Why Canada needs a flood of immigrants…2
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.comJoe Friesen
The nation’s great challenge for the 21st century will be not only to locate and attract the people Canada needs, give them rich opportunities and integrate them into communities, but also to understand and embrace the ways they will reshape this country.
Ottawa’s plan falls short
When immigrants arrive, they not only fill gaps in the work force but pay taxes and spend money on housing, transport and consumer goods. Productive capacity increases and there is a ripple effect across the economy. And studies show that their offspring tend to be among the country’s best-educated and initiative-taking young people.
It’s not that the federal government is blind to the issue. Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is crossing the country to promote his reforms of the system, trying to make it more responsive to the needs of employers and the economy. But he says he has no intention of boosting the actual number of immigrants Canada admits annually, despite demands from nearly every provincial government.
On that level, the federal plan seems inadequate to the looming challenge. Today, there are 4.2 working-aged Canadians for every senior citizen, making contributions to cover retirees’ pensions and health care. By 2031, that ratio will be cut in half. The tax base will shrink, growth will slow and labour shortages will become even more dire. Immigration can’t completely cure a problem of that scale, but it can help to alleviate the symptoms.
Already, in 2012, all the growth in the country’s labour force comes from immigration. Within two decades, barring an improbable baby boom, immigration will account for all population growth too.
Luckily, Canada has an advantage: The country has the highest per-capita rate of immigration in the world, a program that commands widespread public support. While there would be resistance, expanding immigration is not the political impossibility it would be for some competing nations. And with good reason: With 34 million people, this country remains highly underpopulated, for all its vast geography.
The motivations for growing out of that awkward middle phase – between the northern hinterland we once were and the thriving modern power we could be – stretch far beyond short-term calculations of labour markets and pension balance sheets.
As University of Toronto public policy professor Irvin Studin puts it, “We’re losing the idea of building the country.” Prof. Studin argues that the country should set its sights on swelling to as many as 100 million people. This new Canada would become a far more influential consumer market, a more diverse and imaginative producer and a much more robust and self-sustaining culture. Its voice would become more prominent in international affairs.
When history looks back, what seemed like a temporary western labour shortage could turn out to be the impetus that prompted Canada to embrace its destiny as a nation of immigration.
Can we really handle so many?
The idea of a radical boost in newcomers, even skilled and educated ones, will strike some people as crazy, experts included. They will point to the difficulty many immigrants have getting their credentials recognized, and the social disruption that can spring from culture clash. Steinbach’s example suggests that those problems are more than manageable, with the appropriate commitment and resources.
The immigrants under Manitoba’s provincial-nominee program have education levels three times higher than the provincial average. The Institute for Research on Public Policy in Manitoba has found that “almost everyone who wanted to work was working” – nearly 85 per cent were in the labour force within three months of their arrival, not always in their chosen fields but generally progressing toward that goal.
Steinbach residents know they have benefited. Orville Giesbrecht, co-owner of Harvest Insurance, says his business has expanded to 21 employees from seven, because all the new arrivals need to insure their homes and cars – and he has made a point of catering to them by hiring employees who speak their languages.
Why Canada needs a flood of immigrants
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.comJoe Friesen
Between now and 2021, a million jobs are expected to go unfilled across Canada. Ottawa is making reforms to the immigration system but isn’t going far enough. We need to radically boost immigration numbers. With the right people, Canada can be an innovative world power. Without them, we’ll drain away our potential.
1. The Manitoba experiment
Arriving into Steinbach, Man., an hour southeast of Winnipeg, you find a quiet, conservative community, the kind of place that has twice as many churches (22) as traffic lights (11). But continue on and you see some sights you might not expect in a prairie hamlet of 13,500: a Paraguayan food store; two Filipina-run nail salons; and, when you reach the western edge, a 25-acre soccer complex that has become the hub of local life.
As an outpost of the global game in the geographic centre of the nation of hockey, the soccer arena is a symbol of the transformation that has swept through Steinbach in the new millennium – one that could be a lesson to the whole country.
