Keller: The Liberals have broken Canada’s immigration system

2023/08/19 Leave a comment

The Globe continues its transition from an immigration booster, hosting Century Initiative events, to one of the more trenchant critics of current policies, with weekly if not more frequent negative and well argued commentary:

Canada’s immigration system used to be the envy of the world.

Note my use of the past tense.

To appreciate what was good about Canada’s previous immigration strategy – the one followed until recently through governments Progressive Conservative, Conservative and Liberal – contrast it with the dysfunction of our friends down south.

Since the 1980s, the United States has had relatively low legal immigration compared with Canada. The U.S. also wasn’t particularly focused on admitting the highly educated and highly skilled. And there was an unofficial immigration stream – called illegal immigration or undocumented immigration, depending on one’s politics – that involved millions of people, most in low-skill, low-wage jobs.

In 2015, when the Trudeau Liberals came into office, Canada was already a high-immigration country, with a rate two-and-a-half times higher than the U.S. More importantly, Canada was a smart immigration country, with immigration selection built around the points system, which sent educated, skilled, young immigrants to the front of the line.

Both countries’ immigration had long been a mix of family reunification, refugees and economic immigrants, but Canada put the accent on the latter. Within the economic stream, our points system put the emphasis on people who were more educated or skilled than the average Canadian, and whose contribution could boost not just gross domestic product, but GDP per capita.

A skilled immigrant doesn’t just grow the size of the economic pie. They’re likely to grow it at a rate greater than the rising number of forks in the pie.

As for the U.S., it stood out for having a large pool of permanently temporary immigrants, most filling low-wage jobs. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimated that there were 12 million people classified as illegal aliens in the country.

Canada’s own count was unclear, but clearly far lower.

And that was at least partly because of another bipartisan Canadian policy choice. This country had long devoted considerable efforts to making it hard to enter or remain in Canada without permission. People from countries whose citizens had a record of overstaying tourist visas found it extremely difficult to get a tourist visa.

A 2017 World Economic Forum survey ranked Canada as having among the world’s most stringent travel visa rules, placing us at 120th out of 136 countries. But that this was a feature of the Canadian system, not a bug.

We had a wider door than the U.S., yet taller walls. The welcome mat and the walls were complimentary, not contradictory. Canada was a high immigration country with unusually high public support for immigration. Why? Because the manner, scale, makeup and regularity of immigration clearly benefitted Canada, and Canadians.

Our immigration approach was successful, stable and boring.

In 2013, the U.S. Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act. The bill died in the House of Representatives because the Republican leadership refused to take it up – they wanted to campaign against illegal immigration, not fix it – but in the Senate it was supported by the entire Democratic caucus, plus a third of Republicans.

The legislation proposed a points system to focus admissions on skilled immigrants; more opportunities for visa students who earned advanced degrees in science, technology and engineering to remain in the U.S.; and strong measures to discourage illegal immigration.

Had it become law, it would have given the U.S. a more Canadian-style immigration system.

A lot has changed over the past decade. But not so much in the U.S.

Since 2015, the Trudeau government – with the co-operation of the provinces, educational institutions and business – has remade our immigration system. Without anyone noticing, and without public debate, it has become more American.

What gets most talked about most – and what isn’t American – is how Canadian immigration levels that had been stable for a generation are being steadily increased. By 2025, this country will be welcoming half a million new Canadians a year, and rising, double the number of a decade earlier.

But the Liberals have brought about a much bigger and little-noticed revolution in the shadow immigration system’s various temporary foreign worker streams – whose accent is on admitting people for low-skill, low-wage, low productivity jobs. Just like the shadow immigration system in the U.S.

Canada’s streams of temporary admissions are now larger than traditional immigration, and growing fast.

I’ve recently written about how hard it is for doctors – even Canadian graduates of overseas medical school – to get permission to work in Canada. The supply of these highly-educated professionals is greatly restricted.

At the same time, however, the Liberal government has gone to extraordinary lengths to give employers a nearly unlimited supply of low-wage workers, with many of those now arriving via the education visa stream. Those visas used to be entirely about education, but many schools now appear to be partly or even mostly peddling something else, namely the opportunity to reside and work in Canada, usually in a low-wage job.

More on this, and how to fix it, next week.

Source: Opinion: The Liberals have broken Canada’s immigration system

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Clark: Go big or go home on housing, Mr. Trudeau

2023/08/16 Leave a comment

As well as “going smaller” on immigration given the increased pressure and demand on housing:

Maybe it was just a coincidence that the new federal Housing Minister, Sean Fraser, told the press he’d be taking the train to an announcement in Burnaby, B.C., on Monday.

But Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre had been talking about building housing next to train stations in a social-media video he posted Saturday that garnered over two million views and won plaudits from housing experts.

That made Mr. Fraser’s arrival on the SkyTrain to talk about housing seem a little late. That’s a recurring problem for the Liberals.

