Two hundred young Taiwanese were selected yesterday as the first participants in a working holiday program between Canada and Taiwan.
“I had expected the applications would be overwhelming,” said Scott Fraser, executive director of the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei (CTOT), after a draw to pick 200 names from a pool of 516 applicants.
Under a Memorandum of Understanding that took effect on July 1, the administrative process will be simplified for people aged between 18 and 35 from Canada and Taiwan who wish to travel and work in each other’s territory for up to one year. Each side offered a quota of 200 of multiple-entry visas for the first year of the program.
Toby Schwartz, CTOT’s deputy director of general relations, encouraged the 200 Taiwanese to take advantage of the range of travel opportunities Canada has to offer. She said she hoped they would also make friends with Canadians and “go back to study in Canada, taking short courses or learning either English or French.”
The 200 candidates selected in the draw will have to undergo screened and 20 alternatives were drawn in case of any of the candidates fail to meet requirements, Schwartz said.
Canada was the fourth country to sign a working holiday agreement with Taiwan, while Taiwan was the 22nd country to do so with Canada.
“This is a great opportunity for Canadian and Taiwanese youth. Canadians can travel and work in Taiwan for up to a year, gaining valuable work and professional development experience. Taiwanese young people can do the same in Canada,” Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon said in a press release earlier yesterday.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching