There are four main classes allowed for Canada immigration. These are the skilled worker, the family, and business classes. The fourth is as a temporary worker or student.
The skilled worker class, or points system, is the most popular class under which to apply. The applicants are awarded different amounts of points based on their age, education, work experience, and their proficiency in English or French. Points can also be granted if a person has arranged employment or is already working in Canada. Additional points can be awarded for factors such as a partner's qualifications, or if a person had previously studied in Canada for at least two years. Special considerations are made for people that have family already living in Canada.
For Canada immigration under the family class, a person must have a Canadian residing relative who is eligible and willing to be their sponsor. These sponsors must hold a Canadian passport or be a permanent resident. These include a husband or wife, conjugal or common-law partners, dependent children, a parent, or grandparent. They may also be a sister or brother, nephew, niece or grandchild that is orphaned and under 19 years of age. Any relative who currently has no other relations living in Canada can also be a sponsor. Most often the typical family class application is by individuals who are currently engaged or married to citizens of Canada.
Applicants for Canada immigration who are applying under the business class will be separated into three sub-categories which are the investor, the self employed and the entrepreneur. Those wishing to apply for immigration under the category of self-employed will have to provide a business plan that has been extensively researched, possess enough capital and a good amount of solid experience for establishing a Canadian business. The net worth of the entrepreneur must be a minimum of C$300,000 and must have past experience in a qualifying business. Within three years of arrival the entrepreneur will have to establish or purchase a business which creates at the very least a single new job that is full time for a citizen of Canada. An investor's net worth must be a minimum of C$800,000 and they will be required to make an investment of C$400,000 of that in the Canadian Receiver General for a period of 5 years.
Temporary visas for Canada immigration are allowed for students or workers. These workers must be presented a job offer that could not otherwise be taken by a Canadian. The issuance of the work permit is for the length of employment, which does not usually exceed three years. Canadian employers hesitate in hiring foreign workers unless there is a certain skill advantage that they possess or there are labour shortages. Most workers on a temporary visa were on a transfer to Canada from their current employer. Students who enrol in a qualifying Canadian institution have the option to put in an application for a student visa. This allows the student to study full-time and to work limited hours.
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2011年1月29日星期六
2010年10月30日星期六
2010年10月23日星期六
Christie Davies wonders why Sargant reminds him of Henry Scott Tuke: <em>Sargent and the Sea</em> at the Royal Academy
Sargent and the Sea
Royal Academy, London
10 July - 26 September 2010
Daily 10am - 6pm (Fridays until 10pm)
Sargent and the Sea is mainly concerned with the artist's work in 1874-9 when he was still learning his trade. It is the juvenilia of the man who went on to become among the greatest painters of the canals and lagoons of Venice, a man who in his maturity really knew now to handle water. Yet if it were not for his later skill and fame, no-one would ever have bothered to organise this assemblage of rather mediocre paintings at the Royal Academy. It is purely of historical interest, telling us of Sargent's early life and of the artists he admired, notably Whistler. There are only a few pictures on show that one would wish to go and see for their sheer aesthetic appeal.
In his early years Sargent travelled to the coasts of Normandy and Brittany and to the shores of the Mediterranean with his wandering parents and his work from this time shows a fascination with the sea, though no real mastery of how to depict it. He was learning but he had not yet learned. In 1876 he went to America for the first time across a turbulent Atlantic which made him realise that the sea has power and ferocity as well as the quiet charm of the seaside.
The curators speak of the influence of Turner on him but Turner he ain't. Sargent may well have admired Turner but he was quite unable to emulate him. The cellars of minor English provincial galleries probably contain many Victorian seascapes of equal quality to those in this exhibition but fortunately we are very rarely able to see them.
There are two splendid exceptions to such a condemnation.
On the Sands, 1877, and Wharf Scene, 1879, that already indicate the talent that would in time mature into genius. On the Sands is just that, a great expanse of shining white sand reaching out to distant bathing machines. It is broken only by a mere impression of two figures in the wind, a girl in white in the foreground and a brightly dressed and darkly parasoled woman in the distance. Sargent knew exactly where to place them; they are unimportant except to break up the bright flatness of the sand.
Wharf Scene, 1879, in grisaille indicates how black and white are merely the end of a very varied spectrum of greys and what can be achieved within that single dimension.