The biggest, loudest, most obvious political issue in Canada is the high cost of housing. Yet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have been slow to see it build. And they still haven’t matched the public’s angst with governing ambition.

That’s baffling, if only because of the politics. Mr. Poilievre has been banging the housing issue like a drum for a year and half, striking a chord with couples who can’t afford a house and folks facing skyrocketing rents. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is now making it his theme in tour stops, too. And housing is a top-of-mind concern for many in cities and suburbs – and that’s core Liberal electoral geography.

Mr. Trudeau likes big policy initiatives in areas like child care or clean energy, yet he has sounded pretty ambivalent about housing lately. A few weeks ago, he backed into a vague answer about Ottawa’s plans with an assertion that much of the problem is in provincial jurisdiction, not federal.

But it should be obvious that Mr. Trudeau has to expand the scale of federal housing policy to another level.

Former Liberal policy adviser Tyler Meredith argues Mr. Trudeau should go big: by bringing the federal government back into funding large-scale development of affordable housing, creating tax incentives for residential building, adjusting infrastructure programs and policies in areas such as immigration and banking. Then, he suggests, the PM should call provincial premiers to a national housing summit.

Mr. Meredith wants to see the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation put tens of billions of dollars into developing affordable housing, noting that can be done without a major impact on Ottawa’s budget deficit or net debt, because Ottawa will own the buildings as an asset. It doesn’t have to be a landlord: It might lease those houses to non-profit organizations.

Policy thinkers have already proposed a number of solid, relatively low-cost ways to change the tax system to provide incentives to build – and acting on such things now should be a no-brainer.

One is eliminating the GST on purpose-built rental housing, which should seem like a good idea to Mr. Trudeau because it was in his 2015 Liberal election platform. Another, proposed by economist Mike Moffat and former Stephen Harper adviser Ken Boessenkool, working with the Smart Prosperity Institute, is more generous tax treatment for depreciation of residential buildings. Those two measures would cost the treasury relatively small sums.

Both the Liberals and the Conservatives have proposed using infrastructure spending as a lever to get municipalities to permit more building. Mr. Poilievre has called for Ottawa to withhold funds from cities that don’t approve housing projects quickly, while the Liberals have created a $4-billion “housing accelerator fund” to encourage towns to speed up the process.

And it’s pretty clear money will talk: Municipalities will be reluctant to lower the costs they charge to developers unless someone – Ottawa or the provincial government – replaces the revenue.

Mr. Meredith also thinks the Prime Minister should call premiers to a national housing summit, because a lot of the obstacles are at the provincial or municipal level, from building rules and permits to fees. Provinces are responsible for municipal governance.

Usually, prime ministers are wary of such summits as premiers tend to come to them with demands. But the cynical political calculation could be different for a prime minister launching major federal housing initiatives and inviting premiers to join the mission. It could shift some of the political pressure to act back to the provinces.

At any rate, Mr. Trudeau has reached a point where he has little time to catch up to the urgency many Canadians feel. The alternative is to roll out small initiatives and argue his government has done enough, and that means missing the train on the country’s hottest political issue.

Source: Go big or go home on housing, Mr. Trudeau

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , ,

Long way home: Blamed for affordability crisis, Liberals look to pivot on housing

2023/08/15 Leave a comment

But a real pivot has to include both immigration and housing….

Chris Burke and his fiancée have been less than a year away from buying their first home for the past three years.

Saving for a down payment was the first challenge. Now, rising interest rates have kicked home ownership down the road again, stalling the couple’s plans to get married and have children.

“Any gains we make towards purchasing a house, we’re watching the goalposts move further and further away,” the 31-year-old Ottawa resident said.

Feeling “stuck,” as Burke put it, is a sentiment shared by many young Canadians who are increasingly pessimistic about their home ownership prospects.

For the federal Liberals, the growing discontent with the state of the housing market is becoming a political threat.

“I’m a former Liberal voter,” Burke said. “I certainly wouldn’t be voting for them this time around.”

Experts say the housing crisis poses a great risk to the incumbent government in the next election if it doesn’t take drastic action soon.

“This has become probably the most important both economic and political problem facing the country right now,” said Tyler Meredith, a former head of economic strategy and planning for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.

“And especially given the significant emphasis the government has put on immigration and the relationship between immigration and the housing market, there is a need to do more.”

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has taken direct aim at the Liberals for the state of the housing market, highlighting the dramatic increases in home prices, rents and even interest rates.

According to the Canadian Real Estate Association, the national average price of a home sold was $709,000 in June 2023, up from $455,000 in Oct. 2015, when the Liberals first came to power.

And the cost of getting a mortgage has soared, following a series of aggressive interest rate increases by the Bank of Canada in response to rising inflation following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rent prices have also skyrocketed, with some cities seeing double-digit increases over the last year.

Trudeau has tried to deflect for the housing crisis, recently saying there are limits to what the federal government can do.

