Over the past few years, alternative investment funds (AIFs) have evolved as a popular investment vehicle. AIFs have become investor-friendly due to recent regulatory developments and evolving norms.
AIFs offer specialized opportunities and potential higher yields on investments. Yet, the ₹1 crore minimum investment requirement is an entry hurdle, attracting only sophisticated investors looking for a bespoke investment strategy. Over the previous seven years, the AIF category in India has increased tenfold, with assets under administration totalling ₹7 trillion, according to the Indian Association of Alternative Investment Funds (IAAIF). These investments often have a 10-year time horizon, necessitating financial advisors’ continuous engagement with investors to manage expectations.
Almost a decade ago, foreign institutional investors (FIIs) were financing India’s AIFs. However, there has been an ever-expanding pool of domestic investors that is now contributing to the industry’s growth. Compared to a decade ago, when overseas investors infused majority of the capital, almost 80-90% of funds raised today are from domestic investors. Current trends indicate that AIFs could become a huge industry in the future and get close to the size of India’s ₹46-trillion mutual fund industry.
AIFs offer specialized opportunities and potential higher yields on investments. (iStockphoto)
AIFs encompass a spectrum of categories, each offering distinctive investment opportunities. Interestingly, each category can further evolve and offer more specialized investment opportunities to investors with the help of innovation. Here is how.
Real estate funds: Real estate funds offer a gateway to property markets without direct ownership. In an era of digital transformation, these funds are capitalizing on property technology (PropTech) for property management, virtual property tours, and data-driven location analysis. With the help of this technology, real estate funds could channel more resources into sustainable, affordable housing and smart city projects.
Infrastructure funds: The innovation in this category is likely to come from green infrastructure initiatives. As environmental concerns guide investment choices, infrastructure funds are likely to finance various projects around climate change. They can be highly influential in shaping the energy systems of the future.
Venture capital funds: Venture capital funds are crucial in nurturing early-stage startups. VC funds are utilizing data and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify promising startups and predict market trends. As this ecosystem evolves, these funds could use technology in not only identifying investment opportunities, but also scouting talent to guide the startups through their early stages of business cycle.
Hedge funds: From long-short equity positions to derivatives trading, hedge funds leverage market inefficiencies. Hedge funds can adopt AI and machine learning algorithms for high-frequency trading and risk management. These funds are poised to navigate to a landscape where technology and ethical investment principles get intertwined.
Fund of Funds (FoFs): These are an emerging category. Through this, investor can get a diversified exposure to AIFs. As data-driven investment gains prominence, FoFs could adopt AI-algorithms to make real-time portfolio adjustments and optimize risk-return profile of the portfolio.
One key factor driving the growth of the AIF industry is the expanding pool of domestic capital, spilling over into India’s tier II and tier II towns. Their participation in the growth of the startup ecosystem has been critical and has led to a lot of wealth creation. Despite the AIF ecosystem’s enormous expansion, distribution in India still remains expensive and difficult. While regulations have enabled asset management companies to launch AIFs without any hassles, distribution fees need to moderate so as to encourage the industry to facilitate a fully technology-driven onboarding of investors.
Aditya Kanoria is founder and managing director of Credent Global Finance
Foreign investors sold a record $12bn worth of Chinese stocks in August as piecemeal support measures from Beijing failed to assuage concerns over slowing growth in the world’s second-largest economy and a worsening crisis in the country’s property sector.
The unprecedented outflows come as figures on Thursday showed China’s manufacturing sector contracted for a fifth consecutive month, despite pledges from leaders in late July to deliver more substantial support measures for the vital property sector, which is typically responsible for about a quarter of annual economic activity.
Simmering tensions with Washington have also dimmed western investors’ appetite for Chinese assets, with US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo warning during a four-day visit to the country this week that American companies were starting to see China as “uninvestable”.
Calculations by the Financial Times based on exchange data show net sales of almost Rmb90bn ($12.4bn) worth of Shanghai- and Shenzhen-listed shares by offshore traders in August, more than any month since the programme launched in late 2014.
Asset managers and analysts said the surge in sales reflected disappointment from global investors, whose focus has shifted this year from hopes for a broad stimulus to a more targeted bailout for property developers. But Chinese leaders have so far remained reluctant to launch such a rescue.
