Elections not measure of real change

 

 

In his recent column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Conrado de Quiros talked about the wisdom behind universal suffrage. According to de Quiros, had the right to vote been limited to those who have education, we would not have reforms or change, in government or in society at large. “Wealth and power would have remained with the landowners, the slave-owners, the gun-owners, the caciques, the compradors, the owners of fabricas and companias, with no end in sight,” de Quiros wrote.

Election festival in the Philippines. Click link to view "Politics as Entertainment:
Covering the 2010 Philippine elections," a project of the University of the Philippines
Open University, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST39L7jqFg0 

That’s putting too much unnecessary weight on elections being the most predominant feature of Western democracy. We have often heard American politicians pontificate that the United States should spread the concept of free elections in countries where democracy has not yet gained its foothold. As if elections were the only thing that matters in a democracy.

 

Before elections became fashionable, political reforms or social change, as history would tell us, was only achievable through the barrel of a gun, not by the ballot box. The revolutions in France and America and the U.S. civil war brought about radical changes that have become the bedrock of their democracies, and models for the rest of the world to adopt. New independent republics were born through people’s armed uprisings against their colonizers or despotic rulers. Wealth and power, in the political and economic sense turned to be more easily redistributable once revolutions changed societies and restructured the ordering of social relations.

 

But of course, as nations became more civilized, the rule of law has been established as the foundation of governance, for the majority of countries that have opted for the democratic system. So we have elections to select our leaders and representatives, and this process constitutes the hallmark of our democratic government.

 

Whether modern-day elections continue to serve the purpose of achieving great political and social reforms remain questionable, however, or at least dependent on how the process is put into practice. The gruesome Maguindanao massacre on November 23, 2009, that was perpetrated by the Ampatuan clan is a grim reminder of how political warlords could subvert the electoral process by means of their private armies, wealth and power. That this kind of aberration in a democracy had actually happened and its recurrence still threaten the so-called free electoral process in the Philippines only shows that elections are a double-edged knife, that it could be both a good or bad thing depending on how it is used.



The massacre of 34 journalists in Maguindanao in November 2009 shocked the
world. What really happened that day; why has so little light been shed on the
killings? Click link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dbvgyS6dms to view
"Turning a Blind Eye -- Philippines."

It was in this context that Senator Miriam Santiago made her sardonic commentary on Filipino voters in a talk before a Manila university which then became the subject of Mr. de Quiros’s column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Senator Santiago did not mince her words when she said that majority of Filipinos are “not educated for voting.” That majority of candidates are “not educated for serving” too, she added. The lady senator gave the example of movie stars getting elected in Congress because of the “ignorance of the Filipino electorate.”

 

Senator Santiago, however, was wrong to ridicule the Filipino masses for being not educated (or schooled, perhaps) for voting, which Mr. de Quiros rightfully debunked. But if Senator Santiago was referring to a level of education (completion of college education perhaps) which she thought every Filipino voter must have achieved before being allowed to exercise the right to vote, then, she could probably be right. With the pervasive level of poverty in the Philippines, way more than a majority of the population have not reached tertiary education or have completed at least a secondary education. But criticizing them for not knowing how to vote only reveals how ignorant even a highly-educated senator like Miriam Santiago could be in appreciating the limits of the electoral process.

 

The right to choose leaders or representatives in government is not predicated on one’s possession of higher education. If the right to vote is inherent in a democracy, it should be given to all those who have earned that right, regardless of whether a voter is a moron or an intellectual. Every citizen of voting age is a member of a democratic society and should be given the right to exercise the right to choose his or her leaders or representatives in Congress. Attainment of legal age and residence should be enough to qualify a citizen to the right to a democratic vote, all other factors are irrelevant.

 

This talk about Filipinos not being educated enough to vote is akin to the concept of voter suppression, or disenfranchisement. It has happened during the recent U.S. presidential elections. In Florida, the Republican-dominated state legislature tried to reduce the number of days for early voting, prohibit Sunday voting, and impose a 48-hour time limit on third-party voter groups to register new voters. It was criticized as making voting more difficult, a decision meant to disenfranchise African-Americans and Latinos who were leaning to vote for the Democratic Party. The decision backfired against the GOPs on Election Day as thousands and thousands of voters lined up to vote and had to be accommodated until the following day while the rest of the votes from the other states had already been counted. When the final vote was counted, Florida ended up voting for Obama instead of Romney, but the Florida vote didn’t matter anymore because the election had already been decided by the other states.

 

In Pennsylvania, the state legislature passed a law requiring voter-identification, which was criticized by some civil rights groups as having the effect of suppressing mostly poor or minority voters—a demographic more inclined to vote Democrat. Photo ID requirements have been opposed by minority, handicapped and elderly voters who don’t normally maintain driver’s licenses.

