Quotulatiousness

November 23, 2018

“These are deficits of choice, not necessity”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The federal government released its fall economic statement the other day. The contents would not really have been a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention since the last election, as Andrew Coyne explains:

The 2018 fall economic statement begins with a puzzle. Economic growth, it trumpets, is strong — the strongest in the G7 in, er, 2017. Unemployment is at a 40-year low; capacity utilization is back to pre-recession levels; profits are up; wages are growing faster than they have in eight years.

All this good news has produced a bumper crop of revenues to the federal treasury: an average of roughly $5.5-billion more annually over the next couple of years than was projected in the spring budget. Yet deficits are now projected to be … higher than expected — at $19.6 billion and $18.1 billion, respectively, about 10 per cent over forecast.

What explains this surprising result? Simple: as it has done throughout its tenure, the Trudeau government took the revenue windfall, and spent it — every last dollar and then some.

This is what the government calls “carefully managing deficits over the medium term.” It used to talk about reducing or even eliminating deficits. Now it seems devoted to doing whatever it takes to keep them in the $20 billion range, in perpetuity.

To be sure, the current set of projections, like its predecessors, shows deficits declining majestically in later years. But somehow in the here and now they never do. Once upon a time, this was supposed to be owing to a shortfall in revenues, the fruit of the Harper government’s supposed obsession with austerity.

By now this is not even pretended. The last Harper budget projected revenues for the current fiscal year at $326.9 billion, enough for a small surplus. The latest estimate has them at $328.9 billion — yet the deficit stands at $18.1 billion. Even allowing for a couple of billion dollars in accounting adjustments, it’s clear what is going on. These are deficits of choice, not necessity.

November 22, 2018

The apparently unexpected backlash over cancelling a French-language university in Ontario

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I suspect a lot of the uproar is actually just target-of-opportunity stuff to justify criticism of Ontario premier Doug Ford. Chris Selley points out that until the announcement, there wasn’t actually a lot of support for the new university among French-speaking Ontarians:

You would never know it since Thursday, when the Ontario government cancelled plans to open a new French-language university in Toronto, but those plans were not universally beloved. A lot of people hated the location. In an op-ed in Le Droit, University of Ottawa political scientist François Charbonneau complained it was being built to serve future francophone immigrants, not proper Franco-Ontarians in a community where they’ve been established for generations.

He called it “a historic mistake that perfectly illustrates what it means to be a minority: to have no power over one’s own destiny and to be dependent on ideological rantings with no democratic legitimacy.”

Higher-education consultant Alex Usher was among many who dismissed enrollment projections for the university as “fantasy.” Writing on the Higher Education Strategies blog, Usher called a recent survey of francophone Ontario high school students the “worst piece of social science I have ever seen.” It found lots of interest in attending the new university, but didn’t bother asking about their interest in existing bilingual alternatives like Laurentian University and the U of O.

To language hawks, bilingualism is the enemy: French always loses out in a budget crunch, and it does nothing to advance the right to live one’s life solely in French. Trouble is, very few students at French-language Ontario high schools are remotely interested in living their lives solely in French.

These are all things Premier Doug Ford and his ministers might have mentioned if they hoped to leave an impression other than that Ontario francophones just aren’t worth the money. They might wisely have chosen not to axe the French Language Commissioner in the same fiscal update, transferring its complaint-resolution powers to the ombudsman but orphaning its advocacy mandate. Finance minister Vic Fedeli hasn’t even said how much of its $1.2 million budget he hopes to recoup.

But they did what they did, all at once, and they said it was all about saving money. I suspect the whirlwind they reaped came as a surprise.

Good heavens, though, what wind.

November 21, 2018

Statistics Canada’s instrumentalist philosophy

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Financial Post, Bruce Pardy discusses the motivation behind Statistics Canada’s recently revealed demand for the private financial records of half a million Canadians:

Recently it was revealed that Statistics Canada sought to obtain the private banking information of half a million Canadians without their knowledge or consent. Jennifer Robson, professor of political management at Carleton University, in an interview with the CBC, justified the data sweep on the grounds that governments need this information to make good policy. But don’t be concerned, she said, it is not for ideological purposes, since Statistics Canada is ideologically neutral. That made me laugh. The very idea of policy based on data reflects an instrumentalist belief that governments should solve social problems by political means. That requires an ideological confidence in the administrative state, to which the agency is a handmaiden.