“Investors are quite worried about GDP and whether [policymakers] can even hit that 5 per cent growth target,” said Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management. “That’s directly attributable to the property market because the hit to GDP from that could be 1 percentage point or more.”
Innes added that investors were also wary of “high-level political risk” as the outlook for US-China relations remained dim despite describing Raimondo’s visit as “positive”.
Concerns over the outlook for the country’s real estate market have worsened this month as private Chinese developer Country Garden, once considered among those least likely to default, missed payments on international bonds and sought to push back on renminbi repayment obligations coming due next week.
Meanwhile, shares in China Evergrande, the developer whose defaults on dollar bonds two years ago marked the start of the sector’s liquidity crisis, resumed trading in Hong Kong this week for the first time in 17 months and immediately fell almost 90 per cent.
“The word ‘stimulus’ has been misused too many times and now nobody expects a big bang on the fiscal front anymore,” said Alicia García-Herrero, chief Asia-Pacific economist at Natixis. “Now investors’ clients are focused on the real estate sector policy — that’s the new mantra.”
She said there had been a handful of property policy changes over the past month, including the easing of mortgage conditions for first-time buyers in the megacities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen. But these amounted to “tiny bits, not the big bang [that would cause] equity inflows from foreign investors”.
The economic slowdown has weighed heavily on broader valuations of Chinese stocks, dragging the benchmark CSI 300 index down 8 per cent in dollar terms in the year to date even as big markets elsewhere in the world have notched double-digit gains.
Efforts to prop up shares through cuts to trading fees and other measures, which delivered substantial gains when previously deployed, have likewise failed to provide a lasting boost to investor sentiment.
“You need substantial stimulus to get people back in,” said García-Herrero, before adding: “Don’t hold your breath.”
Human Rights Experts have stressed that more than ever, the world urgently needs humanity to unite and collaborate in a spirit of equality and non-discrimination.
They said in a statement that it demands political will to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination, inequality and stratification at both the domestic and international levels.
Achieving this goal means that inequalities within and among countries will need to be drastically decreased, and the legacies of colonialism, apartheid, enslavement and genocide effectively resolved, they added.
‘A cause for humanity’
The General Assembly proclaimed 2015 to 2024 as the International Decade for People of African Descent, with actions at the national, regional and global levels.
Objectives include promoting respect, protection and fulfilment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by people of African Descent, and greater knowledge of their diverse heritage, culture and contributions to society.
“The cause of people of African descent for recognition, justice and development is a cause for humanity,” the experts stated.
Sustain the momentum
They said the UN Decade, together with the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, have contributed significantly to combatting racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance.
“However, there is much more work to be done and the momentum gained must be sustained,” they said.
They urged the General Assembly to consider proclaiming a second International Decade for People of African Descent from 2025 to 2034, “with a view to taking further action to address systemic discrimination and legacies of the past to bring about the full recognition, justice, and development for people of African descent worldwide.”
‘Pervasive discrimination’ persists
The 13 experts were appointed by the UN Human Rights Council and are not UN staff, nor are they paid for their work.
They issued their appeal on the eve of the International Day for People of African Descent.
In his message for the Day, UN Secretary-General António Guterres highlighted “the enormous impact” that both the African continent and people of African descent have had on the development, diversity and richness of world civilizations and cultures, which constitute the common heritage of humankind.
“At the same time, we acknowledge the pervasive discrimination faced by people of African descent around the world, and the many obstacles they face to realising their full human rights,” he said.
Promote equality, combat racism
He noted that recent years have seen renewed momentum for change, based on the global anti-racism movement of 2020. Millions of people took to the streets of major cities worldwide following the police killing of George Floyd, an African American man, that May.
Mr. Guterres pointed to UN initiatives, such as the establishment of the Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in the context of Law Enforcement, and the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, as a testament to the collective aspirations of the African diaspora for justice and equality worldwide.
The Secretary-General has also made anti-racism a management priority at the UN, where he has appointed a Special Adviser and team charged with overseeing implementation of a Strategic Action Plan on Addressing Racism and Promoting Dignity for All.