 

Senator Santiago is barking at the wrong tree. Instead of putting down the electorate with her condescending remarks, she should sponsor a law in Congress that would tighten the qualifications of candidates for public office, prohibit political dynasty as envisioned in the Constitution, impose stricter and effective term limits, and limit campaign financing to level the playing field. Every candidate for public office must not only be beyond reproach, but must be able to represent or mirror the needs and issues of his or her constituency. If we must have a functioning representative democracy, the leaders and representatives we elect must stand and speak for the interests of their constituencies, not for their own selfish reasons or for the wishes of the special interests that help them get elected.

 

We have a dysfunctional electoral system that could easily be manipulated by special interests and professional politicians or “trapos.” The level of apathy or a disengaged electorate is a result of the ability of the elite and special interests to control the elections; it’s never the by-product of an uninformed or uninvolved electorate because it is not well-educated enough to vote.

 

In The Idea of Justice, the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen wrote: “… in understanding the roots of democracy in the world, we have to take interest in the history of people’s participation and public reasoning in different parts of the world. We have to look beyond thinking of democracy only in terms of European and American evolution. We would fail to understand the pervasive demands for participatory living, on which Aristotle spoke with far-reaching insight, if we take democracy to be a kind of a specialized product of the West.”

 

The old Athenian democracy, where balloting emerged in a particular form, used a process called sortition where nearly all government offices are filled by lottery of full citizens rather than by election. Women, slaves and aliens had no say. Candidates were almost always male, Greek, educated citizens holding a minimum of wealth and status. Yet, even Plato attacked this system which he criticized as putting the state into the hands of ignoramuses unable to distinguish between right from wrong.

 

How is this different from the system we have now?

 

We have a senator who plagiarizes and unabashedly maintains his innocence, senators who are children elected on account of their father’s “splendid” legislative record, a congresswoman who was wife to a former dictator and mother to a sitting senator, or movie stars who continue to “act” in their roles as representatives of the people, or a “know-nothing” or “can-do-all” president (depending on which side of the aisle you stand on) elevated to the highest office in the land on the political legacy of his parents. Is this circus the desire and hope of the people who elected them?

 

“Democracy’s capacity to shock has been its own demise,” wrote A. C. Grayling. We could only wish, for heaven’s sake, the kind of revenge our democracy will bring upon us next time. Perhaps not through the electoral process, and we could just imagine how those who abuse or shamelessly make a mockery of their democratic responsibilities will enjoy being out of power or less in control than they used to be.

Privatizing immigration

 

 

It all began with the rapid rise in the number of temporary foreign workers who have been coming to Canada to fill in labour shortages that cannot be addressed by Canadian workers. There is no quota for this type of workers, no upper limits.

 

There are more temporary foreign workers in Canada over the past decade, more so and rapidly since 2006. Today their ranks outnumber those of economic immigrants.

 

In 2010 alone, there were 283,096 temporary foreign workers in Canada, doing work that employers claimed there was no Canadian available to do. This is the highest on record, but only slightly higher than the number recorded during the worst of the recession in 2009.

 

The highest demand for temporary foreign workers comes from Alberta and Saskatchewan, the fastest-growing economies in Canada. But every Canadian province except Newfoundland and Labrador and Nunavut has at least doubled its number of “guest workers” over the years.

In an effort to modernize Canada's immigration process, the Harper government has
introduced several key proposals. The Agenda looks at what the proposals mean for
those coming to Canada. Click link to view "Realigning Canadian Immigration,"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrGfit4-z5g&feature=related

Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, has observed that this shift to temporary foreign workers or “guest workers” as others call them, is an indication of government’s off-loading of public policy to private sector interests. The public interest which is much broader than employers’ needs is increasingly being taken over by the private sector such as Canada Immigration’s plan to allow employers to define Canadian immigration policy.

 

While the involvement of employers can help reduce skill mismatches between local economic needs and immigration quotas set by Canada Immigration, there is a clear and present danger in allowing employers alone to determine the workers they are willing to admit because they are intuitively looking for average workers, not skilled labour. Employers are now taking advantage of the temporary work permit program to bring workers for hotels, fast food outlets, janitorial services and factories – typical Canadian jobs, albeit low-paying.

 

According to Naomi Alboim, Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University, “while the use of temporary foreign workers to address acute skill or labour shortages is justifiable, some employers are using them to fill ongoing vacancies without exploring more durable long-term solutions. This is an illustration of how federal policies which facilitate temporary entry to Canada sometimes have long-lasting detrimental effects.”

 

Temporary workers come to Canada practically as guests of the employer. Oftentimes, they have very few rights or which they are usually unaware. They have no access to services available to other immigrants, and rarely is there a path for them to permanent residency.

 

Yessy Byl, a lawyer who volunteers with the Edmonton Community Legal Centre describes the temporary foreign worker program as really about contracting out immigration. “In fact the government is setting the stage for a bizarre non-immigration program because those workers can’t immigrate,” Byl adds.

