Monsef’s place of birth shouldn’t have ‘serious consequences’ – De Kerckhove, Glavin

Former Canadian Ambassador Ferry de Kerckhove injects needed knowledge about the region and refugees:

Many people have expressed sympathy for Maryam Monsef, the federal Minister for Democratic Institutions, since the disclosure that she was born in Iran, rather than in Afghanistan. But there have been criticisms – which I simply can’t fathom – from MPs such as Tony Clement and Michelle Rempel, who talked about “serious consequences” if the minister’s birthplace had not been accurately represented on her refugee and citizenship applications.

Do these people have any idea what region we are talking about? Does Ms. Rempel have any understanding of how volatile, porous and border-inconsequential the region was, where even dates of birth, when registered, between Muslim and Christian countries don’t match up? Does she, and those who chime in with her, realize that many Afghans sought refuge in Iran during both the Soviet occupation and the subsequent civil war culminating in the rise of the vicious Taliban regime?

 The Afghan city of Herat (where Ms. Monsef’s parents married and where she believed she was born) and the Iranian city of Mashad (where she was actually born) are historically and geographically close. So Afghans would travel back and forth to Iran in times of duress; although they might have not been warmly welcomed, they were at least in a safer environment than in Afghanistan.

Source: Monsef’s place of birth shouldn’t have ‘serious consequences’ – The Globe and Mail

Terry Glavin makes similar points in What you need to know about Maryam Monsef – Macleans.ca The MP’s birthplace does not matter. Her mother made a brace choice, sparing her daughters from a brutal and ruthless past macleans.ca      

Terry Glavin: Canada’s servile relationship with China | National Post

In Glavin’s diatribe against previous and current governments efforts to strengthen ties with China, some valid observations and concerns with respect to immigration policies and programs:

….Canadians were similarly hoodwinked by the Immigrant Investor Program (IIP). Begun by Conservative free trader Brian Mulroney and conceived mainly as a way to lure thousands of jittery cash-rich Hong Kong entrepreneurs to Canada, the IIP ended up as the primary means by which Canadian real estate became a favoured bolthole for all the money being spirited out of the People’s Republic. As the country descends deeper into the abyss, Chinese banks were drained of nearly a trillion dollars in illegal money transfers last year alone.

The IIP had to be folded up by the Harper Conservatives after it became clear — and as it took the South China Morning Post’s Ian Young to reveal — that Canada’s ragged refugee-class immigrants had contributed more to Revenue Canada than the IIP’s big-spender immigrant investors did over the life of the program. Now, in an inter-provincial ripoff far more outrageous than any of those “equalization payment” uproars between “have” and “have-not” provinces that have erupted from time to time, the Quebec government has taken over the immigrant-investor racket. Quebec scoops up an $800,000 loan from every IIP arrival – roughly 2,000 “investors” annually — nine out of 10 of whom then immediately get back on a plane and fly elsewhere, mainly Vancouver.

The B.C. treasury gets nothing out of this — and the B.C. government’s recent 15-per-cent sales tax imposition on properties bought by foreign nationals isn’t expected to change a thing. What Vancouverites have gotten out of this is one of the world’s least affordable cities, bitterly divided against itself. Average house prices in Metro Vancouver have nearly tripled over the past 15 years. Home ownership for working families is a thing of the past.

Now we’re being sold on a Chinese version of the temporary foreign worker program. Conceived as a short-term remedy to the occasional ailment of acute labour shortages in key industries, the indentured-labour service had to be dismantled by the Conservatives owing to its inevitably scandalous abuse by disreputable employers. By 2012, there were 338,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada. Last year the number was down to about 90,000. Now, McCallum is championing a ramped up, Beijing-vetted version. You would not be unwise to wager that this will not end well.

Source: Terry Glavin: Canada’s servile relationship with China | National Post

Terry Glavin: The real story of the Komagata Maru

Terry Glavin provides additional historical and broader context:

It’s true that many, if not most, of the passengers later disavowed any seditious intent, but telling the story the way Trudeau told it does a grave disservice to the memory of the brave radicals who organized the Komagata Maru enterprise, from the outset, in the cause of India’s freedom.