Call to action
“Today, as we mark the International Day for People of African Descent, I reiterate the call of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to use the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to announce and take prompt and robust steps to advance equality and combat racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia,” he said.
The UN chief urged countries to take concrete steps, with the full participation of people of African descent and their communities, to tackle old and new forms of racial discrimination; and to dismantle entrenched structural and institutional racism.
“Today and every day, we must continue to speak out against all ideas of racial superiority, and work tirelessly to free all societies from the blight of racism,” he said.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Thursday that the EU for now is not planning to evacuate its personnel from coup-hit Gabon as the “situation is calm.”
Speaking to reporters ahead of an informal meeting of EU foreign affairs ministers in Toledo, Spain, Borrell said recent events in the Central African country “give ground for preoccupation but we are not doing evacuation like in Niger.”
A group of high-ranking Gabonese military officers on Wednesday said they had seized power, and annulled results of the recently held general elections.
Borrell stressed the “situation is calm at the moment, there is no violence” in Gabon that would justify the evacuation of the EU delegation.
He asserted that “a military coup is not a solution” even if “there might have been irregularities around” Saturday’s polls.
The EU is “working on the diplomatic front” and analyzing the developments, he added.
Meeting of EU foreign affairs ministers
The EU foreign affairs ministers will again meet on Thursday to discuss the union’s response to the war in Ukraine and the situation in Africa’s Sahel region. The meeting is being hosted by Spain, which assumed the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union on July 1.
Joined by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, the ministers will discuss support for Ukraine, as well as diplomatic means to end the war, Borrell said.
According to the EU official, Moscow’s decision not to extend the Black Sea grain deal, which was brokered by Türkiye and the UN in July 2022, has “weakened Russia’s position” in international relations.
The meeting of EU foreign affairs also gives a chance for the bloc to “review its Africa policy,” he added.
The ministers will also assess the EU’s response to the military coup in Niger, including a sanctions regime.
John Azumah, secretary-general of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and Hassoumi Massaoudou, foreign minister of Niger’s ousted government, will also participate in the meeting.
A business owner in Kent has said that the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) to the whole of outer London will have a “massive impact” on her livelihood.
But a clean air campaigner labelled Ulez “the most effective solution” to pollution and poor respiratory health.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan said it would bring “cleaner, healthier air”.
Abby Austen said she was saddened and stressed by the Ulez expansion
Motorists will now have to pay £12.50 a day to drive their vehicle in the Ulez if it does not meet emission standards.
Abbie Austen lives in Medway and runs a carpet cleaning business.
She says 75% of her clients live in London so she regularly drives into the capital in her van, which does not comply with Ulez.
Ulez would have “a massive impact, financially and personally”, Ms Austen said.
“Ultimately I could lose the business,” she added
Abbie Austen uses her van to transport equipment for cleaning carpets
According to Mr Khan, “90% of cars seen driving in outer London already meet the standards and their drivers won’t have to pay a penny”.
“Those who do are eligible for thousands of pounds to replace their vehicle”, Mr Khan added, referencing the Ulez scrappage scheme.
However, the scheme is only open to London residents, meaning those who live outside of the capital but regularly drive there face the choice of fully funding a new vehicle themselves or paying the daily charge.
Councils bordering London have refused to install signs warning drivers they are entering Ulez
James Stoddart, from Epsom, Surrey, has a classic 1985 Austin Mini and a 20-year-old van, neither of which comply with Ulez requirements.
“If I go right out of my house, then I’m in the zone – there are cameras everywhere,” he said. “If I wanted to go to the shops up the road, I can’t even do that anymore.”
Adrian Hill, who has chronic and life-threatening asthma, said clean air zones were “the most effective way of reducing traffic-related air pollution”.
Although he acknowledged that replacing a car was “an expensive endeavour”, he said people with ill health had not been compensated for “years of suffering”.
Mr Hill, from Brighton, said that at times he had “woken up in the morning starved of oxygen” and people with respiratory conditions were “just asking for clean air”.
“I think that’s a fundamental right,” Mr Hill added
Rwanda and Cameroon have unveiled significant shifts in their security forces, impacting senior military personnel.
