Terry Glavin: We’re not Los Angeles yet, but it might be coming

2025/06/13 Leave a comment

Behind the alarmist click bait headline, some serious issues. Striking silence on the impact of social media discourses. They fraying of the consensus is largely based on concerns over housing, healthcare and infrastructure, all exacerbated by Liberal government excessive levels of both temporary and permanent residents, largely encouraged by provincial governments, business and advocates:

…On top of the economic impacts, there’s the matter of Canada’s fraying social fabric.

A huge surge in wealth migration from the People’s Republic of China in recent years has swamped Canada’s long-standing Cantonese communities and introduced grave threats to Canada’s political sovereignty. After all the scandals involving compromised federal politicians and manipulated federal election races, there is still no sign that the Carney government intends to proceed with a foreign influence registry.

With politically active immigrants from the Middle East emerging as a heavy counterweight to Canada’s long-standing affinity with the Jewish state of Israel, profound changes are underway in the formulation of Canada’s foreign policy and Canada’s traditions of religious tolerance.

For all the Liberals’ recent admissions of error, the Trudeau government’s immigration legacy is with us still, and there’s little evidence that a Carney government, despite its reassurances, will be making much of a break with it.

While Toronto has lately adopted an American-style “sanctuary city” policy through its Access T.O. initiative (“Access to City Services for Undocumented Torontonians), this doesn’t mean that Canada is hurtling towards American-style standoffs between federal and local enforcement authorities.

It’s just that while Americans are going through distinctly American convulsions related to immigration, Canada doesn’t have anything to brag about. Canada’s old consensus on immigration has been broken. The public trust in a functioning immigration system has been badly shaken.

It can’t go on like this.

Source: Terry Glavin: We’re not Los Angeles yet, but it might be coming

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Terry Glavin: B.C. doesn’t need to atone for its origins

2024/08/07 Leave a comment

Useful reminder that history and context have nuance:

…British Columbia’s origins owe little to even the most conventional narrative lines that have explained Canadian history.

While the HBC was a pivotal player in B.C.’s early years, it was never much about beaver pelts and furs. The HBC trade was concentrated in tierces and hogsheads of salted salmon. While the Métis were key players in the HBC brigade trails, a third of the HBC workforce west of the Rockies were Hawaiians.

The westward expansion of the Dominion of Canada involved the establishment of provinces by federal law, but that pattern stopped at the Rockies. B.C.’s story runs mostly north-south, and like Newfoundland, B.C. was a self-governing Crown colony that joined Confederation, for good or ill, on its own.

The story of B.C’s colonial survival against the backdrop of overwhelming American military and population pressure is a story written almost entirely by Douglas’s sheer will and force of personality. Douglas was himself a “coloured” person, the son of Martha Ann Ritchie, a free Creole from Barbados, and John Douglas, a Scottish merchant and planter from Glasgow. James’s wife, Lady Amelia Douglas, was the daughter of a Swampy Cree woman and an Irishman from Lachine, Que.

In 1858, when a war broke out between the Nlaka’pamux people and American miners in the Fraser Canyon, Douglas unilaterally annexed the mainland as a British colony in advance of London’s formal declaration. That’s one of history’s ironies. Far from being about stealing Indigenous land, B.C. was established in order to protect Indigenous people from heavily-armed American marauders and to secure to the Indigenous people of the Fraser River all the rights of British subjects.

In 1859, when an American military regiment occupied one of the Southern Gulf Islands in a clear violation of the boundary provisions in the Oregon Treaty, Douglas told the HBC’s Angus McDonald that if the Americans didn’t stay put, he would mobilize “fifty thousand Indian riflemen at Victoria.”

After the American Civil War broke out in April 1861, Douglas suggested to the colonial office in London that he would be glad to lead an expeditionary force to take back the Columbia territory that had fallen to the Americans 20 years earlier, and to keep on going, all the way to San Francisco Bay.

A great part of the success of British Columbia’s early settlement was owing to Douglas’s largely cordial relations with the Indigenous peoples within the colonial ambit. For one thing, Douglas and the Royal Navy were formidable allies to the Coast Salish people against the slave-raiding tribes from further up the coast. For another thing, the Indigenous leadership was fully aware of what had happened once the Americans moved into what would become Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

There was the Cayuse War, the Klamath War, the Salmon River War, the Yakima War, and the Nisqually War.

In Douglas’s vision of a successful colony, the tribes would be not be disturbed in their customary laws, their villages and enclosed fields would be protected along with their rights to hunt and fish “as formerly,” and there would be no removals to reservations. Indigenous people were to have the same rights as any settler and would be full participants in the emerging economy.

It was only because of the insistence of the Colonial Office in London that funds for treaty-making had to be raised locally that Douglas managed to secure only 14 treaties with First Nations on Southern Vancouver Island. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Victoria and Ottawa secured another treaty — with the Nisga’a people of the Nass Valley. Most of B.C. remains without benefit of treaty even now.

Despite the perilous challenges Douglas faced in his day, for the most part, peace prevailed.

In his articulation of how a proper colony should be managed, Douglas made clear that medical care would be denied no one on the basis of race or status, child labour would not be tolerated, common-law marriages should be recognized and public charity should be encouraged. Importantly, slavery, which was a commonplace Indigenous practice, would not be tolerated.

And so, for a time, a peaceable kingdom prevailed on what was to become Canada’s West Coast. Its multiculturalism emerged organically more than a century before it was conjured in the Canadian imagination as the invention of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, later mutating into the “diversity, equity and inclusion” regime strictly enforced by his son, Justin.

It’s why James and Amelia’s children were baptized in several Christian traditions — Catholic, Anglican and Methodist. It’s why the Congregation Emanu-El on Victoria’s Blanshard Street is the oldest continuously-occupied synagogue in Canada. Its cornerstone was laid in 1863. Many if not most of the synagogue’s original fundraising subscribers were gentiles.

When Lumley Franklin was elected mayor of Victoria in 1865, he became the first Jewish mayor in North America. In 1871, the year B.C. joined Confederation, Victoria voters sent Wharf Street merchant Henry Nathan to Ottawa. He was Canada’s first Jewish member of Parliament.

This is not a history that requires atonement, penitential reflection or some “long overdue reckoning.”

It’s certainly not entirely a happy story. But it’s nothing to be ashamed of, either.

Source: Terry Glavin: B.C. doesn’t need to atone for its origins

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Terry Glavin: Immigration and housing — the elephants in Canada’s crisis room

2024/01/05 Leave a comment

Another voice adding to the chorus:

…The difficulty with having a serious national conversation about the role “immigration” plays in this intolerable state of affairs is that it’s dominated by the property industry and its various “experts,” activists possessed by a nostalgia for the social-housing idealism of the 1970s, Century Initiative ideologues fixated on growing Canada’s population to 100 million from 40 million, and cranks obsessed with conspiracy theories about white-race extinction.

Outside this cacophony are Canadians of all ethnic and racial backgrounds who persist in expressing an understanding of Canada as an idea worth holding onto and a country where immigrants are properly expected to “fit in,” and any newcomers who arrive with hatred in their hearts and sympathy for terrorist groups should be deported.

…

It’s time for a wholly new conversation, and it might begin with an honest conversation about immigration and its impact on housing affordability, cultural identity and what we mean when we use terms like “Canadian values.” Instead of the passive “policy” that always seems to favour Beijing-aligned multimillionaires, dodgy Khomeinist money-men, unscrupulous immigration consultants and bloated university budgets, an active policy would be a better idea.

We should at least have a recognizable “immigration policy,” and it needs to start by radically cutting back on the flood of “non-permanent” arrivals. From there, rather than vetting potential immigrants out, we should be vetting immigrants in. Canada could be a safe haven for refugees from the United Nations’ police state bloc, for starters — there are millions to choose from. If you’re a suitable candidate for the invaluable gift of Canadian citizenship, we’re interested. Show us. If you have a demonstrable record of standing up for liberal-democratic values, you go to the front of the line.