“I’ll be blunt as well: housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility,” Trudeau said during a housing announcement in Hamilton on July 31.

“It’s not something we have direct carriage of. But it is something that we can and must help with.”

His remarks were quickly blasted by Poilievre, who reminded people of earlier promises Trudeau had made on housing.

“(Trudeau) held a news conference … to tell you all he’s not responsible for housing. That’s funny, because eight years ago, he promised he was gonna lower housing costs,” Poilievre said in a news conference the next day.

Most experts agree that Ottawa isn’t solely responsible for the problem. But many say the federal government could still be doing more to alleviate the shortage of housing at the root of the affordability crunch.

The Canada Mortgage Housing Corp., the national housing agency, warned last year that the country needs to build 5.8 million homes by 2030 to restore affordability.

If the current pace of building continues, then only 2.3 million homes will have been added to the housing stock by then.

There are several things experts say the federal government could be doing, such as better calibrating its immigration policy with housing and reforming tax laws to incentivize rental developments. It could also push local governments to get housing built faster.

The federal government has been hearing from stakeholders and housing experts on these potential solutions, as rumblings grow about a focus on housing in the coming fall economic statement and next year’s budget.

A senior government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could discuss matters not yet made public, says the Liberals plan to take steps over the next year to get other levels of government, the private sector and the not-for-profit sector to build more homes.

Trudeau’s recent cabinet shuffle might be an early sign that the federal government plans to prioritize housing. The prime minister appointed one of the stronger communicators and a rising star on the Liberal bench, Sean Fraser, to take on housing and infrastructure as one, amalgamated file.

“The prime minister said something to the effect of, ‘I’ve got a big job for you to do,'” Fraser said in an interview.

Fraser said he hopes to help restore a housing market closer to the one he grew up with in small-town Nova Scotia: one where having a job was enough to buy a home.

“It might take a bit of time for us to solve the housing challenges that are before us,” he said. “But man, is it a challenge we’re solving.”

That challenge includes overcoming jurisdictional issues. Many of the policy levers that could help spur more housing development are at the provincial and municipal levels of government.

Urban planning, zoning laws and red tape are the purview of local governments, which have decision-making powers that can help or hinder housing development.

Ben Dachis, associate vice-president of public affairs at the C.D. Howe Institute, says the predicament the Liberals find themselves in speaks to the “insidious nature of consistent federal overreach.”

“The cautionary tale is that the federal government needs to stick with jurisdiction,” Dachis said.

But housing expert Carolyn Whitzman has a different take. The University of Ottawa adjunct professor says the federal government can’t turn its back on Canadians in the middle a crisis.

“The federal government: it’s where the buck stops,” Whitzman said.

“If housing and climate change are the crises that they’re certainly treated (as), the federal government is going to have to put on its big kid pants and actually deal with it.”

Source: Long way home: Blamed for affordability crisis, Liberals look to pivot on housing

Related article: Canada ‘absolutely’ can’t build more houses without more immigrants, minister says

Canada’s housing crisis “absolutely cannot” be solved without the aid of new immigrants who bring their skills here, Immigration Minister Marc Miller told reporters on Friday

“The federal government is making housing more affordable and bringing in the skilled workers required to build more homes,” Miller said in Montreal.

“Without those skilled workers coming from outside Canada, we absolutely cannot build the homes and meet the demand that exists currently today.”

Miller was asked by reporters if he was considering slashing Canada’s immigration targets, which are currently at historic highs, in response to a recent Bank of Canada report that new immigrants are adding to housing demand.

The minister said he was not.

“People coming to this country are resourceful. When they bring capital, they are able to acquire houses,” he said.

“If people are asking us to slash, what does that mean? Does that mean slashing the skilled workers that we need to actually build those houses? Slash family reunification, which can be devastating for the mental health and well-being of the families that are already here?”

Canada aims to welcome 451,000 new immigrants in 2024.

By 2025, the number is expected to go up to 500,000 new immigrants in one year.

Miller said around 60 per cent of new immigrants to Canada are economic migrants, many of whom are the kind of skilled workers needed to build more housing. Family reunification visas account for around 20 per cent of those migrating. The rest, he said, are refugees and asylum seekers.

“We have a humanitarian duty towards people that are fleeing war and persecution,” Miller said.

Last week, a spokesperson from Miller’s office told Global News that fulfilling Canada’s labour shortages is one of his key priorities, and a key goal of the government’s immigration targets.

“Strategies like Express Entry, and the historic Immigration Levels Plan, which is largely made up of economic migrants, are a great asset to our nation as they will directly help combat the ongoing labour shortage. This is especially true when it comes to the housing sector,” Bahoz Dara Aziz, press secretary to the immigration minister, told Global News.

“With provinces like Ontario needing 100,000 workers to meet their housing demands, it is clear that immigration will play a strong role in creating more homes for Canadians.”

The federal government increased its immigration targets in November 2022, and Miller has suggested those targets may need to keep rising.

