Citizenship Issues: Jason Kenney

Jason Kenney: Throughout his case studies of various policy issues, Griffith underlines how officials working on multiculturalism and citizenship issues under Kenney were forced to confront their own latent ideologies and grapple with challenges to their expertise under a regime that broke starkly from the approach of previous governments, according to The Star. An organizations use of terms such as oppression, white power and racialized communities became grounds for striking it from a pool of grant applicants. This aversion was part of the ministers larger distaste for the issue of barriers facing visible-minority Canadians, and his desire to shift focus toward discrimination within and among minority communities and Andrew Griffith , a retired senior official at Citizenship and Immigration Canada, has just published a book about the tense period beginning in 2007 that saw minister Jason Kenney bring a tidal wave of change to two federal departments. Among the many virtues of Griffiths book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism , is a striking commitment to epistemological modesty and self-reflection. From vocabulary to policy priorities to the deepest questions of what counted as sound evidence for policy-making, the Conservatives upended decades of received wisdom. For instance, Griffith reports, Kenney and his staff held in particular odium the blame-laying perspectives taken by downtown activists and researchers in analyzing mainstream discrimination toward cultural minorities. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.