That would be a good start, anyway…

Source: Terry Glavin: Immigration and housing — the elephants in Canada’s crisis room

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Articles of interest: Immigration

2023/12/08 Leave a comment

Additional polling on souring of public mood on current high levels, related commentary on links to housing availability and affordability among other issues:

‘There’s going to be friction’: Two-thirds of Canadians say immigration target is too high, poll says

Worrisome trend but understandable:

Two-thirds of Canadians say this country’s immigration target is too high, suggests a new poll that points to how opinions on the issue are taking shape along political lines — a shift that could turn immigration into a wedge issue in the next federal election.

A poll by Abacus Data has found the percentage of people who say they oppose the country’s current immigration level has increased six points since July, with 67 per cent of Canadians now saying that taking in 500,000 permanent residents a year is too much.

“The public opinion has shifted in Canada to a point where if a political leader wanted to make this an issue, they could,” said Abacus chair and CEO David Coletto.

“We’re headed into a period where there’s going to be friction.”

Source: ‘There’s going to be friction’: Two-thirds of Canadians say immigration target is too high, poll says

Affordability crisis putting Canadian dream at risk: poll

Yet another poll, focussed on immigrants:

The Leger-OMNI poll, one of the largest polling samples of immigrants in recent years, surveyed 1,522 immigrants across Canada between Oct. 18 and 25. It is one of the few polls specifically surveying immigrants.  

The research finds the cost-of-living crisis is hitting immigrants hard. Eighty-three per cent polled feel affordability has made settling more difficult. While financial or career opportunities were the motivating factor for 55 per cent of immigrants’ journey to Canada, just under half surveyed think there are enough jobs to support those coming in. 

A quarter (24 per cent) feel their experience in Canada has fallen short of expectations.

Source: Affordability crisis putting Canadian dream at risk: poll

Kalil: We simply don’t have enough money to solve Canada’s housing crisis 

Reality:

Housing does not magically appear when there is demand for it. It takes time, infrastructure needs to be built to support it, the construction industry needs to have the capacity to deliver it, and our housing economy needs to hold enough money to fund it – which it does not.

Source: We simply don’t have enough money to solve Canada’s housing crisis

Burney: Trudeau, please take a walk in the snow

Burney on immigration and his take on the public service:

A rapid increase in immigration numbers was touted until it was seen simply as a numbers game, lacking analyses of social consequences, notably inadequate housing, and unwelcome pressures on our crumbling health system. Meritocracy is not really part of the equation, so we are not attracting people with needed skills. Instead, we risk intensifying ethnic, religious and cultural enclaves in Canada that will contribute more division than unity to the country.

The policy on immigration needs a complete rethink. But do not expect constructive reform to come from the public service, 40 per cent larger now than it was in 2015 and generously paid, many of whom only show up for office work one or two days per week. Suggestions that they are more productive or creative at home are absurd.

Source: Trudeau, please take a walk in the snow

Keller: The Trudeau government has a cure for your housing depression

Here’s what Stéfane Marion, chief economist with National Bank, wrote on Tuesday. It’s worth quoting at length.

“Canada’s record housing supply imbalance, caused by an unprecedented increase in the working-age population (874,000 people over the past twelve months), means that there is currently only one housing start for every 4.2 people entering the working-age population … Under these circumstances, people have no choice but to bid up the price of a dwindling inventory of rental units. The current divergence between rental inflation (8.2 per cent) and CPI inflation (3.1 per cent) is the highest in over 60 years … There is no precedent for the peak in rental inflation to exceed the peak in headline inflation. Unless Ottawa revises its immigration quotas downward, we don’t expect much relief for the 37 per cent of Canadian households that rent.”

What are the odds of the Trudeau government taking that advice?

Source: The Trudeau government has a cure for your housing depression

Conference Board: Don’t blame immigration for inflation and high interest rates – Financial Post

Weak argumentation and overall discounting of the externalities and wishful thinking for the long-term:

Of course, immigration has also added to demand. Strong hiring supported income growth, and immigrants coming to Canada need places to live and spend money on all the necessities of life. This adds to demand pressures and is especially concerning for rental housing affordability. Such strength in underlying demographic demand is inflationary when there is so little slack in the economy. Taking in so many in such a short period of time has stretched our ability to provide settlement services, affordable housing  and other necessities. But there is also no doubt that the surge in migrants has alleviated massive labour market pressure and is thus deflationary. Without immigration, Canada’s labour force would be in decline, especially over the next five years as Canada’s baby boomers retire in growing numbers. Steady immigration adds to our productive capacity, our GDP and our tax take — enough to offset public-sector costs and modestly improve government finances.

One thing is certain, if immigration is aligned with our capacity to welcome those who are arriving, it will continue to drive economic growth and enrich our society through diversity, as it has through most of our history.

Mike Burt is vice president of The Conference Board of Canada and Pedro Antunes is the organization’s chief economist.  

Source: Opinion: Don’t blame immigration for inflation and high interest rates – Financial Post

More international students are seeking asylum in Canada, numbers reveal

Another signal that our selection criteria and vetting have gaps:

The number of international students who seek asylum in Canada has more than doubled in the past five years, according to government data obtained under an access-to-information request.

The number of refugee claims made by study permit holders has gone up about 2.7 times to 4,880 cases last year from 1,835 in 2018, as the international student population also surged by approximately 1.4 times to 807,750 from 567,065 in the same period.

Over the five years, a total of 15,935 international students filed refugee claims in the country.

While less than one per cent of international students ended up seeking protection in Canada, the annual rate of study permit holders seeking asylum doubled from 0.3 per cent to 0.6 per cent between 2018 and 2022.

Source: More international students are seeking asylum in Canada, numbers revea

‘It’s unfair’: Haitians in Quebec upset province has opted out of federal family reunification program

Well, Quebec has the right to opt-out and face any resulting political pressure:

The federal program, announced in October by Canadian Immigration Minister Marc Miller, will open the door to 11,000 people from Colombia, Haiti and Venezuela who have immediate family members living in Canada either as citizens or permanent residents.

But when it launched on Nov. 17, it made clear that only those who “reside in Canada, outside the province of Quebec,” would be eligible to sponsor relatives.

The province of Quebec had opted out of the program.

Source: ‘It’s unfair’: Haitians in Quebec upset province has opted out of federal family reunification program

Douglas Todd: Californians taken aback by vast gap between wages and housing costs in Vancouver

More evidence of the disconnect between housing affordability, income and population:

Last month, scholars at the University of California, Berkeley invited a Canadian expert to offer his analysis of the riddle that is crushing the dreams of an entire generation.

“What really surprised them in California was the sharp decoupling there is in Metro Vancouver between incomes and housing prices,” said Andy Yan, an associate professor of professional practice at Simon Fraser University who also heads its City Program.

It’s relevant that Yan was invited to speak to about 75 urban design specialists in the San Francisco Bay area, since it also has prices in the same range (adjusted to Canadian dollars) as super-expensive Metro Vancouver.

But there is a big difference. Unlike Metro Vancouver, the San Francisco region also has the fourth-highest median household incomes in North America.

Indeed, median wages in the California city come in at the equivalent of about $145,000 Cdn., 61 per cent higher than $90,000 in Vancouver.

In other words, while things are rough for would-be homeowners in the San Francisco area, they are horrible for those squeezed out of the Metro Vancouver market.

Why is that? In his California presentation, Yan talked, quite sensibly, about the three big factors that normally determine housing costs: supply, demand and finance.

Source: Douglas Todd: Californians taken aback by vast gap between wages and housing costs in Vancouver

Glavin: Is there a triumphant Geert Wilders in Canada’s future? Not yet, but …

The risk exists but overstated:

….To object to this state of affairs doesn’t make Canada a racist country, and state-sanctioned rejection of the very idea of mainstream Canadian values, coupled with the catastrophic mismatch between immigration levels and Canada’s capacity to accommodate them all, doesn’t mean there’s some hard-right turn just around the corner with a Geert Wilders figure coming out of nowhere.

