Some news links: history, cities, migration, diasporas

I have some links up for today, with an essay to come tomorrow.

• JSTOR Daily considers the extent to which the Great Migration of African-Americans was a forced migration, driven not just by poverty but by systemic anti-black violence.
• Even as the overall population of Japan continues to decline, the population of Tokyo continues to grow through net migration, Mainichi reports.
• This CityLab article takes look at the potential, actual and lost and potential, of immigration to save the declining Ohio city of Youngstown. Will it, and other cities in the American Rust Belt, be able to take advantage of entrepreneurial and professional immigrants?
• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow. That immigrant neighbourhoods can become largely self-contained can surprise no one.
• Guardian Cities notes how tensions between police and locals in the Bairro do Jamaico in Lisbon reveal problems of integration for African immigrants and their descendants.
• Carmen Arroyo at Inter Press Service writes about Pedro, a migrant from Oaxaca in Mexico who has lived in New York City for a dozen years without papers.
• CBC Prince Edward Island notes that immigration retention rates on PEI, while low, are rising, perhaps showing the formation of durable immigrant communities. Substantial international migration to Prince Edward Island is only just starting, after all.
• The industrial northern Ontario city of Sault Sainte-Marie, in the wake of the closure of the General Motors plant in the Toronto-area industrial city of Oshawa, was reported by Global News to have hopes to recruit former GM workers from Oshawa to live in that less expensive city.
• Atlas Obscura examines the communities being knitted together across the world by North American immigrants from the Caribbean of at least partial Hakka descent. The complex history of this diaspora fascinates me.

On francophone immigration to Toronto and Ontario

Back in July 2008, as part of a long post on the gradual assimilation of most Francophone minorities in Canada outside of Québec ("Demography and culture: French Canada's fall and Québec's isolation"), I mentioned in passing the possible role on Francophone immigration in bolstering Francophone numbers. The numbers involved would of necessity have to be substantial, especially given the strong pressure for Francophone minorities in the rest of Canada to shift to English. Even so, Francophone immigration to Canada is a real and growing phenomenon, and while Québec is the obvious focus of this migration--around a hundred thousand French immigrants are in Montréal alone--it is also a reality elsewhere. Here in Toronto, as Selena Ross' article in The Globe and Mail mirrored at 24news.ca noted, this has had a significant impact on the number of French-medium schools in Toronto. As Francophones continues to immigrate to Ontario and older-established Francophones start to make use of these facilities, the numbers of students keep rising.

Despite guarantees in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, French-only schools in Toronto have historically been few and far between. For decades, a real fear for many francophones settling in Hogtown has been that they would fail to pass on their language and culture to their offspring.

A once-in-a-generation opportunity is starting to change that, and it promises a bigger cultural shift in Toronto. As enrolment in English-language schools declines, a crop of school properties is being put up for sale and the region’s two French school boards have jumped to buy. What no one predicted is the snowball effect that has followed each new school opening, drawing “invisible francophones” out of a reluctant assimilation and making new connections between them.

Lianne Doucet, a mother of three in Toronto’s Leslieville neighbourhood, laughs and lowers her voice to a spooky register. “We always say, ‘We’re all around you.’”

The cultural isolation of Toronto-area francophones – whether by mother tongue or schooling – can be so extreme that many don’t know that Section 23 of the Charter promises French-language K-12 education for their children. The Toronto area’s first French-language school board was created in 1988, and there are now two serving the region, one public and one Catholic. Still, nearly 30 years later, the secular board, the Conseil Scolaire Viamonde, must diligently advertise its schools to get the word out, superintendent Sylvie Longo said.

It has had a lot of ads to put out lately: 12 new schools in the past eight years, with four more under construction. The board’s Catholic counterpart, the Conseil Scolaire de District Catholique Centre-Sud, has opened 10 in the same time span. The two boards’ enrolment rose respectively by 33 and 16 per cent from 2008 to 2014.

That’s in sharp contrast with the shrinking English system. The Toronto District School Board’s enrolment dropped by nearly 5 per cent in the same period.

And still, French schools consistently fill up faster than predicted. École Élémentaire La Mosaïque opened in Toronto’s Danforth area in 2008 and has already had to rezone, unable to fit in all the eligible children. École Ronald-Marion in Pickering opened in 2013 and now needs portable classrooms to meet demand, while a French Catholic school in Stouffville is at full capacity and hasn’t even opened yet.

“When we build schools, they come,” Ms. Longo said.

Toronto may be one of the world’s most diverse cities, but within Canada, it’s also a bastion of English – and Quebec, a more obvious destination for francophone immigrants, is just a few hours away. Who are the tens of thousands of Toronto-area residents itching for all-French education?

Ryerson Centre for Immigration and Settlement's January 2014 report "Ontario Francophone Immigrant Profile: Immigration Trends & Labour Outcomes" (PDF format) took a look at the basic dynamics of Francophone immigration to Ontario.

From 2001 to 2012, francophone immigration nationally accounted for on average 9.9% of all immigration to Canada. Excluding Quebec, francophone immigration, on average, accounted for 4.1% of all immigrants. Francophone immigration to Canada remained stable with no average decrease or increase per year. When Quebec was removed, there was a slight decline.