A quixotic propaganda-of-the-deed collaboration between the Socialist Party of Canada and the revolutionary Ghadar Movement, the explicit purpose of the effort was to mount a legal challenge to the “continuous passage” immigration regulations that India’s British overlords had persuaded Ottawa to adopt to stem the flight of pro-independence Indian militants to Canada. The larger aim was to bolster the ranks of insurrectionists plotting India’s emancipation from the relative safety of North America or, failing that, to expose the cruel hoax of equal citizenship in the British Empire, first asserted by the Empress of India, Queen Victoria herself, more than a half-century earlier.

The slogan of the Komagata Maru campaign’s organizers was not: “We choose Canada, please be nice to us.” It was: “What is our name? Mutiny. What is our work? Mutiny.” This was a specific reference to the 1857 Indian insurrection known as the Sepoy Rebellion, named after the British Empire’s native soldiers in India, known as sepoys. In the Urdu language, “mutiny” is “ghadar.”

Ghadar Movement leaders saw to the organization of the ship’s voyage, led the “shore committee” activities while the ship was waylaid in Burrard Inlet, and eventually provided arms to Komagata Maru’s passengers during their stopover in Yokohama on the return journey to Kolkata. In the days after its forced departure from Vancouver Harbour, Ghadarite propaganda aimed at Vancouver’s Indian expatriates was explicit: “Go to your country and set up a rebellion at once.” Even before the ship weighed anchor and headed out to sea, the Socialist Party’s H.M. Fitzgerald was exhorting Vancouver’s Sikhs to heed the Ghadarite call and return to India to take up the fight. Within two years, half of British Columbia’s roughly 2,000 Sikhs had done just that.

The Socialist Party provided the Komagata Maru’s legal defence in Vancouver, which was no small affront to “progressive” thinking at the time. British Columbia’s labour movement and left-wing leadership had been rife with racist hooliganism ever since B.C.’s assortment of socialist leagues and union councils coalesced into the Provincial Progressive Party in 1902. Fractious and comically sectarian, the one thing the party delegates firmly agreed on at their founding convention was that Asian immigrants should be barred from Canada.

All this is not to say that the Komagata Maru passengers were not treated abysmally, or that none of the passengers intended to settle peacefully in Canada, or that they were not subjected to racist immigration rules, or that Canada has nothing to apologize for, or that the passengers were not unjustly denied permission to disembark in Vancouver. But to cast them all in the role of “victims,” as Trudeau put it, commits an indignity against the truth and dishonours the cause of Indian freedom to which the Ghadarites and their eccentric, ahead-of-their-time socialist friends were so passionately committed. Parliamentary apologies are all well and good, but a formal House of Commons’ acknowledgment of their bravery would have been a more worthy tribute.

During his apology for Canada’s role in the Komagata Maru affair last week, Trudeau said this: “When we make mistakes, we must apologize, and recommit ourselves to doing better.”

This is a fine sentiment. We might also hope that committing ourselves to being a bit more honest about Canada’s past, rather than just putting history to the purpose of making ourselves appear so much better than our forebears, should be something to strive for, too.

Source: Terry Glavin: The real story of the Komagata Maru | National Post

Terry Glavin: Canada’s unhappy affair with China’s princeling millionaires

Terry Glavin on the set-for-abuse investor immigrant program, cancelled by the Conservatives and refashioned to address some of the abuse (not convinced that the new Immigrant Investor Venture Capital Pilot Program will completely address some of these issues):

To give you a sense of how absurdly the taboo had throttled Canadian debates it’s instructive to recall the rubbish that was uttered when Harper finally got around to shutting it all down last year with a resolve to start from scratch. Vancouver MP Don Davies, the New Democrats’ international trade critic, accused the government of “damaging Canada’s economy and trade relationships.” Then there was Liberal warhorse John McCallum (Markham—Unionville): “Are Conservatives inadvertently picking on Chinese people?”

China’s massive Operation Skynet fraud squad is now rummaging through Vancouver’s real estate industry. British Columbia’s police agencies won’t say whether they’re cooperating, but even if they were it wouldn’t be easy work. Over its final decade or so, the Immigrant Investor Program drew more than 30,000 Chinese millionaires to British Columbia.