But it does mean that Canada is barrelling towards a brick wall, and we should stop and turn around.

Source: Glavin: Is there a triumphant Geert Wilders in Canada’s future? Not yet, but …

Antiquated U.S. Immigration System Ambles into the Digital World

Similar challenges as Canada:

Notorious for its reliance on antiquated paper files and persistent backlogs, the U.S. immigration system has made some under-the-radar tweaks to crawl into the 21st century, with the COVID-19 pandemic serving as a catalyst. Increased high-tech and streamlined operations—including allowing more applications to be completed online, holding remote hearings, issuing documents with longer validity periods, and waiving interview requirements—have resulted in faster approvals of temporary and permanent visas, easier access to work permits, and record numbers of cases completed in immigration courts.

While backlogs have stubbornly persisted and even grown, the steps toward modernization at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the State Department have nonetheless led to a better experience for many applicants seeking immigration benefits and helped legal immigration rebound after the drop-off during the COVID-19 pandemic. Swifter processes in the immigration courts have provided faster protection to asylum seekers and others who are eligible for it, while also resulting in issuance of more removal orders to those who are not.

Yet some of these gains may be short-lived. Some short-term policy changes that were implemented during the pandemic have ended and others are about to expire, raising the prospect of longer wait times for countless would-be migrants and loss of employment authorization for tens of thousands of immigrant workers. Millions of temporary visa applications may once again require interviews starting in December, making the process slower and more laborious for would-be visitors. This reversion to prior operations could lead to major disruptions in tourism, harm U.S. companies’ ability to retain workers and immigrants’ ability to support themselves, and create barriers for asylum seekers with limited proficiency in English.

Source: Antiquated U.S. Immigration System Ambles into the Digital World

Thousands of Canada’s permanent residents are afraid to leave the country. Here’s why

Another policy and service delivery fail:

According to an email from Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), there are over 70,000 Ahmad Omars out there, waiting on their first PR cards. This situation has left them trapped in a travel limbo, unable to leave the country or make future plans.

“Initially, the estimated waiting time for the PR card was 30 days. However, 30 days later, it extended to 45 days, and then, 45 days after that, it became 61 days. Now, I find myself significantly beyond the expected waiting time,” Omar said.

“It doesn’t feel like I am actually a permanent resident until I get the card.”

Source: Thousands of Canada’s permanent residents are afraid to leave the country. Here’s why

Saunders: How the push for border security created an illegal-immigration surge

Agree, but likelihood low:

If we wanted to reduce legal immigration numbers, as Mr. de Haas argues, we’d need to change the underlying economy: fund universities and colleges so they don’t rely on overseas student fees; incentivize farms to rely on technology rather than cheap labour (at the cost of higher food prices); make domestic housecleaners and child-minders a strictly upper-class thing again; and settle for lower levels of competitiveness and economic growth.

What doesn’t work is the entire false economy of border security – as years of expensive, dangerous experiments show, it actually amplifies the problem it’s meant to solve.

Source: How the push for border security created an illegal-immigration surge

Rise in net migration threatens to undermine Rishi Sunak’s tough talk – The Guardian

Leaving others to clean up the mess:

Of Boris Johnson’s many broken promises, his failure to “take back control” of post-Brexit immigration is the one that Tory MPs believe matters most to their voters.

Johnson has long fled the scene – Rishi Sunak is instead getting the blame from his New Conservative backbenchers who predict they will be punished at the ballot box in the “red wall” of the north and Midlands.

The former prime minister’s battlecry of “getting Brexit done” at the 2019 election went hand-in-hand with a manifesto promise to reduce levels of net migration from what was about 245,000 a year.

A tough “points-based immigration system” was going to be brought in by the then home secretary, Priti Patel, and supposedly allow the UK rather than Brussels to have control of the numbers.

And yet the latest net migration figures of almost 750,000 for 2022 show that far from decreasing, net migration has gone up threefold. Many economists believe this level of migration is necessary and the natural consequence of a country facing staff shortages and high domestic wages.

Source: Rise in net migration threatens to undermine Rishi Sunak’s tough talk – The Guardian

The Provincial Nominee Program: Retention in province of landing

Good analysis of retention rates by province:

“The Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) is designed to contribute to the more equitable distribution of new immigrants across Canada. A related objective is the retention and integration of provincial nominees in the nominating province or territory. This article examines the retention of PNP immigrants at both the national and provincial or territorial levels. The analysis uses data from the Immigrant Landing File and tax records, along with three indicators of retention, to measure the propensity of a province or territory to retain immigrants. Results showed that the retention of PNP immigrants in the province or territory of landing was generally high. Overall, 89% of the provincial nominees who landed in 2019 had stayed in their intended province or territory at the end of the landing year. However, there was large variation by province or territory, ranging from 69% to 97%. Of those nominees located in a province at the end of the landing year, a large proportion (in the mid-80% range) remained in that province five years later. Again, there was significant variation by province, ranging from 39% to 94%. At the national level, both short- and longer-term provincial and territorial retention rates were lower among provincial nominees than among other economic immigrants. However, after adjusting for differences in the province of residence, sociodemographic characteristics and economic conditions, the provincial nominee retention rate was marginally higher than that among federal skilled workers during the first three years in Canada, and there was little difference after five years. Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia had the highest PNP retention rates, and Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick, the lowest. This gap among provinces tended to increase significantly with years since immigration. Accounting for the provincial unemployment rate explained some of the differences in retention rates between the Atlantic provinces and Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. However, even after adjusting for a rich set of control variables, a significant retention rate difference among provinces persisted. Provinces and territories can benefit from the PNP not only through the nominees retained in the province or territory, but also from those migrating from other provinces or territories. Ontario was a magnet for the secondary migration of provincial nominees. After accounting for both outflows and inflows of provincial nominees, Ontario was the only province or territory that had a large net gain from this process, with significant inflows of provincial nominees from other provinces. Overall, long-term retention of provincial nominees tended to be quite high in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, particularly when considering inflows, as well as outflows. Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia tended to have an intermediate level, but still relatively high longer-term retention rates. Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador had the lowest retention.”

Read the full report: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2023011/article/00002-eng.htm

Keller: Why are our schools addicted to foreign student tuition? Because government was the pusher

Unfortunately, a large part of the visa system has been diverted to other purposes. We’re basically selling citizenship on the cheap, with the funds backfilling for provincial governments’ underfunding of higher education.

Source: Why are our schools addicted to foreign student tuition? Because government was the pusher

International students, advocates say Canada should permanently lift 20-hour work cap

Advocates underline point that international students have become a back-door immigration worker stream:

Advocacy group Migrant Workers Alliance for Change has been calling for this change since 2017 and has been fielding increasing calls from concerned students.

The alliance’s organizer, Sarom Rho, said it has been organizing against the 20-hour work limit since international student Jobandeep Singh Sandhu was arrested for working too many hours outside school in 2019.

“This is a question about whether we want to live in a society where everybody has equal rights and protections, or if we’re going to allow a system that sections off a group of people on the basis of their immigration status and denies them the same rights,” she said.

“There are six weeks left until the end of this temporary policy. Every day matters and the clock is ticking. We’re calling on Prime Minister Trudeau and Immigration Minister Mark Miller to do the right thing and permanently remove the 20-hour work limit.”

Source: International students, advocates say Canada should permanently lift 20-hour work cap

‘Canadian experience’ requirements are not just discriminatory – they harm the economy

Change happening but too often Canadian experience applied unevenly. That being said, during my experience during cancer treatment, there were some cultural differences in patient care, reminding me that immigrants would encounter also encounter differences:

In 2021, immigrants made up nearly a quarter of the Canadian population, a historic high. As Canada ages, immigration is projected to fuel the country’s entire population growth by 2032.

It is often said that immigrants help drive Canada’s prosperity. But if “Canadian experience” remains a stumbling block for newcomers to enter the job market, that vision will be nothing but a pipe dream.

