New immigration minister says Trump presidency could prompt best and brightest to choose Canada 

2025/03/22 Leave a comment

Of note (HESA also made a similar pitch):

The new Immigration Minister Rachel Bendayan thinks the Trump presidency is creating an “incredible opportunity” for Canada to attract the best and brightest from around the world – including talented people currently living in the United States.

In her first interview since being appointed to the portfolio in the cabinet shuffle last week, Ms. Bendayan said she had already discussed with fellow ministers the prospect of successful and highly educated people wanting to live here instead of the U.S.

“What I’m hearing is that people are thinking more and more about Canada, whether it’s in the United States, and Americans thinking about making the trip north, or quite frankly right around the world,” she said. “I think we could attract some of the best minds around the world, just as the United States once did. I think there’s an incredible opportunity to attract the best and the brightest, including from the United States to Canada.”

Donald Trump has criticized Canada’s immigration policies, implying they are lax, an accusation that Ms. Bendayan said is ”very far from the truth.”

She said Canada has “a robust immigration system” and “we take security very seriously.”

She said there is already a lot of co-operation and information sharing with the U.S. “in order to make sure that North America is a secure environment” and that is increasing.

But Ms. Bendayan said she wanted to make further reductions to the number of migrants living in Canada – including temporary migrants.

Last November, the government sharply tightened migration targets as part of its annual immigration levels plan. Ms. Bendayan said she wanted to maintain a downward trend for both permanent and non-permanent residents.

She said figures released this week showing a big reduction in the number of temporary residents are “important and certainly trending in the right direction.”

“But that number still needs to continue to come down,” she said….

Source: New immigration minister says Trump presidency could prompt best and brightest to choose Canada

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An Arab festival, a headless clown, a sword—cue the outrage

2015/11/07 Leave a comment

Martin Patriquin on the humour of the Festival du Monde Arabe de Montréal:

The festival team did so by adopting a particularly ballsy theme for this year’s festival. The FMA has never been particularly anodyne; last year’s theme was “Folies Métèques,” which translates roughly to “dirty immigrant follies.” This year’s theme goes further with  “Hilarus Delirus,” an apparent double entendre meaning either hilarious delirium or delirious slave (Hilarus was a gladiator owned by the Roman emperor Nero). The idea is that laughing  through anything—up to and including decapitation—is the best revenge against one’s decapitators, figurative or otherwise.

The festival itself further destroys the cliché that Arab culture is a desert of bloody austerity. If the headless clown wasn’t enough, consider the accompanying video by Lynda Thalie, a Montreal singer who originally hails from Algeria. It is a five-minute carnival of painted faces and naked flesh set to Arab strings­—a Muslim fundamentalist’s nightmare, performed by an Algerian woman. The lineup also includes Iraqi-Montrealer rapper Narcicyst, who is as outspoken about Islamic fundamentalist regimes as he is of what he sees as the West’s enabling of them.

The festival’s theme also exposes another unspoken truth: that the critiquing of religious fundamentalism is most visibly the domain of non-Arabs. It makes it all too easy for apologists of, say, the murder of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists to to wrap themselves in the veil of Muslim persecution. The FMA’s headless clown lays waste to this specious argument. It is heartening to see Arabs—namely, the Muslims, Berbers, Christians and Jews who comprise the FMA team—critique the very same fundamentalism. (An important aside: the clown bleeds words and musical notes, not blood.)

Quebec has had a tumultuous few years in regards to Muslims and other religious minorities. After the Parti Québécois’s electoral attempts to remove all religious symbols from the bodies of its public servantsin 2013, the newly elected Liberals went to another absurd extreme, by introducing a bill that many legal experts say would make it illegal to critique any organized religion. Both are shoddy in their own way. Thankfully, both failed to become law.

By laughing through his own misery, the headless clown is a reminder that the best line of attack against fundamentalism isn’t through laws or government decrees. It’s as simple as embracing the culture and deriding the extremists who would dare try to smother it.

Source: An Arab festival, a headless clown, a sword—cue the outrage

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Cleese and Maher on Political Correctness

2014/12/02 Leave a comment

John Cleese and Bill Maher on political correctness (at the 2 min mark):

Money quote from Cleese:

Any kind of fundamentalism is terribly funny.

Of course it is. I particularly liked Cleese’s comment about the condescension involved in ruling certain groups as impermissible targets of humor. There’s this deeply patronizing idea that minorities are fragile, terribly vulnerable, unable to laugh at themselves, and incapable of the to-and-fro of democratic debate and conversation. One reason I find the latest upsurge in identity politics on the left so dispiriting (and boring) is the assumption that minorities of a few kinds are so vulnerable, so oppressed, so burdened by majoritarian prejudice that they have to go through life demanding safe zones from “micro-aggressions” and other terrible assaults on their delicate sensibilities. Members of a minority are reduced to quivering recipients of “hate”, rather than actual living, breathing, thinking people who can surely give as good as they get in public discourse. But it appears an entire generation has now been educated into this mindless, maudlin mush.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend « The Dish.

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