Just one of the unseemly costs of Ottawa’s wheel-greasing for Beijing’s princelings is a sum that might well amount to billions of dollars in no-interest loans that should have gone to British Columbia’s provincial treasury. Instead, the money got spent on thousands of back-door keys the Canada-Quebec Accord made available with a wink and a nod to Chinese millionaires bound for Vancouver, in transit through Montreal.

It says something unflattering all round that what we know now about Canada’s immigrant-investor courtship of Beijing’s princelings is mainly due to the courage and persistence of a single reporter

Contrast that with the marquee billing given to the gluttonous wastrel Mike Duffy, a senator facing criminal charges that may or may not involve the prime minister’s former chief of staff having improperly repaid the federal treasury for travel and living expenses that Duffy may or may not have improperly billed the taxpayer, to the amount of $90,000. It’s a gripping yarn and dozens of journalists are on the story, but it says something unflattering all round that what we know now about Canada’s immigrant-investor courtship of Beijing’s princelings is mainly due to the courage and persistence of a single reporter.

Ian Young, Vancouver correspondent for the South China Morning Post, has been almost alone in chasing down the immigrant investor scandal. It was Young who recently ferreted out the data demonstrating that Canada’s investor class immigrants, about 80 per cent of whom are Chinese millionaires, appear to have contributed less to the federal treasury over the past quarter of a century in tax on earnings than the bedraggled refugees Canada admitted over that period.

Nobody seems to even know where all these bigshot investors have gone. Surveys by the China Merchants Bank show that nearly a quarter of Mainland China’s millionaires had already emigrated by 2013, but vacancy rates in Vancouver’s posh new condo districts are perhaps 30 per cent. The city doesn’t keep track, but University of British Columbia geography professor David Ley has been tracing the relationship between the rise in Vancouver residential property prices and the influx of immigrant investors over the years. The lines run in direct lockstep.

Terry Glavin: Canada’s unhappy affair with China’s princeling millionaires

Hopes high for Modi’s arrival in the Lower Mainland

Likely correct assessment of how Modi’s visit will be received but nevertheless will be interesting given the large Sikh population in the Vancouver area:

While protests are promised, many in B.C.’s Indo-Canadian community appear to be enthusiastically looking forward to only the third official visit of an Indian prime minister to Canada.

And it doesn’t seem to matter that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will be accompanied by Prime Minister Stephen Harper at April 16 events in the Lower Mainland, is the controversial leader of a Hindu nationalist party coming to a region where Sikhs dominate the Canadian diaspora.

The son of a tea vendor in a society with limited social mobility, Modi’s political rise, his anti-corruption stance, and his economic record as chief minister of Gujarat state from 2002-14 have impressed Indians around the world.

That has some analysts suggesting India holds enormous potential for Canadian exporters, including those in the LNG sector. “He has an image of a person who is able to do things and make decisions,” said Kwantlen Polytechnic University political scientist Shinder Purewal. “And people like the fact that personally he’s not corrupt. Not even his enemies can accuse him of taking a cup of tea.”

One of his B.C. hosts, Khalsa Diwan Society president Sohan Singh Deo, brushed aside suggestions B.C.’s history as a breeding ground for Sikh separatism during the turbulent 1980s might cool Modi’s West Coast reception.

The relationship between India’s dominant Hindu majority and the tiny Sikh minority hit a tragic low point in 1984 when then-prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for the Indian army’s assault on armed Sikh separatists in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Her assassination led to deadly pogroms involving Hindu mobs targeting Sikhs, and was followed by the Air India bombings orchestrated by B.C.-based Sikh terrorists in 1985 that left 331 dead.

“It means nothing,” Deo, who will greet Modi and Harper at the Ross Street Temple on April 16, told The Vancouver Sun. “The whole community — Hindus, Sikhs — they’re all excited to welcome (Modi) with open hearts.”

And Modi, if the hopes of many are realized, will return the warmth by announcing that foreign visitors from Canada will be able to apply online for travel visas and obtain them at the airport upon arrival in India.

Ujjal Dosanjh, who as a former premier and federal cabinet minister has been the most successful South Asian politician in Canadian history, said the 1984-85 “aberration” can’t erase long-standing goodwill between Sikhs and Hindus in Canada. “I think that the sense of connection Indians have with India makes almost everyone, even the critics, have a sense of pride.”