The construction industry is short tens of thousands of workers, and experts say a coming wave of retirements could make the problem worse.

Meanwhile, Canada is millions of homes behind what’s needed to reach housing affordability this decade.

The job vacancy rate in construction is at a record high with around 80,000 vacancies in the industry,  CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal said in a recent note.

Those vacancies, which push up building costs and impede productivity, come at a time when the residential construction industry is under pressure to meet the demands of a growing population.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. forecasts a need for 3.5 million more homes by 2030 than the country is currently on track to build.

The number of new homes built, however, has been in decline, from just over 271,000 in 2021 to 260,000 in 2022. And in May this year, the annual pace of housing starts dropped 23 per cent month over month, leading the CMHC’s chief economist to predict that just 210,000 to 220,000 new homes will be built by the end of the year.

Last week, the federal government launched a separate stream of entry for newcomers with work experience in skilled trades.

“It’s absolutely critical to address the shortage of skilled trades workers in our country, and part of the solution is helping the construction sector find and maintain the workers it needs,” Miller said in a statement, making his first major announcement as Canada’s new immigration minister.

“This round of category-based selection recognizes these skilled trades workers as essential, and I look forward to welcoming more of these talented individuals to Canada.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said that by welcoming people in skilled trades such as carpentry, plumbing and welding, Canada can help its construction sector attract skilled workers.

But there remain questions about how the government can ensure those bringing the skill set to work in construction actually end up working in the sector and are able to navigate the certifications processes across the country.

Source: Canada ‘absolutely’ can’t build more houses without more immigrants, minister says

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Globe editorial: The Trudeau cabinet doesn’t need new faces. It needs new ideas

2023/07/29 Leave a comment

Immigration money quote from editorial (Globe going all in on immigration given series of articles and commentary):

Fixing this will require a change of philosophy. The Liberals need to ask themselves whether bringing the population equivalent of 5½ Reginas into the country over three years is the best idea during a period of sagging labour productivity and a widespread housing shortage.

Full devastating editorial:

ernment.

Source: Globe editorial: The Trudeau cabinet doesn’t need new faces. It needs new ideas

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ICYMI – Hébert: Justin Trudeau’s anti-Islamophobia disaster reveals a government dangerously out of touch with voters

2023/02/11 Leave a comment

Of note, searing yet valid:

By appointing Amira Elghawaby as his lead representative on the Islamophobia file, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has thrown the equivalent of a political grenade into his Quebec trenches.

The damage to his party and to the cause she is tasked with advancing could be consequential.

Here is an early assessment.

At week’s end, Elghawaby’s appointment had been disavowed by most of the leading figures of Quebec’s political class.

The ranks of those who believe Trudeau should reconsider his choice extend well beyond the fans of Quebec’s controversial law on securalism and its attending ban on religious vestments in selected public service workplaces.

Take former NDP leader Thomas Mulcair. Throughout his tenure, he had been a top Quebec anti-Islamophobia advocate.

His uncompromising defence of religious and minority rights has come at some political cost. In the 2015 election, his denunciation of the Conservatives’ so-called niqab ban took a toll on NDP fortunes in Quebec. 

In his Montreal Gazette column this week, Mulcair argued Elghawaby, a former Star columnist, was the wrong person for the job. That is also the position of the provincial Liberals, the party with the most diverse base. (Mulcair then stated in a subsequent column he was willing to accept her apology at face value. The Quebec Liberals did not.) 

No one in Quebec seriously expected Trudeau to appoint a special representative on anti-Islamophobia who was a supporter of Bill 21. But, by the same token, few expected the prime minister to appoint someone who had burned her bridges with Quebecers on her way to this new role.

A lot of the media commentary this week has focused on Elghawaby’s misrepresentation of a poll to shore up her assertion that most supporters of Bill 21 are Islamophobic.

But chances are her apology for an ill-thought-out column would have found more takers if it had not been part of a larger pattern.

The latter suggests either an abysmal ignorance of Quebec history or a blatant indifference to Canada’s less-than-glorious past treatment of its francophone minority.

In a since-deleted tweet, Elghawaby wrote that assertions to the effect French-Canadians had been oppressed and seriously discriminated against under the British rule made her want “to throw up.”

Coming from someone who lives in Ontario — a province that once outlawed any teaching in the French language — that’s a rich comment.

Should she develop an appetite for facts, Trudeau’s representative may want to acquaint herself with the findings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Alternatively, she might want to read up on the deportation of Canada’s Acadian community.

But whether she does or not, it will likely be too little, too late.

Given her baggage, it will be hard for Elghawaby to be much of an asset to Quebec’s anti-Islamophobia forces.

Moving on to Trudeau. He and his Liberals have just been on the receiving end of the biggest Quebec backlash of his tenure as prime minister. 

By all available indications, the prime minister was only aware of some of Elghawaby’s musings about Quebec prior to her appointment. He may not have been briefed about the vomit tweet.

