Sun Editorial: How to create a crisis in housing

2023/07/31 Leave a comment

Sun nails it more directly but avoids the option of freezing or reducing levels:

Hello, newly minted Housing Minister Sean Fraser and congratulations on your promotion. Ditto Marc Miller, also recently arrived in the Immigration portfolio after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s seismic shuffle this week.

The left hand of Immigration seems to be unaware of what the right hand of Housing is doing. So shake hands and start working together.

The Trudeau government has what it calls an “ambitious” target of bringing in 465,000 new permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025.

According to its National Housing Strategy, the federal government is committed to building, “up to 160,000 new affordable homes” over the next 10 years.

You don’t have to be a math genius to see the problem. The government is committed to bringing in 1.4 million people over the next three years and has a plan to build only 160,000 new homes. That leaves approximately 1.2 million newcomers looking for homes. Certainly, the private sector will fill many gaps – if they’re allowed to.

We already have a housing crisis, with people under-housed or homeless and those who can’t afford a mortgage in this over-inflated economy the government has created.

No one is arguing that this country shouldn’t bring in newcomers. Canada was built on immigration. It’s our economic lifeblood. But the numbers have to add up. And these don’t.

Fraser said recently he would, “urge caution to anyone who believes the answer to our housing challenges is to close the door on newcomers.”

Fair enough. Now show us your logical and practical plan to house them.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland recently turned down Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow’s reasonable request for more federal funding to help deal with a massive influx of asylum seekers who were living on the streets.

Freeland set an adversarial tone for every big city. The federal government will bring in hundreds of thousands of newcomers to this country, dump them on cities, shortchange those communities and tell them to deal with it.

It’s not just housing. Where’s the funding for new schools, community centres and healthcare? The government is creating a crisis.

Trudeau needs to put his money where his mouth is – and fund those newcomers before they, too, are living on the streets.

Source: EDITORIAL: How to create a crisis in housing

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Yakabuski: The renewal theme rings hollow even as Justin Trudeau names seven new faces to cabinet

2023/07/28 Leave a comment

Pointed comments on Ministers Fraser and Miller, likely understate the challenges. And of course, turning up the dial on the number of permanent and temporary residents much easier than new housing:

Conveying renewal and stability at the same time is a neat trick, if you can manage it.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried to do both with a cabinet shufflethat featured a slew of new faces on Wednesday, all while relying even more heavily on a quartet of tested ministers – and likely future leadership contenders – to carry the load of a government living on borrowed time.

…

Source: The renewal theme rings hollow even as Justin Trudeau names seven new faces to cabinet

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Airport, passport and immigration problems ‘should never have happened,’ minister admits

2022/08/31 Leave a comment

Refreshing admission by Minister Miller (he consistently one of the few ministers who is more candid with respect to government weaknesses and failures). And yes, the task force is more communications than substance as the main issues involve Service Canada and IRCC, which did not need a task force to address. (Airport issues are more complex given the different players involved):

The delays plaguing Canada’s airports, passport services and immigration processes “should never have happened in the first place,” the federal minister charged with co-leading Ottawa’s task force on slashing wait times admitted Monday.

Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller, providing an update on the government’s efforts to tackle pandemic-induced delays across a swath of operations and services, said that despite some improvements, officials were still working to prevent such issues from occurring again.

“I do want to say that nobody should be congratulating themselves for having done their jobs. We are by no stretch of the imagination out of the woods yet. The focus will continue to be on Canadians and the results they expect and deserve from this or any other government,” Miller said at a joint news conference with other ministers.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau struck a committee involving 13 cabinet members in late June to get started on reducing wait times at major airports and clear out backlogs that led to sluggish processing times for passport and immigration applications.

As COVID-19 restrictions eased, air passengers passing through Canadian travel hubs have contended with hours-long delays in security screening lines, delayed or cancelled flights, hiccups with the ArriveCAN app and the chaos of lost baggage.

Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said Monday that between January and August, the number of air travellers jumped by more than 250 per cent just as the travel industry faced staffing shortages.

He pointed to the hiring of more than 1,800 new screening officers and weekly meetings with airlines, airports and travel-related government departments as evidence that delays were improving. According to the federal government, between Aug. 18 and Aug. 21, 85 per cent of passengers were screened within 15 minutes. The number of aircraft held at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport also dropped to 47 by the third week of August, down from 370 in May.

Monette Pasher, the interim president of the Canadian Airports Council, said there has been “marked progress” in reducing wait times and cancellations in the past few weeks.

But she told the Star in a statement that other measures, like modernizing screening procedures and reopening Nexus assessment centres amid a backlog of applications for the trusted traveller program, would improve the situation more.

The staffing increases don’t change the fact that airport screeners are “worn out,” said Catherine Cosgrove, the director of communications and public affairs for Teamsters Canada, which represents over 1,000 screeners across the country.

“We can expect to continue seeing difficulties in hiring and retaining screeners and delays throughout the fall,” she told the Star, adding that there still aren’t enough trainers to get new hires working at full capacity.

