Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2010

A quick spin through Canada’s refugee program

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

An interesting article at the Montreal Gazette looking at the current refugee system in Canada:

Want to know why Canada’s refugee system is a shambolic mess that leaves claimants in limbo for years while bleeding taxpayers for uncounted billions?

It’s not just because anyone from anywhere in the world can claim asylum in Canada simply by showing up at the border or in one of our airports and lying, although that helps.

It’s not the usual suspects, either. It’s the review process that is severely broken, encouraging abusers and discouraging legitimate claimants. The time it takes for an applicant to go through the process is breathtaking:

Average wait, with local taxpayers picking up half the tab for the welfare on their property taxes (the rest comes out of your provincial taxes): 19 months. [If turned down,] they can apply for leave to appeal to the Federal Court.

Average wait for a court date: four to six months.

If a risk assessment is required they wait another nine to 24 months. They can also return to federal court for another go, waiting yet another four to six months.

On welfare. For most of the world’s poor, “that’s pretty attractive,” Kenney points out.

If the courts still say no to our Swiss claimant the alleged refugee can appeal for admittance to Canada under Humanitarian and Compassionate grounds, which takes at least six more months. If they lose that they get another crack at federal court, waiting four to six more months.

On top of the 12,000 claimants allowed in under current refugee rules, another 40,000 try to get into the country every year. Nearly 6 in 10 of these claimants are refused refugee status by the courts, but the number of cases increases faster than the applications are processed. The current (admitted) backlog for applicants is 61,000 and growing. An unknown number have just abandoned the process but (in many or most cases) haven’t left the country: they’re underground, hoping not to get caught.

The federal government is hoping to pass reforms to the refugee process, raising the number of legitimate refugees allowed in annually, but cutting down on bogus claimants earlier in the process, with an eye to both improving fairness and cutting the costs of supporting the current system.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

April 13, 2010

Expect to read more stories like this

Filed under: Britain — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

Britain’s welfare support system was originally designed to provide temporary assistance — at barely-above-survival-levels — to workers and their families until the primary wage-earner could find new work. It wasn’t intended to provide this kind of support:

The Davey family’s £815-a-week state handouts pay for a four-bedroom home, top-of-the-range mod cons and two vehicles including a Mercedes people carrier.

Father-of-seven Peter gave up work because he could make more living on benefits.

Yet he and his wife Claire are still not happy with their lot.

With an eighth child on the way, they are demanding a bigger house, courtesy of the taxpayer.

Hard to blame ’em, really: if you can get substantially more through welfare support than you can by working, what’s the incentive to keep that job? Once upon a time, it was shame that would provide that extra spur to keep people in marginal economic circumstances from claiming welfare or other social benefits, as friends and neighbours would disdain them. These days? They’re probably envied by the next-door and down-the-street folks still dumb enough to get jobs.

At their semi on the Isle of Anglesey, the family have a 42in flatscreen television in the living room with Sky TV at £50 a month, a Wii games console, three Nintendo DS machines and a computer — not to mention four mobile phones.

With their income of more than £42,000 a year, they run an 11-seater minibus and the seven-seat automatic Mercedes.

But proof that material wealth does not translate directly into happiness, the Daveys still yearn for things they can’t yet have. But at least they’re not feeling burdened by feelings of guilt or shame:

She added: ‘I don’t feel bad about being subsidised by people who are working. I’m just working with the system that’s there.

‘If the government wants to give me money, I’m happy to take it. We get what we’re entitled to. I don’t put in anything because I don’t pay taxes, but if I could work I would.’

[. . .]

Mrs Davey, who spends £160 a week at Tesco, says she does not intend to stop at eight children. Her target is 14.

And she adds: ‘I’ve always wanted a big family — no one can tell me how many kids I can have whether I’m working or not.’

It’s true: in spite of all the other intrusions into everyday life by the British and European bureaucracies, there are still things they can’t tell you.

H/T to Jon (my former virtual landlord) for the link.

July 22, 2009

Tinkering with “the engine of poverty”

Filed under: Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:42

Jon sent me this link with the comment “Don’t know if the article is bloggable, but I liked the opening salvo”:

Natural disasters can cause enormous human misery, and require massive relief operations, to provide food and medical aid. To cause serious, long-term, grinding poverty, however, you need government involvement.

I have to agree with Jon, the opening to the post is quite good. After digging into some of the examples (the Ukraine under Stalin, Ethiopia in the 70s-80’s, and the US experiment with the “Great Society”), the first point at which an apolitical or undecided reader would say “Now, hold on there . . .”

Of course, the meaning of “poverty” has changed a lot over the years. The poor of the United States have a higher standard of living than the middle class in much of the rest of the world. They also have a higher standard of living than the filthy rich of a hundred years ago, or the crowned royalty of the centuries before that. This improved standard of living has very little to do with the government.

Poverty is something any civilized society wants to reduce and then eliminate, but it never seems to happen. The reason for that, aside from the vast amounts of time, effort, money, and resources being wasted through inefficiency, incompetence, and bureaucratic delay, is that the problem cannot be solved in most countries by definition. Most of the time when people use the term “poverty” they mean relative poverty. For most of the western world, absolute poverty affects a vanishingly small number of people (it’s not gone, but it’s lower than it’s ever been for any civilization in history). Relative poverty, however, is usually linked to a formula (like a set percentage of the average family income), which means that even as individuals’ and families’ financial situations improve, they will still be proportionally lower than the average (which will have improved over the same relative period of time). Statistically, no improvement will appear.

Popular belief, shaped by the official statistics, is that many people live in dire circumstances. Some do, but most who are technically below the poverty line are doing better than the average family from a few decades back. Proportionally, they’re still below the line, but from the standpoint of access to food, shelter, health care, and transportation, they’re better off.

If you are motivated by a humanitarian desire to help the poor – the ostensible mission of much of the modern liberal state – you must realize that nothing helps them more than the increased standard of living and economic opportunity brought about by the private sector.

However, the public perception is quite different: that it is the modern liberal state that has made these improvements against the active resistance of the private sector.

Here, in a nutshell, is the crucial difference between reality and the perception of most voters:

The value of every wasted government dollar must be judged by what free enterprise could have accomplished with it.

Most westerners think that General Motors, Chrysler, and AIG are the perfect exemplars of the free enterprise system, replacing the earlier capitalist icons of Enron and Worldcom.

When you say “capitalist”, most people hear a very different word than the one you’re using. “Free enterprise”, to far too many people, means vast corporations with dozens of legislators (or even legislatures) in their back pockets, using their tame politicians to obtain tax credits, advantageous labour codes, or “eminent domain-ing” their way through neighborhoods. The “private sector” decodes to “rich, secretive plutocrats”.

What you say and what they hear bear very little resemblance to one another. You’re not speaking the same language.

Then, the touching statement of hope:

If the six long months of this Administration serve any constructive purpose, it should be permanently dissolving the illusion that a small group of political appointees can predict what the economy will do, and control it to produce an improved outcome.

Most people, in times of stress, look for that man on the white horse. Most Americans still think they found one.

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