Canadian Government, of course, views visit on both substantive and diaspora politics grounds.

Hopes high for Modi’s arrival in the Lower Mainland.

Terry Glavin focusses on the Komagata Maru, historical recognition and the broader historical context:

Compounding the awkwardness of just who should be apologizing here, and to whom, and for what, is that the story India tells itself about the Komagata Maru has undergone some significant revision as well. It was not long ago that the 1914 voyage was widely regarded in India as something of an embarrassment, an ill-conceived operation put up by Sikh militants and other Indian radicals who were rather too rash in their patriotism.

The since-revised Indian version, which formally acknowledges the voyagers of 1914 as heroes, is closer to the mark than the contemporary Canadian telling of the Komagata Maru story. It’s not just because Canadians tend to leave out all the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary intrigue, the spies, the provocateurs and double-agents, the terror and counter-terror of the time. Most conspicuously absent in the Canadian version of the Komagata Maru tragedy are the villains of that ethno-religious foreign constituency that was most fervently determined to insinuate its belligerent chauvinisms into Canadian affairs at the time. I refer of course to the British.

For all the racist hysteria animating Canadians in 1914 (in the preceding year, roughly 500,000 immigrants had arrived in Canada, a number not exceeded in any year since) the larger drama that determined the pivotal events in the story of the Komagata Maru arose from the brutal, global reach of the British Empire. Its Canadian champions and shadowy agents were already busy manipulating Canadian immigration law and its enforcement in cunning anticipation of the Komagata Maru long before the ship’s arrival in Burrard Inlet.

It was a time when the British Empire was acutely vulnerable to insurrections among its subject populations. Only weeks after the Komagata Maru was barred from docking in Vancouver, the First World War broke out. To the Indian patriots behind the Komagata Maru expedition, the voyage was a win-win proposition.

… Modi’s problem is that the Punjab Assembly resolution was accompanied by a motion demanding that he apologize to the Punjab Assembly, on behalf of the Government of India, for its bloody 1984 Operation Bluestar campaign in Punjab which so brutally rooted out Khalistani Sikh separatists from Amritsar’s Golden Temple.

Should Canada then turn around and demand that the Punjab Assembly apologize to us for the 1985 murder of 329 people, mostly Canadians, in the bombing of Air India Flight 182? That operation was orchestrated by the Khalistani Sikh terrorist leader Talwinder Singh Parmar, whose Babbar Khalsa organization enjoyed refuge in the Golden Temple prior to Operation Bluestar.

History does not lend itself to being abused and apologized for, especially not at the same time. The endearing Canadian custom of sanitizing history and putting it to innocently uplifting and inclusive purposes, too, is bound to go sideways sooner or later.

Having been involved in the Community Historical Recognition program and some of the community outreach with the Indo-Canadian and other communities (as well as attending the PM’s community picnic apology), it is the recognition part, and the greater awareness that it engenders, more than apologies, that is more important.

But I agree that if a government wishes to issue an apology, the only place for it is in Parliament, not at community events as PM Harper did with Indo-Canadians, or former PM Mulroney did with Italian Canadians.

Terry Glavin: Narendra Modi is coming to Canada. Things might get awkward

Glavin: Canadians have no reason to be smug about race | Ottawa Citizen

Interesting piece by Terry Glavin comparing the situation of African-Americans to Canadian Aboriginal people:

Things are going downhill, too. Over the past decade, the Aboriginal population in federal prisons has grown by more than 50 per cent. In Western Canada, two-thirds of the inmates in federal and provincial institutions are Aboriginal people.

About 28 per cent of African-Americans are stuck with something less than a high school education – half again higher than the rate among white people. In Canada, about 29 per cent of Aboriginal people have less than a high-school education, compared to 12 per cent of non-Aboriginal people.

While a third of African-American children entering high school will drop out – twice the rate of white kids – current drop-out rates indicate that more than half of Canada’s Aboriginal kids probably won’t finish high school. That’s a drop-out rate roughly six times higher than among non-Aboriginal kids.

