Quotulatiousness

October 6, 2012

Reporting from the St. Catharines Wine and Grape parade

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:43

Scott Feschuk goes back to St. Catharines to watch the parade go by:

In my hometown of St. Catharines, Ont., the last Saturday of September brings the Grape and Wine parade — a fun, child-friendly celebration of Niagara’s contribution to our national drunkenness. Join me as I attend the parade for the first time in 25 years:

9:48 a.m. We set up across from City Hall, just down from the viewing stand and just up from the elderly lady in the “Will work for wine” T-shirt. Behind us, at a church-run snack table, a sign announces that passersby are welcome to take a free apple as a gesture of God’s love. An Italian sausage, however, will set you back four bucks because the hydro company does not accept payment in love gestures.

9:54 The parade doesn’t start until 11 o’clock, which gives everyone plenty of time to brag about when they arrived downtown to Get a Good Spot. The exchange between two women in line for coffee is typical. “I got here around 8.” “Really? We were totally set up by 7:30.” Subtext: You are a terrible mother, first woman.

[. . .]

11:14 I didn’t know the Grape parade had a theme — and had I known, I’d have assumed it was Please Stop Laughing at Our Floats. But this year several of the floats commemorate the War of 1812, including one with a giant banner that reads: “1812-2012: 200 Years of Peace.” Being a stickler for historical accuracy and also a huge jerk, I loudly point out that the war didn’t end until 1814. Feschuk 1, Parade 0.

11:16 It’s still early, but if I had to pick my favourite War of 1812 re-enactor so far, it would definitely be the soldier in the period-accurate Nike cross-trainers.

[. . .]

12:27 The parade is almost over and there hasn’t been a single clown yet—not one. And where is the A&W Bear and why aren’t people on floats throwing candy and why isn’t everything exactly the same as it was in my childhood WHEN EVERYTHING WAS PERFECT AT ALL TIMES??

12:34 A final note: the Grape and Wine parade featured a number of cheerleading teams and academies — so many that I feel confident in stating for the record that we, as a nation, are good for cheerleaders. We do not require any more eight-year-old girls to paint on thick, sparkly eye makeup and thrust their pelvises in a sexualized manner. We are good for bare midriffs and self-esteem issues. Sure, Niagara may have lost most of its manufacturing jobs, but it’s in terrific shape if the key to prospering in the global economy turns out to be human pyramids.

October 5, 2012

Apparently only Christians go to prison in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

At least, that’s the most charitable interpretation of this move by the federal government:

The federal government is cancelling the contracts of non-Christian chaplains at federal prisons, CBC News has learned.

Inmates of other faiths, such as Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jews, will be expected to turn to Christian prison chaplains for religious counsel and guidance, according to the office of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who is also responsible for Canada’s penitentiaries.

Toews made headlines in September when he ordered the cancellation of a tender issued for a Wiccan priest for federal prisons in B.C.

Toews said he wasn’t convinced part-time chaplains from other religions were an appropriate use of taxpayer money and that he would review the policy.

In an email to CBC News, Toews’ office says that as a result of the review, the part-time non-Christian chaplains will be let go and the remaining full-time chaplains in prisons will now provide interfaith services and counselling to all inmates.

According to the report, 57% of inmates are Christian. I smell a charter challenge to this ruling.

October 4, 2012

The zero-sum trading myth

Filed under: Business, Cancon, China, Economics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:44

In Maclean’s, Stephen Gordon decries the undying myth that if one party to a trade is benefitting then the other must be losing:

In The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan argues that the most important obstacles to implementing sound economic policies are not lobby groups or the ability of other special interests to influence politicians, but certain systemic, irrational beliefs of the electorate. This is hardly an encouraging conclusion, but if we needed any more evidence for at least one aspect of his thesis, the CNOOC-Nexen takeover is providing it.

One of the prejudices identified by Caplan is what he calls anti-foreign bias: “a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of interaction with foreigners.” According to popular (mis)perception, dealing with foreigners is to be mistrusted: if they want something from us, then they must perceive some benefit from the exchange. And if foreigners are gaining, then Canadians must be losing.

