Linguistically flammable

Canadian minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism Jason Kenney sparked a controversy when he suggested that people without a satisfactory command of English or French should be denied citizenship. Let’s put aside the official bilingual farce, although, to be fair, speaking both languages does make sense in certain circumstances, for example, if a person happens to be an immigrant or wants to pursue a career in government.

Back to language tests. To demand a satisfactory command of the official and/or prevalent language is legitimate. Immigrants, in any major migrant destination, can spend their lives without the knowledge of English in some areas. Florida and China Towns are the most obvious examples. But the living is often reduced to survival as any involvement with the authorities requires help of other people. As a result, not knowing the language of majority confines individuals to their communities, limits their opportunities and fosters “ghettoization” of neighbourhoods.

On the other hand, authorities often make their announcements or application forms available in minority languages. The London borough of Tower Hamlets offered voter registration form and other documents and in many European and Asian languages. But while that can be viewed as a form of help and support, it also takes away an important opportunity for the new and old immigrants with poor majority language skills to become active members of the community beyond the borders of their language and culture.

Many of immigrants in Canada come from countries where even basic education is scarce and the opportunities to learn languages may be non-existent. The only way to learn English or French is to take a language course in Canada.

But the quality of teaching staff in various immigration centres is often questionable. An immigrant I know in Calgary went to English classes shortly after their arrival to Canada. Educated in Europe and fluent in three languages, they kept asking more profound grammar related questions such as “why is that”. The ubiquitous answer was “it’s like just that, English has no logic”. Which is a) rubbish, b) proof that the “teacher” was not really a teacher of English but merely an English speaking person without necessary qualification and lack of pedagogical skills.

It’s not an isolated case. In Canada and Britain, English language is not a part of standard school curriculum. English is reduced to teaching spelling and stylistics but it is not the same as teaching a language. People learn their mother tongue only by means of its everyday use. Asking an educated Briton or Canadian questions about an accusative or a plus quam perfectum (pluperfect tense) usually results in a pretty accusatory, i.e. dumb, look. Not to mention frequently misunderstood and thus potentially explosive “genitive case”.

According to the Conference board of Canada, about 40% of adult (working age) Canadians “do not have the literacy skills to cope with the demands of everyday life and work in modern society”. In other words, they are functionally illiterate. UN statistics from 2000 put Britain’s illiteracy rate to approximately 20%. UK government says that 42% of children leaving school at 16 “fail to achieve a basic level of functional English”. According to Daily Telegraph, one in six British adults lacks the literacy skills of an 11-year old.

A friend of mine spent two years teaching biology at two prestigious private boarding schools in Britain. That was her main assignment. As a secondary one – she taught overseas students English as a foreign language. In Britain.

This emphasizes the fact that teaching English to people who grew up in a non-English environment requires different methods, qualifications and skills which, apparently, most of the native speakers do not possess as they had no opportunity to acquire them.

If the federal government in Ottawa wants to make the command of official languages a condition for granting an applicant citizenship, it must reconcile its two often contradictory policies – granting substantial semi-autonomous language-related cultural and religious rights on the one hand and its integration policies. Second task would be to improve language learning programs for both immigrants and the Canadians.

Unfortunately, things are not that simple. Even if immigrants do speak perfect English or French and can present official diplomas from their home countries, they are often required to pass language tests because Canadian authorities or private companies chose not to accept their foreign qualification in a given language. But that’s a different story.

Ontario, Made in China

Awarding a contract to an overseas company when domestic manufacturing sector struggles is like inviting a Hannibal Lecter for dinner. Ontario’s bureaucrats should have known that before placing an order for $1000 worth of Ontario provincial flags to a Chinese company.

But who could blame them? The $1000 funds allocation in the budget has to be followed as the Scriptures. Let’s do the math. A Toronto flag manufacturer sells a flag for $18 dollars. Ontario can get them $13 a piece from China. It’s 55 versus 77 flags. Problem solved.