On reserves, 74 per cent of schools are so dilapidated they lack such basic amenities as drinking water. More than half the schools function without a library, a gymnasium, a science laboratory, or a kitchen. Of Canada’s nearly 1.5 million Aboriginal people, about half are under 15 years of age.

“How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King proclaimed all those years ago.

African-Americans might be forgiven for every once in a while losing patience with how long it’s taking that arc to fully bend towards them. For Canada’s young Aboriginal people, it’s not clear that the arc of the moral universe is even bending in their direction at all.

Glavin: Canadians have no reason to be smug about race | Ottawa Citizen.

Glavin: What’s so wrong with involving diasporas in foreign policy?

Terry Glavin on diaspora politics:

Here’s the thing. Even if these claims are true, so what?

Parliament obtained full foreign-affairs sovereignty from Britain only with the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931. I can’t seem to find the codicil stipulating that foreign-policy jurisdiction was to be transferred only to wheezy Upper Canada diplocrats, yesteryear UN ambassadors, boring Middle Eastern Studies grad students and the twilight alumni of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs.

Canada is a bustling multicultural democracy. One fifth of Canadians are foreign-born. With dozens of diaspora communities, Canada is blessed with an invaluable foreign-policy resource of experts, global networks, deep wells of human intelligence, and — heaven forbid — ballot-box moxy. Where better to turn for guidance and close consultation?

Three years ago, the Mosaic Institute and the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation undertook an in-depth analysis of the potential for Canada’s diaspora communities to more directly and usefully inform foreign policy. The government hasn’t paid it much attention, but what’s worth noticing here is that the authors of the “Tapping Our Potential” study straight away encountered a cynical old-guard view that the whole idea was a bad one to start with. There was a “general skepticism” in foreign-policy circles, “a view, in other words, that foreign policy is best left to the experts.”

Glavin, of course, cites the examples of diaspora politics he agrees with: Ukraine and Israel, but only makes a passing message to those he disagrees with (China).

Ethnic communities have a natural interest in events in their “homeland.” Canada, as a democracy, naturally responds to those interests, as it does to other interests as I argued in my take on diaspora politics (Shopping for Votes Can Undermine Canada’s Fine Balance).

But responding does not necessarily mean adopting wholesale the position of a particular community. This has to be balanced against other Canadian interests.

And what about diasporas that the Government or Canadians do not want to support? What is the criteria? The ideology of the Government of the day? The political strength of the community? The presence or absence of economic or other interests? Do we simply accept the leading community organizations as being fully representative of the community? And how do we balance – or should we – competing diaspora interests?

So, the question is not, as Glavin frames it as turning “away from the talents, insights and leadership in this country’s diaspora communities.” On the contrary, we can and should continue to listen and engage with them.

But the harder issue, which Glavin ignores, is how to balance these diaspora interests against other equally legitimate Canadian interests?

Glavin: What’s so wrong with involving diasporas in foreign policy? | Ottawa Citizen.

Temporary Foreign Workers Commentary

Terry Glavin’s well-placed rant in the Citizen on the temporary workers program. The government in its efforts to please its small business and franchisee base is surprised that the program has encouraged hiring foreign workers, as it would appear, at the expense of Canadians:

But harder still is the work of believing all those things we are told in order to dissuade us from the reasonable conclusion that the entire edifice of the Temporary Foreign Workers program has been subverted to the purpose of a racket, and the whole point of it is to defraud the Canadian public, suppress the wages of the people and distort the national labour markets to the unearned advantage of some employers.

You will be expected to believe that the stagnation of real median wages since the 2008-09 recession is by some voodoo mechanism wholly unrelated to the roaring trade in easily-exploitable foreign temps that has been underway, simultaneously, as documented by the Labour Market Assessment 2014 report the Parliamentary Budget Office released last month.

You will be asked to take it as normal that there are nearly a half million foreign workers in Canada, and that a quarter of all the new jobs filled across Canada last year were taken by these vulnerable migrants, and similarly there is somehow nothing especially worrisome about the rate of temporary foreign workers in Canada exceeding the number of permanent residents being admitted into this country as prospective citizens.

You will be further obliged to agree that the routine eruption of all those scandals is merely a matter of an otherwise proper system being gamed and foully abused, spoiled by a few grifters and bad apples, and that in actuality the program is unfair to employers owing to its burdensome encumbrances by way of inordinate fee-paying and form-filling and application-submitting, and Employment Minister Jason Kenney is just being mean.