What is certain is that, notwithstanding any after-the-fact apology, anyone who had cavalierly dismissed the historical grievances of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples would not have been appointed to a federal bridge-building role. 

It sometimes seems the due diligence approach of this Prime Minister’s Office to the vetting of high-profile appointments is to dismiss potentially inconvenient facts rather than dig into them.

On that score, the most glaring example remains Julie Payette’s elevation to the role of governor-general. 

In this case, the tendency seems to have been compounded by a serious PMO disconnect from Quebec.

If there is someone on Trudeau’s staff with a solid Quebec antenna and the influence to draw attention to red flags, he or she must have taken January off.

And if such a person does not currently exist, prudence would have required turning instead to his Quebec ministers for advance feedback on the planned appointment.

Judging by the stunned reaction of the prime minister’s Quebec lieutenant, Pablo Rodriguez, that did not happen.

This latest mess comes on a week when an Abacus poll found the Conservative party with a solid lead on the Liberals in national voting intentions. 

For months, all polls have shown that, among the larger provinces, Quebec was most responsible for keeping Trudeau’s party competitive with the Conservatives. The Liberals can only hope that won’t change as a result of this week’s events.

In the larger picture, the Abacus poll found that 75 per cent of Canadians do not believe the current government is focused enough on the top-of-mind cost-of-living crisis. The numbers on health care were not much better for the government.

Against that background, a Liberal week spent on the defensive on the divisive front of identity politics can only drive home the opposition’s message that on the issues that matter most to voters these days, Trudeau’s government is missing in action.

Source: Hébert: Justin Trudeau’s anti-Islamophobia disaster reveals a government dangerously out of touch with voters

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Dodek: It’s time for the Supreme Court, and the federal government, to stand up for the Charter

2023/01/06 Leave a comment

Valid critique:

The Liberals used to be the party of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Now, under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, they risk being the party that leads to the Charter’s decline.

Over the past five years, the political taboo over the use of the notwithstanding clause, which allows governments to override some Charter rights, has been shattered across Canada. This occurred not under former prime minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative who was the favourite lightning rod of Liberal Charter enthusiasts, but under the current Liberal stewardship of Mr. Trudeau.

When Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatened to use the notwithstanding clause in the fall of 2018, as part of a plan to shrink the size of the Toronto City Council in the midst of the provincial election, the Prime Minister did nothing. (Ultimately, Mr. Ford did not use the clause in that instance.)

The next year, Quebec Premier François Legault went ahead with using the notwithstanding clause to insulate Bill 21, which bans certain provincial government employees from wearing religious symbols at work. In 2021, Mr. Ford also used the clause for a law limiting third-party election spending. In both cases, Mr. Trudeau again did nothing.

Earlier this year, the Quebec government used the notwithstanding clause once more, this time to push through Bill 96, its new language law. Yet again, the Prime Minister took no action, though he has said that the federal government would intervene in a legal challenge to Bill 21 at the Supreme Court of Canada.

“This is a matter that matters to all Canadians, regardless of which part of the country they live in,” Mr. Trudeau said in May, when asked if Ottawa would involve itself in the Bill 21 challenge. “This government will continue to be here to defend people’s fundamental rights and freedoms.”

I doubt those whose rights have been threatened or stripped away by legislation in Quebec and Ontario find much comfort in the Prime Minister’s vague and banal words. They won’t help the Muslim women in Quebec who have lost their jobs because they wear a hijabas a declaration of their faith. They won’t help non-native French speakers who are barred from speaking another language at work.

While the Ontario government pledged to repeal its most recent use of the clause (as part of Bill 28, which made it illegal for unionized education workers to go on strike), Canadians should still be concerned about the increased use of this clause by provincial governments.

Mr. Trudeau could act right now if he wanted to. If he has the political courage to do so, the Prime Minister could initiate a reference to the Supreme Court challenging the pre-emptive use of the notwithstanding clause in Quebec and Ontario. He could send some of the best legal talent in the country from the Department of Justice down the street to the high court to stand up for the minority rights of Canadians.

Crucially, Ottawa could argue that the Supreme Court should revisit its 1988 Ford v. Quebec (Attorney-General) decision, which gave governments the carte-blanche ability to use the notwithstanding clause.

Supreme Court decisions are not cast in stone. Much has changed in the three decades since it first ruled on the use of the notwithstanding clause, which authorized its use both in reaction to court decisions striking down laws as violations of the Charter, as well as its pre-emptive use in advance of any such legal challenges.

The rights and provisions set out in the Charter do not define themselves. It is the task of the courts, especially the Supreme Court, to interpret its contents. The political leaders who debated and enacted the Charter knew full well that they would be giving this awesome responsibility to the courts.

Between 1980 and 1981, a special joint committee of the Senate and the House of Commons spent more than 150 hours hearing from Canadians about the draft Charter. The legislators on this committee were warned that the enactment of a constitutionally-entrenched bill of rights such as the Charter would make the courts responsible for its interpretation.