In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame retired hundreds of soldiers, coinciding with the advancement of young soldiers within the nation’s security framework. New generals have also been appointed to lead army divisions situated across the country.
The Rwanda Defense Force (RDF) released a statement disclosing Kagame’s approval of the retirement of twelve generals, eighty-three senior officers, and six junior officers.
Additionally, eighty-six senior non-commissioned officers will be retired. About 678 soldiers retired as their contracts concluded, with 160 others medically discharged.
Prominent figures from Rwanda’s 1994 liberation war, including Gen. James Kabarebe, Gen. Fred Ibingira, and Lt. Gen. Charles Kayonga, are among the retirees. Both Kabarebe and Kayonga previously held the position of chief of defense staff of the Rwandan army.
On the same day, Kagame elevated several young officers to the rank of colonel and designated new generals to lead military divisions. Other retirees encompass Lt. Gen. Frank Mushyo Kamanzi, currently Rwanda’s ambassador to Russia, and Maj. Gen. Albert Murasira, a former defense minister.
In June, Kagame appointed Juvenal Marizamunda as the new defense minister, succeeding Albert Murasira, who had held the role since 2018.
In similar development, Cameroon’s President Paul Biya, one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders, enacted fresh appointments within the Defense Ministry’s central administrative unit, as outlined in a decree shared on social media.
The sweeping changes in Cameroon and Rwanda came barely hours after the coup in Gabon, where President Ali Bongo Ondimba was toppled and placed under house arrest by soldiers. Both leaders did not reference the coups in Niger and Gabon in their respective decisions.
Soldiers who seized power in Niger in late July have also faced sanctions by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), although the measures have so far failed to persuade the junta to return power to the democratically elected leadership.
Mr Biya, in a statement posted on Twitter Wednesday afternoon, said he had issued a decree to terminate some soldiers and move others from the country’s defence department.
Newly appointed senior military chiefs for the army include Ajeagah Njei Felix, Kamdom Lucas, and Nguema Ondo Bertin Bourger, amongst others.
Edou Essono Serge Durel and Moudio Hervé were among the newly designated officers in the Cameroon’s marine.
US firm Global Fire Power, in its 2023 ranking of the most powerful armies in the world put Cameroon at the 17th in Africa out of 34 countries, and 100th in the world.
Within the CEMAC zone, Cameroon is outperformed by Chad, 15th on the continent and 97th in the world.
Africa’s top 5 military powers are Egypt (14th in the world) Algeria (26th in the world), South Africa (33rd in world), Nigeria (36th in world), Ethiopia (49th in the world) and Angola (55th in the world).
A concerted effort is being made to exclude representatives from the oil, natural gas and coal industries from participating in the upcoming COP28 Conference which will be held in December in the United Arab Emirates.
Such a move would reverse the progress made from last year’s COP 27 gathering, in which the industries were allowed to participate after having been banned from the 2021 event.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres seemed to kick this campaign off in earnest recently when he made a statement blaming the “climate emergency” on the very existence of fossil fuels, rather than the emissions they cause: “The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions. It’s fossil fuels – period”.
The Secretary General is far from alone in his hostility towards non-renewables. Earlier this year, more than 100 lawmakers from the US and EU sent an open letter to President Biden and the President of the EU raising “profound concern” at how the UN rules “permit private sector polluters to exert undue influence” on that body’s climate change activities.
The letter’s signatories note that at least “636 lobbyists” from the oil and gas industries attended last year’s COP 27 conference held in Glasgow – more people than the delegations of most countries in attendance.
Of course, labelling every oil and gas industry attendee as a “lobbyist” is ridiculous hyperbole and the signatories know it: this is framing designed to make their attendance appear sinister. But there is demagoguery to be spread, and fossil fuel bosses make for easy targets.
Various progressive darlings have piled on their support for banning oil and gas delegates, with Al Gore railing against the practice in a recent TED talk entitled “What the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want you to know”.
US Climate Envoy John Kerry also chimed in over the weekend: in a speech he gave in Scotland, Kerry labelled anyone who disagrees with his rhetoric related to the “climate emergency” as participants in a “cult that constitutes a threat to humanity’s very existence.”
