Catholic public health board nominee dumped

2015/04/02 Leave a comment

Interesting debate in Toronto over what views are acceptable in the Board of Health:

But her voting record as a long-standing trustee did not sit well with several councillors. Kennedy, a registered nurse for 45 years, has voted against gay-straight clubs in schools, HPV vaccinations for young girls and is opposed to abortion.

“Thankfully, council did the right thing,” said Councillor Joe Mihevc, chair of the Toronto Board of Health who introduced the motion to replace Kennedy with Chris Glover, a public school board trustee from Etobicoke.

Mihevc said Kennedy’s “consistent” opposition to gay-straight alliances makes her unsuitable to sit as a board member, he said.

“Would we allow that as a society if it was black-white alliances? That’s what human rights are about and those perspectives in a public health context just won’t work.”

Mayor John Tory supported Kennedy’s appointment, though he said he disagrees “completely” with her views on HPV vaccinations, gay/straight alliances in schools and a woman’s right to choose.

“If we started applying every test based on whether we disagree with somebody’s views on people we appoint to things . . . it’s sure going to change the nature of this place.”

Councillors Paula Fletcher, Gord Perks  and Joe Cressy  did not support Kennedy’s appointment. “These are actually human rights issues, the right for gays and lesbians to lead an equal life in the city of Toronto,” Fletcher said.

Kennedy is the wrong fit because the board of health has an obligation to deliver programs that meet health standards set out in legislation, such as programs to encourage safer sex, Perks said.

“This isn’t about whether you’re trying to get people on the board of health who vote the way you feel,” he said. “It is whether or not we are prepared to appoint people who support the legal mandate of the entity they are being appointed to.”

Catholic public health board nominee dumped | Toronto Star.

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19th-century Toronto Irish immigrants a lesson in upward mobility

2015/03/16 Leave a comment

A good piece on the history of the Irish in Toronto, the original public fears, and how the Irish community eventually blended in, emerged from poverty, and was no longer was perceived as threat to the majority population:

So how did the Irish emerge from a climate of poverty, hostility and violence that too often defined their lives in Toronto? A range of factors contributed, of course, some hard to replicate in modern-day Toronto, but others more readily at hand.

It surely helped that the Irish spoke English, allowing them to sidestep the language barrier that would slow the integration of later generations of newcomers.

Physical mobility was another Irish advantage. Corktown and neighbourhoods like it may have served as landing pads for the new immigrants, but they rarely stayed in one place for long.

“By the 1890s, they’re everywhere,” said McGowan, himself descended from famine refugees. “If you went to an American city, there would be these long-standing Irish enclaves. You don’t have that here.” This geographic dispersal helped bring Catholics and Protestants into closer contact, driving mutual understanding and even encouraging intermarriage. “Cupid was probably more important than denomination at a certain point,” McGowan said.

At the same time, immigrants from other parts of the world began trickling into Toronto, loosening the Irish monopoly on the fears and resentments of the WASP majority.

“From the 1880s, Toronto started getting immigrants who were even more scary from the majority perspective,” said Allan Levine, author of Toronto: Biography of a City.

“Number one, Catholic Irish immigration peters out, so there are fewer paddies with cloth caps and accents in the downtown area,” said William Jenkins, a professor of North American Irish history at York University, and himself the proud owner of a lilting Irish accent. “People basically just forget about the Irish.”

In the meantime, the community was working doggedly to improve its lot. Mutual aid societies, church parishes, sports teams, card parties, and temperance leagues created a thick support net for Catholics trying to climb the social ladder or simply to avoid destitution.

“They created their own infrastructure,” said Levine. “They looked after themselves.”

19th-century Toronto Irish immigrants a lesson in upward mobility | Toronto Star.

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Newcomer Parents Face Challenges Navigating School System – New Canadian Media – NCM

2015/03/13 Leave a comment

On some of the integration issues faced by parents helping their kids succeed in the school system:

Luz Bascuñan, the first Latin American woman to be elected as a trustee at the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), shared her views on Spanish student dropout rates in the 2009 publication “Four in Ten Spanish-Speaking Youth and Early School Leaving in Toronto.” In it, Bascuñan reduced the problem to four factors: the hiring system, the status of Spanish language in Toronto’s schools, the school curriculum and the lack of formal structures for parent and community involvement.

Today, she says the amalgamation of Toronto in 1998 also negatively impacted the education system, and she calls things like Ontario regulation 612/00, which installed parent involvement committees “a very generic way” to address parents not getting involved.

