains graves of Japan’s worst war criminals. And accounts of war atrocities remain slim to non-existent in Japanese textbooks.

Source: Douglas Todd: Lest we overlook the ‘Asian Holocaust’

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Douglas Todd: Canadian aboriginals joining Christian clergy despite residential-school legacy

2016/02/09 Leave a comment

Interesting piece by Douglas Todd on indigenous peoples and spirituality. When I was looking at religious affiliation in my book, Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote, one of the bigger surprises was the low number following traditional Aboriginal spirituality:

The biggest group of Canadian aboriginals, 506,000, affiliate with Roman Catholicism. The National Household Survey found another 134,000 associate with the Anglican Church, 59,000 with the United Church and 36,000 are Pentecostal.

Almost one in five aboriginals say they have “no religion.” And 63,000 say they follow traditional aboriginal spirituality.

Dozens of aboriginal clergy in the Anglican, United Church, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches have trained through the Native Ministries Consortium at Vancouver School of Theology on the UBC campus. Every summer, 40 to 60 aboriginal theology students take programs at The Native Ministries Consortium, says director Ray Aldred, who is Cree.

The students are often from the West Coast — Salish, Haida, Tsimshian, etc. Other indigenous students hail from Ontario, the Arctic and the Prairies. That’s not to mention Lakota, Navajo or Nez Perce from the U.S.

Contrary to most media reports about Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Aldred believes “aboriginal anger about white Christianity” and the legacy of residential schools abated more than a decade ago.

“I think in the 1950s the churches began realizing they had made a mistake with residential schools. But it took another 50 years to get out of them,” said Aldred, 56.

The churches closed almost all residential schools by the 1970s, but the federal government’s billion-dollar compensation and healing program is continuing.

“Now we can do Christian faith on our own terms,” said Aldred, who was baptized in the United Church but is now a minister in the Alliance Church. “That’s the cool thing about Canada. We seem to find ways to get along.”

Both Aldred and Nahanee feel they have integrated Christianity into their aboriginal traditions.

“I believe Christianity is everyone’s religion. It’s not just white man’s religion,” said Nahanee, 63, who also chairs the Canadian Catholic Aboriginal Council.

Nahanee often holds a talking stick or eagle feather when he’s in the pulpit at St. Paul’s Church, which is decorated with aboriginal designs and where he co-ministers with his Filipina wife, Emma, 53.

The Catholic Church allows deacons, unlike its priests, to be married. However, Nahanee and Emma joked about how the church would not permit him to remarry if she died.

Even though Nahanee would like to see Pope Francis repeat earlier Vatican apologies for Canada’s residential-school system, including one that operated a few hundred metres from St. Paul’s Church, he regrets how some good things that happened in the schools are being ignored.

“People are now afraid to say positive things about the schools,” said Nahanee. He noted, for instance, that in the late 1800s the Catholic priest for St. Paul’s Church and its related residential school stopped an attempt by the legendary Vancouver saloon owner, “Gassy Jack” Deighton, to seize Squamish Nation land.

Nahanee is convinced Christianity, at its best, adds to aboriginal culture. He knows it might not be for everyone, but he urges aboriginals and others who are angry about the past to find ways to transcend it.

“I think forgiveness is a way of healing and getting on with our lives. We’ve had so many problems because of anger and alcoholism. It has to end.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Canadian aboriginals joining Christian clergy despite residential-school legacy

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Douglas Todd: ‘Ethnic economies’ on the rise in North America

2016/02/01 Leave a comment

Interesting piece on ethnic economies, familiar to anyone in Canada’s major cities with ethnic neighbourhoods. My sense is this is particularly true for small businesses (e.g., stores, restaurants) and thus the larger questions of discrimination are less likely to have a significant impact:

Although the concept is sometimes considered controversial because it suggests ethnic groups are in competition with each other, most Western scholars are either neutral or positive about the rapid expansion of ethnic economies.

Light and Gold assert that ethnic solidarity can be highly advantageous in business. “Ethnic-based collectivism makes a difference to the economic status of immigrants and minority groups.”

Ethnic economies are particularly important to cities such as Metro Vancouver and Toronto, where the populations are more than 45 per cent foreign born.