Fortunately, I am now employed, working in a field where my past skills are highly relevant and respected. In hindsight, I would have answered that recruiter’s question differently.

There is nothing alien about my “foreign experience,” I would have emphasized. What I learned in China – skills like collaboration, research, empathy and writing – still applies. And I say this as a writer and communicator: a skill is a skill, regardless of where I call home.

Owen Guo is a freelance writer in Toronto. He is a former reporter for the New York Times in Beijing and a graduate of the University of Toronto.

Source: ‘Canadian experience’ requirements are not just discriminatory – they harm the economy

Australia’s political opportunists have stoked hysteria and robbed refugees of their humanity – The Guardian

By former Minister of Immigration 1079-82:

There was a time in Australia when refugees were heroes. In the late 1970s, when thousands of Vietnamese refugees settled in Australia, the then Fraser government publicised their “stories of hardship and courage”. They were presented as individuals with names and faces, possessing great resilience and ordinary human needs. Giving these brave people – nurses, teachers, engineers among them – and their children sanctuary made sense. When we are humane and welcome refugees, we assist them and ourselves.

Much has changed since then. As Fraser’s former minister for immigration and ethnic affairs, I have watched with dismay the shift in Australian public attitudes to refugees over the past two decades, since the Howard government began to pedal hard on the issue, depicting people seeking asylum as a threat to the Australian way of life. The humanity and individuality of refugees has been lost in political opportunism, as dog-whistling slogans stoked the hysterical, sometimes racist elements of public discourse. Yet this politics proved a winner and over the past two decades both major parties came to share the same dehumanising asylum policies. This is evident in the recent ugly, bitter parliamentary debate following the high court’s decision that it is unlawful for the Australian government to indefinitely detain people in immigration detention and the hasty legislative response.

Ian Macphee AO was minister for immigration and ethnic affairs in the Fraser government (1979-1982)

Source: Australia’s political opportunists have stoked hysteria and robbed refugees of their humanity – The Guardian

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Terry Glavin: Antisemitic Egyptian sheikh was to be hosted by Ottawa-funded Muslim group

2023/09/05 Leave a comment

Of note, ongoing issue. But CIJA also has its blind spots given its silence on judicial reform in Israel:

Another year, another conference, another tableau of speakers associated with antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny and hatred.

The convening organization is not the grotesque Goyim Defense League, a Hitler-admiring American neo-fascist groupuscule linked to a spate of graffiti, leaflets and posters the RCMP has begun investigating in the Toronto area. It’s the federally-funded Muslim Association of Canada.

In recent years, the MAC’s conferences have come under increasing scrutiny from Muslim human rights activists and Jewish advocacy organizations. It’s the same story this year with the MAC’s annual gathering at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre this weekend.

Among the speakers, one is known for justifying wife-beating and suicide bombing. Another considers unveiled women to be demonstrating “a sign of weak faith and the domination of desires and lust over a woman.” Another justifies execution for the sin of adultery: “What is the punishment for them? He is to be stoned to death.”

The MAC has responded to criticism in the same way it’s responded in the past: It’s Islamophobia. The MAC conference this weekend will be hosting respected and highly reputable international scholars and theologians who are being subjected to a smear campaign that “epitomizes the persistent Islamophobia and divisiveness” the Muslim community faces in Canada, according to the MAC’s President-Strategy Sharaf Sharafeldin.

There is a bit of a difference this year, however. After inquiries from the National Post, the MAC has “temporarily” dissociated itself with the Egyptian sheikh Nashaat Ahmed, a man who Jewish advocacy groups have accused of openly praying for the Jewish people to be destroyed, and who refers to Jews as evil beasts, the worst of the earth’s living creatures, and the descendants of apes and pigs.

Independent translations of Ahmed’s various speeches feature several statements to the effect that Jews should be eliminated along with “all others who support them in countries around the world,” and suggest support for the Islamic State, the Al Qaida successor in Iraq and Syria. Translations of Ahmed’s speeches on Islamic piety further suggest his support for prohibiting women from leaving the home unaccompanied by a male relative.

On Wednesday, the MAC explained that the organization does not endorse supplications against Jews or any other group of people. “However it is a well established Islamic theological position to invoke the help of God against oppressors.” In a prepared statement, the MAC announced that while it is commonplace for anti-Israel rhetoric to conflate Israel with the Jewish people, it is wrong to do so, and while the MAC had asked Sheikh Ahmed for clarification, an initial review indicated that statements attributed to him had been mistranslated, misrepresented or incorrectly dated.

On Thursday, the MAC sent me a statement reiterating Sharafeldin’s claim that concerns about Ahmed’s statements are evidence of “a smear campaign involving deliberate mistranslations and quotes out of context” that are part of a “harmful pattern of targeting Muslim scholars to undermine religious freedom and perpetuate a cancel culture.”

However, Ahmed would nonetheless be pulled from the weekend program.

“MAC acknowledges certain remarks that do not align with our core values and policies. . . we have temporarily suspended his participation in this year’s convention until the matter is fully resolved. We look forward to him clarifying his position and speaking in the future.”

Another difference from last year’s conference: In January, the Trudeau government appointed Toronto Star contributing columnist and Canadian Race Relations Foundation activist Amira Elghawaby as Canada’s first Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia. Elghawaby was scheduled to speak at the conference, but after queries from the National Post, Canadian Heritage confirmed on Thursday that she’d been pulled from the speakers lineup.

Canadian Heritage spokesman Daniel Savoie would not say why Elghawaby’s address was cancelled. “The Government of Canada strongly condemns any form of racism and hate speech, including antisemitism, as well as hate crimes in Canada and around the world,” Savoie said. “Hate, in any form, has no place in Canada as it runs counter to the values and spirit of a diverse and inclusive society.”

Canadian Heritage is not funding the conference, Savoie said. However, in recent years the Liberal government has allotted more than $3 million to a variety of programs and projects administered by the MAC, which has grown from its founding 20 years ago to include mosques, community centres and Islamic schools in more than a dozen Canadian cities.

As the organization has grown, the MAC has gravitated towards openly counseling a heavily politicized version of Islam embraced by only a small minority of Canadian Muslims. The MAC explicitly aligns with the political theology of Hassan Albanna, founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is the global fountainhead of Islamism, an ideology that demands Islamic law in all aspects of social, cultural and political life. The Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas was founded as the Muslim Brotherhood’s military wing in Palestine.

The focus of the MAC’s weekend convention in Toronto is intended to be “a discourse on how Islam can not be compartmentalized or partially adopted, rather it presents real, viable, and much needed complete solutions for all facets of our lives.”

Even as its federal funding support has increased since Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were elected in 2015, the MAC has been subject to an ongoing investigation by the Canada Revenue Agency. The MAC leadership accuses the CRA of harboring a systemic Islamophobic bias, a claim under investigation by the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA).

Meanwhile, last December the RCMP launched an investigation into a trove of elaborately forged government documents designed to give the impression that the RCMP and the CRA are maliciously targeting the MAC and relying on paid informants to frame the MAC as an organization that funds terrorism overseas.

Shimon Koffler Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), says that the MAC has given no indication that it’s interested in breaking its habit of hosting extremist lecturers at its annual gatherings.

“Year after year, the Muslim Association of Canada platforms speakers with records of promoting virulent antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, and hatred at its convention,” Fogel said. “A major Muslim organization representing a community that itself is the target of hate should know better than to promote that same hatred towards other marginalized groups. Instead, they choose to amplify bigotry, prejudice, and intolerance.”

This year’s conference is “a missed opportunity to show unity against the vitriol we all face,” Fogel said. “It is the responsibility of each of us to combat hatred and racism, and we should expect no less from Canadian Muslims.”