The 1988 Ford decision dates to the early years of Charter interpretation. It is part of the first generation of Charter cases. The high court’s interpretation of Charter rights ebbs and flows over time.

A favourite metaphor among Canadian constitutional lawyers and academics is the idea that our Constitution is a “living tree” – one that is capable of growth and expansion within its natural limits. Sometimes, the Constitution needs to be pruned back. In other cases, the courts or governments go too far – in recent years, both have done so on sanctioning and using the notwithstanding clause.

The time is ripe for Canada’s highest court to revisit its 34-year-old decision. It is also long overdue for some strong federal leadership to defend the Charter rights of Canadians.

Adam Dodek is a law professor at the University of Ottawa and author of the book, The Canadian Constitution.

Source: It’s time for the Supreme Court, and the federal government, to stand up for the Charter

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Liberals to introduce new hate speech bill, possibly bringing back controversial Section 13

2021/06/24 Leave a comment

Virtue signalling, given likely election call?

Right before the House of Commons breaks for summer, the Liberal government will introduce a new bill tackling hate speech, which could bring back a controversial law under the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Justice Minister David Lametti has given notice the government will introduce a new bill, dealing with “hate propaganda, hate crimes and hate speech.” Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has been working on a new online harms bill with Justice and other ministries, though government spokespeople declined to say Tuesday whether that bill is the legislation that will be tabled by Lametti.

One possibility is that Lametti’s bill could leave out online regulation and focus only on changes to hate speech law the government consulted on last year — though if that includes bringing back a civil remedy for hate speech, the bill still stands to garner much opposition.

Source: Liberals to introduce new hate speech bill, possibly bringing back controversial Section 13

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Former Liberal adviser rips party over racial insensitivity in government ranks

2019/09/23 Leave a comment

In 2016, I examined staff diversity which was much less than Cabinet or MP diversity Diversity in political backrooms still lacking):

A former adviser in the Liberal government said he wasn’t surprised by photos of Justin Trudeau in blackface makeup because he encountered racially insensitive behaviour while working in the upper ranks of his government.

Omer Aziz said the photos of Trudeau are of a piece with behaviour he saw while working on Parliament Hill with Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s policy team. According to his Linked In profile, Aziz held the job for seven months. He quit in 2018.

“Sometimes a slip of the tongue is not just a slip of the tongue. It’s a slip of the mask,” he said in an interview with CBC Radio’s The House airing today.

“I basically had to leave my dream job because of racist prejudices that went unacknowledged.”

Aziz said that while he worked in the department, he heard staffers referring to certain communities as “ethnic vote banks.” He said he was assigned to “brown files” in the department — files dealing with non-white-majority countries — and said he was subjected to “whitesplaining” by colleagues who assumed he wasn’t aware of certain cultural nuances because of his skin colour.

Trudeau has been forced to answer uncomfortable questions all week after three instances of him wearing brownface or blackface as part of various costumes surfaced in the media.

The images span about a decade and a variety of situations, and show Trudeau in blackface both as a teenager and as an adult.

“What I did was inexcusable and wrong and hurt a lot of people who considered me to be an ally and that was wrong. And I am deeply, deeply sorry,” Trudeau told a crowd in Saskatchewan Thursday.

Trudeau has now publicly apologized twice — but he also has repeatedly declined to state how many times he may have worn blackface. He said he was “wary of being definitive about this because of the recent pictures that came out, I had not remembered.”

Aziz said almost all of his colleagues in the federal government were white and seemed unaware of subtle racist behaviour in the workplace.

“People in power above me were blind to what I was seeing,” he said.

“I felt like (…) I was a character from the movie Get Out, where my reality was kind of warped and distorted. Obviously people are never racist to your face.”

CBC News’s requests for comment from the Prime Minister’s Office and Freeland’s office were forwarded to the Liberal Party.

“When hiring exempt staff across government, the aim is always to identify high-quality candidates that reflect the diversity of Canada and to build more inclusive work environments,” the party statement reads.

Aziz said he tried to share his concerns with Gerry Butts, then the principal secretary to the prime minister, but was ultimately unable to meet with him.

The India trip

Aziz said his decision to leave the Liberal government permitted him to dodge a bullet: he believes he would have been involved in organizing Trudeau’s early 2018 trip to India.

The trip turned into a colossal PR disaster for the prime minister after news emerged that a Sikh extremist had been invited to a reception at the Canadian High Commissioner’s residence — and after he was roundly mocked for appearing in traditional Indian dress.

“The India trip was brownface without the makeup,” Aziz said.

As for the blackface images, Aziz wondered aloud how everyone managed “to miss this for 18 years.”

Aziz said voters can still count on the Liberals to be progressive in areas like climate change and the economy — but they shouldn’t assume Trudeau “at every instance has been on the side of minorities and the powerless.”

