Categories: The Interview

Maclean's Interview: Jason Kenney

Immigration minister Jason Kenney talks to Kenneth Whyte about citizenship, terrorism, and what we owe newcomers

by Kenneth Whyte on Wednesday, April 29, 2009 1:15pm - 25 Comments

Maclean's Interview: Jason Kenney Q: When you’re speaking at citizenship ceremonies, you tell new Canadians our history is now their history, that you don’t want Canada to be viewed as a hotel where people come and go with no abiding commitment to our past, or to citizenship. What is the meaning of our citizenship?

A: Legally speaking it gives people status in Canada and certain rights like voting, but I think we need to reclaim a deeper sense of citizenship, a sense of shared obligations to one another, to our past, as well as to the future. In that I mean a kind of civic nationalism where people understand the institutions, values and symbols that are rooted in our history.

Q: They don’t understand those things now?

A: Well, heck, if you look at polling data—there’s a massive historical amnesia about the Canadian past, and massive gaps of knowledge about our parliamentary institutions, our democratic procedures. There’s a massive civic illiteracy.

Also at Macleans.ca: Editorial—Our weak identity isn’t an immigrant problem

Q: For old Canadians as well as new Canadians.

A: Yeah, for younger Canadians in particular, whether they’re new or well-established.

Q: But if the problem is general, why are we doing it as an immigration program?

A: Because I’m not in charge of the schools, I am in charge of the citizenship process.

Q: There are questions about civic literacy on the citizenship test. Are they inadequate?

A: It’s pretty weak. We’re reviewing the materials with a mind to improving the test to ensure that it demonstrates a real knowledge of Canadian institutions, values, and symbols, and history. Right now, if you look at the preparatory booklet for the test, there’s three sentences, I think, on Confederation history, and not one single sentence about Canadian military history. It’s bizarre to think that someone could become a Canadian citizen without ever being told what the poppy represents. It doesn’t even show up in the book but it talks about food processing in New Brunswick and how you recycle.

Q: So if this is a general Canadian problem, does that mean there are no problems in terms of new Canadians integrating into society?

A: Look, I think the Canadian model of immigration, integration and pluralism has been pretty successful. However, the economic data suggests that economic outcomes for newcomers has declined over the past generation.

Q: As for all Canadians.

A: But particularly for immigrants. I think the unemployment rate for immigrants with university degrees is four times higher than that for native-born Canadians. What we don’t want to end up with is a kind of social fracturing and so-called ethnic enclaves that one sees in parts of western Europe. You can’t just maintain the highest level of immigration in the world in relative terms without being very deliberate about helping people to integrate successfully and quickly.

Q: We’ve done it for 150 years.

A: Not with the same kind of sustained levels of immigration relative to the overall population.

Q: At some points they’ve even been higher.

A: At some points, and at some points there was no immigration. What we have that’s dramatically different is nearly 80 per cent of newcomers settling in three metropolitan areas with a tendency to follow the natural route of all newcomers of associating with communities from their country or region of origin, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

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Tags: Canada, citizenship, conservatives, immigration, Jason Kenny, multiculturalism

Critical Reasoning

Good interview. Kenney comes across as reasonable and well-informed.

Stephen

Yes, well-informed with anecdotal evidence and faulty analogies to France and Britain.
Fred N

Presently I am a job developer at a non-profit agency and a member of the Provincial Parent Board of Ontario.

I do agree with Jason Kenney’s point of view regarding the effectiveness of our integration of new Canadians.

For the past 5 years, I have served as a consultant, in not-for-profit agencies with a mandate to help immigrants to find full time employment in Canada, preferably within their chosen fields of expertise. As such, I see first-hand the obstacles facing newcomers to Canada, and have spent much time developing methodologies and techniques to help people overcome these difficulties.

My experience as an immigrant to Canada and as an educator both in Canada and in my country of birth, has given me profound insight into the ways people attempt to integrate into their Canadian society and where people typically succeed and fail.

I use a new approach, FOCUS (=Focus On Canadian Understanding and Success), in my work, which is designed to help newcomers understand their new cultural environment, in order to secure employment, help their children succeed in school, and participate in their communities as full citizens, even while they retain their own beliefs and traditions.

I know my approach is effective because I see over and over again, when I actually talk to people and make them understand how life is different here, everything starts to fall into place for them. They will get jobs, their children have a better time in school, they feel less isolated and alone.