You need not be more than a run-of-the-mill moron to believe such propositions, but you would have to be uniquely possessed of a special type of gall to actually traffic in them, and whatever name you want to give that rare quality it is in no short supply around the offices of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

How to fix the foreign-workers program.

Campbell Clark has a more reasoned approach in the Globe, but essentially comes to the same conclusion:

The number of people in Canada under those labour-market opinions grew from 82,210 people in 2005, before the Conservatives took power, to 202,510 in 2012, according to statistics from Mr. Kenney’s department, Employment and Social Development Canada.

The number one occupation group isn’t engineers, it’s” food counter attendants, kitchen helpers, and related occupations,” with 17,755 people. Waiters, cooks, and cashiers are all in the top 20.

Immigration policy does play a role in the labour markets, by determining the number who come and the qualifications they need to come. But the government should have a good public-policy reason before it intervenes to tinker with supply and demand at employers’ request.

There could be a gap in a highly-specialized or highly-skilled profession that Canadians just can’t fill for the time being. There’s always been a separate stream for agricultural workers, and that’s perhaps justified because it’s back-breaking seasonal work and the farm sector can’t risk a labour-shortage at harvest….

But there’s no compelling public-policy reason to help a fast-food franchise find workers at the wage they want to pay. Can a McDonald’s in Victoria really claim no Canadian will take a job there, no matter what the wage?

Yes, some employers like this program. Dan Kelly, of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said a lot of employers say it’s increasingly difficult to “find people who are available to work and will show up with a smile on their face, and not be on their phone for half the shift.” But the government can’t justify guest-worker programs because some employers think these kids today have the wrong attitude.

Politically, it’s not going to be easy to justify the expansion of temporary foreign workers. Most Canadians thought it was a program to fill temporary skills shortages, not to have the government micro-manage the labour pool in jobs Canadians can do. Each case of alleged abuse underlines not simply that the program is open to abuse, but that it’s gone off the rails.

Foreign worker abuses expose Harper’s hollow commitment to free markets

Terrence Corcoran in the Financial Post notes the CD Howe study showing that the program led to an increase in unemployment:

And now comes a heavy-duty economic analysis from the C.D. Howe Institute claiming that the TFWP caused increased unemployment in Alberta and British Columbia. The paper could put a serious crimp in the federal government’s program that has proven wildly successful. As of December, an estimated 338,000 temporary foreign workers held jobs in Canada.

The increase in unemployment in Alberta and B.C. is said to have occurred between 2007 and 2010 when the program was relaxed and a pilot project introduced to allow “cheaper access to foreign workers because of purportedly deep shortages of labour in some occupations.” The program worked, but maybe too well.

The author of the C.D. Howe report does not condemn the TFWP as a whole. Dominique Gross, a professor at the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University, says in her study, Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada: Are They Really Filling Labour Shortages, the idea is economically sound but only if the program is well designed. In an interview, Ms. Gross said the unemployment rates in B.C. and Alberta were on average 1% higher per year over the 2007-10 period than they would have been had the government not relaxed the rules of the TFWP.

To fix the problem, Ms. Gross calls for a number of reforms, including collecting much better data on whether shortages actually exist, increasing the corporate cost-per-worker of a TFW permit (now $275 each compared with $2,500 in the United States) and imposing tougher rules that would force companies to prove the labour shortages are real.

Pending reforms, Ms. Gross says Ottawa should impose a “temporary quota” on the total number of temporary workers allowed into Canada.

Ms. Gross’s reforms may be hard to implement without gutting much of the initiative. Temporary worker programs are a relative success in Europe, she says, in part because labour supply and demand is vigorously monitored through detailed employment vacancy surveys. Europe also makes use of expensive government-run “local labour offices” that serve as matchmakers between workers and employers. Canada has never been hospitable to greater state involvement in day-to-day management of the labour market, whether provincial or federal.

Bit odd however that Corcoran should be citing temporary worker programs in Europe as a relative success given some of the longer-term integration challenges resulting from these programs.

Terence Corcoran: How Canada’s temporary foreign workers program became a victim of its own success