[. . .]

[. . .] The average percent of francophones to Ontario (as a proportion of all immigrants) was 2.5%. This percentage ranged from a low of 1.9% in 2002/2003 to a high of 3.4% in 2010. Over the past two years, the percent francophone immigration has hovered around an average of 3.2%. There was an average growth of 0.1% per year, which is above both the national average growth (0%) and the national average growth without Quebec (-0.1%).

The provincial government has stated an interest in boosting Francophone immigrant numbers to 5% of the total. The promotion of immigration into Francophone minority communities actually has been a goal of the federal government and many provincial governments, a way to try to slow down or even reverse the language shift I described back in 2008. One factor of note in this goal, as the Ryerson report observes, is that the communities chosen by Francophone international migrants in Ontario do not necessarily correspond to the communities where Francophones currently live.

In order to gain an understanding of how francophone immigrants are contributing to existing francophone communities, a profile of francophone immigration to traditional francophone centres was constructed based on the 2011 National Household Survey. Traditional francophone centres are defined as places in Ontario with large French speaking populations relative to the total population. The CMAs [of Greater Sudbury, Hawkesbury, Ottawa-Hull, and Timmins] were chosen because they have high populations of francophones relative to the total population, ranging from 15.8% to 64.3%. In comparison, non-traditional francophone centres such as Toronto and Hamilton, which have received higher absolute numbers of francophone immigrants, only had francophone populations that accounted for 1.3 to 1.6% of the total population.

Amongst the traditional francophone centres, only Ottawa-Hull attracts a considerable proportion of francophone immigrants. Indeed, Ottawa-Hull was the second largest CMA destination for francophone migrants in Ontario. Outside of Ottawa-Hull, francophone immigrants are not settling in traditional francophone centres in Ontario but rather in traditionally-considered Anglophone cities like Toronto, Hamilton, and Windsor. Could this be part of some larger francophone movement towards non-traditional francophone centres? The latest results from the 2011 National Household Survey indicate that the answer is no. A comparison of the geographic distribution of francophones immigrants versus all francophones finds different patterns in their settlement. Shown as a per cent of the total of each group, a larger proportion (on average, 2.3%) of non-immigrant francophones reside in traditional francophone centres (such as Ottawa, Timmins, Sudbury, and Hawkesbury). Indeed, by this measure Timmins is the fourth largest francophone centre in all of Ontario.

According to this cursory NHS analysis, francophone immigrants show a spatial distribution that is consistent with the findings of this report. The largest proportion of francophone immigrants reside in Toronto followed by Ottawa and Hamilton. It is also interesting to note that a slightly larger proportion (3.5%) of francophone immigrants live in Ottawa as opposed to non-immigrant francophones.

Ottawa, it should be noted, not only is the second-largest city of Ontario by population with a Francophone population of its own both proportionately and absolutely large, but it is part of the National Capital Region, including strongly Francophone Gatineau on the Québec side of the Ottawa River. The other communities named--Timmins, Sudbury, Hawkesbury--are relatively smaller centres in the north and east of Ontario. If international migrants are not moving to these communities and are instead opting for Ottawa and the cities of southern Ontario, this might well note their sensitivity to poor economic conditions.

Is this working? In the specific case of Ontario, possibly. Statistics Canada's profile of Canadian Francophones noted that not only did Ontario's Francophone population grow between 2006 and 2011, but it nearly maintained its proportion of the total population. Selena Ross' article, quoted above, does suggest that international Francophone migration might well galvanize Francophone consciousness generally. Then again, as noted above, it's not clear that this international migration can do much for the older Francophone communities in the province. The November 2002 report "Official Languages and Immigration: Obstacles and Opportunities for Immigrants and Communities" notes that there are any number of ways in which Francophone international migrants can just not have a successful experience, with a lack of common ground between migrants and natives spoiling the project.

On the demographic background behind the Ontario election tomorrow

Tomorrow, the Canadian province of Ontario will go through an election. The Liberal minority government failed to get the support of the left-wing NDP in passing its provincial budget, triggering an election. Right now, the parties seem tied; the election can go any way. (I myself intend to turn up at the polls in my riding, or electoral district, of Davenport and vote for the Liberal candidate; the NDP may have overplayed its cards in Davenport specifically and Toronto generally.)

As noted by Jason Kirby of MacLean's, the demographic background of Ontario is rather unpromising. The economic growth that all three parties count on may just not happen as the workforce ages.

[F]or all the thousands of kilometres the leaders travelled, for all the babies kissed, promises made and millions of pixels burned out by instant online analysis, it’s remarkable how little attention went to the only mathematical reality that matters as Ontario tries to get back on its feet. Its workers are getting old, fast, and that simple fact is the demographic hand grenade that threatens to blow an even bigger hole than already exists into Ontario’s economy.