“Involving parents in their children’s education, which is key to educational success, cannot be done only because there’s a regulation,” Bascuñan says. “It’s necessary to develop a number of different initiatives. Back in the day, before the amalgamation, we had funding enough to make monthly meetings with parents, when we had trained child care workers to take care of the kids while the parents were there, we had interpreters for all the different languages, and we had dinner for everyone, solving the biggest problems parents use as an excuse for not going.”

The problems for Guido and Rossy’s daughter got worse with pressure from the school, with calls and letters telling them how behind their daughter was. “Some teachers suggested maybe our daughter had listening or speech problems, or having some family issues at home,” Guido shares.

“I think parents that came from other countries are really concerned of their kids’ education. In fact, a better education was one of the main reasons why they immigrated here in the first place.” – Esther Contreras, Peel District School Board teacher

“As soon as the problems arose we started helping her every night after school until today,” Guido continues. “They’re nice at schools, very polite, but I think they try to evade being blamed for any problem that my daughter had. It’s true, at my house we try to only speak Spanish, but she speaks English too… she could talk in both languages with no problem. Even so, once a teacher told me to put her in ESL classes. And every time you asked for help they give you a long list of websites instead of talking to you any longer. We took her to all the doctors they sent us, and when we realized she didn’t have any medical problem, her teachers changed the nature of the issue over and over.”

Given that some communities appear to have greater challenges then others, there may be some internal community dynamics at play as well, that need to be factored into account in developing community-specific approaches as appears to be the case in Toronto.

Newcomer Parents Face Challenges Navigating School System – New Canadian Media – NCM.

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How closing the ‘word gap’ could give poorer kids an equal chance at success

2015/02/06 Leave a comment

Interesting and positive initiative:

That realization [that children in richer households were exposed to a whopping 30 million more words by age 3 than their low-income counterparts] inspired two projects recently launched by Eriks-Brophy, now an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Speech Pathology, and PhD candidate Hillary Ganek.

Like the Providence initiative, the researchers are making use of LENA technology. But they’re aiming to recruit Toronto-based families of varied backgrounds, to expand the scope of the discussion beyond just income level.

They also want to look at the influence of culture in how parents talk to their kids. It will be the first time LENA has been used to explore the topic.

While both acknowledge income level plays a role in children’s development, Eriks-Brophy and Ganek say framing the issue as a “gap” might be the wrong approach.

Ultimately, they hope their research will help speech pathologists and schools be more responsive to cultural variations in language learning, which Eriks-Brophy argues often gives minority children their own unique set of skills.

“It’s not necessarily the case that it’s a (word) deficit or there’s a problem. It’s a difference. And that has to be acknowledged as well.”

WHEN DR. RIPUDAMAN S. MINHAS treats families in the city’s low-income Regent Park neighbourhood, he asks some unusual questions.

In addition to inquiring about kids’ allergies and immunizations, he wants to know how many books parents have at home. He wants to know if they have a library card, and how much they sing to their children.

“The idea of this 30-million-word gap really rings true,” he says. “Because it’s something that we see every day.”

Minhas’s medical interest in words is an approach endorsed by the country’s top children’s health body. Although there is no specifically Canadian research on the effects of the “word gap,” the Canadian Paediatric Society calls low literacy a “severe and pervasive” national problem.

New programs, such as St. Michael’s Hospital’s Reach Out and Read initiative are taking this to heart. Minhas, a developmental pediatrician affiliated with the hospital, is now also embarking on research into how inner-city families can be supported in creating “linguistically rich” homes.

How closing the ‘word gap’ could give poorer kids an equal chance at success | Toronto Star.

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Toronto’s income gap continues to widen, finds U of T expert

2015/01/30 Leave a comment

Not new, but better documented by David Hulchanski than done earlier:

Between 1970 and 1990, average incomes jumped significantly in only about 13 per cent of Toronto’s 500-plus “census tract” neighbourhoods.

Slightly more, 19 per cent, saw incomes drop significantly, while most Torontonians, in 67 per cent of the census tracts, saw earnings change only modestly.

Expanding the time frame to 1970 to 2012 exposes a dramatic shift.

Middle-income communities across the city began to evaporate. Neighbourhoods with relatively stable average income shrank by more than half, to 32 per cent of the census tracts.

The percentage of neighbourhoods where residents’ average incomes skyrocketed more than doubled. At the same time, the percentage of neighbourhoods where people were getting much poorer also doubled.