October 3, 2012

“The stereotype is so strong, that when you look at the actual data, you’re shocked”

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

In the National Post, Tom Blackwell finds the common stereotype on domestic violence at variance with the facts:

Conventional wisdom suggests that women usually kill their spouses in self defence or as a final, desperate reaction to chronic battery, the burning-bed syndrome that is sometimes cited as a defence in murder trials. A new Canadian study, however, suggests that barely a quarter of husband-killers are victims of domestic abuse, less than half suffer from any identified psychological problem, and fewer still have had trouble with police.

[. . .]

To Don Dutton, a UBC psychology professor who has examined domestic violence for decades, the results of the new study are no surprise, despite what he called an erroneous understanding of “intimate-partner” assault that continues to prevail in society.

“We’ve got a stereoptye about domestic violence … that the oppressor or perpetrator is the male and when female violence happens, it’s a reaction against male violence,” he said. “The stereotype is so strong, that when you look at the actual data, you’re shocked.”

Prof. Dutton, author of the book Rethinking Domestic Violence, suggested that such assumptions evolved from the feminist view that family violence was a socio-political act of “patriarchal men suppressing women.” He argues instead that personality disorders in both male and female offenders better explain family violence than do social norms.

Prof. Dutton, not involved in the Quebec research, cited a number of studies in the United States that concluded the most common type of domestic violence was not abuse of women by men, but “bilateral” violence where both spouses hurt each other with similar severity.

September 29, 2012

Disabusing Canadians about mercantilism, one tweet at a time

Filed under: Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

Stephen F. Gordon is waging a lonely campaign to persuade Canadians that free trade is better than the managed, mercantilist “free trade” most of our governments have wanted since the NAFTA negotiations:

CN experiments with natural gas for its locomotives

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Canadian National Railways is running a limited experiment with a pair of retro-fitted diesel locomotives converted to running on natural gas:

Canadian National Railway is exploring whether its feasible to use cheap and relatively clean natural gas to power its trains instead of diesel.

CN has retrofitted two of its existing diesel-fired locomotives to run mainly on natural gas. It’s testing the locomotives along the 480-kilometre stretch between Edmonton, a key energy processing and pipeline hub, and the oilsands epicentre of Fort McMurray, Alta.

Longer term, CN and three other partners are looking at developing an all-new natural gas locomotive engine as well as a specialized tank car to carry the fuel.

September 23, 2012

Plagiarism in the Globe and Mail

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Writing at Maclean’s, Colby Cosh outlines the case against Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente and the Globe‘s public editor Sylvia Stead:

Journalistic plagiarism is ordinarily regarded as what a lawyer would call a strict-liability offence. It may not be deserving of a career death penalty in any particular case, but the evidence of plagiarism usually suffices to establish the crime. Stead’s procedure as a public editor appears to involve looking into the soul of the accused and searching therein for gremlins. Does she, one wonders, believe in the objective existence of plagiarism at all? Again, she does not use the term, and she will not believe that Wente had heard even a rumour, even a whisper, of Gardner’s prior work for the Citizen.

Well, it is not likely there will ever be a case in which Stead is presented with close-up video footage of Wente using her mouse to highlight someone else’s words and pressing Control-C and Control-V. That is why the strict-liability standard is usual. If Stead will not apply it — if she is willing to accept any denial from a fellow Globe lifer, however preposterous — then how can she ever, as an impartial judge of journalism ethics, deliver a conviction? Can it be that the whole point is to have the appearance of accountability without the actual possibility of it?

Update, 24 September: Chris Selley in the National Post:

I think I’ve narrowed down my top two discreditable aspects, though: One, Stead’s reference to the fact that Wente “writes three times a week,” which could only pertain to a defence of overwork; and two, this astonishing sentence: “There appears to be some truth to the concerns but not on every count.”

Here’s the thing. I have some experience cornering plagiarists, and these are two of their standard defences: “Most of the allegations aren’t that bad,” which of course says nothing about the worst of them; and “I’m so busy,” which isn’t a defence at all but rather an appeal for clemency. And yet here is Sylvia Stead, Public Editor of The Globe and Mail, effectively raising these arguments on Wente’s behalf. This isn’t public editing; it’s public relations, and inept public relations at that.