Not long ago, in the late 1990s, Steinbach feared that it might join rural Canada’s casualty list. Young people were leaving for opportunities in Winnipeg or Calgary, and even businesses that were thriving, such as a window manufacturer, could not find enough skilled workers to keep up with demand.
Local leaders, says mayor Chris Goertzen, were searching for a way forward. Then they caught wind of what was happening a hundred kilometres away, in a place with similar problems.
In Winkler, Man., an immigrant from Paraguay named Adele Dyck, who sat on the Chamber of Commerce, heard through family connections about skilled workers in Germany who were interested in coming to Canada, but couldn’t qualify under immigration rules that favoured university graduates. She contacted the federal and provincial governments to say she would get local employers to guarantee jobs if the Germans were admitted. They agreed, and what began with 50 immigrants in Winkler became in 1998 the country’s first “provincial nominee” program: Manitoba was the first province other than Quebec to gain the power to select and resettle a portion of each year’s new immigrants for itself.
And that is how Steinbach found its solution. The owner of the Loewen window plant contacted Ms. Dyck about finding 150 to 200 skilled German employees. “They wanted people who were trainable, people who were very capable of learning,” says Ms. Dyck, who is now a professional immigration consultant. “Even though not many spoke English, language was never really a problem. At some point, they had over 300 of our clients working for them.”
That was just the beginning. Since the mid-1990s, Steinbach has grown by 60 per cent, one of the fastest rates in the country. Last year, the region welcomed about 900 immigrants from 40 countries into industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals, trucking and hog farming. The city had to expand its industrial park and then open a new one. National chain grocers, restaurants and department stores are setting up shop. Steinbach has been revitalized.
What ailed the Steinbach of old is the creeping malignancy that threatens all of Canada today. The shortage of skilled labour in the Alberta oil sands and Saskatchewan potash mines has become a national issue. But a similar lack of people power is plaguing the ambitious but underdeveloped secondary cities of Ontario, and in Atlantic Canada a third of the population will be over 65 in less than two decades. The Conference Board of Canada estimates that over the next 10 years, there will be a million jobs going wanting across the country. This shortage is a drag on Canada’s potential to innovate and compete into the future.
Unless Canadians suddenly start having radically larger families, the only logical answer is the same as Steinbach’s: The country needs to dramatically increase its immigration levels – perhaps even double them, at least in the case of immigrants in the “economic” category (which includes skilled workers, provincial nominees, those with prior Canadian experience, entrepreneurs, investors and their families). (The Globe and Mail) – More to come next week.
Extremism elsewhere, moderation in Canada
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.comBy Haroon Siddiqui
Extremism wins votes in the United States and Europe but not in Canada — at least not enough to make a difference. Alberta is only the latest example.
Denying climate change did not hurt George W. Bush or the latest Republican presidential candidates. But it helped sink Danielle Smith of the Wildrose Party. Her assertion that “the science isn’t settled” was widely mocked. That it was even in Alberta says something.
Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and others routinely bashed gays. But Smith paid the price for one of her candidates condemning gays to a “lake of fire, hell.” And Rob Ford is derided for boycotting Pride Parade.
Mitt Romney echoed some of the rabid anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric of Santorum, Gingrich, Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen won votes by railing against immigrants and Muslims. In Canada, parties lose votes by demonizing immigrants but win by wooing them.
Stephen Harper eked out his majority last year by relentlessly pursuing selected immigrant/ethnic/religious minorities in Toronto and Vancouver.
Smith never recovered from an assertion by one of her candidates that he had an advantage because he is white. She visited a Sikh gurdwara, her head covered by a shawl — a Sikh version of the hijab in the holy precincts. Her husband, too, covered his head with a handkerchief. Both sat cross-legged on the floor with a turbaned Sikh Wildrose candidate. But that was not enough to repair the damage.
By not firing the two candidates or even condemning them, she paid the price not just with the gay and immigrant communities but with the larger public.
Contrast her pandering to prejudices in her ranks with the famous 1984 intervention by Brian Mulroney against the leader of the Manitoba Conservatives who opposed francophone linguistic rights. He lost no time in flying to Winnipeg and dragging Bud Sherman before the cameras to recant.
Smith defended her stance by citing free speech. Would she have tolerated anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism and other forms of bigotry in the name of free speech?
She ignored the intervention of the Jewish mayor of Edmonton, Stephen Mandel, and the Muslim mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi. But the voters heeded their counsel.
By contrast, French voters ignored the joint plea of Jewish and Muslim leaders that their communities not be made pawns in the politics of the presidential election that has featured a divisive debate over ritual slaughter.
In last fall’s Ontario election, Tory leader Tim Hudak’s campaign got derailed after he tried to fan nativist sentiments. He tried to make a wedge issue of a provincial tax credit to companies giving on-the-job training to new immigrant professionals. He called it a subsidy for “foreign workers,” who are not foreigners at all.
He also got nowhere with his rant against another “foreign” enemy — the South Korean multinational Samsung, which is investing $7 billion in manufacturing green energy equipment in Ontario.
Moderation is the key to political success in Canada, especially on social values, as well as issues of immigration and multiculturalism.
This is not to deny the right of those who feel strongly about such issues as abortion or same-sex marriage. But as a Christian majority but not a Christian country, Canada thrives by protecting everyone’s rights within the framework of secular laws applied equally to all.
Take the latest hot-button issue, gender-based abortion (feticide — the murder of female fetuses, echoing the language pro-lifers use against all abortions).
During China’s one-child policy, many women aborted female fetuses to ensure that their only child was a male. China now has 32 million more boys than girls.
In India, Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam, parents with one or two girls abort the female fetus in the third pregnancy until they are sure of a boy.
Some immigrants to Canada from those countries have imported the practice. Six Toronto area hospitals now refuse to divulge the gender of the fetus following ultrasound.
This raises several questions about the equal application of the law.
Women have a right to abortion. Pro-lifers do not like it. But that’s the law. So, on what basis do we say women cannot abort female fetuses? Or, are we saying that Canadian women from certain ethnic communities have only a partial right to abortion?
All patients have a right to know their own medical information. Why are six hospitals are denying patients this right? Since these hospitals are located in “ethnic areas,” why is the provincial government allowing this discrimination directed mainly at non-white women?
You and I may think of gender-based abortions as repugnant. But we must answer these questions as part of the core Canadian value of not treating anyone as a second-class citizen.
A fine nuclear balance?
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.comPAUL KORING
Long the dominant South Asian regional power, India has dramatically upped its aspirations in recent years.
It clearly wants to be regarded – along with China, the United States and, perhaps, a resurgent Russia – as among the handful of 21st-century “great powers” capable of projecting power, enforcing peace and, if need be, waging war far beyond its borders.
Military might is only part, albeit a vital measure, of great power status. And with Thursday’s launch, India added another key piece in the arsenal of power projection.
Nuclear warheads, multistage rockets capable of delivering those warheads half-way around the world, a navy with aircraft carriers able to project air power distantly and nuclear submarines, all are characteristic of modern “great powers.”
Only five countries – Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States – have long laid claim to the status with any credibility. Not coincidentally, they are also the five, veto-wielding permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Any one can block international collective military action with a veto.
While U.S. military might still outstrips the other four, most analysts expect China’s relentless rise to eventually rival, if not match, America’s superpower status.
India wants in. Not only is India pushing hard for its own veto and a permanent Security Council seat, but it wants to be regarded as China’s equal, not just a regional power like Brazil or Indonesia.
Other nations, notably Israel and Pakistan, have shorter-range missiles tipped with nuclear warheads. North Korea exploded rudimental nuclear devices. Many regional powers, like Iran, have sophisticated medium-range missiles and some are suspected of covert nuclear weapons programs.
But only India, with its ambitious development of a “blue-water” navy, including Russian-built nuclear submarines and new aircraft carriers, is making a play to become a great power with global reach. It has long had shorter-range missiles capable of raining nuclear warheads on Pakistan, the neighbour it has beaten three times in war, but the Agni V rocket delivers a whole new capacity: putting India among the handful of nations capable of waging nuclear war over vast distances..
In Washington, India’s rise is largely welcomed, not just as a counterbalance to China but as a powerful democratic partner for the United States in an era when the traditional western allies – Britain and France – are in relative decline and no longer warrant “great power” status.
“We fully embraced India’s rise as a great power and a great partner for the United States,” President Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser Tom Donilon said last year.
It was no accident that the Obamas’ first glittering state dinner – marred by reality-TV crashers – was for India’s Prime Minister.
In India, the successful test of the Agni V rocket with a range of 5,000-kilometres was officially hailed by Defence Minister A.K. Anthony as a “a major milestone in India’s missile program.” In the tabloid media, the missile is glibly dubbed the “China killer.”
Although China’s nuclear arsenal is more than double India’s estimated 100 warheads and Beijing deploys both land- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the 5,000-kilometre range of the Agni V now puts all of China squarely within reach.
An era of strategic nuclear balance maybe is emerging between the world’s two billion-person nations. Relations are uneasy, irritants abound and both warily regard the other. There is relatively little trade between such massive economies and a legacy of ill-will from a brief 1962 border war that India lost.
But India’s intercontinental missile gambit isn’t about regional power nor solely focused on a rivalry with China. It’s really about big-power status.
Still, in the wake of Mr. Obama’s decision to “pivot” to the Pacific, shifting military resources to Asia, amidst ongoing concerns about China’s fast-growing military capabilities – now including aircraft carriers, stealthy warplanes and satellite-killer missiles – the Indian missile launch also rekindles worries of an Asian arms race.
In striking contrast to its shrill denunciations of North Korea’s failed attempt to fire a multistage rocket last week, the Obama administration was low-key in its response to India’s missile test. “We urge all nuclear-capable states to exercise restraint regarding nuclear capabilities,” said State Department spokesman Mark Toner, adding: “That said, India has a solid non-proliferation record.”
In China, the official response was muted but the state-run Global Times was openly dismissive of India’s new prowess. “India should be clear that China’s nuclear power is stronger and more reliable,” it said, adding that “for the foreseeable future, India would stand no chance in an overall arms race with China.”
Hang the rope
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.comArif Zakaria
Balwant Singh Rajoana shouldn’t hang for his crime. Nor for that matter around 79 others who languish in different jails, condemned by the courts yet awaiting a presidential pardon. For most convicts this interim period between the presidential pardon and the court conviction is a death alley in itself. Political compulsions, caste prejudices and religious sentiments often result in sentences hanging in nether land, they don’t die but are left to die. My sentiment does not take away the severity of the convicts acts and its consequences on our political, emotional and historical landscapes but let true democracy raise its head amidst all this. An independent judiciar overseeing a fair trial and doling out strictures with reform written all over is true grit democracy.
A crime is usually committed under a given set of circumstances. Economic compulsions, misguided ideology and an acidic brainwash by societal misfits most often compel young men to cast blood stones but if we as a democracy don’t see the core, show complete empathy and give an individual a chance to reform, how are we up upholding any freedom and specially the ultimate freedom of human life and dignity. Hanging by rope is archaic and lasso’s us to medieval times and practices still practiced in certain desert fiefdoms not far from us. How can we scoff at them and celebrate our liberty at the same time? True democratic balls are needed when even a condemned man is giving a chance and a compassionate ear by the state.
The state is my psychiatrist, the state is my healer and the state is my confession box too. And that is true democracy. A man convicted to death by hanging is the same as us albeit with a different set of extreme circumstances. Let the rope burn once and for all and let there be a selective roar of ‘reform to the condemned’ emitting from sane rational mouths. Why, Look at how long a leash the devil has been given? No more hangings.
The Ugly American in New Avatar
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.com- Sivaram Srikandath
The Ugly American was a 1958 political novel written by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. The novel was hugely popular, spending 76 weeks on the best-seller list with more than 5 million copies sold. It was turned into a Hollywood movie in 1963 with Marlon Brando starring in a major role. The book, which describes the losing battle fought by the United States against Communism in South East Asia, quickly became a cultural landmark, and the term Ugly American became a metaphor for the loud and ostentatious type of visitor travelling to a foreign country.
