Canada has a less than stellar record historically when it comes to immigration policy, having rejected or excluded Indians, Chinese, Jews and Blacks during various periods over the past century.

Today, the country no longer discriminates based on the colour of an applicant’s skin or religion.

But simply having an immigration policy discriminates or excludes certain people in one form or another, says Harold Troper, an immigration historian at the University of Toronto and co-author of None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe.

The government rejects certain occupations, requires certain language skills, and makes immigration officers available in only certain parts of the world. 

Without notice, in 2012, it also arbitrarily rejected a backlog of nearly 100,000 applications, representing 280,000 people, many of whom had waited years to come to Canada.

Every nation’s immigration policy is written through an economic prism — it’s all about what’s good for the country economically, Troper says. That means someone will always be excluded or rejected.

Troper points to a series of notorious examples of past discrimination in Canada’s immigration policy: the infamous Chinese head tax; the exclusion of black Oklahoman farmers from coming to Canada in 1910; the refusal in May 1914 of most of the 375 Indians aboard the Komagata Maru after landing in Vancouver, where the ship spent two months before it was ordered back to India; the exclusion of Jewish immigrants from the 1920s until after the Second World War.

These and other examples of discrimination paint a picture of a country — not unlike others around the world at the time — that was xenophobic and saw itself as an “Anglo-British outpost of British civility,” Troper says.

According to the Canadian Council for Refugees, specific measures taken by immigration officials included: an amendment to the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act to deport “domiciled aliens” with drug-related convictions (directed against the Chinese) in 1922; the prohibition of all Chinese immigrants in 1923; refusal of the ship the St. Louis, carrying 930 Jewish refugees, to land in 1939, forcing it to return to Europe — ultimately sentencing three-quarters of its passengers to death under the Nazi regime.

Perhaps the words of Canada’s Director of Immigration Branch F.C. Blair — held responsible for the policy of not allowing Jews into Canada — best exemplifies the tone and atmosphere of the Canadian government in March 1938. Blair is quoted on the CCR website saying: “Ever since the war, efforts have been made by groups and individuals to get refugees into Canada; but we have fought all along to protect ourselves against the admission of such stateless persons without passports, for the reason that coming out of the maelstrom of war, some of them are liable to go on the rocks and when they become public charges, we have to keep them for the balance of their lives.”

Only after the Second World War did the doors to Canada begin to open — a least a little. According to Troper, officials in Ottawa were reluctant. Immigration authorities had “cut their teeth on the racist, racially-tinged immigration stuff of the 1920s and 1930s,” he explains. And they were in many ways supported by the Canadian public. Troper cites a Gallup poll in 1945 that asked Canadians who they didn’t want allowed into Canada; their first choice was the Japanese, their second were Jews.

Despite these racist sentiments, there were cries for more labour from businesses to meet the needs of a postwar booming economy, forcing Canada to accept more immigrants.

After introduction of the 1952 Immigration Act, there was still room for discrimination. The act allowed for refusal of admission on grounds of nationality, ethnic group and geographical origin, and against homosexuals, drug addicts or drug traffickers.

Not until 1962 did the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration implement new guidelines removing most racial discrimination. In 1967, a points system was introduced and the last of racial discrimination was removed. Since then, the Immigration Act has been revamped and rewritten a number of times, including the most recent changes made by the Conservative Party last year.

– Toronto Star

The Senkaku/Diaoyu island territorial dispute is the greatest crisis in Japan-China relations in 60 years.

Second only to nuclear weapons development on North Korea and Iran, it is the most dangerous potential casus belli in the world today, and it likely to remain so indefinitely.

It is a crisis between and among the Japan, China, and—because of the U.S.-Japan security alliance—the United States, world’s three largest economies, possessing among them the world’s most formidable military arsenals.

The gravity and danger of the Japan-China Senkaku/Diaoyu territorial dispute are such that we would expect all parties concerned to have striven to prevent it escalating into a potentially hostile conflict

Why then, we must ask, did they not?  More to the most critical point, why did the United States—which could have vetoed Japanese ‘nationalization’ of the islands, the action that guaranteed a full blown crisis—not do so?