Ideology is not a dirty word. An ideology is merely a worldview, a lens through which to perceive society. Political parties, by definition, each have one (and sometimes extra ones for special occasions). But it is another thing for a public agency to act independently in furtherance of its own ideology while pretending to be neutral.

Statistics Canada’s deep dive into banking records — presently on hold while federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien investigates its legality — appears not to have been directed by government officials but was undertaken on its own initiative. The agency’s decision is consistent with a conviction that the more personal data available to government, the better off we will be; that governments are benevolent; that private financial matters call for public policy management; and that a bigger government is a better government. A commitment to social policy, wrote Milton Friedman “involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scare resources to alternative uses.”

November 20, 2018

Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn devotes a column to the work of Canadian singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, particularly his very well-known ballad on the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior in 1975:

Edmund Fitzgerald, 1971
Detail of a photo from Wikimedia Commons

When it comes to trains and boats and planes, Gordon Lightfoot has hymned all three, but it’s the middle mode of transportation that produced the song he’s proudest of:

    The ship was the pride Of the American side
    Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
    As the big freighters go
    It was bigger than most
    With a crew and good captain well seasoned…

In November 1975 Lightfoot chanced to be reading Newsweek‘s account of the sinking of a Great Lakes freighter in Canadian waters. He’s a slow and painstaking writer, which is one reason he’s given up songwriting – because it takes too much time away from his grandkids. But that day forty-three years ago the story literally struck a chord, and he found himself scribbling away, very quickly:

    The legend lives on From the Chippewa on down
    Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
    The lake, it is said Never gives up her dead
    When the skies of November turn gloomy…

“Gitche gumee” is Ojibwe for “great sea” – ie, Lake Superior – as you’ll know if you’ve read your Longfellow, which I’m not sure anyone does these days. Evidently Hiawatha was on the curriculum back east across Lake Huron in young Gordy’s Orillia schoolhouse. The Gitche Gumee reference may be why, when I first heard “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“, I assumed its subject had sunk long before the song was written. In fact, it sank on November 10th 1975 – just a few days before Lightfoot wrote the number. When she’d launched in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, and, when she passed through the Soo Locks between Lakes Superior and Huron, her size always drew a crowd and her captain was always happy to entertain them with a running commentary over the loudspeakers about her history and many voyages. For seventeen years she ferried taconite ore from Minnesota to the iron works of Detroit, Toledo and the other Great Lakes ports …until one November evening of severe winds and 35-feet waves:

    The wind in the wires
    Made a tattle-tale sound
    And a wave broke over the railin’
    And every man knew
    As the captain did too
    ‘Twas the witch of November come stealin’…

And about seventeen miles from Whitefish Bay the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, with the loss of all 29 lives. It remains the largest ship ever wrecked on the Great Lakes, launched in 1958 to take advantage of the new St Lawrence Seaway (to be opened by the Queen and President Eisenhower on an inaugural voyage by the Royal Yacht Britannia the following year) and specifically constructed to be only a foot less than the maximum length permitted. Edmund Fitzgerald was the then chairman of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance of Milwaukee, and, as far as I’m aware, the only insurance company executive to be immortalized in a song title. Fifteen thousand people showed up for the ship’s launch at River Rouge, Michigan. It took Mrs Fitzgerald three attempts to shatter the champers against the bow, and then there was a further half-hour’s delay as the shipyard workers tried to loosen the keel blocks. After which the ship flopped into the water, crashed against a pier, and sent up a huge wave to douse the crowd. One spectator promptly had a heart attack and died.

And then came seventeen happy years. Even in the twenty-first century, there is something especially awful and sobering about death at sea: it is in a certain sense a reminder of the fragility of security and modernity. Whenever I’m in, for example, St Pierre et Miquelon, the last remaining territory of French North America, I stop by the monument aux marins disparus, sculpted in 1964 and to which many names have been added in the years since – because a ship put out, and somewhere on the horizon the great primal forces rose up from the depths and snapped it in two like a matchstick.