There are some who have rejected this farcical position, however. More thoughtful environmental advocates like Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and Ro Khanna have argued that fossil fuels industry reps must be engaged in the climate debate in order to arrive at anything like a reasonable result.
Reaching any sort of real solution requires “oil and gas at the table,” Gates said. “We don’t have time to exclude countries or sectors.”
Rep. Khanna, himself a staunch oil and gas industry critic who recently reiterated his support for a new windfall profits tax on the business, said “sure, have them at the table”.
This is an important interjection into the debate from a man who opposes having the COP28 conference chaired by the CEO of the UAE’s national oil company, Sultan Al Jaber.
In an opinion piece responding to the aforementioned congressional letter, Mr. Bloomberg was more direct, saying, “We need oil producers at the table – including the US, which is the largest oil producer in the world.”
Bloomberg also defended Al Jaber, noting he is “also founding CEO and chairman of its renewable energy company, Masdar, and under his leadership, the UAE has become one of the world’s largest investors in renewable energy.”
The bottom line here is this: even if you accept every word of the alarmist rhetoric from climate alarm leaders like Kerry and Guterres, there is no solution to our emissions problem that is possible without active participation in it by the fossil fuel industries.
It is the responsibility of lawmakers, who understand the real-world trade-offs that ecoactivists find themselves cushioned from, to push back on fantastical demands for results without consequences. It is impossible to even manufacture the preferred solutions of the green movement – wind, solar and electric vehicles – without massive deployment of energy derived from fossil fuels.
These renewed calls for banning oil, gas and coal from even being involved in the debate are ridiculous. We rejected them last year – and the time has come to reject them again.
Ousted #Gabon President, Ali Bongo Cries Out For Help After Military Coup [VIDEO]—-The Genius Media Nigeria reports that the ousted president of Gabon, Ali Bongo has cried out for help after the military coup that ended his reign in the country.
In a video shared few minutes ago, he was heard asking people to make noise about what is happening because he doesn’t have an idea about what is going on.
He said his son is somewhere else different from where his wife is and that he has been placed on house arrest.
A refugee arrives at the Roxham Road border crossing at the U.S.-Canada border in Champlain, New York, on March 25. LARS HAGBERG/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Canadians like to think of their country as a nation built on immigration. Canada, the story goes, is a bastion of multiculturalism. This narrative has been refined through smug comparison to the United States and other Western countries. At first glance, it may seem that Canada is more welcoming: While other Western nations have faced heavy criticism for their migration policies, Canada has garnered a reputation as being immigrant-friendly. Since 2019, the Canadian government has resettled more refugees than any other country, with little public backlash.
So in November, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to expand immigration, it seemed like a politically savvy move. Since Trudeau took office in 2015, immigration has already increased from around 300,000 to 400,000 new residents per year. Now, Canada plans to welcome 500,000 permanent residents each year by 2025. Laid out as a way to build up the Canadian economy, which faces labor shortages and a declining birth rate, the plan prioritizes bringing in skilled immigrants. It was met with praise from major corporate advocacy groups, such as the Business Council of Canada.
Ten months later, Trudeau’s plan is facing skepticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Criticism from the far right is no surprise. But as the government has struggled to integrate and support migrants, the prospect of bringing in significantly more of them has led immigration experts and advocates to air grievances about what they see as the administration’s failings in related sectors, notably refugee resettlement and housing.
Meanwhile, public opinion on immigration has started to shift. As cost of living and housing prices stay stubbornly high, anti-immigration sentiment—long boiling—may rise to the surface.
Imran Khan’s Short-Lived Legal Win
The former Pakistani prime minister had his prison sentence suspended—but has to stay in jail to face other charges.
In early 2019, controversy arose over billboards put up across the country with the slogan “Say No to Mass Immigration,” which promoted then-MP Maxime Bernier’s far-right People’s Party of Canada in the campaign for the upcoming federal election. Complaints and citizens’ petitions ultimately led the advertising company to take down the signs.
Those who complained about the billboards, including candidates from Canada’s center and left-wing parties, saw their removal as a victory for Canadian pluralism, thrown into relief by then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s xenophobic, anti-migrant policies to the south. On election day in 2019, Trudeau’s Liberal Party triumphed, while Bernier’s party received meager support.