The reality is Ontario’s creaking workforce is likely to upset everyone’s plans, no matter which party wins. That’s because underlying the various party platforms was a common assumption: that Ontario’s economic growth will kick into higher gear over the next few years, providing a boost to the provincial budget and doing much of the heavy lifting needed to haul Ontario out of its fiscal hole. The impetus for the growth might vary (Tory cuts, Liberal corporate welfare and taxes on the rich, NDP corporate taxes), but once past the nitty-gritty each party was in the same finger-crossing territory: our plan will boost the economy, and that growth will bring Ontario’s $11.3-billion deficit under control.

Partway through the campaign, Doug Porter, chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns, published a report entitled “Destiny dictated by demography” (PDF) that should have given all parties pause. In it, he sketched some of the ways Canada’s aging population will hit the economy over the next five to 15 years. Top of the list: “Average growth rates will be slower; get used to it.” For Ontario in particular, he estimated, that means an annualized rate of real GDP growth of just 1.7 per cent for 10 years. Yet the Liberal’s last budget before the election forecast growth of 2.5 per cent for each of the next two years, rising to 2.6 per cent by 2017—growth rates not out of step with what the other parties might expect.

To see how Ontario’s demographics could undermine the economy, consider the following. In the early 2000s, Ontario was a notch behind Alberta in terms of the pace of growth of its adult, working-age population. Today the two provinces aren’t even close. Ontarians are shuffling into retirement age far faster than new workers are coming along to replace them. Sure, the aging workforce is a nationwide phenomenon. But in Alberta, where the number of people turning 65 last year rose slightly more than five per cent, the working-age adult population also grew five times faster than in Ontario.

Ontario’s labour force participation rate is already deteriorating as a result. While it’s often said that a lower participation rate is a sign of workers giving up and leaving the job market, the real driver is demographics. As this chart shows the participation for most Ontario regions is below the national average, which is saying a lot when you consider the size of the province’s population.

For the curious, Ontario's official population projection to 2036 is here, and Douglas Porter's report mentioned in Kirby's article is here.

Some demography-related links for the New Year

I've been collecting a few interesting links--articles, blog posts--for some time. Longer thematic essays will come--Ukraine interests me significantly, for instance, as do some of the topics raised here--but for now here's a selection of what I've been reading.

• First off, writing at io9, George Dvorsky argues that extreme human longevity won't destroy the planet. The Atlantic, meanwhile, featured an article by Jean Twenge arguing that popular wisdom on female fertility is wrong, that in fact it's substantially easier for women in their late 30s and even early 40s to conceive than ill-founded statistics would have it.
• Crooked Timber had two posts in November taking a look at the risks faced by clandestine migrants, one on overland Mexican route and one on the overseas route to Australia.
• In East Asia, meanwhile, the National Interest has warned that the aging and shrinking Japanese population may weaken Japan vis-a-vis China (the Japan Daily Press noting that births have reached all-time lows in the modern era while deaths have reached all-time highs). The Economist's Buttonwood blog uses Japan's fate to meditate on the future of advanced economies.
• Elsewhere in the region, the Taipei Times notes South Korea's continuing problems with integrating immigrants--at least working-class immigrants; according to the Want China Times, investor-class immigrants are doing quite well in Jeju island. The Diplomat observes that immigration from Africa is creating a sizable enclave of immigrants in Guangdong, while Marginal Revolution cited an authority who claimed that one child in five was growing up without their parents, migrant workers in the city.
• In the Middle East, a post by Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money on Syrian refugees caught my attention: of the huge number of forced emigrants, many live in Lebanon, where one resident in three is now Syrian.
• In Singapore, Marginal Revolution examined inequality in Singapore and that city-state's very low birth rate (I think there's a connection), while the Wall Street Journal's Southeast Asia blog wondered if very high rates of immigration are aggravating internal issues.
• NPR, looking to southern Europe, observed Portugal's baby bust and commented on the return of mass emigration in Greece. Eurasianet has observed that Latvia is trying to shut down an investor-class residency program that has been quite attractive to migrants from the former Soviet Union, particularly Russians and Central Asians, part of an effort to avoid a Cypriot-style economic bubble.
• According to Presseurop and the Financial Times, meanwhile, strong economic growth in Poland is starting to attract large numbers of immigrants to that country. (This immigration, it should be noted, exists alongside still high levels of emigration to western Europe.)
• France, a country of emigration? Le Nouvel Economiste warns (in French) that France risks losing its underemployed young, while a Business Week report profiles French workers who commute across the Rhine to work in Germany.
• I rather liked Jamie Mackay's Open Democracy essay explaining how Chinese migrants in Venice were being used as scapegoats for the problems of that city (and country, by extension?).
• In Canada, a recent book by Bob Plamondon critical of long-time Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau has made the argument that the shift in immigration under his rule, specifically shifting priorities from skilled workers towards family reunification, diminished the benefits of immigration.
• Le Devoir discusses (in French) the demographic challenges of Québec, with a rising (if sub-replacement) fertility rate and consistent problems in attracting immigrants. (This came out before the recent CBC report highlighting rising outmigration from la belle province.) In Ontario, meanwhile, the low birth rate means that the cohorts of new university students--as noted in MacLean's--will start to fall.
• The Atlantic Cities had an extended essay by Howard W. French talking about how the growth of African cities, in population and in economic weight and in governance, would reshape the map of the continent.
• The Atlantic Wire and the Washington Post both reported the recent American census finding that population increase in the United States is concentrated among non-white populations; white populations have started to experience negative decrease.
• On the topic of diasporas and ethnic identities, the Volokh Conspiracy linked to a study suggesting that 27% of Jewish children in the United States lived in Orthodox homes, suggesting that Orthodox Jewish birth rates are such that the Orthodox share of the Jewish community will grow sharply. (I've read of similar findings in the United Kingdom.)
• Window on Eurasia has a lot of interesting posts. Paul Goble noted that projected populations for most of the former Soviet republics made two decades ago are vastly overstated, the Central Asian republics being the big exception, and arguing that Russia has only a short time to deal with its, temporarily stabilized, demographic disequilibrium. (The Chechen birth rate is reportedly quite high, making it an exception; five of the seven republics of the North Caucasus now have sub-replacement fertility rates.)