Canada is open for (shady) business

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

The Economist looks at the relative level of difficulty in setting up a shell corporation in various jurisdictions and how easy it is to create an untraceable shell:

Shell companies — which exist on paper only, with no real employees or offices — have legitimate uses. But the untraceable shell also happens to be the vehicle of choice for money launderers, bribe givers and takers, sanctions busters, tax evaders and financiers of terrorism. The trail has gone cold in many a criminal probe because law enforcers were unable to pierce a shell’s corporate veil.

The international standard governing shells, set by the inter-governmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF), is clear-cut. It says countries should take all necessary measures to prevent their misuse, such as ensuring that accurate information on the real (or “beneficial”) owner is available to “competent authorities”. More than 180 countries have pledged to follow it. A study* scrutinises the level of compliance worldwide. The results are depressing.

Posing as consultants, the authors asked 3,700 incorporation agents in 182 countries to form companies for them. Overall, 48% of the agents who replied failed to ask for proper identification; almost half of these did not want any documents at all. Contrary to conventional wisdom, providers in tax havens, such as Jersey and the Cayman Islands, were much more likely to comply with the standards than those from the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. Even poor countries had a better compliance rate, suggesting the problem in the rich world is not cost but unwillingness to follow the rules (see chart). Only ten out of 1,722 providers in America required notarised documents in line with the FATF standard.

September 22, 2012

“I can no longer shock [conservatives] when I tell them I’m gay – but I can shock gay people when I tell them I’m Conservative”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

Of all the political changes you might have expected to see in Canada, having Stephen Harper’s Conservatives become pro-LGBT must be one of the least likely:

A mere seven years ago, the Tories were famously the opponents of same sex marriage. Now, the Harper Conservatives freely push gay rights abroad and even host an annual gathering of gay Tories. While they remain the favourite punching bag for Canadian LGBT activists, have the Harper Tories become unlikely warriors for gay rights?

“I can no longer shock people in the conservative movement when I tell them I’m gay – but I can shock gay people when I tell them I’m Conservative,” said Fred Litwin, and former vice-president of the Ottawa Centre Conservatives.

In June, Mr. Litwin was one of the organizers of the Fabulous Blue Tent Party, a gathering of approximately 800 gay Conservatives at Ottawa’s Westin Hotel that went until 3 a.m.

[. . .]

“It’s no secret that the Conservative Party hasn’t always been the biggest champion of gay rights, but public pressure, and quite frankly, society evolving has changed their views,” said Jamie Ellerton, an openly gay former staffer for Mr. Kenney.

“The Conservative Party, like the rest of society, has moved to be more supportive of gay rights in recent years, and I see that trend continuing,” he said.

[. . .]

After the 2011 suicide of gay Ottawa teen Jamie Hubley, Mr. Baird told the House that homophobia has no place in Canadian schools, and then appeared with other Tory MPs in a video for the “It Gets Better Project,” an online campaign looking to curb the disproportionately high suicide rates among LGBT youth.

In June, members of the Tory caucus even came to the rescue of a transgendered rights bill put forward by NDP MP Randall Garrison. Promising to protect transgender people under the Canadian Human Rights Act and make anti-transgender violence a hate crime, the bill passed second reading thanks to the support of 15 Conservative MPs, including Jim Flaherty and Lisa Raitt.

The “joy” of data-capped, throttled internet access

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Welcome to Canada:

Blogger Stephanie Morrow has complained about data caps in Canada for a while now. The details of her situation show just how hard it can be to get faster internet even if you are willing to pay for it:

    My monthly data cap at the moment is 80 gigs. I pay just over $100 CA for 80 gigs a month, and $2 CA per gig over my cap. Understandably, 80 gigs is not that much, especially if you play multiple games or download a lot of games on Steam, watch Netflix, have a PlayStation 3, Xbox, 3DS, iPad or iPhone like we do. Sadly, there are not a lot of other options. We have two major ISP companies in the city that work this way (there’s no such thing as unlimited here in Canada from these two ISPs), and then there are a handful of smaller ISPs that do offer unlimited but at a greatly reduced speed.