Metro Vancouver and Toronto have dozens of Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Iranian, Pakistani, Korean and other ethnic enclaves, which often form the basis of ethnic economies (although ethnic economies can operate outside a specific geographical area).

University of B.C. geographer Daniel Hiebert has found people in enclaves in which a single ethno-cultural group predominates tend to do better economically than people in enclaves in which no single ethic group prevails.

Comparing neighbourhoods by income levels, unemployment, welfare rates and home ownership, Hiebert says residents of enclaves in which one group dominates have the benefit of unique business and job opportunities.

“Ethnic economies are situations where entrepreneurs in a group employ co-ethics and specialize in particular industrial sectors, for example, Vietnamese immigrants in nail salons in New York City or Indian immigrants in the American hotel sector,” Hiebert says.

“Living in the midst of a large co-ethnic group may be beneficial, perhaps by enabling people to access social capital, or perhaps through the employment opportunities that may arise in … ethnic economies.”

A few decades ago, the conventional theory was that ethnic economies formed because immigrants faced discrimination in the mainstream job market. But, with the rise of equal rights in the 1960s, scholars now generally believe it’s frequently a bonus for immigrants to have access to ethnic economies.

Alireza Ahmadian, an Iranian-born research associate at Vancouver’s Laurier Institution, said enclaves fuel ethnic economies because they provide a place where newcomers and strangers can meet co-ethnics and discuss challenges.

“One of the first items on their agenda is business. These conversations sometimes lead to business partnerships. The issue of trust is an important one in driving ethnic economies. For many new and first-generation immigrants, it is easier to trust someone from their own culture who speaks their language.”

Few researchers of ethnic economies have taken on the kind of ethical issues that the co-author of Freakonomics explored in his discussion of possibly discriminatory hiring practices, however.

North American human rights law places many restrictions on hiring people based on their ethnicity, particularly if a company has more than 10 to 15 employees.

For instance, a Mexican restaurant in Houston, Texas, was recently fined for terminating a black and a Filipino employee because they didn’t speak Spanish.

The U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission successfully argued the Mexican restaurant was using language as a “pretext” for hiring only Hispanics.

Despite such anti-discrimination laws, it has become increasingly common for some employers in Canada, particularly in Metro Vancouver and Toronto, to require proficiency in a foreign language.

Albert Lo, head of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, said it’s often possible to make a legitimate “business case” that a prospective employee might need to speak a certain foreign language.

But Lo said it’s always crucial to keep an eye out for when a language requirement is used as a cover for ethnic discrimination — and for when the ethnic-employee ratio of a company becomes “out of sync with the community it serves.”

Lo, a former real estate developer, said the subject of ethnic economies can sometimes be “divisive.”

In Western societies in which most companies, the public sector and non-profit organizations are legally required to be “colour-blind” — and are pressed to hire employees from a range of ethno-cultural groups — ethnic economies go the opposite direction.

Despite thorny questions regarding discrimination and ethnic competition, the traditional theory that ethnic economies rise because of discrimination in the larger marketplace is now rarely heard, according to the book Landscapes of the Ethnic Economy, edited by David Kaplan and Wei Li.

Immigrant-fuelled economies have “matured” and “drastically transformed” Canada’s major cities, says York University’s Lucia Lo. Scores of Chinese malls, for instance, now exist in the “ethno-burbs” of Toronto and Vancouver, Lo writes, because that’s what many ethnic Chinese want.

Source: Douglas Todd: ‘Ethnic economies’ on the rise in North America

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Douglas Todd: Movie shines a ‘Spotlight’ on corruption

2016/01/25 Leave a comment

Douglas Todd’s reflections on why the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal and cover-up was challenged earlier and more effectively in Canada:

People have to be ready for the truth before it can be revealed.

That’s a theme of the riveting, award-winning movie, Spotlight, which recounts how the Boston Globe newspaper laid bare an ecclesiastical and political coverup of rampant pedophilia by more than 87 Roman Catholic priests and brothers.

After years of Boston Globe staff ignoring clergy abuse cases, the newspaper’s investigative team, called Spotlight, broke its explosive story in 2002. It led to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law and helped elevate clergy abuse into an international issue, which continues to reverberate.