Let me repeat:  it was U.S. acquiescence in (if not encouragement of) the Noda government’s decision to nationalize the disputed islands—creating a direct and immediate challenge to China’s claim to sovereignty—that enabled this crisis.

If I may be a bit insensitive, aside from the tragic loss of life, against the enormity of the blunder in this case, the failures of U.S. policies and negligence in Benghazi, or even the naive wrong-footed dealing with the Arab Spring, are as superficial pinpricks against a gaping, life-sapping self-inflicted wound.

But, unlike toward Benghazi, there have been no congressional hearings on this egregious policy blunder.  Rather, John Kerry, the erstwhile chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee—where such hearings might have taken place—now occupies the office of U.S, Secretary of State, taking over from Hillary Clinton, who would bear the greatest culpability, ensuring—with the complicity of a Democratic Senate and ever-compliant pro-Obama foreign policy press–a continued cover-up.

There should be no doubt that the U.S. did in fact sanction Japan’s nationalization of the islands in September last year.  In an interview with Asahi Shimbun published on October 31, 2012, the current Japanese ambassador to the U.S. Sasae Kenichiro states that before even approaching and seeking to mollify China, Japan solicited the position of the United States on nationalization and was told that the U.S. “did not oppose.”

We should expect that the “no opposition” policy message was delivered through diplomatic channels, i.e. through Hillary’s State Department, though the policy was almost certainly a product of the normal, often drawn-out and contentious inter-agency “clearing” process, in which—we must assume in this case—the input of the Department of Defense was heavily weighted.  But DoD’s position should not have been—and I would guess was not—uncontested.  And if it had been strongly contested by the State Department (i.e., in the official position adopted through State’s own internal “clearing” process), I doubt that the “no opposition” policy would have emerged.

The policy must have been violently controversial and contentious within State—pitting, at minimum, the “Chrysanthemum Club” on the Japan Desk against the heralds of the G2 world on the China Desk–for two reasons:  1.  It was a sharp break with and effective change in long established U.S. policy toward the sovereignty of the islands;  and, 2.  There could have been no doubt about the furious reaction and sense of U.S. treachery and betrayal that the policy would engender in Beijing.

As to long-standing U.S. policy, from the end of WWII, and more explicitly from the return to Japan of sovereignty over Okinawa in 1971, the U.S. position had been unambiguous:  while the U.S. “acknowledged” Japanese administrative control over the islands, the U.S. “takes no position on the ultimate sovereignty” of the islands.   (Until recently the islands were referred to in U.S. diplomatic documents by both Senkaku and Diaoyu in a way that underlined that the U.S. was siding neither with Japanese nor Chinese—or Taiwanese—sovereign claims.)

After a hopeful start in U.S.-China relations, the pinnacle of which may have been the second U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue held in Beijing in May 2010.   Then riding high, Secretary of State Clinton headed a U.S. delegation comprising over a dozen U.S. cabinet members and agency heads including Treasury Secretary Geithner, Fed Chairman Bernanke, Council of Economic Advisors Chairwoman Romer, USTR Kirk, and Commerce Secretary (now ambassador) Gary Locke.  Jon Huntsman was then U.S. ambassador.

The relationship has seemed to cascade downhill from there, taking an increasingly militaristic, and confrontational tone, as the U.S. announced its defense structure “pivot” to Asia and WWII and Cold War legacy “alliances” emboldened the Philippines—and, indeed, Japan—to push back against or further press their own claims in territorial disputes with China, with Hillary in public fora often offering moral support.

Relations between nations, especially great nations, should be and usually are based on cool calculations of national interests, not on personal feelings or personalities.  I cannot help but suspect, however, that China’s leaders’ refusal to be included among Hillary Clinton’s admirers served to harden and bias her attitude toward China in a way that redounded in favor of hard line nationalists in Tokyo.

How else to explain her acceptance—in approving Japan’s nationalization of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands–of a clearly provocative and unnecessary change in U.S. policy that has served the interests of none of the parties, least of all perhaps the United States?

– Forbes