November 18, 2018

The Toronto Circus Riot of 1855

Filed under: Cancon, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published on 26 Oct 2018

In 1855 Toronto, a fireman and a clown walked into a brothel. What followed would change the course of one of the world’s great cities.

The episode is intended for educational purposes. All events are portrayed in historical context. No graphic depictions of violence are included.

The History Guy uses media that are in the public domain. As photographs of actual events are sometimes not available, photographs of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

November 17, 2018

Modern houses are not flexible

Filed under: Cancon, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kate Wagner, of McMansion Hell fame, discusses the pressures that have combined to create the modern western house and why they are not as flexible in use as we really need:

Houses are a particular paradox. We expect them to serve as long-term, if not permanent, shelter — the word “mortgage” even has the prefix mort, death, implying that the house will live longer than we will — but we also expect them to shift in response to our needs and desires. As Christopher Alexander writes in his treatise The Timeless Way of Building, “You want to be able to mess around with it and progressively change it to bring it into an adapted state with yourself, your family, the climate … to reflect the variety of human situations.”

That is exactly what we want — and we’ve gone about it in exactly the wrong way. We’ve ended up with overstuffed houses that attempt to anticipate every direction our lives could go, when what we need are flexible houses that can adapt to the lives we’re actually living.

But flexibility rarely comes up, as [Stewart] Brand points out in his book [How Buildings Learn], in the fevered brouhaha of building and architectural consumption. And if we’re going to rethink how flexible our houses are, we need to do so at the level of our structures and the way they are built.

[…]

Of course, the premier example of a house designed for stuff is the McMansion, which, as I have argued at length elsewhere, is designed from the inside out. The reason it looks the way it does is because of the increasingly long laundry list of amenities (movie theaters, game rooms) needed to accumulate the highest selling value and an over-preparedness for the maximum possible accumulation of both people (grand parties) and stuff (grand pianos). This comes at the expense of structure, skin, and services. The structure becomes wildly convoluted, having to accommodate both ceilings of towering heights and others half that size, often within the same volume. Because of this, the rooflines are particularly complex, featuring several different pitches and shapes, and the walls are peppered with large great-room windows (a selling feature!), and other windows on any given elevation consist of many different sizes and shapes.

The skin — which often features many different types of cladding — and the roof are, due to their complexity, more prone to vulnerabilities, such as leaks. Because of the equally complex internal space plan, often following the trend of more and more open floorplans and large internal volumes, services like heating and cooling have to combat irregular volumes and energy leakage through features like massive picture windows. Rooms are programmed for specific activities: craft rooms, man caves, movie theaters. This is a kind of architectural stockpiling, devoting space to hobbies that could easily be performed in other parts of the house, out of a strange fear of not having enough space.

November 16, 2018

The political wrangles ahead over the federal carbon tax

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne — for once not beating the drum for electoral reform — discusses the challenge facing the federal government in the wake of provincial resistance to their carbon tax plans:

But the real test, of course, is yet to come. The provinces cannot stop the tax on their own. The court challenges are likely to fail. Provinces that refuse to implement carbon pricing will simply find the federal “backstop” tax imposed in its place. It is the election that will decide the issue, not duelling governments. Or so Conservatives hope.

Certainly there are abundant grounds to doubt the political wisdom of the Liberal plan. A tax, or anything that resembles it, would be a hard enough sell on its own. But a tax in aid of a vast international plan to save the earth from a scourge that remains imperceptible to most voters, to which Canada has contributed little and against which Canada can have little impact, while countries whose actions would be decisive remain inert? Good luck.

What seems clear is that voters’ support for carbon pricing is shallow and tentative. The Conservative strategist who chortled to the National Post that the Liberals are asking Canadians “to vote with their hearts, not their wallets” — an impossibility, he meant — was correctly cynical. Just because people want to save the planet doesn’t mean they want to pay for it.

The best way to read the public’s mood is in the positions of the political parties, who are in their various ways each trying to assure them that it won’t cost them a dime. The Liberal version of this is to promise to rebate the extra cost of the federal tax to consumers — indeed, they pledge, 70 per cent of households will make a profit on the exchange.

The Conservatives have been less forthcoming, but it would appear their plan is to hide the cost, substituting regulations, whose effects are largely invisible to consumers, for the all-too-visible tax at the pump. Here, too, I suspect they may have a better (i.e. more cynical) read on popular opinion. The public often prefer to have the costs of government hidden from them, even if they know they are paying them — even if they know they are paying more this way, as indeed they are in this case. Do what you want to us, they seem to say, just don’t rub our faces in it.

So I would be skeptical about polls showing majority support for the federal plan: 54 per cent, according to Angus Reid, while Abacus finds 75 per cent would either support or at least accept it (versus 24 per cent opposed). These were taken shortly after the announcement of the federal rebates. Yet it is far from evident the rebates will still register with people a year from now. Indeed, the Conservatives barely paused to acknowledge them as inadequate before going on to pretend they had never been mentioned.

November 15, 2018

The Romance of the Rails

Filed under: Cancon, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Randal O’Toole’s new book on North American railways goes straight to my “wish list”. He’s also a long-time fan of railways, but has been forced to admit that attempts to bring back the golden age of rail are wasted effort because railways — especially US and Canadian lines — are built to carry bulk freight efficiently and economically but attempts to also carry large numbers of passengers quickly cannot be successful without building entirely separate (high-speed) lines. This is from the introduction to The Romance of the Rails [PDF]:

Amtrak’s
Eastbound Empire Builder crossing Two Medicine Trestle at East Glacier MT on 20 July 2011.
Photo by Steve Wilson via Wikimedia Commons.

Early in my career, I joined the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) and supported more funding for Amtrak. Later, I realized Amtrak was poorly managed and supported Amtrak reform. More recently, along with NARP founder Anthony Haswell — who is sometimes called the Father of Amtrak — I became completely disillusioned with the idea of government-run trains and have argued for abolishing the heavily subsidized federal passenger rail corporation.

My attitudes toward urban transit have also undergone a transition. In 1972, as an undergraduate student, I wrote a paper for the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG) advocating low-cost transit improvements in Portland aimed at attracting people out of their automobiles and reducing air pollution. When the director of OSPIRG later became general manager of TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, he implemented some of those improvements, and transit ridership surged. To be honest, I didn’t propose rail transit reform in 1972 simply because I didn’t think there was much chance of that happening. However, I later became more skeptical of rail transit when Portland built an expensive light-rail line, followed by more lines that were even more expensive.

That skepticism has led some people to call me “anti-transit” and “anti-passenger train.” But I’m not. If someone could design a rail system that attracted riders and efficiently moved them from place to place, I’d be the first to endorse it. As this book will show, however, this is no more likely to happen than the freight railroads converting back to steam power. The next technology replacement will not be people trading in their cars for high-speed trains and light rail. Rather, it will be people trading in their human-driven cars for increasingly autonomous cars that drive themselves.

The short answer to the question of why passenger trains and streetcars have been replaced by planes, cars, and buses is that rails are more expensive and less flexible than the alternatives. To understand why, the first 10 chapters of this book will delve deep into the history of rail to show how passenger rail transportation once worked, who it worked for, and what has changed so that it no longer works today. This history demonstrates why statements such as, “High-speed trains have faster downtown-to-downtown times than flying” or “Light rail provides an alternative to congested roads going to work” are not relevant. Chapter 11 discusses the question of why passenger rail seems to work in Europe and Asia but not in North America.

Chapters 12 through 17 will each focus on a different kind of passenger rail, from streetcars to high-speed rail. Finally, Chapter 18 will demonstrate why we love trains, but also why we can’t expect them to do for us what they did in the 19th century.

Passenger rail was once an important part of our history, but today it represents a drag on our economy. I still love passenger trains, but I don’t think other people should have to subsidize my hobby.