A brief note on Bricker and Ibbitson's The Big Shift

Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen cited yesterday The Big Shift: The Seismic Change In Canadian Politics, Business, And Culture And What It Means For Our Future, by Canadians Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson. Their thesis?

The political, media and business elites of Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal ran this country for almost its entire history. But in the last few years, they have lost their power, and most of them still do not realize it’s gone. The Laurentian Consensus, a name John Ibbitson coined for the dusty liberal elite, has been replaced by a new, powerful coalition based in the West and supported by immigrant voters in Ontario. So what happened?

Great global migrations have washed over Canada. Most people are unaware that the keystone economic and political drivers of this country are now Western Canada and the immigrants from China, India, and other Asian countries who increasingly are turning Ontario into a Pacific-oriented province. Those in politics and business have greatly underestimated how conservative these newcomers are, and how conservative they are making our country. Canada, with an ever-evolving and growing economy and a constantly changing demographic base, has become divorced from the traditions of its past and is moving in an entirely new direction.

In The Big Shift, John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker argue that one of the world’s most consensual countries is polarizing, with the west versus the east, suburban versus urban, immigrants versus old school, coffee drinkers versus consumers of energy drinks. The winners—in politics, in business, in life—will figure out where the people are and go there too.

(The quote that caught Cowen's attention was a projection: "In Toronto, 63 percent of the population will be foreign born by 2031…In Vancouver, the foreign-born population will be 59 percent." That figure doesn't sound off.)

I haven't read the book, so I can't comment authoritatively. What I can say is that the thesis isn't obviously wrong. The Conservatives have had significant success in breaking the traditionally close relationship of the (in my opinion) slowly dying Liberal Party's support among recent immigrants, while the traditionally more centrist and left-wing central Canadian region has been relative decline as Alberta--as we've noted here for the past seven years--leads western Canada in experiencing very strong economic and population growth. My two May 2011 posts reacting to the 2011 election (1, 2) could be read as suggesting some sort of ideological polarization of the country between a Conservative-leaning west and a NDP-leaning centre. At the very least the book seems worth a look.

On immigrant under-representation in politics

Vancouver Sun journalist Douglas Todd's blog The Search has an interesting focus on exploring questions of religion and identity in and around and beyond Vancouver and northwestern North America. One of his most recent Vancouver-themed posts highlighted a remarkable fact: descendants of Celtic immigrants, especially Scots, have monopolized the office of mayor.

The last three mayors of Vancouver - Gregor Robertson, Sam Sullivan and Larry Campbell - all value their rich Scottish ancestries.

Even prior to the election of these three kilt-loving men, the number of Vancouver mayors who have had Scottish surnames has proved impressive. Three of the past nine mayors of Vancouver, for instance, have been Campbells, which means "crooked mouth" in Gaelic. They include Gordon Campbell and Tom Campbell.

Vancouver's first mayor, Malcolm McLean, was born in Tiree, Scotland. The city went on to elect a host of mayors with surnames long associated, at least in part, with Scotland, including Malcolm McBeath, Louis Taylor, Gerry McGeer, Tom Alsbury (born in Edinburgh), George Miller, Fred Hume, Charles Thompson and William Rathie.

This West Coast metropolis, in addition, has had far more than its normal share of those with a combination of Scottish, or Welsh-Irish, surnames, such as Philip Owen, William Owen, Art Phillips, William McGuigan and Charles Jones. (See John Mackie's lively list of Vancouver mayors.)

Indeed, with the addition of a few mayors with English-Norman surnames (such as Michael Harcourt and Charles Tisdal), the city of Vancouver has almost entirely lacked mayors of non-British ancestry in its 125 years.

The one well-known exception is mayor David Oppenheimer (1888-1891), who had Jewish-German roots.

Where have been the Italian, Scandinavian or French mayors -since up until the 1970s people of this ethnicity, along with Germans, together accounted for almost 15 per cent of the city's residents?

And - the question that's most obvious in this age of high Asian immigration - why has there been no Vancouver mayor of Chinese extraction?

One might even joke about a Celtic cabal. (And no, McDonald though I am, I can't say anything about this. Really. Can't.)