I was recruited by the Ontario organisation, in fact, to author a handbook on this same topic for newcomer parents; many of these people are actively causing problems for their children in school without knowing it; (because the children are being taught to be Canadian, but go home and find themselves in trouble for not being African, or Indian, or Caribbean, or European). Once they understand, parents invariably become active in their local Parent Council, and begin to participate in their children’s education in ways they never did before, and their children enjoy much higher rates of success.

Many of us do not realize it, but the issue of immigrant integration is THE ISSUE behind much else that ails us…from the skills gaps in employment, to poverty, to gun crime among youth and the failure rates of children “of colour”. If we settled our immigrants deliberately, and rid the system of its rampant social Darwinism, we would find many of these problems mitigated, if not completely resolved.

My point is, that people DO bring their wars here, and people do try to make mini-versions of their old homes, and that on a grand scale this is not always good for the country if, as Mr. Kenney says, people are not talking to, interacting with, cooperating with, and learning to understand other cultures.

Mr. Kenney mentions that some of the worst enmities exist between people from the same region of the world. I can say he is right

We have the ability to change this situation, we already have a proven system that works. However, the Settlement and Intergovernmental Affairs Directorate at the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration, Ontario region, or whatever the hell, seems to actively resist learning about it. I have introduced them to this methodology many times, and provided them with evidence of its effectiveness, and had many high level officials from the Ontario Ministry of Education, and various school boards, back me up.

I wonder whether the federal Minister is more interested in a solution than the Settlement and Intergovernmental Directorate of the Ontario Region is??

I would be interested in discussing any of this with any interested party. I feel that the more people who know about it, the sooner we might be able to help our country heal from this particular wound.

Fred N.
Job developer

Emisar

Good interview? No part of this reads like an interview. It reads like someone with their dander up trying (and failing) to take Kenney down a peg. He can handle himself with anyone Maclean’s cares to put in front of him, but it got pretty comical reading the supposed questions which did not end in question marks.

“Jason Kenney – The Debate” would be a more appropriate title. But I’m sure you’d conduct an interview with a Liberal or NDP MP in the same manner. Right.

http://www.jackmitchell.ca Jack Mitchell

The interviewer is Kenneth Whyte! Of all people who have a mandate to ask Ministers of the Crown hard questions, he is practically numero uno. And anyway it gave Kenney a chance to show his stuff, which fluff questions would not have done. If an official doesn’t have what it takes to answer the hard questions, he’s not the one to deliver on what he says, and Kenney, I must admit, had a good answer for everything.

Emisar

Whyte has every right to ask tough questions, it’s too bad that, on 17 occasions by my count, he decided that instead of asking a question he’d make a statement instead. Are you sure this “interview” wasn’t conducted by Jim Travers?

http://www.jackmitchell.ca Jack Mitchell

He was having a conversation. Would you have a conversation with somebody who did nothing but ask you questions? It would be dull as hell. The media’s role is not to simply transcribe what politicians have to say.

Keith

Jason Kenney was giving a puff -n-fluff. This wasn’t a conversation or an interview. C’mon Macleans get George Galloway and Jason Kenney in a debate and moderate it. Where’s the fire? Quit blowing Zionist smoke up my arse.

Paul Wells

Wow.

Wayne

I give Jason a major political cookie for this one! = Q: Regardless of the specific funding, you’ve been skeptical of what you call the sari-and-samosa school of multiculturalism support.

A: Right. I think that’s totally passé. I think having a clear understanding of Canadian values won’t prevent people from importing ancient enmities but it can only help if you say, “Look, this is a liberal democracy, these are the rules by which we play, and we expect you to play by them.” With respect to the language requirement, it seems to me that a basic ability to speak one of the two official languages is the sine qua non of civic literacy. This is nothing new, by the way. I’m just simply suggesting that we should be applying it consistently. I hear anecdotes about people bringing translators in to do their citizenship test for them, or getting passes when they can’t speak a sentence of English or French. This is a knowledge economy, and I think we’re putting people at an enormous disadvantage if we don’t give them the tools, nor the expectation that they have some capacity in one of our two official languages.
Kaplan

Well, I’m pleased to note that my grandparents wouldn’t have been allowed into Canada under Kenney’s proposed language requirements. I’m not so sure Kenney really had a “good” answer to everything, Jack.

Cool Blue

But back in your grandparent’s time language wasn’t as important as it is now. Having a strong back was more important than being able to speak English. Think of how many of our grandparents were only functionally literate and many didn’t even finish grade school.

Today, where it takes a high school diploma to be a garbage man, you need to be able to speak an official language or else 99% of jobs are unavailable to you (not to mention receiving education to improve your situation).

http://www.relocation2bc.com Frank

I thought Jason Kenney came out pretty well from this interview. I work a lot with people moving to Canada and even with good skills they struggle to convince Canadian employers that their skills are relevant in Canada. I hope that Kenney’s aim to “more closely align our immigration program to our economic and labour market needs” will make life easier for these new immigrants. But employers and old stock Canadians need to change too.

Warmly,

Frank

Maureen

Unfortunately, most of the problems lie in the provinces, since most regulated professions (requiring a license to work in Canada) are provincially regulated – some provinces have made great strides in addressing this (those provinces that have booming economies and need workers) while others are doing little. The federal government has little impact on that.

Pingback: Jason Kenney on immigration levels and employment | The Relocation Coach
MJH

The Americans should be worried about the security of our border. We have let some very unsavory people into the country and lost track of them. Our immigrant program is very loose and out of control.

Emisar

Thanks Janet Napolitano.

John

He’s so self-aggrandizing. With his smug little smile.
keith c

really good interview. i think much more of Kenney having read this and am impressed he sees this through the prism of 19th century Orange Ontario and Toronto the Methodist Rome – a part of our history that has been totally forgotten by almost everyone.. I like to tell Irish friends here in London that nice bland Canadian Toronto had a slum called Cabbagetown and redoubts named Orangeville outside of town.
Michael

My favourite part is when Kenney lamented a lack of understanding of our civil institutions, on the back of calling a legitimate coalition a “coup d’etat” etc, only months earlier.

What a load of malarkey.
Michael

Oh oh, and then there was the the time that Kenney patronized the chinese by creating and presenting a fake award to a chinese food restaurant, wasting Canadian tax dollars in an attempt to embarrass Warren Kinsella.

That was a good one too.

Jason Kenney is a blow hard.
George

Kenney finds that “It’s bizarre to think that someone could become a Canadian citizen without ever being told what the poppy represents” and I find it bizarre that our Minister of Immigration considers that the poppy represents something specifically Canadian. Wearing a poppy as a symbol of armistice is essentially a British tradition. As far as I know, they also do it in Australia and New Zealand (i.e. the former British colonies). But what does it have to do specifically with Canada so that we must teach this to the new immigrants? Beats me.

By the way, very few Québécois (French Canadians) either wear the poppy on November 11, or are concerned about it, since they don’t follow the British traditions. In fact, if Kenney would go to a small village, for example in the Gaspé area where there are no anglophones, very few inhabitants there would know what the poppy represents, despite the facts that they have been Canadians for many generations.

Maureen

well the poppy has a lot more meaning to more Canadians than the maple leaf. Kenney’s point was that the current information provided to immigrants is pretty silly (recycling – really! that’s makes us Canadian!). Receiving Canadian citizenship should be a privilege that is earned – and earning it means making a commitment to Canada – not just visiting the country every now and then (yes Iggy I’m talking about you and your ‘imaging’ of Canada in your last book – another silly book from an elite who spent too long away from Canada to know what Canadians are!). Yes, it would be nice if native-born Canadians had a better understanding of Canadian history and institutions, but that would be the role for provinces and their education departments and Kenney is the immigration minister (which is what he had to remind Whyte of).

George

Well, I totally disagree that a poppy has more significance than the maple leaf. Apart from the fact that poppies grow in the Flanders fields and in the fields of Afghanistan where our soldiers died and continue to die in foreign wars, poppy has no significance at all. Kenney’s suggestion that we should teach newcomers more about Canadian military history and our participation in various wars, is ludicrous. We are not a warring people, and many of the immigrants come from countries devastated by wars and, if anything, want to learn how to live in peace.

As far as making Canadian citizenship “a commitment”, this would be very easy to do, by abolishing dual citizenship for all Canadians. But, this will never happen because Canada is a weak nation. All the Brits that come to Canada want to maintain their British passports, the French do the same (even our Governor General had a dual French/Canadian citizenship before she became GG), most Canadian Jews have dual Canadian/Israeli citizenship and most Lebanese have dual citizenship, and so on. So it’s hard to know where is the primary “commitment” of all these people.

Jocko

I think the style of the interview got in the way. The questioning was more petulant than it was tough. In any case, Kenny is a breath of fresh air.