The Canadian media, however, produced many stories about widespread sexual abuse by Catholic priests and brothers much earlier than the Boston Globe. The spate of Canadian articles began in 1989 with Newfoundland’s Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal, first reported by The Sunday Express under publisher Michael Harris.

That was 12 years before the Boston exposé. Nevertheless, the historical timeline of 20th-century Catholic abuse that is on the Spotlight film’s website contains no mention of the mass abuse of Mount Cashel orphans (which powerfully impacted two Metro Vancouver Catholic schools) or scores of other Canadian cases.

It appears most Canadians were ready, before most Americans, to admit to the horrible truth of Catholic clergy pedophilia. By the time the Boston exposé was published, the Canadian media had run thousands of articles about molesting clergy.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, under the direction of retired Vancouver archbishop Adam Exner, had also responded to the debacle as early as the mid-1990s — by creating a complaints process that supported abuse victims in going to police.

That kind of protocol was not in place in 2002 in the U.S., and especially in Boston, where Catholics dominated culture, politics, business, philanthropy, high society, the police and even the judiciary.

Almost every city has a powerful elite that operates behind the scenes to sway regional affairs. In Boston, it was the Catholic establishment, which did everything it could to keep a lid on decades of the clergy’s destructive behaviour.

At one point in Spotlight the Boston Globe’s publisher cautions his staff against running the clergy abuse investigation by warning that 53 per cent of the newspaper’s readers are Catholic.

Such pervasive resistance to the Catholic Church exposé leads one of Spotlight’s investigative reporters (played by Mark Ruffalo) to finally burst: “They control everything! Everything!”

Even though the Canadian census says 43 per cent of Canadians have an affiliation with the Catholic Church, Canadian courts, governments and journalists have been less hesitant than most Americans to wade assertively into church sex-abuse cases.

I wrote a story in 1993 that calculated the Canadian media had by then reported on more than 100 Canadian Catholic priests and brothers who had been charged or convicted of sex crimes.

It’s hard to know why Canadians were more ready to recognize the appalling truth.

It may have grown out of the way Canadians are, in some ways, less deferential than Americans to Catholic leaders, more questioning of authority in general, more frank about homosexuality and more willing to deal with the shame associated with sexual abuse.

Source: Douglas Todd: Movie shines a ‘Spotlight’ on corruption

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Douglas Todd: Iranian-Canadians find road to integration is a rocky one

2016/01/11 Leave a comment

While largely anecdotal in nature, interesting piece on Iranian Canadians by Douglas Todd, focussing on Vancouver but including Toronto.

My sense is that most Iranians integrate reasonably well. NHS 2011 data shows 55 percent of working age adults (25-64) are university-educated, 77 participate in the workforce, although unemployment is higher at 9.7 percent than non-visible minorities. Median employment income is about $50,000, comparable to those of Canadian ethnic origin. 73 percent have Canadian citizenship.

Like other groups, of course, Iranian Canadians tend to concentrate in a number of neighbourhoods, as any drive in North Vancouver or north of Steeles on Yonge St in Toronto will attest:

“There is little or no incentive for some recent immigrants to integrate into mainstream Canadian society,” says Ahmadian.

“Immigrants who do not want to get a university degree (in Canada) have little or no incentive to learn English fluently. For recent immigrants from Iran, there are Iranian brokers, Iranian financial advisers, Iranian salespeople and Iranian physicians.”

This creates something that sociologists refer to as an ethnic economy. “Iranian immigrants who do not know the rules and regulations in Canada have no choice but to trust the service providers. And when there is no need to master the English language, some people take the easy route of staying in their ‘own community’,” said Ahmadian.

The social pressure among Iranians to communicate mainly in Farsi has recently been on display among the thousands of Iranians in Metro who attend events devoted to the poetry of the Persian mystic, Jalaladin Rumi. An outcry recently ensued when some Iranians suggested the city’s Rumi events occasionally be switched from Farsi to English.

Language barriers are most noticeable among immigrants who arrive in late adulthood, says Karimaei, a building developer who is also founder of The Iranian Calligraphers Association of North America, which is centred in the North Shore cultural centre.