This sort of underrepresentation isn't unique in Canada to Vancouver. Toronto's mayoral elections last year, held in a city where half the population is foreign-born, all six of the leading candidates were of European descent, three were of British background, and in the end mayor David Miller passed on his position to Rob Ford. This isn't limited to the position of mayor: in the Canadian Parliament, MPs from visible minority groups are consistently only half as numerous as suggested by visible minorities' share of the Canadian population, with similar or greater under-representation in the Ontario Provincial Parliament and even on the most recent Toronto City Council but one. The Canadian experience is not so different from the French, where until recently descendants of the immigrants from North Africa (not, as Sarkozy's existence shows, immigrants from Europe) were excluded. Elsewhere, too?

Todd's almost certainly right in saying that it's only a matter of time before Vancouver gets a Chinese mayor, that it's simply a matter of immigrant groups becoming more comfortable with the Canadian system and second- and third-generation community members moving up through the ranks, perhaps starting low and gradually plugging into networks. I hope so: the scale of this lag is embarrassing, and only partially mitigated by the fact that Canadian multiculturalism is almost entirely a post-Second World War creation. This lag is also potentially problematic, inasmuch as excluding entire population groups from political power can bring obvious negative consequences onto the polity.

On sputtering integration in Toronto

One of the less cheerful tags ar my personal blog is "three torontos". The tag comes from a phrase in the title of a 2007 report by the University of Toronto's David Hulchanski, who found that Toronto's neighbourhoods could be divided into three categories based on patterns of income growth: neighbourhoods which saw significant income growth over the 1970-2000 period; neighbourhods which more-or-less stagnated (growth or decline of less than 20%); and, neighbourhoods which saw significant income decline. These divisions map onto enduring social, geographic, and ethnic divisions in Toronto, onto any number of patterns like the distribution of cyclists, voting in the recent municipal election, and the boundaries of the once-autonomous communities in an amalgamated Toronto. A follow-up study, available here and covered in the Globe and Mail by Anna Mehler Papierny, suggests that on the balance of existing trends Toronto's going to be polarized into two areas, have and have-nots.

Toronto is becoming a city of stark economic extremes as its middle class is hollowed out and replaced by a bipolar city of the rich and poor – one whose lines are drawn neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

New numbers indicate a 35-year trend toward economic polarization is growing more pronounced: The country’s economic engine, which has long claimed to be one of the most diverse cities in the world, is increasingly comprised of downtown-centred high-income residents – most living near subway lines – and a concentration of low-income families in less dense, service- and transit-starved inner suburbs.

Three years ago, University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski published a paper on Toronto’s “Three Cities,” illustrating a growing socioeconomic disparity among the city’s census tracts. But the three-way divide Prof. Hulchanski and his fellow Cities Centre researchers described is swiftly being reduced to two, according to a new paper they will release Wednesday. Toronto, a predominantly middle-class metropolis just three decades ago, is increasingly dominated by two opposite populations – one with an average income of $88,400, and another of $26,900.

These two groups live in different neighbourhoods, work in different sectors, send their children to different schools and have divergent and unequal access to city services and public transit. Even the 905-area suburbs outside of Toronto are seeing a dramatic drop in the proportion of middle-income earners in their population, the report finds.

Those in the lowest-income areas are also more likely to be immigrants and visible minorities.

“It’s only going to become worse,” Prof. Hulchanski said. If the trend continues, the paper suggests, Toronto in 2025 will have a concentration of high-earners along the lakefront and the city’s subway lines surrounded by low-income areas – with almost nothing in between.

[. . .]

It also seems to contradict Toronto’s most prized mottos – “Diversity our strength” and “The city that works.” Neither of those rings true any more: Toronto’s diversity is becoming balkanized, turning it into a weakness where it could otherwise act to the city’s advantage. The creation of economically polarized pockets of high- and low-income residents means Toronto simply won’t “work” as a municipal entity.

“We used to brag about it,” Prof. Hulchanski said. “ ‘Toronto’s an efficient city – it works.’ We know now that’s not true.

“To have so much poverty in one geography and for it to be so deep and for the social distance to be so large … that isn’t healthy.”

In a five-year period alone, average incomes declined in 34 of the city’s census tracts (about 7 per cent of its total) – 23 of those areas became predominantly low-income. At the same time, 12 areas became high-income and nine earned “middle-income” status.

This has to do with the exclusion of immigrants from the labour force. As the Toronto City website boasts, Toronto's population is quite cosmopolitan, absolutely and relative to other Canadian cities. A variety of sources suggest that new Canadians just aren't fitting into the labour market, as evidenced by current unemployment rates.

While jobless rates dropped both nationally and locally – to 7.6 per cent Canada-wide, the lowest level in two years, and to 6.7 per cent from 9.2 per cent earlier this year in Toronto – unemployment is ramping up for people who have come to Canada in the past five years.

In Toronto, 19.7 per cent of recent immigrants are unemployed. That’s far higher than the 13 per cent who were jobless just a year ago, and nearly three times the jobless rate for Canadian-born residents.

It’s not unusual for immigrants to be hit harder by recession and to take longer to recover their job prospects. But Toronto relies more on immigrant labour now than it has in the past: As of 2011, virtually all of the city’s job-market growth depends on immigrants.