Yorkville, which transformed from downtown hippie haven to posh shopping district favoured by the jet set, saw the biggest surge in average incomes. Part of Thorncliffe Park, which became a landing pad for newly arrived immigrants, saw the biggest income drop.

When the city snapshot is narrowed to only 2012, just under half of Toronto is considered low-income — well under the $46,666-per-year average — while 21 per cent is high-income and only 30 per cent is middle.

“What I call City No. 2 — the middle-income city — is simply disappearing,” Hulchanski says.

Gentrification is only one of the root causes, he says, listing provincial and federal policy changes since 1990 that he believes were intended to further enrich society’s top earners.

This can also be mapped against visible minorities, many of whom are low-income in Toronto.

Of course, this is not just a Toronto issue as part of worldwide trend towards greater inequality.

Toronto’s income gap continues to widen, finds U of T expert | Toronto Star.

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Diversity our strength (someone tell the bigots)

2015/01/27 Leave a comment

Elizabeth Renzetti puncturing the myth of Toronto being welcoming of diversity, following a political panel of visible minority candidates:

It’s not just Toronto, of course. This week’s controversial Maclean’s cover story claiming Winnipeg is the most racist city in Canada highlighted the virulence of anti-aboriginal sentiment in the last municipal elections. As mayoral candidate Robert-Falcon Ouellette told the CBC last summer, “If there’s one person saying it, there’s 1,000 people thinking it.” (It should be noted that the man who was elected mayor, Brian Bowman, is Métis.)

As Ms. Chow said, “We’ve become complacent.” Because Canada’s largest city mostly trots along in peace and prosperity, it’s easy not to notice the bitter undercurrents that the past four years stirred up. Or perhaps to think that they’ve disappeared, along with the brothers who did the stirring. But that would be wishful thinking.

Politics is, of course, a hurly-burly – a brutal, elbows-up game. I don’t think any of the women who were on that panel thought otherwise when they stepped into public life. “I have very thick skin,” Ms. Chow said. “Probably too thick.” What they didn’t expect was the idea that they had no right to be in the game in the first place.

But those are precisely the kinds of candidates who should be playing the game. If we’re presented with more of the same faces touting more of the same platforms, an already apathetic, disillusioned electorate will switch off – in which case everyone loses.

And diversity among municipal elected representatives is proportionately less compared to other levels of government.

Diversity our strength (someone tell the bigots) – The Globe and Mail.

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Toronto Police team with other forces to help Somali community

2015/01/19 Leave a comment

Some good community policing initiatives here in addition to the exchange program with Minneapolis:

Toronto Police spent roughly $500,000 to employ six officers of Somali background in 23 Division as part of a Somali Liaison Unit, a renewable two-year project as a way to build trust in the predominantly Somali community and to engage youth, Deputy Chief Peter Sloly said at a policing conference at Woodbine Banquet Hall Saturday.

“The connections between Toronto, Minneapolis, Edmonton and Ft. McMurray … it’s a large issue that involves senior police leaders,” Sloly said. “We’re applying that neighbourhood approach. We’ve employed those police officers on Dixon Rd., right around Woodbine Racetrack, they’re in there for two years and develop trusting long-lasting relationships and a deep knowledge of community conditions.”

Toronto’s Somali liaison unit has been in place since 2013 and will likely be renewed at the end of this year, Sloly said.

“We did a high-risk project in spring of 2013 (Project Traveller) and the three years before then, we had over 20 shooting incidents every year and 10 homicides every year and the two years since we’ve had this unit in place, we’ve only had one shooting and no homicides,” he said. “That’s because of great local leadership.”

Toronto Police are also working with Positive Change Toronto, an advocacy group that formed to bring down gun violence in North Etobicoke, particularly in the Dixon Rd. and Queen’s Plate Dr. areas.

“When we formed in 2012, that was the summer of the gun,” explained PCT spokesman Idil Burale. “There were way too many funerals. Something had to change. In the past two years, we’ve seen people call these police officers directly, rather than call the police. They were coming forward with information more. A lot of young men in our community are interested in becoming police officers.”

Toronto Police team with other forces to help Somali community | Home | Toronto.

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National Post Editorial: Good Riddance to Carding

2015/01/09 Leave a comment

From the National Post Editorial Board:

Police have long defended carding as a vital law enforcement tool, and claim it has led to breakthroughs in major cases. But critics have long claimed  the process was inherently discriminatory, as young, black, male Torontonians were far more likely to be carded than others.