“Don’t have any illusions and still pretend that this is a saviour … It’s not true,” he said.

Trudeau also responded to questions about how voters should analyze his actions.

“I certainly hope that they will continue to support us in the work that we’re doing, but they might not,” he said at a media event in Winnipeg Thursday. “And I know that is something that all Canadians get to decide and they get to bring in all sorts of different factors, because every Canadian has a different way of looking at what matters to them.”

If the Liberals form government again, Aziz said he wants to see changes made at the top.

“One thing I’m going to be looking forward to is if they are re-elected, do they diversify at the top, because I’m kind of tired of hearing about people talking about diversity when everyone around them looks the same.”

Source: Former Liberal adviser rips party over racial insensitivity in government ranks

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NP View: Racism lurks in the supposedly ‘woke’ Liberals’ new impaired driving laws

2019/01/14 Leave a comment

Valid parallel to the biases of carding:

Has the self-styled “party of the Charter,” as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau still, curiously, calls the Liberals, actually even read the Charter? Have the Liberals, for that matter, paid much attention to what their own prime minister has been saying?

Canada’s impaired driving laws underwent a major overhaul last month, courtesy of the federal Liberal government. Some of the changes were necessary to recognize the changed reality of legalized cannabis. Others were simply intended to further reduce rates of impaired driving, by drug or alcohol, on our roads. This is a goal everyone shares — impaired driving is the leading criminal cause of death in Canada, way ahead of anything else. It’s a stubborn problem that governments are right to try to address, particularly a government that has recently legalized a whole new category of intoxicant.

But the new laws have given to police significant new powers. In a free society, that’s never something to be done lightly. And in this particular case, what is being done is especially bizarre because the Liberals are now insisting that such powers will not be abused even while insisting, in a slightly different context, that they inevitably will be.

One of the new powers given to police is the right, under certain circumstances, to demand a breath sample from someone who has not provided any sign that they might be impaired. Previously, a police officer needed at least some grounds to insist on such a test — the officer could have observed erratic driving before pulling the car over, for instance, or suspected a whiff of alcohol on a driver’s breath. Under the new law, a driver stopped by police for any lawful reason whatsoever (which is a very low bar) may be subjected to a breath test. Refusing to provide one is itself a criminal offence. Canadians effectively have no choice but to comply.

This is a meaningful expansion of police search powers, and it will absolutely be challenged — hopefully successfully — as a violation of Canadians’ fundamental protections against unreasonable searches. This is also an expansion of police authority that the Liberals were explicitly warned would result in abuses of power, most likely taking the form of racial discrimination. “There will be nothing random with this breath testing,” defence lawyer Michael Spratt told a parliamentary committee reviewing the bill before it became law. “Visible minorities are pulled over by the police more often for no reason. That’s what is going to happen here.” The Canadian Civil Liberties Association sounded a similar warning in its own filing, writing, “Experience has also unfortunately demonstrated that ‘random’ detention and search powers are too often exercised in a non-random manner that disproportionately targets African-Canadian, Indigenous, and other racial minorities.” It continued, “… the reality of racial profiling and the increased invasiveness that attends a mandatory alcohol screening means that the practice will adversely impact those disproportionately targeted by police for vehicular stops, in particular African-Canadian, Indigenous, and other racial minorities.”

The ratcheting-up of systemic racism might normally be an issue you would expect the gloriously woke federal Liberals to be falling all over themselves to fix, or at least to tweet piously about. That’s not the case here. The Liberals have readily acknowledged that they expect that this new law will be challenged in court, but say they will defend it, and are confident it will survive the challenges.

There’s reason enough to be alarmed at the expanded use of police powers, even if they weren’t bound to be targeted disproportionately at racial minorities. Random, groundless searches conducted by whim of the authorities are manifestly a gross violation of Canadians’ fundamental rights. Now that the law is finally being used, there are already unsettling stories of such mandatory searches starting to emerge: Global News reported this week that a Toronto-area man, who was not in the slightest bit impaired, was given a breath test after a police officer observed him returning empty beer bottles to a store for recycling, as if he’d knocked them all back on the way over in his car.

But the thing that makes this so especially strange is how the Liberals, not long ago, were embracing the very same arguments they now say concern them not at all. During the run-up to the legalization of cannabis, no less an authority on right-thinking Liberal values than Justin Trudeau himself explained that it was important that Canada legalize cannabis because of — wait for it — racial factors, that saw police applying marijuana laws with disproportion and discrimination against minorities. The prime minister even shared an anecdote about how his own late brother, Michel, after being arrested for possession of cannabis, was able to have that charge quietly taken care of. It helps to be a powerful white guy, the prime minister confessed, especially one as well-connected as the son of a prime minister. “That’s one of the fundamental unfairnesses of this current system is that it affects different communities in a different way,” he said in 2017, acknowledging that random screenings are rarely truly random, and that discretion is rarely equally applied.