Sargent left the sea and became an assembly line portrait painter of the rich and fashionable and would be celebrated. In some respects he joined their ranks, for in a good year he could have cleared a million pounds (2010 money) and he always painted in a fine bespoke suit; presumably if it got smudged with a bit of flake white, he could afford to donate it to his valet or his butler.
Then in 1884 Sargent had the unpleasant experience of having to go to Sheffield, where unquiet flows the Don. He went there to paint the members of the Vickers family, entrepreneurs who had made a lot of brass out of steel and were to make a lot more from armaments. They were the British equivalent of Germany's Krupp. While at their home in Bloomer Hall, Sheffield Sargent painted his famous appalling portrait of three bright-eyed and bushy tailed sisters, The Misses Vickers , 1884, which the French called "pseudo-Velasquez" and which when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1886 was voted the "worst picture of the year". Not surprisingly it has remained in Sheffield where it belongs.
However, the kindly Mrs Vickers arranged for him to visit Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, the home of Dracula. As a result of this visit, Sargent produced one of the finest works in the exhibition Whitby Fishing Boats, 1885. We are led in a clear but subdued light from sand, to tide, to sea, to cloud between two exactly placed asymmetrical clusters of hard dark sails. He presented the picture to Mrs Vickers, the mother of the Misses, presumably as compensation for the failure of his ill-arranged, falsely pretty portrait of her three squirrels.
Whitby Fishing Boats is a clear precursor of Venice, Sailing Boat, 1903, in which our eye is guided through the gap between bulky dark quay and square sailed sailing boat in the foreground to a distant ethereal church across the water that floats almost in the air. Sargent had entered his great Venetian decade but that is another story.
In the exhibition Sargent's representations of naked boys on the beaches of Naples and Capri and his Two Nude Bathers Standing on a Wharf, 1879, remind us of the other reason he loved Venice. It was a place where gay men from England and Germany could go to pick up boys without fear of arrest or social disgrace.
You suddenly realise how much Sargent's perceptions have in common with those of Henry Scott Tuke, R.A. who painted naked, splashing Cornish lads for the gay market; Tukes are now once again selling well in that market and prices have risen. Gay readers looking for an art investment should consider a good Tuke.
Tuke was a friend of Sargent's and of the pederasts Charles Masson-Fox and Baron Corvo who had strong Venetian connections. It is difficult to believe that Sargent, who was also close to Oscar Wilde and to the man who was the original for Proust's Charlus, was not involved with this little Venetian coterie. Such a supposition helps to explain both the male nudes that Sargent did exhibit and the near-pornographic ones that he did not. Why does it matter you may ask? It matters because - like his fellow Capri artist, Christian Wilhelm Allers - Sargent has the gaze of the gays.
Christie Davies is the author of The Strange Death of Moral Britain, 2006.
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London 2012 and the Dirty bomb: some philosophical reflections
Don't be fooled by the pseudo-science of risk assessment, argues Lincoln Allison - Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor of Sport and Leisure at the University of Brighton.
Some weeks ago somebody telephoned me and asked if I'd like to talk about the security risks arising out of London 2012. Despite being known as "media tart" and "rentagob" by my sons, I wasn't even tempted; having a supposed expertise on sport does not make you an expert on security and the policing problems are essentially the same for a sporting event as for anything else involving a large crowd.
I was quite right to refuse because I would only have shown my ignorance. For example, I thought that a dirty bomb referred to a highly radioactive nuclear weapon. Since I have now been exposed to debate about these problems at every level from academic conferences to my mother-in-law's Daily Star I now know that dirty bomb has come to refer mainly to a fairly small and uncomplicated conventional explosive which spreads radioactive material and that such weapons are also known to be in the possession of some Chechen groups.
One small piece of sporting wisdom is relevant to security problems. It is that the Olympics offer a uniquely attractive target for terrorists. They do not - despite what their broadcasters inevitably pretend - represent state-of-the-art global sport. Nor do they any longer represent any clear alternative. But their unique success is as an event embodying the global village. The football World Cup may make more money and absorb more person-hours of viewing, but Olympic sport penetrates the places (like India and the USA) where interest in football is low and for various reasons Olympic sport is uniquely interesting to governments. A successful terrorist attack on the Games would, therefore, be the most symbolic act possible and also gain the most attention.