“They have nothing to do,” Karimaei said. “They say they are not good over here. They don’t want to integrate. They’re just involved in the Persian events.”

Despite inevitable difficulties learning English as a second language, Esmaeilpour said it is the responsibility of new Iranian immigrants to do so.

“If you are a guest in a house, the first thing you should do is learn their language. That is out of respect for the host.”

Religion’ role

While Iran is often portrayed in the Western media as a country full of rigorous Shia Muslims, many Iranian-Canadians say they have gone a different path.

“You don’t even need to go to the mosque to be spiritual,” says Esmaeilpour.

Although some among the most recent wave of immigrants are devout Shia Muslims, Karimaei estimated only 15 per cent of Iranians in British Columbia regularly go to mosque.

Rohani, a member of the Baha’i faith that has been persecuted in Iran, believes only a tiny portion of Iranian-Canadians are religious hardliners.

Indeed, Rohani said many Iranians are like most other Canadians; open to secularism and alternative spiritualities.

That’s why, he says, evangelicals on the North Shore and elsewhere have recently had success in starting Christian congregations specifically designed for Iranians.

Source: Douglas Todd: Iranian-Canadians find road to integration is a rocky one

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Douglas Todd: Richmond toughens stance on Chinese-language signs

2015/12/18 Leave a comment

Finding the balance:

After years of dismissing residents’ worries about the expansion of Chinese-language signs in Richmond, the city is hiring a new staff person to press for more signs to include English.

Richmond last week quietly posted a full-time job for a sign inspector. The inspector’s duties will include educating business owners about the city’s policy, which says signs should contain 50-per-cent English lettering.

“I think the issue is being taken more seriously than it once was,” Councillor Alexa Loo said this week.

Loo, who was elected to council in the fall of 2014, had previously said it was “ridiculous” that Chinese-only signs were on the rise in Richmond, despite ethnic Chinese now making up one out of two residents.

Richmond’s current council, Loo said, is slowly becoming convinced that community “harmony” is threatened by a proliferation of signs that cannot be read by those who do not read Chinese.

The city’s decision to hire someone to educate businesses about English on signs is a significant change.

Only a few years ago former Richmond city bylaw manager Wayne Mercer said every month he would tell yet another “anxious and insecure” Richmond resident that the city correctly intended to do “nothing” about Chinese-only and Chinese-dominant signs.

Joe Greenholtz, a member of Richmond’s intercultural advisory committee, also brushed aside the concerns of people who felt alienated by Chinese-only signs.

Longtime Richmond residents who complain about signs, Greenholtz wrote in 2012, are simply “feeling the pain of being irrelevant in their own backyards for the first time.” At the time, Greenholtz, an immigration consultant, argued the sign issue was solely a matter of commerce, but more recently he acknowledged community cohesiveness is also at stake.

The city’s records show Richmond residents were going to council to express concerns about Chinese-only signs as far back as 1997.

In was only in recent years that some residents became more vocal, launched petitions and eventually brought international attention to Richmond, whose population is 62-per-cent foreign born.

The tide began turning late last year when retiring Richmond councillor Evelina Halsey-Brandt admitted she had been mistaken in believing the sign controversy would “solve itself.”

Halsey-Brandt urged the new council to find a way to ensure that a large portion of the 200,000 residents of Richmond don’t end up “feeling that they don’t belong in their own city.”

Between 1981 and 2011, Statistics Canada figures show the ethnic Chinese population of Richmond expanded by 80,000. In the same period, the white population had a net loss of 28,000 people.

In response to increasing debate, a group of prominent Metro Vancouver Chinese business leaders gathered in Richmond in May and urged all immigrants to “follow Canadian customs” and include English in their signs.

For his part, Richmond Councillor Chak Au says he has been waiting for years for other council members to come around to his viewpoint.

“I was the only one four years ago who was saying we should go to bilingual signs,” Au said.

“In the beginning, the others didn’t want to do anything.”

Many Richmond residents remain disappointed the city’s new inspector is being asked only to “encourage” business owners to make signs 50-per-cent English.