The critics were right. Data compiled by the Toronto Star revealed that young black men were being carded far more often than other citizens. Blacks, who are less than 10% of Toronto’s population, made up roughly a quarter of those being carded.

This is not to suggest that the police were simply bigoted. It is a sad truth that young black men in Toronto kill and are killed at a number that is wildly disproportionate to their share of the population. Young black men are charged with violent crimes more often than their numbers alone would warrant. Carding was the police response to the genuine issue of alarmingly high rates of violent crime among Toronto’s black youth.

But it was still the wrong response. Since 2008, more than a million people have been carded in a city that only sees somewhere in the region of 50 homicides a year. Not only was this an unwarranted police intrusion into the lives of citizens, but it needlessly stigmatized members of a racial minority, casting individuals under suspicion — or certainly making them feel under suspicion — solely on the basis of their race.

My only comment, as earlier posts this week have illustrated (A MacArthur Grant Winner Tries to Unearth Biases to Aid Criminal Justice – NYTimes.com, The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men), is not that the police are “simply bigoted” but they, like all of us, have subconscious biases and prejudices that play a role here.

National Post editorial board: Good riddance to carding 

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Meet Toronto’s disenfranchised non-citizens

2015/01/07 Leave a comment

Further to my post on the declining number of immigrants taking up citizenship (Ottawa hiking citizenship fees for second time in a year | various), Myer Siemiatycki and Ratna Omidvar on how it plays out in Toronto and the links to poverty and precariousness:

Imagine a city the size of Halifax and then superimpose it onto the map of Toronto. Now imagine a wall surrounding that city state — a wall that divides its residents from the rest of the metropolis.

That’s perhaps the best way to think of the roughly 380,000 residents who live in Toronto who are without Canadian citizenship, says Myer Siemiatycki, professor of politics and the founding director of Ryerson University’s graduate program in immigration and settlement studies. And that number, from the 2006 Census, could be even higher today.

Some estimates suggest the number could be even higher if you include undocumented migrants, whose exact numbers are unknown. Some are foreign temporary workers; some are here on two-year work permits; some are live-in caregivers; many are permanent residents; others are refugee claimants. Some may one day achieve status or citizenship; others will remain underground eking out a living, always looking over their shoulder, perhaps not even able to speak English.

Critics say it’s a lost opportunity for them and for Toronto.

A deep divide separates non-citizens from most of the city’s residents, says Siemiatycki. They work here; pay property taxes; use the TTC. Their children go to school here; some use recreational facilities, community centres and libraries. But they are detached, disengaged, without a voice or a vote. Some are able to get only precarious or low-paying work. Many stay under the radar by working for cash and not paying taxes. Others live in constant fear of being deported. They pay for health care out of pocket.

“Imagine if you did not have papers,” says Ratna Omidvar, executive director of the Global Diversity Exchange at Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University. “Imagine if you could only work for cash. Imagine if you were always in fear that someone would come and get you. Imagine you’re paying a premium for rent … of course they’re disengaged. They can’t not be disengaged.”

Meet Toronto’s disenfranchised non-citizens | Toronto Star.

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Immigrants took the brunt of recession-year turn toward self-employment

2014/11/21 2 Comments

Self-EmploymentInteresting study by StatsCan on the effects of the 2008 recession and increase in self-employment:

During the recent recession in Canada, rates of self-employment increased by 3.9 per cent, while paid employment in both the private and public sectors shrank by 4.1 per cent and 1.6 per cent, respectively.

“Economic downturns do not impact all groups of workers equally. It is newcomers, particularly those recently arrived, who are more likely to lose their paid employment compared to Canadian-born workers,” says the 48-page study.

“These workers are often left to compete for low-paying, part-time and temporary types of precarious jobs to survive . . . Some workers are pushed into self-employment as a means to replace lost income from paid employment and due to the failure of government social safety nets.”

Toronto immigrants also fared worse than their Canadian counterparts in self-employment, with median income at $7,270 a year — $560 less than non-immigrants. They were also more likely to work in trade and transportation industries, while the business and professional services sectors are the most common for self-employed Canadians.

The newcomer group had a median before-tax total income including paid jobs of $17,220, compared with $25,180 for non-newcomers, though immigrant men made almost $1,000 per annum more than newcomer women.

Immigrants took the brunt of recession-year turn toward self-employment | Toronto Star.

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