Abstract: Canadian policy-makers attempt to integrate and engage Canadians of diverse backgrounds by placing political stock in multiculturalism and democratic pluralism. Research shows however that Canadian Arab youth populations continue to struggle with ethnic segregation, ‘parallel lives’, racial discrimination, social and familial tensions, intra-community conflict over Canadian foreign policy, political disenfranchisement/exclusion, and personal isolation. Transnational activism and connections with home countries, geographies of (political) circularity, help Canadian Arab youth explore the scope of citizenship claims-making in which they are currently invested, and potential ways to expand their political involvement in, and personal ownership over democratic processes locally and globally. In a context of imposing media limelight that seeks to save Arab youth from themselves while simultaneously mummifying their potential vis-a-vis the first two years of the Arab Spring, this study taps into the youth voice itself in the terms of its own dynamism through peer-to-peer investigative methods to examine how Canadian Arab youth perceive and pursue the rights and obligations of Canadian citizenship in the traditional sense (e.g., via voting and advocacy/ campaigning through official political channels) and engage in alternative practices of citizenship claims-making (e.g., via political associationism and managing political expression in public spaces). In this paper, drawing upon survey and focus group interview data for hundreds of Canadian Arab youth from multiple Canadian cities, we explore the parameters, and political, social, and personal impact of citizenship claims-making among Canadian Arab youth for their social self-understanding, the expansion of their political agency, and bottom-up social policy development.

Abstract: On October 17 2009, one year after the Harper Conservative government apologized for the Komagata Maru incident, two migrant ships - Ocean Lady and MV Sun Sea - carried less than 500 asylum seekers to Canada’s west coast. Before these ships even entered Canadian shores, government officials publicly characterized the people on these boats as possibly diseased and likely criminal. On June 29, 2012 Bill C-31 the Protecting Canada’s immigration System Act – a re-tabling of 2009’s Bill C-49 Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System Act - received royal assent, which human rights organization in Canada and abroad have called unconstitutional, excessively punitive, and the intensification of the “discursive disappearance of the refugee” (Macklin 2005; Mann 2009). In this paper I examine the contributions of Asian Conservative members of parliament (MPs) to the debates that led to the successful passage of Bill C-31. Little attention has been devoted to the Asian racial conservative because it has generally been assumed that racialized politicians stand in opposition to the racial state (Goldberg 2002). The prevailing premise that racialized MPs could not possibly advance and circulate anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiments in parliamentary debate (Bird 2012) is challenged. As part of a larger project examining the parliamentary contributions of Asian Conservative MPs in Canada, the paper contributes to growing Canadian scholarship in critical policy analysis (Abu-Laban 2009), political discourse analysis and ongoing conversations on the politics of representation (Andrew, Biles, Siemiatycki, Tolley 2009).

Abstract: Despite Canada’s large and growing “visible minority” population, we know very little about the drivers of political participation among members of ethnocultural minority groups. This paper will explore the impact of local community context on the political engagement of members of ethnocultural minority groups in Canada. More specifically, it will examine whether levels of political interest, political efficacy, and political knowledge among members of ethnocultural minority groups depend on the proportion of people from the same ethnocultural background in their local neighbourhood, or on the level of ethnocultural diversity more generally in their local neighbourhood. The evidence from other countries is mixed: Bilodeau (2009), Ramakrishnan (2005), and Leighley (2001) find that participation is higher in places with larger visible minority populations, whereas Cho, Gimpel, and Dyck (2004) find the opposite. The paper will examine this question use survey data from a sample of 1600 Canadians from “visible minority” backgrounds in the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia, combined with data from the 2011 National Household Survey.