The Liberals’ success, combined with the outcry over the far right’s weaponization of immigration, signaled to Trudeau that most Canadian voters were resolutely pro-migration. Polling seemed to back this up. The month before the election, the Environics Institute for Survey Research found that 85 percent of Canadians surveyed agreed that immigration has a positive effect on the economy, while 69 percent supported the current immigration rate.
Yet these figures obscured Canada’s long-standing challenges with diversity and inclusion. “Because Canada is pro-immigration, there’s a perception that conflates this with Canada being an open society and not being racist,” said Pallavi Banerjee, a sociologist at the University of Calgary who researches how discrimination affects young migrants’ futures.
Canada has a history of racist policies related to immigration, from the late-19th-century Chinese head tax, which forced Chinese immigrants to pay a fee when entering the country, to Quebec’s highly controversial Bill 21, a law passed in 2019 that prohibits the display of religious symbols from public servants’ attire, including crosses, turbans, kippahs, and hijabs. In one high-profile incident in 2021, Bill 21 led to the removal of a Muslim teacher from her classroom for wearing a hijab.
In a 2022 Environics survey, 46 percent of respondents agreed that “there are too many immigrants coming into this country who are not adopting Canadian values.” The term “Canadian values,” though vague, points to respondents’ desire for immigrants to assimilate. The same poll has been conducted for three decades, and while that figure has decreased from 72 percent in 1993, it still indicates that Canada has yet to fully embrace multiculturalism.
Even at current immigration levels, Banerjee said, migrants are segregated from established Canadians, limiting opportunities for them to integrate into the social fabric of their new country and thrive. According to Statistics Canada as of 2021, 41.8 percent of nonpermanent residents and 16.1 percent of immigrants who moved to Canada in the past five years lived in poverty.
The government’s failure to fully integrate newcomers has spurred skepticism of Trudeau’s new program on the left. Columnists for center and left-wing outlets have written that Canada has an “immigration elephant in the room,” referring to racism against newcomers, and that the country is “woefully unprepared for the coming immigration boom” due to funding cuts for newcomer settlement organizations, which are typically funded through a combination of federal, provincial, and private donor funds.
Migrants crowded on the deck of a rescue ship look out at the sea beneath a cloudy sky, watching a French Coast Guard patrol boat approach their ship in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Migrants crowded on the deck of a rescue ship look out at the sea beneath a cloudy sky, watching a French Coast Guard patrol boat approach their ship in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Advocates for refugees and other migrants are some of the loudest voices demanding reform to Canada’s immigration and settlement processes before expansion. Directors of settlement and refugee organizations, who may have otherwise endorsed Trudeau’s plans, say the system is already overloaded. Newcomers categorized as “highly skilled” have publicly complained about being stuck in a bureaucratic limbo with the immigration ministry and not receiving decisions on their residency permits for years.
Public opinion appears to have shifted as well. Even before Trudeau’s plan, anti-immigration sentiment was already worsening online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Banerjee said, as some Canadians blamed immigrants, particularly those of Asian descent, for the spread of the disease. In July, David Coletto, CEO of Canada’s Abacus polling firm, wrote on his Substack that 61 percent of Canadians polled believe that 500,000 immigrants per year is too high, including 37 percent who feel it is “way too high.”
In addition, a July Abacus survey found that four in 10 Canadians polled would vote for a politician who promised to reduce immigration levels.
Now, some Canadians are conflating a different issue with immigration: the housing crisis that Trudeau has been unable to stem in his nearly eight-year tenure. In the many think pieces about immigration, commentators have complained of already overburdened services, from health care wait times to the availability of language lessons. But the most common criticism of Trudeau’s plan to expand immigration is the lack of affordable housing.
“Canada doesn’t have a refugee problem. Canada has a housing problem,” said Francesca Allodi-Ross, who runs Romero House, a nongovernmental organization in Toronto that connects migrants with people who have spare rooms. She worries about newcomers being blamed for a housing shortage that has been a long time coming.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Canada has the most expensive housing market in the G-7. Vacancy rates for rental housing are at a two-decade low, and the Royal Bank of Canada expects the country’s rental housing gap (the difference between available rental units and those seeking them) to surpass 120,000 by 2026—quadrupling today’s deficit. In early August, Stefane Marion, the chief economist of the National Bank, called on the government to revise the immigration target until housing supply could match demand, citing “record imbalance” between the two.