Source: Terry Glavin: Antisemitic Egyptian sheikh was to be hosted by Ottawa-funded Muslim group

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Terry Glavin: ‘Killers’ poster points to Canada’s failure to crack down on Khalistani extremism

2023/07/07 Leave a comment

Of note and concern:

It’s a good thing that Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly is making an effort to reassure India’s diplomats in Canada that her government is taking the latest bloodcurdling threats against them seriously. A good thing, because Canada’s track record on keeping a lid on Khalistani extremism is abysmal, and the Indian government has little reason to trust Canada’s intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to do their jobs.

The latest threat comes in the form of a pro-Khalistan “Sikhs for Justice” poster advertising an upcoming rally at India’s Toronto consulate featuring photographs of Indian High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma and Toronto Consul General Apoorva Srivastava. The poster describes Verma and Srivastava as the “killers” of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh separatist in British Columbia.

The poster comes only a few weeks after Canadian diplomats in India were scrambling with earnest disavowals following a parade in Brampton, Ont., that featured a float with mannequins in a grotesque replication of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.

The president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, B.C., Nijjar was gunned down in the temple’s parking lot on June 18. He was closely associated with the Sikhs for Justice group, which has been organizing an international “referendum” on Sikh independence in an independent Khalistan (“land of the pure”) carved out of India’s Punjab state.

While Nijjar’s friends and associates deny his alleged terrorist affinities and claim CSIS had warned him to be careful, Indian police authorities say Nijjar led a group called the Khalistan Tiger Force and was a key figure in Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), the terror-listed entity in Canada that carried out the bombing of an Air India jetliner that fell into the sea off the coast of Ireland in 1985, killing all 329 on board. That atrocity was plotted and planned in Canada under the noses of the RCMP and the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.

Nijjar was wanted in India on a variety of criminal charges going back to the bombing of a Hindu temple in the Punjabi city of Patiala in 2010. Punjab police had also issued an arrest warrant for Nijjar on dubious charges that he was plotting the murder of religious leaders, and on the unlikely claim that he was organizing a training camp for Khalistani militants in a rural area near Mission, B.C.

While Punjab’s police authorities are notoriously paranoid about the Khalistani movement, which is almost entirely a phenomenon of diaspora Sikh communities — especially in Canada — Indian authorities have good reason to be concerned about Canada’s determination to keep a lid on a recent upsurge in Khalistani violence.

Khalistani terrorism literally exploded onto the scene in India in the early 1980s, with Canada serving as haven for the separatist movement’s government-in-exile. Babbar Khalsa was perhaps the most bloodthirsty terror group that had holed up in the Golden Temple Complex in Amritsar, Sikhism’s Vatican. The organization was commanded by the Air India atrocity mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar from his home in Burnaby, B.C.

The Khalistani movement has undergone a revival in recent years, with Canada again providing a haven for several key figures wanted on terror-related charges in India. On Monday, India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar drew attention to the Sikhs for Justice “Killers” poster that singled out Indian diplomats in Canada. “We have requested our partner countries like Canada, U.S., U.K. and Australia where sometimes Khalistani activities happen, not to give space to the Khalistanis. Because their radical, extremist thinking is neither good for us nor them nor our relations.”

Similar posters identifying Indian diplomats in the style of a “wanted” poster and describing Nijjar as a shaheed jathedar (martyred commander) have also turned up in San Francisco and Australia. Last Sunday, a fire was set outside India’s consular offices in San Francisco in an incident condemned by the U.S. State Department on Monday.

In March, during a severe clampdown on separatist agitation in Punjab, Indian embassies were the sites of sometimes violent protests in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., London and Ottawa. The San Francisco consulate was subjected to an arson attack. The fence of the High Commission in London was scaled and an Indian flag was ripped down. In Washington, a journalist was allegedly assaulted, and in Ottawa, “grenades” that turned out to be just smoke bombs were thrown at the High Commission.

Surrey RCMP say they are exploring all leads related to Nijjar’s murder, which took the shape of a typical Surrey gangland hit job — two heavy-set masked men were spotted fleeing the scene and are believed to have absconded in a nearby getaway car. The local Integrated Homicide Investigation Team would not say whether a stolen car found torched a few kilometres away was part of the investigation, but it would be consistent with gangland murders in Metro Vancouver.

Nijjar was known to have been feuding with the former Khalistani militant Ripudaman Singh Malik, the multimillionaire implicated in Babbar Khalsa’s 1985 Air India bombing who was murdered in a hit job in July last year. Malik, who was acquitted on Air India charges, had made his peace with the Indian government and had his name removed from India’s visa blacklist as a result. Malik went on to express support for India’s authoritarian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is wildly unpopular among India’s Sikhs and has become notorious for his civil rights abuses and close relationships with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

The two men charged with first-degree murder in Malik’s shooting have lengthy criminal records and were well known to police agencies keeping tabs on Metro Vancouver’s organized-crime underworld.

While Nijjar’s murder exhibits fairly routine signs of a revenge killing, New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh, who has publicly indulged in a conspiracy theory proposing an Indian intelligence-agency plot behind the Air India bombing, has asked Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino to look into the case in light of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security adviser’s identification of India as a source of foreign interference in Canada.

This is the sort of thing that gives the Indian government cause to distrust Ottawa’s seriousness in coming to terms with threats to India’s security that come from Canada. As recently as 2018, the convicted former Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Singh Atwal showed up in Trudeau’s entourage in the prime minister’s tour of India, which had already become a public-relations disaster owing to Trudeau’s weird wardrobe choices, and Modi snubbing him for several days before agreeing to meet with him.

The RCMP later conceded that Atwal’s background should have been brought to the prime minister’s attention. Atwal was convicted for his role as the triggerman in the attempted assassination of a visiting Punjabi cabinet minister on a Vancouver Island backroad in 1986. When the controversy blew up, Trudeau’s national security adviser at the time, Daniel Jean, insinuated that the whole affair had been orchestrated by India’s foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing.

Maybe Mélanie Joly’s sternly reassuring words about Canada’s duty under the Vienna Convention to protect foreign diplomats in Canada are the sign of a changed attitude in Ottawa. If so, that would be very good news.

Source: Terry Glavin: ‘Killers’ poster points to Canada’s failure to crack down on Khalistani extremism

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Glavin: Amira Elghawaby seemed the perfect appointee to combat ‘Islamophobia’ — except for all the politics 

2023/02/02 Leave a comment

Of note, Glavin’s assessment of the political targeting considerations:

It’s profoundly unfair to Amira Elghawaby that she was engulfed in a whirlwind of opprobrium and hurt feelings and disgust pretty well from the moment the Trudeau government announced last week that she’d been chosen to serve as Canada’s first Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia.

No matter what you might think about Elghawaby or about her harshest detractors — among whom you can count members of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s own cabinet — the appointment was doomed to turn out badly, no matter who’d been picked for the post. The whole point of Elghawaby’s job — who she’s supposed to represent, exactly, and what she’s expected to be combatting — has been obscured in a shambles of pious boasts, half-truths and cynical disinformation.

According to Trudeau’s announcement last week, Elghawaby is intended to be Canada’s representative in the matter of this thing that has come to be called Islamophobia. But after certain of his Quebec lieutenants and the Quebec government erupted in umbrage owing to indelicate insinuations she’d appeared to have made about Quebeckers, Elghawaby went from being a representative of the Government of Canada to what Trudeau called “a representative to the Government of Canada.” On Monday, Trudeau put it this way: “She is there to speak for the community with the community and build bridges.”

This is not quite throwing Elghawaby under the bus. Neither is it a case of Trudeau having unfairly set up a Muslim woman in the first place to challenge Quebec’s entrenchment of laïcité secularism, which clearly disfavours devout Muslim women in the public service.

At the same time, it’s not hard to make the argument that Trudeau hasn’t shown much mettle in forcefully challenging Quebec on this front himself. Today, Elghawaby told Quebeckers she was sorry that her words “have hurt the people of Quebec … I have heard you and I know what you’re feeling.”