More than half a century later, the term Ugly American is still part of the argot of popular culture, portraying the image of a boorish and insensitive tourist who has the money, but not unfortunately, the class. The only change is that now the term refers to not just American tourists in their electric Bermuda shorts and colorful Hawaiian shirts, but to a whole new breed of international traveller, equally obnoxious and painfully irritating, mostly from the newly rich economies of countries prospering from the globalization boom.
All you need is to travel during the holiday season, and you will understand what I am talking about.
The typical New Ugly American comes in three varieties. First of all there is the outbound tour group that travels in a large pack; then there is the smaller group of professionals travelling together for trade conferences or on sales junkets; and finally there is the nou- veau riche category, usually travelling as couples or families. Each is a horror story in its own way, and comes into their own, particularly in the restaurants and in the dining areas.
The outbound tour group is the loudest, and yet the easiest to handle. Just avoid places where they congregate, and you are safe ! It is easy to spot them. Usually there will be a tour leader, an officious looking type wearing a baseball cap, a man-bag over his shoulders, and an eager-to-please grin on his face, cosseting them around like a herd of sheep. This group is at its obnoxious best around the breakfast buffet. They chatter loudly in their mother tongues, laugh loudly over private jokes made at other people, cut into lines, pile their plates with food which they mostly discard, and then are in a frenzy to load up their handbags with free fruit, bread rolls and jam tarts ( which they normally wrap up in paper napkins!) Once they leave, the restaurant returns to normalcy and you can have your breakfast in peace.
The second group of travelling professionals normally comes to life late in the evenings, long after the first group have chowed down and retired for the night. This group has been drinking steadily throughout the evening in their rooms (why else have they gleefully stocked up on their quota of liquor at the Duty Free at the airport ?) and by 9.30 pm are in an advanced state of inebriation. Then they wander down into the restaurant, dressed in tacky T-shirts, ill-fitting shorts and bathroom slippers. Fortunately, the restaurant is mostly empty by now, and only the waiters are left to watch the painful spectacle of a bunch of glassy-eyed sad sacks aimlessly wander around, with food dripping off their plates onto their T-shirts and shorts. These folks are completely hammered and have no clue as to whether they are eating scalloped potatoes or veal medallions. However, food is the last thing on their minds – they are already thinking of ways to kill the bottle in their rooms before calling to quits. So they feel no pain !
The third variety – the nou-veau riche – is the most dangerous of the lot. Now, this is a group of tourists that is familiar with the travel experience. And precisely because of this, they tend to be loud, rude and extremely obnoxious to the waiters and waitresses. They know well enough to order a bottle of good Australian Merlot with their dinner. But then they spoil it for everyone else by making a loud spectacle of tasting the wine, comparing it with a South African Cabernet they had been served in Singapore, or some other place, and then sloshing it down like a glass of cola. Or else they complain about the quality of the fruit sitting next to the cheese platter, bickering that the musk melon is not sweet enough, or that the grapes are too mushy. Occasionally, this group has a teenage daughter in tow, with an immeasurably bored expression on her face (sort of been-there-done-that look ) and sulking all the time while Papa and Mama are getting progressively sloshed on the Merlot.
And the ordeal continues when you arrive the airport to catch the return flight. Most of them are already there at the terminal, cabin baggage and bulging shopping bags in hand. The tamasha starts just before the boarding gates open. They jostle and shuffle to get to the front of the line, and when boarding is announced according to rows, they mill around the boarding gate preventing the others from proceeding ahead. And then when they finally board the plane, there is a further mad scramble to stuff their bags into the overhead luggage bins.
Finally, when that objective has been realized, they settle down into their seats, eagerly looking forward to the final indulgence of their holiday – the complimentary booze served on board the flight. And once they have their fill of all the beverages they can consume, they happily drift into slumber, probably dreaming of their next vacation.
And you realize with a sinking heart that yes, it is quite possible that you may meet them again. The Ugly American in his or her new avatar rules !
-Manorama