QotD: The French language in Quebec

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

To follow Quebec politics, to read a French-language Quebec newspaper, is to regularly come across trumped-up or bewildering linguistic angst. A new study or census will show French is in pretty good shape, and the language hawks will immediately start slicing and dicing the data to paint the most dire possible picture. The Habs will appoint a captain who doesn’t speak French. A newspaper columnist will hear a friendly “bonjour-hi” one too many times shopping in downtown Montreal and blow his stack. While First World parents around the world strive to have their children learn as many languages as possible, you still encounter the odd Quebec voice wondering if francophone children learning English represents an existential threat to their society.

Chris Selley, “Oh no… It really looks like Justin Trudeau truly, deeply believes all those silly Liberal myths”, National Post, 2017-01-19.

November 11, 2018

Mark Knopfler – “Remembrance Day”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Bob Oldfield
Published on 3 Nov 2011

A Remembrance Day slideshow using Mark Knopfler’s wonderful “Remembrance Day” song from the album Get Lucky (2009). The early part of the song conveys many British images, but I have added some very Canadian images also which fit with many of the lyrics. The theme and message is universal… ‘we will remember them’.

QotD: “Chateau” generals and the modern Canadian Army

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the great British strategist, one of the “fathers” of modern armoured-mechanized-mobile warfare, Major General JFC “Boney” Fuller, wrote in the mid 1930s called Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure: A Study of the Personal Factor in Command. In it Fuller was harshly critical of what he saw as an old, fat (quite literally) and out of touch military command structure that was intent on fighting the last war, or even the one before that, and was unable to innovate or accept change. Too many generals, he suggested, were physically and mentally unfit for the stresses of modern war, they could not “rough it” with soldiers and actually needed to be in nice warm chateaux behind the lines while soldiers and colonels fought in the mud. This is related to something that the brilliant British soldier-scholar Field Marshal Lord Wavell said in his comments on “generalship:” commanders need to be “robust … able to withstand the shocks of war.” Fuller, especially, went to great lengths, and back two thousand plus years in history, to say that wars and military leadership require physical and mental vigour and that young people, often very young people can master both war and leadership. I suspect that both Fuller and Wavell would look at our modern Canadian Army, especially at our seasoned, experienced and relatively old sergeant section and tank commanders and so, “No, no, no! You’re wasting all that good training and experience at too low a level. Section commanders need only half that much training; those sergeants should be doing more and more important things.”

I believe that we, the Canadian public, need and deserve a more efficient and cost effective Army, and one way to make it so is to lower the ranks of junior leaders: tank and rifle section and tank troop and rifle platoon commanders. It should be harder but quicker for young soldiers to achieve the ranks of lance corporal, corporal and master corporal and command a tank or a rifle section ~ but the corporals and master corporals should be paid more. Junior officers should spend longer in the ranks of second lieutenant and lieutenant, and be paid more, while they are given the opportunities to master the basics of their profession. If you have first rate platoon commanders you’ll get good generals without too much trouble … if you don’t have a plentiful supply of really good tank troop and rifle platoon commanders then good generals will only appear now and again, by happy accident.

Ted Campbell, “The foundation (2)”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2017-02-21.

November 7, 2018

Quebec cabbies sue provincial government for declining revenues and lost capital cost due to Uber competition

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

William Watson makes the argument that it’s the ripped-off taxi customers who should be suing, not the cabbies:

There are at least two problems with the court case, one technical, one regarding fairness. The technical one: Cabbies want compensation for both declining revenue and the capital loss on their permits. But that’s double-counting. The permit is an entitlement to earn the revenues. Its value falls only because expected revenues have fallen. Give operators one or the other, if the law eventually says you must, but not both. They can have their compensation but not eat it, too.

The fairness question concerns where the taxi cartel’s surplus came from all these years, which is no mystery: It came from taxi users. But what are we, chopped liver? Why don’t we start a class action suit of our own to get back all the money ripped off from us over decades of artificially restricted taxi supply?