The prime minister was right. So was Mr. Spratt and the CCLA. Beyond the basic offence to everyone’s rights constituted by such random and baseless searches, these expanded police powers will obviously be applied unevenly, and that is fundamentally unfair. Why was that so true for cannabis that the prime minister used it to justify why legalization was necessary, but the Liberals deem it to be of no concern whatsoever for impaired driving?

Source: NP View: Racism lurks in the supposedly ‘woke’ Liberals’ new impaired driving laws

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Quebec’s Bill 62 splits federal Liberals amid calls to ignore court challenge

2017/11/11 Leave a comment

Not surprising:

Quebec’s face-covering law is exposing divisions among federal Liberals, with staunch defenders of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on one side and a large number of Quebec MPs who fear becoming political casualties of the contentious debate on the other.

Several Liberal MPs are calling on the government to stay out of the coming court challenge to the law, including some of the most vocal opponents of Bill 62 in caucus.

The Trudeau government has responded with a carefully calibrated response: stating that women have the right to dress as they want, while refusing to be drawn into an open confrontation with the provincial government.

The Liberal government’s decision to stay on the sidelines has created anger among opponents of the legislation who feel it is a full-on assault of Charter rights targeted at Muslim women. Passed last month, the provincial law requires people to show their face when giving or receiving services in places such as libraries, university classrooms, daycares and buses.

Federal officials said the government has yet to decide whether it will participate in the coming court challenge, which was launched this week by the National Council of Canadian Muslims and Canadian Civil Liberties Association. If Ottawa participates in the judicial showdown, federal lawyers will have to publicly state their views on the Charter issues raised by the law, which could contribute to its defeat.

Liberal Party officials said that Quebec MPs and ministers have been urging their colleagues from other parts of the country to cool their rhetoric on the issue in recent weeks.

“The Quebec caucus was very clear … in telling our colleagues, our ministers, that this is a file that belongs to the Quebec government,” said Liberal MP Rémi Massé, who is the chair of the party’s Quebec caucus. “This is [the Quebec government’s] responsibility and we are giving them the necessary leeway to do what they feel they have to do. With the court challenges that are starting, it’s up to them to react accordingly.”

Liberal MP Alexandra Mendès has been one of the most vocal critics of the law, but she said Ottawa should continue to stay out of the matter at least until it reaches the Supreme Court of Canada.

“I think right now, the government should just let it play out in Quebec and see how the courts in Quebec look at this,” said Ms. Mendès, who represents a riding on Montreal’s south shore. “The fact that I have a very strong opinion doesn’t mean that the government should necessarily intervene right away.”

Another opponent of Bill 62, Liberal MP Raj Grewal, said the law goes against his vision of the country, but added the government needs to respect “the National Assembly’s ability to pass their own laws.”

“I’m fundamentally happy that it is going to be challenged because in my humble opinion, it goes against everything that Canada stands for,” said Mr. Grewal, the MP for Brampton East.

Liberal MP Nicola Di Iorio, a lawyer who represents a Montreal riding, said Ottawa cannot take the lead when it comes time to challenging the constitutionality of provincial laws.

“The federal government’s role is not to act as law enforcement for the legislatures,” he said. “There are organized groups that are sufficiently resourced to be able to raise these issues, and the federal government should not be at the forefront of such a topic.”

While the law has exposed political fault lines across the country, it has garnered support in all regions of Canada. According to a Nanos survey conducted for The Globe and Mail, 63 per cent of Canadians support or somewhat support Bill 62.

Support for the law is highest in Quebec (69.4 per cent), the Prairies (63.5 per cent) and the Atlantic provinces (62 per cent), but Ontario (59.4 per cent) and British Columbia (58.4 per cent) are not far off behind. The poll of 1,000 Canadians was conducted between Nov. 4 and 7 and is considered accurate within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20

Pollster Nik Nanos said the results show how “this is a no-win situation” for the Liberals. “The message to the government is that this is a political minefield,” he said.

To this point, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has walked a fine line on the law, always stopping short of vowing to fight it in court.

“As I’ve said several times, I don’t think a government should be telling a woman what to wear or not wear,” he has said. “We are looking very carefully at what tools we have and what steps we have to make sure we make this situation better for everyone.”

Liberal MPs from Quebec said they don’t want the debate to turn into a federal-provincial battle, or a symbol of Ottawa’s interference in Quebec’s affairs. One of the worst scenarios would be for Quebec to use the notwithstanding clause to keep the law on the books even if it is defeated in court, a Liberal MP from Quebec said.

The groups who filed a court challenge in Quebec Superior Court on Tuesday said the law is unconstitutional and discriminates against Muslim women.

“I live in fear,” co-plaintiff Warda Naili said at a news conference in Montreal. “I don’t know what will happen when I go out. I don’t know how people will react because of this law.”

via Quebec’s Bill 62 splits federal Liberals amid calls to ignore court challenge – The Globe and Mail

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