    So, I had to make the sacrifice. Did I want an unlimited cap when I’d barely able to download anything because it would take weeks and weeks, or did I want a cap and be able to download at the speed of light? The cap is a harsh mistress, not to mention that everything peer-to-peer gets throttled. That means no free-to-play games for me because they typically download via a peer-to-peer method that gets throttled. I was unable to do my job while using internet from Rogers, one of the major companies here. I had no choice but to switch to a smaller company or give up my job. I wrote to the companies about this situation but didn’t hear anything back.

That’s a pretty amazing story. I remember the speeds I got when I used another cable company, and I remember just how bad it felt to have to set a game to download overnight. Stephanie goes on to update the situation on her Google + blog, noting that the company she is with is one of the worst throttlers in the country. She quotes TechVibes:

    In 2010, Shaw throttled 14% of users and Bell throttled 16% of users. Rogers? The Toronto-based telco throttled a startling 78% of users, and this number has surpassed 90% during some quarters since 2008.

Again, it can be hard for many of us to imagine having such a limited connection, but I hear from players all the time who have such issues. Is internet access a human right, as declared by the United Nations? Do players have a right to the internet, even if they are using the connection mainly for gaming? I’d have to say yes simply because there are so many common advantages that come with internet access, access that provides information not only about one’s social network but local weather problems, health issues… the list goes on and on. The internet is now so much a part of our lives that we forget just how much we need it.

It’s a very rare month that I don’t get a bandwidth warning from Rogers…

September 21, 2012

Rick Mercer’s first rant

Filed under: Cancon, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:15

No, not his own … the first one he remembers:

One of my earliest life-defining memories as a kid was being dragged against my will to the bank because Mom had a meeting.

I can remember sitting in a chair next to my mother while she had an excruciatingly dull conversation with a banker. I remember wondering what I had done to be forced to sit through this and if it were actually possible to die from boredom. And then everything changed. I will never forget the moment. The banker leaned forward and said, “Now Mrs. Mercer, do you have your husband’s permission to do this? Perhaps we should give him a call.”

From my point of view the day just got a whole lot better; for the man behind the desk the opposite was true. He had no idea what he had done. He had unleashed a hell storm that he had absolutely no chance of surviving. The poor, hapless man.

To say the oxygen was immediately sucked out of the room would be an exaggeration. To say that the blistering rant my mother delivered to the dumb creature made his ears bleed would not be. Needless to say very soon we were no longer in a cubicle but in a much nicer office upstairs, with a different banker who was doing everything he could to stop my mother from closing every account and going across the street. The dude who suggested Mom get her husband’s permission to open a chequing account was sent to “get the lad a fudge stick.”

Go Mom!

Everyone should rant. Ranting not only makes you feel better but occasionally, as my mother proved to me many times, you might get results—justice, satisfaction or a fudge stick.

September 20, 2012

Of course they’d say that…

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

NBC News reported that the US State Department has “No secret plan to invade Canada”. But they’d say that even if they did have such a plan (and let’s be honest, they must have thought about it, especially during the Trudeau years):

The U.S. and Mexico are not secretly planning to invade Canada, a State Department spokeswoman confirmed to laughter during a daily press briefing.

Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland was taking questions from journalists about its activities Tuesday, which included a meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mexico Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa.

She was asked about “a signing ceremony” with Espinosa — what was being signed and why was the ceremony not open to the press.

“I think it’s an update on Merida, but I will get that for you,” Nuland reported, referring to the Merida Initiative to fight organized crime.

The journalist asked, “This isn’t some secret thing … to invade Canada or something like that?”

Amid laughter, Nuland replied: “No, no, no. It’s not anything classified.”

It’s also one of the things that military staff do: prepare plans for all kinds of potential conflicts. Canada had a plan to invade the United States, for example.

Update, 22 September: For your further reading pleasure, why not go through the actual 1935 invasion plan document?

Rewriting a crucial moment in WW2: 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade on D+1

Filed under: Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

If you’re interested in the Canadian part of the D-Day landings and the days that followed, you’ll probably want to visit the Canadian Military History site:

Marc Milner’s Chapter, “No Ambush, No Defeat: The Advance of the Vanguard of the 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade, 7 June 1944″ in Canada and the Second World War: Essays in Honour of Terry Copp rewrites the history of 9 Brigade on D-Day+1. The defeat of 9 Brigade has always been used a prime example of the flawed nature of Allied leadership and combat capability and proof of the superior fighting skill of German forces. Milner challenges this assessment, arguing “the vanguard of 9 Brigade fought an enemy at least three times its size to a standstill, and did so largely without the crucial component of Anglo-Canadian doctrine: artillery support … in the process 9 Brigade met and defeated a portion of the panzer forces that the 3rd Canadian Division had been tasked with destroying. So maybe 9 Brigade did all right on D+1 after all.”