The trouble isn’t just Elghawaby’s views about Quebec’s Bill 21, which the Canadian Civil Liberties Association reasonably describes as a “horrendous law that violates human rights and harms people who are already marginalized” because it prevents teachers, police officers and other public servants from wearing hijabs and turbans and yarmulkes and crosses.

Part of the problem is this: If a job description in a federal posting called for the composite stereotype of a faintly obnoxious and earnest upper-class social justice enthusiast from one of the leafier Liberal strongholds of the Greater Toronto Area, Elghawaby would be the ideal candidate — except she’s an Ottawa resident.

As an activist and frequent opinion-pages contributor, Elghawaby has adopted all the respectable standpoints with just the right degree of transgressive élan, rarely too strident or too squishy. She’s called for removing the Queen as Canada’s head of state and dismissed Canada Day as a festival of “Judeo-Christian storytelling.” She’s been gushing in her praise for Trudeau and backs the Trudeau government’s extremely contentious moves to regulate commentary on the internet. She has argued in favour of Muslim prayer rooms in schools, and once blasted the former Conservative government of Stephen Harper as having done more harm to the image of Canadian Muslims than al-Qaida’s atrocities in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.

That last claim was clearly over the top, but fair enough. In certain high-fashion “progressive” circles, that’s the sort of thing one is expected to say.

More worrisome is Elghawaby’s apparent contentment with the conflation of anti-Muslim bigotry with genuine and justifiable alarm among liberal Muslims and national security agencies arising from the presence of reactionary, grossly antisemitic and foreign-influenced Islamist elements within Canada’s Muslim leadership itself. For years, the Trudeau government has used the spectre of “Islamophobia” to dismiss these concerns.

It’s a pattern that began in the traumatic days of January 2017, after six Muslims were massacred at a mosque in the Quebec City suburb of Sainte-Foy. Back then, the Trudeau government sacrificed all-party consensus around a definition of the term Islamophobia, leaving it sufficiently open-ended to include a mere disdain for the Islamic religion itself or even high-pitched opposition to the theocratic-fascist ideologies of Islamism — which is not the religion, Islam.

According to the definition set out in the contentious federal anti-racism strategy, Islamophobia is defined this way: “Includes racism, stereotypes, prejudice, fear or acts of hostility directed towards individual Muslims or followers of Islam in general. In addition to individual acts of intolerance and racial profiling, Islamophobia can lead to viewing and treating Muslims as a greater security threat on an institutional, systemic and societal level.”

So whatever Islamophobia is, it includes these things.

Two years ago, at the national Summit on Islamophobia where the establishment of the post Elghawaby has taken up was first proposed, the main matter at hand was the Canada Revenue Agency’s audits of certain Muslim-centred charities. At that summit, Trudeau said the CRA was targeting Muslims, and it should stop. “Institutions should support people, not target them,” Trudeau said.

This puts the prime minister squarely at odds with Canada’s national security agencies and the Research and Analysis Division of the CRA’s Charities Directorate. Based on the Finance Ministry’s 2015 Assessment of Inherent Risks of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing in Canada, the “most likely” destinations for Canadian funds supporting terrorism were Afghanistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories and several other mostly Muslim-majority countries. Terrorist groups with “a Canadian nexus” in the assessment included several Islamist fronts associated with al-Qaida, the Islamic State (ISIL), Hamas, Hezbollah and so on — terrorist groups that rely on an Islamic cover story for their savagery.

Trudeau ordered the CRA Office of the Taxpayer’s Ombudsperson to inquire into the claim that the CRA’s audits of certain Muslim charities constituted “systemic Islamophobia,” but the review has been stymied by the Ombudsperson’s inability to ferret out specific national-security information from the relevant agencies.

The Muslim Association of Canada and the National Council of Canadian Muslims — Elghawaby’s employer during the Islamophobia summit — are now demanding that the CRA audits be called off altogether. They also want the Ombudsman’s review to scrapped because it’s apparently useless. They certainly have a point there.

The whole thing is a mess, and it’s just as jumbled and fractious as Elghawaby’s appointment, which is as Trudeau described it — to “build bridges.” But it’s to build the Liberal Party’s bridges to Muslim voters.

In a 2017 opinion piece for the Ottawa Citizen, Elghawaby quite reasonably described the Quebec government as a bully that was “out to gain votes off the backs of vulnerable minorities.” That’s at least arguably exactly what the Trudeau government is doing here, too.

As Trudeau himself said of Elhawaby: “Her job now is to make sure she’s helping the government.”

Source: Glavin: Amira Elghawaby seemed the perfect appointee to combat ‘Islamophobia’ — except for all the politics 

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Glavin: Good news! Canada is not being overrun by racist zombie hordes

2022/06/25 Leave a comment

A bit overly dismissive of the Abacus poll IMO:

There are cranks among us. There are racists, loons, nutters, dingbats and weirdos among us and there are millions of them, according to a recent Abacus Data poll. I know this to be true because I read it in all the newspapers.

Here’s a National Post headline from last week: “Millions of Canadians believe in white replacement theory: poll.” Here’s the Toronto Star: “’Kind of terrifying’: Numbers show racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory has found audience in Canada.” Here’s Abacus Data’s own headline: “Millions believe in conspiracy theories in Canada.”

And then the story just seemed to disappear. If the story were true, why did it vanish after a couple of news cycles? Shouldn’t we all be taking this a lot more seriously?

If the story is true, millions of Canadians are afflicted with exactly the same fascist derangement that drove white supremacist Brenton Tarrant to massacre 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand three years ago. In a similarly live-streamed replication of the Christchurch atrocity only last month, the lunatic Payton Gendron slaughtered ten people in a Black neighbourhood in Buffalo, N.Y. with a weapon with the words “White replacement theory” written on it.

Surely it can’t be true that millions of Canadians are devoted to the same hideous “theory” that motivated Tarrant and Gendron, can it?

I’m happy to report that no, there’s no evidence to support the proposition, or contention, or if you like, this “theory” about millions of Canadians revealed by that Abacus poll, because the poll did not provide any evidence of the sort.

This is not to say that there weren’t some quite disturbing findings that the Abacus pollsters came up with. And the story didn’t quite vanish, either.

In an otherwise thoughtful contemplation of the degeneration of political discourse that appeared in Policy magazine last weekend, the outspoken New Democrat Charlie Angus contemplated the tendency to crazy thinking as a kind of orchard where Conservatives are happy to find low-hanging fruit, and perhaps it explains why “some Conservative leadership candidates have spent so much time promoting all manner of conspiracy claims.”

Angus wrote: “Maybe the Conservatives think they will be able to harness the tactical rage of this phenomenon to the faux outrage of political theatrics.”

And that may be so.

It’s certainly true that the populist Conservative leadership contender and bitcoin enthusiast Pierre Poilievre does sometimes give the impression of being an eccentric who wasted too much of his youth playing with Buzz Lightyear action figures in his room.

But it’s also true that among the poll respondents inclined to believe what is possibly the craziest proposition Abacus canvassed for — the notion that Microsoft uber-zillionaire Bill Gates has been using microchips to track people and their behaviour — New Democrats were only two percentage points behind Poilievre fanciers: 11 per cent as opposed to 13 per cent.

As for the white supremacist “Great Replacement” imbecility, the idea is that there’s a plot, often attributed to the Jews, to orchestrate immigration policies in such a way as to monkeywrench a country’s demographics in order to replace “white” people with Muslims, specifically, or with people of colour, generally.

The Abacus poll doesn’t provide all that much insight into how many poll respondents, let alone Canadians, actually believe this drivel. If you drill down below the way the poll findings have been reported and then dig below the way Abacus described its findings to the bedrock of the poll question itself, you might be relieved to discover that it isn’t quite time yet to head for the hills to build yourself a compound to defend yourself against millions of marauding racist zombies.

Abacus described its findings this way: Some 37 per cent of Canadians (11 million people) think “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Canadians with immigrants who agree with their political views. This is an articulation of what is commonly referred to as replacement theory.”