Meanwhile, as housing shortages threaten to affect the coming “highly skilled” migrants prioritized by Trudeau’s plan, social justice-oriented groups such as Romero House have pointed out that the government has so far neglected to provide enough housing for other newcomers who have already arrived: specifically, refugees and asylum-seekers. The government’s failure to arrange temporary housing for them was glaringly apparent over the summer, when hundreds of asylum-seekers camped outside Toronto’s emergency shelter intake center.
The way the government responds to the needs of newcomers, and especially refugees, is “very reactive—and it’s been this way for years,” Allodi-Ross said. It was only after the Toronto shelter crisis, when many media commentators questioned Trudeau’s immigration expansion program, that the municipal, provincial, and federal government committed $71.4 million to housing for refugees and asylum-seekers, and the city freed up more hotels for emergency shelter.
Directors of temporary shelters and refugee settlement programs say there is a chronic lack of state funding and support for recent arrivals. John Mtshede, the executive director of Matthew House, a shelter for asylum-seekers in Ontario’s Niagara region, said his shelter is stretched to capacity. For years, the government has repeatedly denied Matthew House’s requests for funding to develop a plot of land for additional housing. Matthew House has found its most sustainable support through private fundraising and religious groups, rather than government funding.
Like many others who work at refugee and immigration NGOs, Mtshede is frustrated with the lack of coordination between the municipal, provincial, and federal governments about who bears responsibility for housing the government’s target of a little more than 70,000 new refugees each year. “Nobody wants to take the blame for this situation,” he said.
Despite the pushback, the Liberal government appears to be doubling down and ignoring accusations that it has not funded the services required to process and settle newcomers. At a press conference in early August, a reporter asked Marc Miller, the new immigration minister, if the government would reduce the immigration targets.
“Whether we revise them upwards or not is something that I have to look at,” he said. “But certainly, I don’t think we’re in any position of wanting to lower them by any stretch of the imagination.” In the meantime, newcomers will increasingly become the fall guy for the housing crisis that has unfolded under Trudeau’s watch.
Claire Porter Robbins is a journalist in Calgary, Alberta, and the founder of Btchcoin News. She has worked as an aid worker in the Middle East and in strategic communications for a United Nations peacekeeping mission.
A group of senior military officers in the Central African country of Gabon said they have cancelled the elections and seized power because polls held over the weekend were not credible.
The officers, in a television announcement on Gabon24 during the early hours of Wednesday morning, revealed this shortly after incumbent President Ali Bongo was announced to have won a third term as president.
The military has dissolved all state institutions and closed the country’s borders. They said they represented all security and defence forces of Gabon.
The announcement came shortly after the state election body said President Ali Bongo Ondimba had won a third term in office in Saturday’s disputed elections.
“In the name of the Gabonese people … we have decided to defend the peace by putting an end to the current regime,” the officers said.
The Gabonese Election Centre said Bongo had secured 64.27 percent of the vote compared with 30.77 percent for his main challenger Albert Ondo Ossa, after a process beset by delays.
Gabonese President Ali Bongo Ondimba casts his vote at a polling station during the presidential election in Libreville, Gabon August 26, 2023 [Gerauds Wilfried Obangome/Reuters] The opposition camp, on Saturday, insisted the election was a “fraud orchestrated by Ali Bongo and his supporters” after the internet was cut and a curfew imposed.
French media outlets France 24, RFI and TV5 Monde were also banned, accused of “a lack of objectivity and balance in connection with the current general elections”, the government said.
Bongo was the candidate for the Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG), the party founded by his father, Omar Bongo, who led Gabon from 1967 to 2009. After his death, his son, then the defence minister, took his place as president and has been in power ever since.
So, far nothing has been revealed by the military concerning where the president is.
Tensions had been running high amid Saturday’s vote with the opposition pushing for change and an end to the Bongo family’s dominance of Gabon.
Following the military announcement, the Reuters and AFP news agencies reported the sound of gunfire in the Gabonese capital, Libreville.