Three related issues arise out of this: cost, civil liberties and risk. The cost of security at the Los Angeles games in 1984 was estimated at just under $80 million. For the Athens games twenty years later it had risen to $1.5 billion; no sensible figure can be given for Beijing in 2008, nor - yet - for London in 2012. Since the benefits to weigh against these costs can be described as vague, intangible and transcendent no real assessment is possible. Apart from entertainment they include the maintenance and development of a global civil society - "bringing people together" - and the perpetuation of an ancient sporting tradition. Since the 1980s host governments invariably and strongly believe that hosting is good for national prestige despite the absence of any shred of evidence to justify the belief. If you think of this expenditure in terms of the opportunity cost to something you value you might get a little agitated; on the other hand, if you think of it in terms of the education budget it doesn't seem very important.
One Greek commentator, Minas Samitas, described Athens in 2004 as a "panoptic urban fortress". The Athenians were unfamiliar with that level of surveillance (though most of it has remained in place); it will be less of a surprise in London. It is interesting that this description of Athens uses Benthamite imagery because Bentham's argument was that watching people was better than having to hurt them. Surveillance as deterrence protects both potential criminal and victim. Unfortunately, it doesn't really apply to suicide bombers, but from a utilitarian point of view the civil liberties objections to surveillance make little sense.
Even if one accepts Robert Nozick's libertarian premise - that the worst anarchy could never be as bad as the worst state - an understandable preference for gangsters over the Gestapo, it doesn't seem to be a relevant comparison in respect of present dangers. I am worried that my children or grandchildren will be killed or have their lives ruined by a dirty bomb, either in general or in London in 2012. I am not much worried that they will end up in a concentration camp.
Nor am I in the least persuaded by the Orwellian imagery which surrounds surveillance and the arguments which it generates. Certainly, fourteen million CCTV cameras in the wrong hands would be a bad thing, but so would everything else if we ditched our foolish and incompetent government for a vicious one. If the technology existed then such a government would introduce it anyway without relying on their predecessors, any more than the Nazis relied on the Weimar Republic for its gas chambers. What worries me about surveillance in 2012 is whether there will be enough competent people to look at the pictures.
But the really interesting philosophical issue is risk and how we conceive of it. We have an institutionalised belief that risk can be assessed, a belief which is fed by ambition, scientism and our craving for security. At one point in my academic career there was a plan to coordinate the entire research of the University of Warwick around the concept of risk. It was reasonably clear that economists, the business school, biologists, mathematicians and many others could be brought on board, much less clear what the historians were supposed to do.
Careers and complex mathematical theorems have been built on risk assessment. Headmistresses have to do it for premises and projects. The elementary trick is to cover your bottom. The advanced one is to get your risk onto the agenda. We have spent billions in the last eighty years on draconian arrangements to avoid rabies (which kills six people a year on average in France). And whatever happened to swine flu - apart from the epidemic of malingering which it caused? I do have this awful feeling that something is going to get me, the risk of which nobody has assessed.
For what, after all, is risk? It is danger, the likelihood that something bad will happen. Logically, that likelihood can be assessed in two ways. There is statistical probability, where identical events occur without E1 affecting E2: coin-tossing and honest roulette wheels are the classic examples. And then there is the rest of life, where neither condition is met because events are all (very) different and E1 does affect E2.
Here we only have inductive probability to talk about and that is a kind of dressing up of the kind of knowledge gamblers have with a bit of metaphysics and some irrelevant statistics. The point is that we may be better off without the concept: most gamblers lose. Or we may overestimate risk and do nothing - the health and safety disease.
Let me give a sporting example. Risk is a necessary condition of sport: if there isn't a risk - even if only the risk of failure - it isn't sport. Kauto Star has in recent years been regarded as the best chaser over classic distances in National Hunt racing. But to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup you have to jump every fence, including some downhill fences in fast and variable conditions. Punters know that if Kauto jumps all the fences there is little risk of defeat. But in four attempts he has won the Gold Cup twice and fallen foul of the fences twice. And that information may tell you nothing useful about his next attempt.
Either Kauto Star hits the fence or he doesn't; either the bomber gets through or he doesn't. Fate operates on the binary system and you mustn't be fooled by the pseudo-science of risk assessment.