Addressing frustrations experienced by Canadians trying to renew or apply for passports, Families, Children and Social Development Minister Karina Gould acknowledged “the recent demand for passports far exceeded the government’s expectations.”

That was despite unions representing federal workers warning the government in 2021 that passport requests would rise, without the necessary staffing to take on the increased load.

Gould said Ottawa has boosted the number of staff handling the country’s passport program and that workers have implemented a “triage system” to better process applications. Passport services have also been expanded in a number of offices and Service Canada centres.

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser also discussed application backlogs within his department, which have left international students and others hoping to immigrate to Canada in limbo.

“Though we have a welcoming nature towards newcomers, our immigration system has faced unprecedented challenges and obstacles that have become larger and have compounded on one another over the past few years,” Fraser said.

He said that owing in part to staffing changes, his department had returned to a “pre-pandemic service standard” in some areas and was on track to reaching its permanent residency and study permit goals.

“We could have sat here and blamed others. We could have blamed airlines, we could blame this, that and the other. But we realized quite quickly that a lot of responsibility did lie on our shoulders,” Miller told reporters.

“To some extent, we were slow in responding to a number of unprecedented … things that Canadians expect to see from their governments.”

Indeed, ministers said Monday that Ottawa has been “scrambling” to contend with a series of challenges outside its control, from the havoc the pandemic wrought on Canada’s travel sector to continuous humanitarian crises that hampered which immigration applications were prioritized.

“We’ve thrown bodies at the problem, which is not the most effective way of doing things. It’s important because it got people their passports in time so they could finally travel after sitting in their houses for two years,” Miller said. “That is not the most effective way … of doing things.”

Source: Airport, passport and immigration problems ‘should never have happened,’ minister admits

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Should statues of Sir John A. Macdonald be taken down? Canada’s minister of Indigenous services says no

2021/06/04 Leave a comment

Of note and right approach:

As shock waves continue to reverberate following the discovery of a gravesite of 215 Indigenous children, Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller spoke out Wednesday against taking down the statues of the prime minister responsible for creating the residential schools that led to their deaths.

Miller said removing statues of Sir John A Macdonald from public display would amount to Canadians taking their eyes off the brutal history and legacy of the schools.

“Knocking things down, breaking things is not my preferred option. Turning my eyes away from things is not my preferred option,” Miller said during a news conference in a government building named after Macdonald.

“Looking at things as painful as they are, explaining why they are, is my preferred option.”

Across the country, institutions and local governments are resuming efforts to remove statues of Canada’s first prime minister, and to rename streets and schools whose namesakes have a direct connection to Canada’s residential school program.

Similar such movements have become flashpoints over the last several years, including last summer in the wake of global Black Lives Matter protests, when Miller and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke out against taking down the monuments.

But the outpouring of anger now is more directly targeted at the heart of one of Macdonald’s legacies: the residential school system.

The revelation last week that 215 children were buried in unmarked graves on the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. is leading to fresh rounds of soul-searching about whether and how Canada must come to grips with the deadly effect of those schools, which were initiated by Macdonald’s government in 1883.

During the century that followed — the last school closed in 1996 — about 150,000 Indigenous children were removed from their homes and forced to attend what Miller called “labour camps” that were built for the express purpose of eradicating their culture.

At least 4,000 children are known to have died while attending residential schools. Following the discovery of the graves in Kamloops last week, those estimates have begun to climb, with some now speculating the number could be as high as 25,000.

“We know there are lots of sites similar to Kamloops that are going to come to light in the future. We need to begin to prepare ourselves for that,” former senator Murray Sinclair said in a written statement late Tuesday.

“Those that are survivors and intergenerational survivors need to understand that this information is important for all of Canada to understand the magnitude of the truth of this experience.”

What must be done with that information is a debate taking many forms, be it the removal of Macdonald statues or the demands for the federal government to move much faster to implement the calls to action on missing children and burial information contained in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report on residential schools.

In 2019, some $27 million was set aside to respond to those calls, but the funds were redirected to address the impacts of the pandemic and to finish off virtual engagement sessions on the response to the TRC, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett’s office said Wednesday.

Some money began to flow last year. On Wednesday, Bennett announced communities that want to begin the work of documenting, locating and memorializing missing children could apply anew and the money would flow on an “urgent” basis.

How that work is done must be determined in consultation with communities, Bennett and Miller have insisted.

The ministers said on Tuesday it is also important to listen to those who speak out against Macdonald.

However, Miller said the debate over renaming buildings or taking down statues has become too partisan, and misses the point.

“I respect the meaning and the expression of people saying we need to take this down, rip it down,” he said.

“It’s an expression of pain. I understand. I’m not a proponent of it. I think we have to keep explaining. We have to keep explaining so that we don’t repeat those errors.”

Conservative politicians have also spoken out against the need to tear down statues, though for different reasons, arguing doing so amounts to so-called “cancel culture.”

Conservatives including Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and federal Leader Erin O’Toole have also said removing statues of people like Macdonald would also erase all acknowledgment of the benefits they provided to Canada.

Source: Should statues of Sir John A. Macdonald be taken down? Canada’s minister of Indigenous services says no

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