Basic fairness would certainly require that. Unfortunately, the law may not. The taxi drivers’ case against the government is that, despite statutes on the books about needing a taxi permit in order to provide taxi services, when Uber came along the government decided not to enforce the law. That created two classes of taxi driver: Uber drivers, whom the government turned a blind eye to, and regular taxi drivers, whom it continued to subject to close regulation. That double standard was an unfairness, yes, but a minor one compared to the long-lasting aggravated rip-off of consumers.

Bottom line: Taxi drivers lobby for and get a law allowing them to overcharge their customers. When in a bout of good policy sense (a “Taxi Spring” you might say) the government decides not to enforce it, the taxi drivers set about suing taxpayers instead. However unfair that may seem — and it’s exasperating! — I suppose, in the end, supply-and-demand must take notice of the principle of rule of law.

November 6, 2018

Fly the “Party Flight” with Canadian (Forces) Airways!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Ottawa Citizen, David Pugliese reminds us that not all is right with the higher-ups of the Canadian military, based on what was allowed to occur — and at least partly covered-up — on a VIP flight last year:

The December 2017 “Team Canada” tour – now more popularly known in some quarters in the military as “the party flight” – has without a doubt been a major public relations black eye for the Canadian Forces.

The tour, with VIPs who were supposed to boost the morale of military personnel deployed overseas, turned into a fiasco. Some VIPs on the RCAF flight to Greece and Latvia were drunk and abusive to the crew, in particular the military flight attendants. The VIP civilian passengers, including former NHL player Dave “Tiger” Williams were exempt from security screening before the flight, and some — already drunk — walked on to the Canadian Forces aircraft with open alcoholic drinks in their hands.

Two individuals were so drunk they were reported to have urinated themselves. Video taken aboard the plane showed people — including a staff member from Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance’s office — dancing in the aisles of the aircraft with their drinks as a rock band played at the back of the plane. Others chewed tobacco, in violation of Canadian Forces rules, spitting the slimy juice into cups for flight attendants to clean up.

The military flight crew was prohibited from approaching the VIPs except to provide them with service. The crew felt they couldn’t do anything to put a halt to the antics as these very important people were Vance’s guests.

Williams has been charged with sex assault and assault. He denies the charges.

The $337,000 taxpayer-funded trip was planned by Vance’s office. Vance okayed the booze on the RCAF aircraft.

We know all of this now.

But almost right from the beginning, the Canadian Forces/Department of National Defence Staff Public Affairs branch appeared to try its best to mislead journalists – and ultimately the public – on what actually took place on that flight.

November 4, 2018

Statistics Canada wants to become “Stasi”-tistics Canada by grabbing personal financial data

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

“Stasi” was the abbreviation for the German Democratic Republic’s State Security Service, East Germany’s successor to the Gestapo. Not only did they perform similar functions to the Gestapo, they were even more involved in spying on Germans than their Nazi predecessors had been. Wikipedia says that “the Stasi employed one secret policeman for every 166 East Germans; by comparison, the Gestapo deployed one secret policeman per 2,000 people. As ubiquitous as this was, the ratios swelled when informers were factored in: counting part-time informers, the Stasi had one agent per 6.5 people. This comparison led Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal to call the Stasi even more oppressive than the Gestapo.” Statistics Canada doesn’t want to get the full story on us by physically spying — that’s the RCMP’s job — but they do want to grab huge amounts of our personal financial data to “ensur[e that] government programs remain relevant and effective for Canadians”. Terence Corcoran explains why this might not be such a good idea:

When news broke earlier this year that the accounts of maybe 600,000 Canadian Facebook users had been compromised, Ottawa swung into action to shut down this alarming example of creeping surveillance capitalism. Scott Brison, then acting minister of democratic institutions, said his government had dispatched Canada’s national spy agency to make sure the privacy of Canadians had not been compromised. “Social media platforms have a responsibility to protect the privacy and personal data of citizens,” said Brison.

But when news broke last week that Statistics Canada wants to expand its inventory of data on Canadians by collecting real hard-core personal information on the banking activities of 500,000 Canadians annually, the Trudeau government was suddenly not at all concerned about privacy breaches or even the principle of privacy protection. Instead of waving a red flag over the prospect that StatCan would end up with computers full of private financial details on millions of citizens, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau brushed off privacy concerns, which he implied take a back seat to the government’s need for “high quality and timely data.” Such data, he said, are “critical to ensuring government programs remain relevant and effective for Canadians.”