Lincoln Allison is Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor of Sport and Leisure at the University of Brighton. His two most recent books are The Global Politics of Sport and The Disrespect Agenda: How the Wrong Kind of Niceness is Making us Weak and Unhappy. He is also the author of Amateurism in Sport.
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2010年10月22日星期五
Don't limit access to solicitors for those in custody - it won't save money, argues Jan Davies
Limiting access to solicitors for those in custody is a false economy, argues Jan Davies.
Police officers must have been cheering in the wings when Theresa May made her speech at the Conservative conference. Her promise to scrap the "alphabet soup" of police powers invented by Labour to deal with anti-social behaviour means an end to the tedious work of putting together the paperwork for applications to courts. As she explained to the conference, there are ISOs, ABCs, ASBis, ASBOs and CRASBOS, and whether any of them do any good is very doubtful.
ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) were supposed to be Labour's "flagship" for dealing with yobbish behaviour in communities. Latest figures show that 50% of them are breached. I suspect that the percentage of actual breaches is far higher than that: the orders are sometimes drafted in terms that are difficult to observe, prohibiting a youngster from going to his local parade of shops or entering an area defined by a map. They criminalise activity which is not in itself criminal, and thus are not respected.
For many concerned with criminal justice the coalition government has made an excellent start. Dismantling the Soviet-style control of the Labour government was long overdue. We are hoping for an end to council employees rifling through rubbish bins looking for items which have accidentally not been put out for recycling and to heavy handed surveillance of people taking their dogs for walks. The identity cards scheme, with its intrusive database, has gone.
Theresa May - while saying it is not her job to tell the police how to do theirs - has indicated that there will be an end to obsessive monitoring of targets and a return to common sense policing. For too long officers have been hounded by the demands of their superiors to increase the numbers of "sanctioned detections" - arrests for cases suitable for charge. I should like to hope too that this will lead to more discretion in dealing with domestic disputes so that where all that has happened is some trivial pushing or plate-throwing and a couple want to get back to normal as soon as possible, there will no longer be the pressure to charge a criminal offence, though that is perhaps too much to hope for.
Mrs May is sensibly looking at other simpler options: individual acts of vandalism will perhaps attract more severe penalties. She could, for example, increase the penalty for Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, a charge much beloved by some police officers when they feel that their dignity is under threat, so that the really bad cases can be dealt with by something more severe than just a fine which the impecunious yob will rarely pay.
Cutting back on form-filling and paperwork generally will be welcomed in police stations. Considering the effect of shutting local stations on police travelling time might also be a good idea. In Thames Valley we have the ludicrous situation where the custody cells are in one place and the CID in another.
But as so often in the criminal justice system, while one arm of government is looking for common sense solutions and attempting to improve standards another is contemplating an act of vandalism. It was the government of the supposedly hard-nosed Mrs Thatcher that introduced the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in 1984 which had the effect of putting solicitors into police stations. Section 58 gives every person arrested and held in custody at a police station the right
to consult a solicitor privately at any time.Only in very carefully defined circumstances can this right be withheld. Where a person refuses to answer questions when interviewed, a court can draw an "adverse inference", but this effectual curtailing of the right to silence has been balanced by the right to consult a solicitor before the interview and for the solicitor to be sitting in on the interview.
When a person comes into a police station under arrest and is "booked in" by the custody sergeant he is immediately told that he has the right to consult a solicitor in person or on the telephone, and at the start of any tape-recorded or DVD-recorded interview he will be told that this right is an on-going one and that if he has decided not to have a solicitor present he can change his mind.
Now the coalition government has said it is considering withdrawing that right. Perhaps instead of officers asking a suspect before an interview starts "You decided not to have a solicitor. Are you sure you are happy for this interview to go ahead without a solicitor present?" we shall hear introductions like "Yes, I know you said you wanted a solicitor... well, you see legal aid no longer pays for someone to come. You will have to manage without..."
Advice on the telephone is rarely adequate in any serious situation: there is no security that the conversation is not recorded, and unless the suspect knows his solicitor very well indeed he will usually be reticent about why he is in custody.
No one in the Conservative party said before the election that they were considering this draconian move. Dominic Grieve, who was the spokesman on legal aid before the election, gave the impression that he understood the problems of legal aid solicitors and was aware that many of them were "as poor as church mice". Many solicitors voted Conservative in the expectation that with the threat of competitive tendering for legal aid contracts having been removed, some common sense solutions would be sought for any problems.