 

Now comes the Expression of Interest (EOI) program that Canada Immigration Minister Jason Kenny proposes to install beginning January 2013. It’s a program borrowed from New Zealand and also adopted by Australia last July 2012, which builds a pool of skilled worker applicants that will allow employers to cherry-pick potential immigrants to fill regional labour shortages. By the end of 2014, Canada Immigration expects this pool of candidates to be made available to employers who can screen and choose the workers they would allow to immigrate.

 

Essentially, this amounts to privatizing immigration. Whether unintentional or not, the present Conservative government seems bent on passing to employers the responsibility for focusing the country’s immigration program towards meeting their labour market needs. To Minister Kenney, allowing employers to determine who they are willing to accept is needed to generate growth for the Canadian economy. In a statement issued last year, Mr. Kenney said “Employers are best positioned to decide who can best fill the open jobs rather than a passive and bureaucratic system.”

 

Based on the New Zealand experience, the Expression of Interest program is nothing but a paper review of an immigrant’s application, minus the required proof or documents needed to assess the application. An applicant can submit electronically or on paper an expression of interest to apply under the skilled migrant category. The questionnaire that accompanies the application is no different from the same standard questions an applicant needs to answer when applying for immigration. It’s still in a long format that asks for personal information, work experience, job qualifications and educational background. But the application appears to be biased in favour of those who have undergone post-secondary schooling or post-graduate studies in New Zealand, and those who have had work experience in New Zealand. If after a review the expression of interest is accepted, one must score at least 100 points to be included in the pool, then the applicant is required to submit all documentary proof of his or her answers to the questionnaire.

The pace and scope of change in Canada's immigration system in recent years leaves
one breathless. Click link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC_OHHc_ri0 to view
Prof. Naomi Alboim's "Shaping the Future: Canada's Rapidly Changing Immigration
 Policies."

How different is the Expression of Interest system from the current assessment of an application for any of the categories under Canada’s Immigration system? If New Zealand or Australia can accomplish its EOI assessment in 6 months or less, there is no excuse for Canada not to do the same. Except for one thing, there could be more Canadian applications than those submitted for New Zealand and Australia. But it’s not a good excuse if Canada Immigration is really sincere in its objective of reducing or eliminating the backlog of applications, which appears to be addressed by more efficient processing rather than by legislation or by a single ministerial decision.

 

Remember that all applications for immigration to Canada that were received prior to 2008 have all been wiped out from the backlog. More than 280,000 applications were affected, simply by a sweeping decision of an Immigration Minister, without comprehensive consultation, discussion and parliamentary debate. This also shows unpredictability in Canada’s immigration policy. The fact that changes in criteria can now be made unilaterally by a single minister and imposed retroactively indicates that the rules of the game are constantly changing.

 

Since the affected applicants had been waiting for seven years for their applications to be considered, they have refused to accept Minister Kenney’s decision to annul their applications. Lawyers for the applicants have asked the court for permission to bring a class action against the government. Lorne Waldman, a lawyer representing the applicants, has said that Mr Kenney's decision is unconstitutional and inconsistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Canada’s Bill of Rights.

 

The Expression of Interest system that is being proposed by Canada Immigration will not fully solve the issue of qualification and employment, especially if the determination is going to be left primarily to employers. While it is the federal government that regulates immigration, provincial and professional bodies play key roles in facilitating the employment of immigrants once they have settled in the country. Today, there is less coordination between professional bodies and industry and the government. Attracting qualified new immigrants with promises of good jobs would be misleading them, more so if they find out that it’s the provincial and professional bodies that really control access to jobs. The sad consequence is that these immigrants become deprofessionalized and are forced to accept jobs in the labour market that either underemploy or deskill them.

 

More to the point, Canada Immigration is increasingly becoming a slave to the labour market. The reliance on temporary foreign workers who are selected by employers based on their own short-term interests is headed towards a very troubling path. It is a policy that augurs well for the normalization of migrant labour in Canada, but doesn’t bode well for diversity, appalling for the workplace, and could potentially turn immigration into a source of social tension.

 

Privatizing immigration adds to the growing list of public services that the present Conservative government insists are better delivered and more cost-effective if transferred to the hands of the private sector. Health care, education, social services, utilities, even the prison system, are just a few of those targeted for privatization. The overhaul of Canada’s Immigration system is a clear sign that employers and the labour market are being given the primary responsibility to determine public policy to the detriment of national interest.

 

Throughout its history, Canada has been a welcoming nation to immigrants, unifying their families and providing citizenship and accepting their full participation in Canadian society. Canada’s radical shift in immigration policy from one that is based on the huge potential of human capital is reversing this trend and pushing Canada downwards to a troubling new direction.