Richmond activist Kerry Starchuk, who has been interviewed by media outlets across Europe and Asia, said this week the city and province aren’t being nearly proactive enough.

“This is just as minimal as what can be done,” she said. Without enforceable municipal and provincial legislation, Starchuk believes, almost nothing will change in regards to the proliferation of Chinese-only or Chinese-dominant signs.

For their part, Au and Loo want to avoid formal sign bylaws. They believe it’s more “harmonious” to have a staff member try to persuade businesses to include English, to improve cross-cultural communication.

Au and Loo also worry Richmond could open itself up to a charter challenge if it requires English. Even though the province of Quebec has laws preserving the French language in signs, Loo said Quebec has more constitutional authority than B.C.

The executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which has threatened to take Richmond to court over the sign issue, told The Vancouver Sun in July that individual rights trump community concerns. Some BCCLA board members, however, have since questioned Josh Paterson’s position.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/douglas+todd+richmond+toughens+stance+chinese+language+signs/11597065/story.html#ixzz3uff8Oi1uSource: Douglas Todd: Richmond toughens stance on Chinese-language signs

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Douglas Todd: Racism, a word to use with care

2015/12/07 Leave a comment

Perspective from former British Columbia Premier and federal cabinet minister Dosanjh:

Suffering is difficult to compare — and the fact such global acts of racism are more enormous than what has happened in B.C. or Canada does not lessen the pain for those who have been discriminated against here.

Nevertheless, when former B.C. premier Ujjal Dosanjh first came to Canada almost 50 years ago, he was among the many newcomers who found the West Coast a “fair and inclusive” place compared to where he had been.

After growing up in the Punjab region of South Asia and later moving to Britain, Dosanjh was relieved to come to B.C. and get away from the exceptional “colour consciousness” and harsh caste system he had experienced in India.

The budding young lawyer was also pleased to leave behind the marauding “skin heads and teddy boys” of England, where maverick politician Enoch Powell had just made his infamous 1968 “rivers of blood” speech about unchecked immigration.

B.C.’s record in regards to racism is “not great historically,” says Dosanjh, who served in the federal Liberal cabinet following years as a provincial NDP cabinet minister and premier.

Still, Dosanjh believes it’s wise to put past incidents of B.C. racism into perspective.

“We have learned in B.C. And we’ve been moving forward, including on the First Nations file. To not acknowledge the distance we have come is to do an injustice to Canada,” he says.

Dosanjh remains painfully aware of the ruthless bigotry promulgated elsewhere today, and not only by ISIS. He knows hundreds of millions of India’s lower castes are still discriminated against as “unclean” and that China continues to brutally target Muslim ethnic minorities.

The term racism is often abused in Canada, Dosanjh believes. Last week he gained national attention, and applause, for challenging how Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne tossed out the epithet.

When Wynne suggested people criticizing the federal government’s promise to rapidly bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada were masking “racism and xenophobia,” Dosanjh said Wynne had “in one fell swoop” insulted not only him but the 67 per cent of Canadians who disagreed with the government.

Dosanjh believes Wynne was trying to silence Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s critics by lobbing the often-misused word (which the Oxford Dictionary helpfully defines as “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior”).

Similarly, people of many ethnicities have charged Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and the city’s housing developers with manipulating the racist label to shut down protests about the way international investors are fuelling Metro Vancouver’s astronomical housing prices.

In ethics, the principal of proportionality is key. In just-war theory, the response to an act of aggression should be proportional to the initial violence. In the courts, the punishment should fit the crime.

Is it possible that many charges about B.C.’s history of racism are disproportionate?

For his part, Dosanjh said he “doesn’t recognize” the portraits of a horrifyingly racist B.C. often painted by academics and activists.

“Some experts become vested in continuing to say what they’re saying even when things have changed. They focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else. It’s like a new religion; after it starts, it ossifies.”

Does it create unnecessary division to allege that racial intolerance has been worse that it actually has been?

It’s crucial to remain on guard and denounce racism whenever it arises. But, in the name of proportionality and building community, it’s also important not to exaggerate it.

Source: Douglas Todd: Racism, a word to use with care

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