“Because of the fact that more than 50 per cent of our residents are foreign-born, there’s a sharper thrust and a higher stress for us to do really well,” said Ratna Omidvar, president of the Maytree Foundation.

What’s perennially missing in a city with a plethora of disconnected services and growing socioeconomic stratification, advocates argue, are the tools to connect immigrants to jobs. To this end, the federal government has pledged $2.3-million in funds to help Torontonian immigrants integrate – cash that has gone to programs started in May of this year.

And a new initiative through Scotiabank is teaming up with the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council to try to link immigrant professionals with their Canadian counterparts.

Immigrants who’ve arrived in Canada since the financial crisis face a growing Catch-22 of employment barriers, says TRIEC executive director Elizabeth McIsaac. They are at a disadvantage from the start, and the longer their lack of Canadian experience bars them from the job market, the harder it is to join and the longer their unemployment is a drag on the rest of the economy.

“If you landed in the middle of a recession and you didn’t get your first opportunity, your time out of the market exacerbates the challenges you had getting into it.… It begins to have a multiplying effect – a real scarring effect on immigrants.”'

The gap between immigrant and native-born worker incomes is taking an extra generation to close, a combination of competition from guest workers and the semi-legal labour market, a lack of Canadian-recognized credentials, and--quite possibly--the continued exclusion of new Canadians from the closed social networks of established employers and professional groups which let people join the labour market at a level befitting of their skills.

So. Ontario--including Toronto--may be doing better than in Québec in integrating immigrants into the mainstream labour market, and it's certainly doing a better job of avoiding creating a metic class than countries with less porous immigration regimes like Germany. Even with a national economy that has been performing quite strongly relative to most of its First World peers, this still isn't good enough to avoid creating a very problematic social and geographic pattern of relative deprivation linked to ethnic and national origins in Ontario's, and Canada's, largest city. This can lead in very negative directions. On ethical grounds alone, this is unacceptable.

Any suggestions as to how Toronto--and other cities--could pull out of this? Getting a sufficiently dynamic labour market, and associated economy, is key. Is there best practice to be productively shared?

On Canada's ridiculous census conflict

Statistics Canada is heir to a long tradition, established under the French regime and continued under the British and independence, of government-conducted censuses. Canada's first census occurred in 1666, by order by New France's Intendant Jean Talon. "The census counted the colony's 3,215 inhabitants and recorded their age, sex, marital status and occupation. In light of the need for information to help plan and develop the Colony of New France, Talon did much of the data collection personally, visiting settlers throughout the colony." The census hasn't been publicly very controversial at all, with the privacy issues often raised generally not being raised. That's why it's so surprising that the Conservative federal government felt it had to abolish the mandatory long-form census.

The potential consequences are severe, inasmuch as the sectors of the population less likely to turn in the long-form census (immigrants, the poor, et cetera) are already likely to be undercounted.

Transit: Municipal governments look at detailed census data before deciding whether to make changes to transit routes or increase service. Less reliable data would mean more headaches for planners and — potentially — transit users.

Education: School boards use detailed census data to predict future enrolment, which affects their plans for staffing, the need for new schools and special programs such as minority-language training.

Social services: Without detailed census data, it may be more difficult to determine local needs for daycare, subsidized housing and services for disabled people.

Help for the unemployed: The details in the census data make it easier for governments to determine which parts of the country may need more help in dealing with unemployment and job retraining.

Québec, with its Institut de la statistique, is the only province capable of replicating the fine detail provided by Statistics Canada's long-form census.

The list of groups opposed to the change comprises virtually every sector in Canadian public line. Religious groups (Jews, evangelical Christians, "mainline" Christians, doubtless et cetera), cities in fast-growing Alberta, First Nations groups already unhappy with Statistics Canada's perceived issues, my hometown of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, the city of Toronto, practically everyone in Québec, the government of Nunavut, obviously the opposition Liberal Party and New Democratic Party along with the Bloc Québécois ...

Practically the only people or organizations, besides the government, supporting the scrapping of the mandatory long-form census are groups like the libertarian Fraser Institute, which said that groups which made use of the mandatory long-form census were free-riding on government and that it's time that this stopped.

I'm unconvinced that this is anything but a political move. Already, the government backed down and added language-related questions to the mandatory short-form census in order to limit the damage among Francophones; many Francophone minority organizations were strongly opposed to the change, some going as far as preparing to launch a court battle. Does the suggestion that the government is trying to preserve privacy make sense given how its planning to pass mandatory boaters' registration, say, never mind the cornucopia of information available to the Canadian government thanks to the Canadian habit of funding public services with income tax (among other taxes). Oh, and there's been talk about the Canadian government following a Scandinavian model and not conduct a detailed census, rather collating data from different government agencies (never mind Canada's particular privacy laws).