Ontario veteran legislator Peter Kormos (NDP) was very outspoken about Made in China flags and in the framework of national, provincial and emotional reasons found a spot for the alleged quality issue. Now, quality is a subjective thing, for example JD Power made fools of themselves this week after coming up with a survey stating that notoriously substandard Jaguars and questionable Buicks are more dependable than Lexuses… but that’s another story. Topically equally interesting and equally pointless result-wise thanks to the JD Power’s way of collecting “data”.

Bag to the flag-gate. Yes, a flag is a symbol. Nothing more. Manufacturing a thousand dollar worth of Ontario provincial flags in Ontario will not make a difference to the province’s struggling manufacturing sector. Neither will populism and fiery rhetorics.

Amazing polar discoveries

It’s not clear who ought to be more happy. Polar bears or environmental activists? Canada, Greenland (Denmark), Norway, Russia and the United States declared that the global warming is the single largest threat to the remaining population (20-25,000) of polar bears.

A modest fanfare of the domestic press and WWF heralded Canadian signature on the updated version of 1973 Polar Bear Agreement for acknowledging both the global warming and the threat to polar bears: “The parties agreed that long-term conservation of polar bears depends upon successful mitigation of climate change.” So far so good but not new. Changes to a particular species’ natural habitat, no matter how induced, do affect the species’ ability to prosper and survive. But then, it’s better than nothing, and it’s certainly newsworthy.

What’s not so praiseworthy is the lack of a proper, concrete real-world follow-up to the declaration, there’s not even an obligatory call to the UN. Signing up for monitoring and controlling industrial activities in the region is a matter of common sense not a Polar Bear Agreement update. Having said that, as nobody can say ‘no’ to a non-committing declaration interweaving the bears’ survival with the global warming, the declaration makes polar bears, in a rather specific way, very lucky creatures. Unlike seals…

Web is 20. And, of course, Steve Jobs was there.

These days, the Internet, to most people, is about fun, real or imagined), supposed content creation and self-exposure via sites like Facebook, countless blogs and other experiments in the so called “Web 2.0”. No matter how is the content being created, it’s still the Internet. Web. Without version numbers. PC Mag’s editor Lance Ulanoff, after being apparently off-track recently, has got things right.

Today’s content may appear to be pathetic and the very vague online community may not be very serious about itself, but the beginning of the Internet was serious, meaningful and purposeful.

The wild and wonderful world of the World Wide Web was born in CERN, world largest particle physics lab in Switzerland. 20 years ago, in March 1989, Timothy John Berners-Lee drafted the “Mesh”. The proposal concerned, in Sir Timothy’s own abstract “the management of general information about accelerators at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system”.

CERN was, and still is, a top scientific establishment so it’s not surprising that it used expensive and state-of-the-art computing technology, which also happened to be not just “put together” – it was designed. And expensive. Back in the late 80s and early 90s there was only one computer that would fall into all above mentioned categories. NeXT.

Internet as we know it now may be a side product of the original Mesh proposal, nevertheless, it was created on Steve Jobs’s NeXT. In 1990, the NeXT Cube became the world’s first Web server that went online. Like it or not, Steve Jobs was there when the Internet was created.

Women International, Inc.

Gender equality is one of the greatest myths of the modern-day mankind… sorry, humankind, nope, that doesn’t work either… But irony and differences stemming from obvious physiological differences aside, gender equality is still an objective. Or is it?

Countries around the world have been adopting pro-equality legislation for decades but with few notable Scandinavian exceptions, the results were mixed at best. Some countries, Canada for example, are actually taking steps back. Green Party leader Elizabeth May, speaking at the press conference on the heels of International Womens’ Day on Monday, reminded that the Conservative government refused to accept recommendations of the Pay Equity Task Force to introduce pay equity legislation which would bring Canada in line with its both national and international human rights obligations. The Conservatives removed mandate to promote women’s equality from the mandate of the governmental Status of Women Canada.