Spoken like a true central planner and enthusiastic purveyor of policy-based evidence making. Nobody seems to know why StatCan wants to begin collecting personal banking information on individual Canadians, information that Canada’s bankers are rightly reluctant to provide. In the all-new era of fintech and blockchain, the great concern among regulators is how data privacy will be protected. At StatCan, the concern is: “How do we get our hands on the data?”

[…]

StatCan’s assurances on privacy protection are not all that reassuring. In a document dated October 2018 — obtained by David Akin at Global News— the chief statistician describes his agency’s “Generic Privacy Impact Assessment related to the acquisition of financial transactions information.” It is clear that the names of millions of Canadians, their bank account numbers and transactions, their bill payments and personal activities, will be collected and stored in government computers. StatCan is not merely getting useful generic data on the spending and banking habits of Canadians, it is collecting the actual spending and banking habits and names of individual Canadians.

It is one thing to collect and analyze statistics based on anonymous data. It is quite another to “require” — Arora’s word — that the banks provide “individual payments and income history.” Even though billions of bits of private, individual and personal information will be collected, StatCan says that, “Under no circumstances will the personal information obtained from financial institutions be used to perform credit, expenditure or income checks on individual Canadians.” He said none of the resulting statistical reports will include any personal data.

That’s not good enough.

That pesky Supreme court ruling on the Churchill Falls deal

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I use the term “pesky” in the headline to avoid being slagged by one or possibly even both of my Newfoundland and Labrador readers … to curry favour with them, I’d need to escalate from somewhere between “ethically doubtful” and “outrageous”, and even that might not capture the essence of anger and resentment at Quebec’s amazingly great deal long-term on cheap hydro-electric power from the Churchill Falls facility. It is, as Wikipedia says, “the second largest hydroelectric plant in North America, with an installed capacity of 5,428 MW”, and thanks to Quebec financing and astute negotiations, most of that output is sold to Quebec at a very small proportion of today’s open market price. Colby Cosh arches an eyebrow over a Supreme Court justice’s lone vote of dissent on the case:

Churchill Falls generating station, Labrador.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It is my solemn duty to perform one of the important functions of a newspaper columnist: raising one questioning eyebrow. On Friday the Supreme Court issued a judgment in the long battle between Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corp., a subsidiary of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, and Hydro-Québec. CFLco is the legal owner of the notorious Churchill Falls Generating Station in the deep interior of Labrador, close to the border with Quebec.

The station was built between 1966 and 1971. Hydro-Québec provided backing when the financing proved difficult for the original owner, an energy exploration consortium called Brinco. This led to the signing of Canada’s most famous lopsided contract: a 1969 deal for Hydro-Québec to receive most of the plant’s output for the next 40 years at a quarter of a cent per kilowatt-hour, followed by 25 more years at one-fifth of a cent. The bargain ends in 2041, at which time CFLco will get full use and disposal of the station’s electricity back.

This has been a heck of a deal for Quebec. It took on the risk of financing and building the station in exchange for receiving the electricity at a low fixed price — one that both sides in the court case agree was reasonable at the time. But it meant that Newfoundland saw no benefit from decades of oil price shocks, from the end of nuke-plant construction in the U.S., or from the increasing market advantage hydroelectricity enjoys while dirtier forms of power generation attract eco-taxation.

It has been maddening for Newfoundland to remain poor while Hydro-Québec grows fat on the profits from a Newfoundland river. Quebec, for its part, has never been completely convinced of the legitimacy of its border with Labrador, and it sees its good fortune as a sort of angelic reward for having to be part of Confederation. The Churchill Falls deal is (quite reasonably) regarded as proof that Quebec’s homegrown industrialists were able to beat resource-exploiting Anglo financiers at their own game. There are thus reasons beyond the bottom line that Quebec has never wanted to renegotiate the Churchill Falls contract. But the bottom line is enough.

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