Set aside the fact that this isn’t so much an “articulation” of any theory, exactly, and the fact that the lunatic “replacement theory” doesn’t quite match the Abacus description of it. Last month, Statistic Canada reported this simple fact: “Canada is a low-fertility country, or below the no-migration population replacement level of 2.1 children per woman.” The Abacus poll didn’t ask about “white” people, but rather “native-born” Canadians. And native-born Canadians are retiring in huge numbers. Boomers are exiting the job market in droves.

It’s data of this kind that the Trudeau government has quite openly factored into its Immigration Levels Plan, which sets out the objective of drawing 430,000 newcomers to Canada each year. This is the highest level of immigration in Canadian history, and a higher immigration rate than any other G7 country. Only a small minority of those immigrants are coming from Europe, so they’re not, you know, “white” people. And anyone who hasn’t noticed that it has been a custom of the Liberal Party to jimmy with immigration so as to replenish its urban vote banks hasn’t been paying attention to the way things are done in Canada. The Conservatives do it too, but they’re just not very good at it.

The Abacus poll findings are perfectly consistent with a series of polls of its own and of other polling outfits that show Canadians are becoming deeply distrustful of politicians, government institutions and the news media. The world is in a state of upheaval to an extent unparalleled in decades. Overseas there’s war and looming famine in Central Asia and Africa, and here in Canada you have to be rich to be poor these days, especially when it comes to housing. Canada’s economy is a house of cards that’s increasingly dependent upon high immigration levels.

Canada’s “native-born” population can’t replace itself. Just one reason is that you have to be quite well-to-do to raise a family nowadays, and you can’t raise a family in a 600-square-foot, $600,000 condo. It’s no wonder that nostalgia is so commonplace. So is the sentiment that we’re all being dragged by forces we can’t control into a maelstrom of inhospitable, culturally fractured bedlam. People have every right to look at the rich and famous of the World Economic Forum, for instance — the object of quite a few silly conspiracy theories — with utter contempt.

But millions of Canadians are not setting out across the landscape in roaming hordes of racist zombies. That’s the good news.

These days, we should take the good news wherever we can find it.

Source: Glavin: Good news! Canada is not being overrun by racist zombie hordes

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Glavin: Neil Young vs Spotify, and the gathering storm

2022/02/01 Leave a comment

Good column:

The fight the legendary hippie singer-songwriter Neil Young brought to the music-streaming giant Spotify on Monday over the privileged place it provides a wildly popular podcast by the contrarian comedian and former wrestling colour-commentator Joe Rogan appears to have ended as quickly as it began. But the wider war is gathering steam.

“I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines,” Young said. Either Rogan goes or I go, he told the Stockholm-based audio-streaming giant. On Wednesday, Spotify responded: Off you go, then. By Thursday, Young had decamped with his entire 45-album backlist and all his bread to Apple Music, while Rogan’s big-tent circuses, with their sideshow freaks and thrill rides, will carry on, as before, with Spotify.

It all sounds so frivolous, but it isn’t, because the public-policy hostilities arising from our common captivity in the grip of COVID-19, now in the first days of the third year of SARS-CoV-2, are only becoming more pronounced with every passing day. Millions are dead, the stricken keep on dying, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to discern what the basic facts are and the uproars are unfolding in the midst of what has been called a “crisis of epistemology.”

That’s the philosophical way of describing the erosion of common understandings about not just what the truth is, but about how we’re all supposed to go about the work of figuring out what the truth is in the first place. Facts used to matter. Now, not so much.

Rogan stands accused of engaging in dezinformatsiya, as the Russians elegantly describe the traffic in dangerous half-truths and lies deployed as offensive weaponry in propaganda warfare. Specifically, Rogan’s offside notions about vaccines and masks are widely understood to make him a dangerous menace to public health. While he’s helpfully referred to himself as a “moron” for suggesting young people shouldn’t bother themselves with COVID vaccinations, the former “Fear Factor” game show host’s Spotify broadcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, still draws roughly 11 million listeners per episode.

I should straight away confess my own loyalties this week were to the cause of Team Neil. One must take sides, after all. Sorry, but that’s how these proxy wars work. There’s little room for conscientious objection, and the alliances that form up can draw the most disparate and ordinarily unfriendly parties to one another in the same blocs, rallying behind banners that wouldn’t otherwise summon them.

In all the epistemic chaos abroad in the Anglosphere—it churns and roils its way through the culture only most noticeably in the undying allegiance of millions of Americans to the disgraced former president Donald Trump—we’ve reached the point where the pandemic’s early public consensus and trust in government experts, in Canada at least, appears to be collapsing.

Canadians almost invariably end up adopting the culture-war habits Americans torture themselves with, so there’s now a “small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing.” This is how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau inelegantly described the convoys of truckers and their camp followers rumbling along Canada’s highways in their Peterbilts and Kenworths, and Freightliners and Macks, intent upon converging in Ottawa this weekend.

The On-to-Ottawa organizers insist they are against vaccine mandates imposed upon anyone, not just cross-border truckers, but many protesters appear to share more seething anger and frustration than any clear and coherent objective. Parliament Hill police were planning on about 10,000 people showing up. It’s been a bit unsettling to consider how all this might end up playing out, because there are some genuinely nasty characters who have insinuated themselves into the anti-mandate protests. The Parliamentary Protective Service insists that everything would proceed according to routine this weekend, but it still seems unlikely that events will go on to resolve themselves quite as efficiently as they appeared to in the Young-Rogan conflict.

It wasn’t just a quarrel about Spotify’s royalty rates or shuffle features. The Spotify rumpus was at least partly about whether a musician like Young could use his enormous star power to force an audio-streaming company with roughly 380 million monthly users to ditch what could be described, in the most charitable terms, as the world’s most popular streaming public-affairs talk show. But it’s also about money. A lot of money.

Rogan signed an exclusive contract with Spotify two years ago, reportedly worth more than $100 million, and Spotify is discovering that there’s more profit to be had in podcasts than in archiving digital versions of yesteryear’s hit singles. Young, who had six million monthly listeners on Spotify last week, sold his music catalogue to publisher Hipgnosis last year for $150 million. While Young says losing his him-or-me ultimatum would cost him 60 per cent of his streaming-service revenue, it’s not like his abdication from Spotify will cause him any pain.

Young’s net worth is estimated at $200 million. Now that Apple Music has declared itself Young’s new streaming home, Young’s earnings shouldn’t be disrupted all that dramatically. So as tidy as some of us might want it, this story is not so simple as a moral tale about a shaggy and lanky iconic veteran protest singer, in his 76th year, gallantly impoverishing himself by bravely sticking it to the man.

In normal times, there’s hardly anything even newsworthy about celebrities throwing themselves into causes. They do it all the time and they’re often pretty weird. There are celebrities against circumcision, celebrities against Oprah Winfrey and celebrities against meat. There have always been celebrities against vaccines. Now there are celebrities against COVID lockdowns.

“No more taking of our freedom And our God-given rights, Pretending its for our safety When it’s really to enslave . . .” That’s a lyric line from a one of several anti-mandate songs recently released by Van Morrison, the usually mild-mannered Northern Irish musical icon whose lyrics are sometimes so ethereal as to be comparable to the poetry of the English mystic William Blake.

Early on in the pandemic, Noel Gallagher, the force behind the chart-topping band Oasis, vowed that he would not wear a mask when he was out at the shops. Only last weekend, the Marvel star Evangeline Lilly joined prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy at an anti-mandate rally in Washington D.C.

Last September’s celebrity COVID eruption was perhaps the most amusing. That’s when pop star Nicki Minaj drew unwanted attention to herself by claiming that a cousin’s friend in Trinidad had been abandoned at the altar by a bride who was displeased by the way a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine had made the groom’s testicles swell.

Nicki Minaj has 22 million Twitter followers. Joe Rogan’s Twitter crew, incidentally, numbers eight million. And now there’s a #DeleteSpotify thing on Twitter that’s taking off.