The revised chapter to the book has been made available as a freely downloadable PDF.

September 18, 2012

Canada ranks fifth in the world for economic freedom

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Economics, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

The annual Fraser Institute report on world economic freedom may confirm what a lot of Canadians have been noticing: we’re now much more free than our American friends, at least by the measurements tracked in this series of rankings (PDF):

  • In the chain-linked index, average economic freedom rose from 5.30 (out of 10) in
    1980 to 6.88 in 2007. It then fell for two consecutive years, resulting in a score of
    6.79 in 2009 but has risen slightly to 6.83 in 2010, the most recent year available.
    It appears that responses to the economic crisis have reduced economic freedom
    in the short term and perhaps prosperity over the long term, but the upward
    movement this year is encouraging.
  • In this year’s index, Hong Kong retains the highest rating for economic freedom,
    8.90 out of 10. The other top 10 nations are: Singapore, 8.69; New Zealand, 8.36;
    Switzerland, 8.24; Australia, 7.97; Canada, 7.97; Bahrain, 7.94; Mauritius, 7.90;
    Finland, 7.88; and Chile, 7.84.
  • The rankings (and scores) of other large economies in this year’s index are the United
    Kingdom, 12th (7.75); the United States, 18th (7.69); Japan, 20th (7.64); Germany,
    31st (7.52); France, 47th (7.32); Italy, 83rd (6.77); Mexico, 91st, (6.66); Russia, 95th
    (6.56); Brazil, 105th (6.37); China, 107th (6.35); and India, 111th (6.26).
  • The scores of the bottom ten nations in this year’s index are: Venezuela, 4.07;
    Myanmar, 4.29; Zimbabwe, 4.35; Republic of the Congo, 4.86; Angola, 5.12;
    Democratic Republic of the Congo, 5.18; Guinea-Bissau, 5.23; Algeria, 5.34; Chad,
    5.41; and, tied for 10th worst, Mozambique and Burundi, 5.45.
  • The United States, long considered the standard bearer for economic freedom
    among large industrial nations, has experienced a substantial decline in economic
    freedom during the past decade. From 1980 to 2000, the United States was generally
    rated the third freest economy in the world, ranking behind only Hong Kong and
    Singapore. After increasing steadily during the period from 1980 to 2000, the chainlinked
    EFW rating of the United States fell from 8.65 in 2000 to 8.21 in 2005 and
    7.70 in 2010. The chain-linked ranking of the United States has fallen precipitously
    from second in 2000 to eighth in 2005 and 19th in 2010 (unadjusted ranking of 18th).

September 17, 2012

The chilling of free speech: corporate defamation suits

Filed under: Australia, Business, Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:07

An interesting article in the Toronto Star looks at the idea of reducing the ability of corporations to launch SLAPP lawsuits against private citizens:

Fed up with suits like this (sometimes called Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPPs), Australia changed its laws to prevent most corporations from being able to sue for defamation. Canada’s provinces should do the same.

Canada is no stranger to SLAPPs. For example, when Mark Prince created a website inviting people to describe their customer service experiences with Future Shop, he was threatened with a defamation suit. On the advice of a lawyer, Prince shut the site down. It wasn’t that what he’d done was necessarily defamation, but it would simply have cost too much to defend himself.

Cases like this highlight the fact that defamation is easy to allege and hard to defend. Those who claim to have been defamed need only prove that the defendant published something about them to at least one other person, and that a reasonable person would think less of them as a result. Plaintiffs do not have to prove they suffered any actual loss to their reputation, or that the statement was false. Instead much of the burden falls to defendants to prove a defence, such as that the statement was true.

As a result, most people will retract or apologize, even if a statement is true, rather than spend a small fortune defending their right to say it. This chilling effect doesn’t only affect individuals; the news media’s publishing decisions are also influenced by defamation law.

H/T to Bob Tarantino for the link:

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