Sadly, being in charge of legal aid is not a highly prized position, although no one would seek to blame Mr Grieve for being punted off to be Attorney General. The position does not attract stars - Geoff Hoon started his career making a speech to the Criminal Law Solicitors Association annual conference which I recall being full of clich?s. Now we have Jonathan Djanogly, of whom little seems to be known other than that he is said to be a multi-millionaire who was in trouble with his Commons expenses, and was supposedly "privately condemned" (if you believe the Daily Mail) by Sir John Major for making greedy claims.
I would like to think that before any move is made to scrap the right to legal advice in police stations Mr Djanogly will look at the reasons why it had to be introduced in the first place, the miscarriages of justice, the complaints of bullying and mendacious tactics by investigating officers. It is no good thinking that just because interviews are tape recorded this is a sufficient safeguard. It is what happens outside the interview room that can be the problem, and a solicitor barging in and looking at the custody record to see what has been going on is a brake on abusive behaviour - and can also protect the police from scurrilous complaints.
Kenneth Clarke, now Justice Secretary, is intending to cut the number of firms able to do criminal legal aid, proving that "Unto him that hath shall more be given". Larger contracts, according to a report in the Law Society's Gazette, will be awarded to a small number of providers. We should not be surprised perhaps that someone who said he had not managed to read the Maastricht Treaty cannot be bothered to look beyond the plans that Labour had before the election.
There were nasty rumours before the election that Jack Straw was cutching up to the large firms. Some of these are thought to be desperate. Criminal work has little security. It fluctuates. (I have noticed, incidentally, that the number of arrests plummets at the end of the police financial year when there is not much overtime available, and a senior police officer told me "You could have something there, you know".) Criminal legal aid does not mix well with large overheads, long office leases and staff to pay. It is the small practitioners who have been keeping the system going at a time when rates have been frozen and even substantially cut. Now it seems they are to be punished by being put out of business altogether. How does this fit in with Conservative support for small businesses?
If the Government really wants to make sensible cuts in expenditure, it could scrap the Duty Solicitor Call Centre and CDS Direct, who channel all the requests for legal assistance in police stations to individual solicitors. Far too much time, and presumably money, is wasted in phone calls. It was far simpler and cost effective when the police had all their local solicitors' home numbers and simply called them direct. The call centres are far too inefficient for their employees to be relied on to give evidence if there were ever a dispute, and it wastes the time of the police having to phone the call centre and then wait around for a solicitor to phone back while the call centre call the wrong number and sometimes the wrong solicitor altogether. (I have had numerous bizarre calls over the years but it is beyond the scope of this article to go into details. Suffice it to say that criminal practitioners all have farcical stories to tell.)
They could pay two tiers of fee for police station work: one where there was an attendance and another where it was all sorted out over the telephone. Before the Legal Aid Board (now the Legal Services Commission) started its control freakery we were able to decide whether an attendance was needed. Often, when someone tells you that yes, he went into ASDA or Waitrose, nicked a bottle of whisky and hid it under his jacket and was caught, and when it is the umpteenth time he has been interviewed by police, his situation is not going to be improved by a solicitor attending. Let us, as experienced solicitors, decide whether an attendance is required and the costs will go down.
Interestingly the EU is trying to introduce a directive giving detainees a right to a lawyer while in custody. Our government is opposing this move. So obsessed are they with cutting costs that they are not considering where the cuts should sensibly be made.
Cut the bureaucracy and with it costs, leave small practitioners alone and let the market decide who should be in practice, with the market being dependent on the right of detainees to choose who they wish to instruct. Those who are known in their localities to be incompetent will find themselves without clients and will have to find something else to do. Remember why solicitors were introduced into police stations in the first place, and keep faith with the legacy of Mrs Thatcher.
Jan Davies has been practising as a solicitor in the criminal courts for over 20 years. She was a founder member of Reading Solicitors Chambers and between 2001 and March 2007 was a senior crown prosecutor in Oxfordshire. She now practises as an advocate in both magistrates and crown courts as an associate member of Reading Solicitors Chambers. She is the author of The Criminal Advocate's Survival Guide (Carbolic Smokeball Company, 2007).
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