In this bizarre new world where celebrities are taken to be epidemiologists and the toxins of antisemitism are as prevalent on the “left” as they’ve conventionally been situated on the “right,” it’s not especially helpful to dismiss all those angry truckers as a pack of howling white supremacists. Something’s happening here, to borrow a Buffalo Springfield lyric from Young’s late 60s heyday, and what it is ain’t exactly clear.

Jonathan Rauch, the journalist, author, Atlantic magazine fixture and senior fellow in governance studies with the Brookings Institution, proposes a helpful way of comprehending the perplexing phenomena of the times. It goes like this.

Just as the formalized political rules that derive from the American constitution are necessary to make American democracy work, the ways that knowledge itself is constituted are necessary for politics in liberal democracies to work. And the system is close to broken.

In his just-published book, the Constitution of Knowledge: A Defence of Truth, Rauch describes how the space occupied by what he calls the “reality-based community” is shrinking. Its customs and conventions are falling away. The intellectual strata that has conventionally distilled truth from facts and data and goes about the work of constituting knowledge—historians, social scientists, journalists, policy-makers, jurists—is succumbing to cultures of enforced conformity that stagnate in their own hived-off echo chambers.

Ideological rigidity, speech codes, Twitter-induced outrage spasms and a strict emphasis on consistency with “narrative” are supplanting the social mechanisms that have long served to transform disagreement into knowledge. We are counselled to assess truth claims by sizing up the people “who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing,” as Trudeau put it. The norms and institutions forged over decades by peer review, humility, fact-checking, good-faith debate and the evaluation of truth claims against objective evidence, verification and replication—it’s all up for grabs.

It’s not just that facts don’t seem to matter anymore. It’s that it doesn’t seem to matter that facts don’t matter.

Source: Neil Young vs Spotify, and the gathering storm

Filed under disinformation, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Glavin: Canada’s can’t just shrug off the debate over the Beijing Winter Olympics

2021/02/12 Leave a comment

Agree:
Now that a rising global movement to move the 2022 Winter Games from Beijing is finally starting to pick up steam in Canada, there’s a debate worth having about it, and some difficult questions to be raised. Can the International Olympic Committee be made to reverse its preposterous 2015 host-city decision in favour of Xi Jinping’s ravenous, globe-encircling police state? Is it possible to settle on a more civilized venue in time? What should Canada do if the effort fails?

These are among the difficult questions that arise no matter what we might think about Canadian flags on an Olympic podium being put to use as rags to wipe away the several provisions of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that the Xi regime is transgressing in the course of enslaving and obliterating the Uighur people of Xinjiang.

But before we get to any of those questions, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government will have to be shifted from the unequivocal standpoint it has adopted, which is that none of this is any of our business. The federal government has outsourced these decisions to the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees, and that’s all there is to say, Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau’s office has been helpfully straightforward in explaining.

And then there are all the questions that arise from the rationale that various Olympic committee officials have provided, which several Liberal MPs have echoed, as to why the Winter Games must proceed as planned and according to Beijing’s wishes. The first among these questions is this one: Just how stupid do these people think we are?

Dick Pound, the most senior of the International Olympic Committee’s 98 members and former president of the Canadian Olympic Committee, points to the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Olympics as “completely ineffective” because the Soviet Union was still occupying Afghanistan a decade later. “Boycotts don’t work,” COC chief executive officer David Shoemaker and Canadian Paralympics Committee CEO Karen O’Neill argued in an opinion essay published in the Globe and Mail last week.

Apart from the usual treacle about how the Olympics “help build connections and open doors” and provide a “unique means for the promotion of peace and development, for uniting rather than dividing,” Shoemaker and O’Neill claimed that their critics want an Olympic boycott to be “the first order of business to reshape our relationship with China.”

That’s just straight-up untrue. Human rights organizations, advocacy groups mobilizing on behalf of Tibetans, Mongolians, Uighurs, Hongkongers and Chinese human rights defenders, and Canadian parliamentarians across the political spectrum, have spent years begging for effective measures – Magnitsky Act sanctions, for instance – to re-order Canada’s obsequious relationship with China.

The focus on the Olympics hasn’t just come out of the blue, either. The IOC ignored warnings from international human rights organizations six years ago that allowing China to host the 2022 Winter Games would only serve the regime’s purposes in silencing its critics. And now, the COC is playing right along, warning Canadian athletes to mind what they say in Beijing lest they offend the sensibilities of the ruling Chinese Communist Party and run afoul of the regime’s draconian national-security laws.

You would think Shoemaker would know better, and of course he does know better. Shoemaker came to his top COC job from a post leading the National Basketball Association’s China operations, which suffered massive reprisals – blacked-out broadcasts, boycotted merchandise, cancelled contracts – all in retaliation for a single Tweet in 2019 by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey: “Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong.”

It’s quite true that the Soviets were still carpet-bombing Afghanistan nearly a decade after the American-led 1980 Olympic boycott. Nothing changed, you could say. But nothing changed when the western democracies went all in for the Third Reich’s 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, either. All that Olympic “promotion of peace and development” didn’t dissuade the Nazis from annexing the Sudetenland, kicking off the Second World War and incinerating six million Jews.

The IOC’s decision to award Russia the 2014 Winter Games venue in Sochi didn’t cause the Kremlin to repeal its hateful laws against the LGBT community, but it did serve to further engorge Vladimir Putin’s circle of bloated oligarchs. The Sochi Games were supposed to cost $12 billion. The final bill exceeded $51 billion. When the IOC ignored Chinese human rights defenders’ pleas and awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics to the People’s Republic, the regime was not shamed into dropping its policy of bankrolling and arming the Sudanese atrocities in Darfur – the first genocide of the 21st century.

Awarding Beijing the massive propaganda victory of the 2008 Olympics did not dissuade the regime from descending into depths of despotism unmatched since the days of Mao Zedong, nor cause Xi Jinping to have second thoughts about dismembering what little was permitted to remain of Hong Kong’s autonomy. If anything, the regime was encouraged in its degenerate habits, eventually kidnapping the Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. The two Michaels have been imprisoned for more than two years now, in retaliation for Canada’s detention of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou on a 13-count U.S. Justice Department extradition warrant.

But pity the poor Canadian athletes, Shoemaker and Pound and the rest of the Olympic establishment plead. These fine young people have trained so hard to compete in this glamorous international forum. Why victimize them?

“We are not the ones who are victimizing the Canadian athletes,” Ivy Li of Canadian Friends of Hong Kong told me. Ivy’s group, along with Students for a Free Tibet Canada, the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project and several prominent Canadians, including former Liberal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, are calling on the IOC to back away from Beijing and move the Winter Games to a free country.

“The athletes are being victimized by a very bad decision of the IOC. The IOC ignored all the protests and all the advice they were given. They didn’t listen,” Li said. “They gave Beijing the games and they are putting our athletes in this tough spot. Our athletes should not want medals that have been soaked in blood.”

A separate, similar initiative has united Bloc, Conservative, NDP and backbench Liberals who are calling on the federal government to intervene and urge the IOC to find another host city for the Winter Games. “Some may argue that sports and politics should not mix,” the parliamentarians say in a letter they all signed. “We would respond that when genocide is happening, it is no longer a matter of politics, but of human rights and crimes against humanity.”

The Conservative Party’s foreign affairs critic, Michael Chong, and Green Party leader Annamie Paul, have taken the same line. Paul says the federal government should look into finding a Canadian venue for the Winter Games.

Parliamentarians in Europe and the United Kingdom are taking up the same call to move the 2022 Winter Games out of China. While Joe Biden’s new administration hasn’t had much to say on the subject beyond a pledge to develop a “shared approach” to the issue with American allies and partners, there’s a bipartisan push in the U.S. Congress to give the Beijing games a pass.

The main challenge in Ottawa, however, is simply convincing the Trudeau government that Canadians are entitled to have some say in these things at all.

Source: Glavin: Canada’s can’t just shrug off the debate over the Beijing Winter Olympics

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