It should be obvious that I favour the retention--restoration, now, sadly--of the mandatory long-form census. (I filled it in last time and didn't feel intruded upon, for whatever that's worth.) The arguments of groups like the Fraser Institute and political parties like the one currently forming the federal government that the mandatory long-form census is intrusive is, besides representing a complaint that really and truly hasn't been voiced before, overlooks the fact that detailed statistics are necessary if a government is to manage a complex society, and if society itself--including, say, blogs and bloggers like this one and me--is to understand itself. For shame.

On the inconveniences of Ontario having high structural unemployment and rapid aging

The Canadian province of Ontario is easily the most populous province in Canada, with a population that's more than half again larger than the runner-up province, Québec. Ontario has long been a net receiver of migrants, firstly from the rest of the country then internationally. This, has helped keep Ontario's population young relative to the Canadian average.

Canada's most populous province is also one of the youngest, according to the Census of Population held on May 16, 2006. The proportion of people aged 65 and over is smaller in Ontario (13.6%) than in all other provinces except Alberta, and children form a larger portion of the population (18.2%) than in most other provinces. It is also noteworthy that Ontario was the only province other than Alberta whose population grew faster than the national average between 2001 and 2006.

The relative youthfulness of Ontario's population is due to a combination of factors. The cohorts born in Ontario between the First and Second World Wars were relatively small as the province had one of the lowest fertility rates in Canada at the time. These same small cohorts are the people who are age 65 and over today. Moreover, sustained immigration to Ontario since the late 1980s seems to have had an indirect impact on the number of births. Arriving in the province when they were about 30 on average, female immigrants come to Canada at an age when women are more likely to have children. That is one of the reasons that the percentage of children in Ontario has been higher than the national average since 1996.

Nevertheless, the population is aging in Ontario, as it is in every other part of Canada. The proportion of people aged 65 and over in the province rose from 12.9% in 2001 to 13.6% in 2006. Over the same period, the proportion of people under the age of 15 declined from 19.6% to 18.2%.

The Ontario government's latest projections estimate the province's population to be a bit more than 13.1 million, rising to 17.8 million by 2036, below-replacement fertility being compensated for by net migration, with immigrants providing a disproportionately large share of births. Ontario's share of the Canadian population is projected to rise from 39% now to 44.5% in 2036, while the intensifying urbanization of an already quite urbanized population will lead to the Greater Toronto Area hosting 51.5% of Ontario's population by 2036 (up from 41% now), with the proportion of the population in the 15-64 demographic falling from 69.3% to 60.7% and the proportion 65 and over rising from 13.7% to 23.2% over 2009-2036. Ontario's population is aging, certainly, but not as much as some other polities. Surely Canada's largest and (in aggregate) wealthiest province should be able to handle this?

Not necessarily. Earlier this month, Rick Miner made a blog post at the website of the National Post ("Ontario's coming unemployed legions
") warning that the province faces a crisis of mass unemployment even as the population ages.

[T]he province faces a growing number of people who will be unemployable, due to levels of education and skills that are insufficient to meet the demands of the new innovation economy.

While various policy-makers are grappling with our aging population and the shift to a knowledge economy, no one has put the two together and examined the consequences: More than 700,000 low-skilled Ontarians will be unemployable by 2021. That figure is in addition to the 5% of the population that is traditionally unemployed.

Taken together, it means that in 11 years’ time, more than 1.1 million people in Ontario will be unemployed with no prospects of finding work. That’s like having the entire populations of London, Barrie, Hamilton and Kingston unemployed.

Even worse, the massive unemployment will come at a time when employers will be desperate to find qualified people. Due to demographic changes such as the retirement of the baby boomers, along with the demands for a more highly skilled workforce, it can be safely estimated that more than 1.3 million jobs will go unfilled by 2021.

The skill sets of the workforce just aren't good enough.

Fifteen years ago, the Internet was virtually unknown. Now, it is an essential tool in most workplaces. Many of tomorrow’s high-demand jobs don’t even exist today. These jobs could be anything from nano-mechanic to memory augmentation surgeon or waste data handler. In many cases, jobs that could be filled by an unskilled person today will require a skilled employee by 2021.

In my new report, People Without Jobs, Jobs Without People: Ontario’s Labour Market Future, I have analyzed the data available from sources such as Statistics Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Canada Review, and other materials, including from the United States.

The research shows that even under the assumption of modest population growth, Ontario will still have a major unemployment problem.

By 2021, the experts predict at least 75% of Ontario’s population will require post-secondary education and training in order to be employable. However, if current trends continue, only 64% of the population is expected to have acquired post-secondary credentials by that time.

The study that Miner refers to is here (PDF format). He argues that immigration can't compensate for the low skill levels among the native-born population, since immigrants take a while to catch up to average levels of labour force participation and productivity. A vast multi-pronged approach--increasing the integration of immigrants and other under-represented groups, like women, in the labour force; vastly extending and developing the province's education system; encouraging on-the-job training--will be needed to prevent the province from slipping into very serious economic decline.

Population aging's the primary theme facing the entire world, but as working-age population's shrink relatively or even absolutely it's equally important that people belonging to this demographic have the training necessary to be productive enough to stabilize the economy of a country or region with a rapidly aging population. It's easy enough to expect that among countries with rapidly aging populations and lowest-low fertility, those countries with the more educated workforces (Germany? Japan? South Korea?) will fare significantly better (or less badly) than others (Italy? Spain?).