Another way how Canada, and many other western countries, roll back women’s rights is through either allowing elements of alternative legal systems to sneak in or by not being tough enough in combating religious and/or cultural customs that often deny women basic human rights. Few Canadian provinces already recognize immigrant’s polygamous marriages and there is a real possibility that it could become legal across Canada. There is evidence of Canadian doctors performing the so called female genital mutilation surgery. So called “honour killings” are a major problem in Britain’s South Asian community.

International Women’s Day has pretty colourful history. Despite rather universal values it stands for. In the USA and Canada, it used to be associated with communist propaganda, as a great deal of other UN sanctioned days. On the other hand, The Day was an important one in the feminists’ diary. Communist countries, which, at certain point of history, took gender equality in many ways to much higher standards than Western countries, managed to turn the celebration into a huge party where men would get drunk in the workplace and (finally!) would leave women to enjoy few hours of male-free freedom. Apparently, self-titled neolibertarian kinder-capitalists in the post communist countries forgot to grow up out of propaganda and stereotypes and are still ready to shoot down or at least ridicule any political figure who would dare to publicly say something positive about The Day.

In Canada, they would run out of the ammunition in about two minutes because every major political party issued a statement emphasizing the importance of the gender equality. That doesn’t change the fact that there’s a gap the size of Atlantic between declarations and male reality shaped by politics dominated by personal attacks and ambitions that thrive in the undemocratic first-past-the-post system.

International Women’s Day may have lost its feminist emphasis over the years but as our understanding of human rights changes and becomes more inclusive, so should our approach to women’s rights. Ultimately, it’s a political issue. And why no-one can force women to enter politics, there are ways to make politics a place that would be less hostile and would attract not just more women but more people which politics is about making their countries better places to live.

Canadian Babylon at 175

There are many multicultural cities in the world, but none of them comes close to Toronto, the modern-day incarnation of Babylon. More than 100 languages are used in everyday communication by some 2.5 million people. Almost half of them was born outside Canada. The Babylonian make up provides more than appropriate background for the city’s 175^th birthday. Toronto, know as City of York at that time, was incorporated on March 6, 1834, with all its 9,000 inhabitants.

Over the years, Toronto has become a city which precedes Canada’s ongoing shift towards multi-ethnic and multicultural and multi-religious country. While Quebec is officially francophone and Canada officially bilingual, Toronto is predominantly and unofficially multicultural. Poles once replaced Irish, and what was a Polish quarter in the 1970s and 1980s became a Muslim neighbourhood later as the influx of immigrants shifted from Europe to Asia and Africa. Still, as the experience of a friend of mine confirmed just last week, it’s possible to spend a day in a city using only Russian. And, very likely, any of the major languages.

Toronto is often considered, not just by those who live there but also by the likes of Economist Intelligence Unit and Mercer, to be one of the world’s most livable cities. It thrives whether it’s because or in spite of its diversities. With the city being, in many ways, a proving ground for the whole country, let’s hope it’s stays this way.

GM needs stability of being bankrupt

Bell tolls for General Motors. The company is burning cash at an alarming rate, $5.9 billion in Q4, $19.2 billion in 2008. GM has already received $13 billion from the US Government, it wants another $17 billion, but the survival plan the loan is based on is, in turn, based on sales. However, while all major car manufacturers’ sales suffered in February, GM was the only company that saw more than 50% drop, 52.9% to be precise, even when adjusted for less selling days in February 2009 (24 vs 25).

GM is doing so badly that nothing can really hurt it more. Well, one thing can. The uncertainty if or when it will file for Chapter 11.

The case for bankruptcy grew stronger on Thursday after GM released the report made by auditors from Delloite & Touche who expressed their “substantial doubts” whether the manufacturer can sustain its operations. GM is offloading everything it can, Saab and Opel, for example, but the speed of its actions points to panic. Which is very catchy these days and the fact is that most of plans to sack tens of thousand of people coined overnight are not plans. They are emotional reactions. And when emotions prevail, it’s no longer only about money, investments, markets and bailouts. That’s why it’s necessary to calm things down.

Which, for GM, means bankruptcy. Sure, it will mean rock bottom, but at least it will be a solid one.