Who'll pay for IVF in Ontario (and elsewhere)?

Recently, an interesting proposal was made regarding a new service to be covered by OHIP, Ontario's public health insurance plan.

The Ontario government should provide funding for up to three cycles of in vitro fertilization for women under the age of 42, according to a report released Wednesday.

An expert panel on infertility and adoption, appointed by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty last summer, is also recommending replacing a "patchwork" of adoption services with a centralized adoption agency.

One in six couples will struggle with infertility and the greatest barrier to assisted reproduction services is the cost, with one cycle of IVF costing about $10,000, according to the panel.

The group said the high cost of fertility treatments is leading to decisions which result in an unacceptably high rate of multiple births in Ontario.

To increase chances of success, women and couples choose to have more than one embryo transferred, say the authors of the report. As a result, the rate of multiple births from assisted reproduction was 27.5 per cent in 2006, compared to rates below 10 per cent in other jurisdictions with controls on the number of embryos transferred, they say.

This plan is relatively controversial, given Ontario's own budgetary problems and concerns over strains on the healthcare system.

[The report] points to other jurisdictions that have used public funding as a mechanism to reduce multi-births and argues this saves money down the road by avoiding medical complications from twins and triplets.

But counting on those (imputed) savings requires a leap of faith. It may not fully account for the possibility that many other couples would line up for IVF at public expense – crowding out a strained health budget. In any case, if multiple implantations are medically unsound, they ought to be banned on medical grounds; it's not clear that the province should use its chequebook to discourage what it could otherwise accomplish through regulation and standards of practice.

Welcoming the report, Premier Dalton McGuinty expressed sympathy for families but warned that Ontario faces difficult economic times. That is a good place to start an informed public debate.

The question of government funding for fertility treatments has been a notable issue, triggering lawsuits against the provincial government.

In Quebec, high-profile TV personality Julie Snyder, the wife of Quebecor CEO Pierre-Karl Péladeau, urged the province to cover IVF treatments. She made a documentary about infertility and put pressure on politicians.

In April, Premier Jean Charest's government announced that it will fund three IVF cycles for couples, making Quebec the only province to do so.

Seang Lin Tan, a fertility expert at the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, said one in eight Canadian couples struggles with infertility.

"What's frustrating, is that people who would be good candidates are routinely told they have to dig into their pockets," Prof. Attaran said. "I'm fortunate, law professors get paid decently. But that's not true for everyone."

After a year of trying to conceive, the couple paid $6,300 for one IVF treatment at an Ottawa fertility clinic. A further $6,500 in drugs was covered by private insurance.

A spokesperson for Ontario Health Minister David Caplan said he would not comment on the case.

OHIP paid for IVF in the past, but in a cost-cutting measure in 1994, Ontario withdrew funding except for women whose fallopian tubes are blocked. That applies to about 25 per cent of infertile patients, said Jeff Nisker, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and oncology at the University of Western Ontario.

Just to the northeast, it should be noted that Québec has adopted a policy of subsidizing fertility treatments, first offering a refundable tax credit paying for 50% of the costs of the treatment up to a maximum of $C 10 000 and now preparing to fund the first three cycles of in vitro fertility treatments. This, it should be noted, is part of a historic policy on Québec's part of heavily subsidizing parents and their children.

Since 1997, the province has implemented a panoply of measures to support women who want to be good mothers without sacrificing their careers.

They include generous parental leave, affordable child care, tax incentives for child-bearing, and employment premiums for working parents.

They appear to have worked: Twelve years ago, the province's fertility rate stood at 1.51 children per woman. Today it stands at a 30-year high of 1.72 children per woman, significantly higher than the Canadian average of 1.58.

Premier Jean Charest calls his province "a paradise for families." He boasts that Quebec has succeeded in slowing its population decline, reducing child poverty and increasing the employment rate among women.

His government plans to go further, offering public funding to infertile couples who want in vitro fertilization.

Quebec's programs are expensive. The province will spend $6.5 billion to support families this year (45 per cent more than Ontario).

But its fertility rate is on par with those of the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and Britain.

Critics call Quebec's approach costly social engineering. But the majority of citizens support their government's family policies because they make life easier for parents and safeguard the province's francophone identify.

No other government in the country is following Quebec's example.

In covering this issue, many journalists have noted that in addition to Québec, countries like Belgium, Sweden, Australia, and Israel all pay the costs of at least several cycles of in vitro fertilization. I wonder if the number of countries providing fertility treatments will grow, perhaps driven by concerns over population issues as they effect national populations and national power. Certainly Australia and Israel have histories of wanting to boost their populations, motivated by concerns for these nation's continued survival.

At any rate, the question of assisted reproductive technologies and how they'll be used in different societies is sure to be a major issue, not least because of the continued increase in the age of women at their first child. The women might be blamed for their acting in non-traditional roles, and stigma surrounding male infertility will continue to some degree, but these technologies will continue to be used. In countries with any kind of health insurance program, the emotive question of whether or not aspiring parents will be supported in their desire to have children will continue to be asked.