Quotulatiousness

July 29, 2010

BC government finds an issue to distract the media

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Adrian MacNair linked to this Vancouver Sun article, saying “”B.C. halts penis-arousal test for youth sex offenders” Say whaaaaaaatttt?”

A moratorium has been placed on tests done on B.C. youth sex offenders measuring their penis arousal in response to sexual stimuli after the province’s top child advocate launched an immediate investigation Wednesday.

The device in question is called a “penile plethysmograph” — or PPG. In a lab setting, it is attached to male genitals so technicians can measure changes in “penile tumescence” — essentially erections that reflect the state of arousal in subjects shown photographs of adults, children and even babies in varying states of undress while at the same time being read a story that describes coercive or forced sexual activity.

So, until it came to light, the government was showing provocative images and reading pornographic stories to teenage boys to find out if they got erections during the process? Would anyone be surprised to find that teenage boys found this whole exercise sexually arousing? Teenage boys are hard-wired to find all sorts of things sexually arousing!

The point of the test is to reportedly predict whether offenders have gained control of their deviant arousal patterns through treatment or if they have not learned how to suppress deviance and will be a strong risk for re-offending.

Again, we’re talking about teenage boys . . . I’d be more suspicious if they found that one of them was managing not to react to such stimulus!

Okay, yes, I’m unfairly stereotyping, at least to some degree. But this sort of “test” or “experiment” would be flagrantly illegal if it were being done by anyone other than a government-funded health organization, wouldn’t it?

July 27, 2010

Short form: he’s treating them like civilians

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:16

In the elevators of my clients’ office building, there are video displays with short news items, stock market performance, weather, and (of course) ads. The short form of this story was something like:

Top RCMP officers claim boss is verbally abusive, close-minded, arrogant and insulting

My immediate reaction was “so he’s acting like a cop dealing with a group of citizens?”

Four weeks in Canadian history

Filed under: Cancon, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

Scott Feschuk has been out of the country for a while. He’s delighted to find that something actually happened in Canada while he was away, and provides a useful summary for those of us not paying attention:

I’ve been away from Canada for four of the past five weeks, and it’s always fun to return and see what’s been missed. A comprehensive review:

1. The dominant domestic news story of the past month hinges on the intricacies of statistical analysis.

2. Finally demonstrating a populist touch, Michael Ignatieff has started production on his own Speed sequel: If his party’s popularity in opinion polls falls below 25 per cent, the Liberal Express explodes! (Subplot: If the bus keeps stopping for Timbits, the occupants of the Liberal Express explode!)

3. Conrad Black has apparently tunneled out of prison and escaped.

4. Upon being informed of No. 3, David Radler has soiled himself.*

* Not reported, but a safe assumption.

Don’t ever change, Canada.

July 26, 2010

McGuinty’s governing style on display again

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:05

New rules on young drivers to come into effect very soon:

Starting on Aug. 1, this coming Sunday, drivers under the age of 22 in Ontario must have a blood alcohol reading of zero, regardless of what level of licence they possess or how many years of driving experience they have. This is a major change to Ontario’s system of licensing drivers. Twenty-one-year-old drivers, who may be fully licenced and mature and experienced, will be breaking the law if they have a beer a few hours before driving to the grocery store.

And our friendly Ontario government has announced this change in the dead of summer, on a Monday before a long weekend, and given the people of Ontario exactly six days to find out they might be about to break the law. Surprise, kids! You’re a drunk driver now!

[. . .]

How many times does the McGuinty government plan on making mistakes like this this summer? First there were the maddening rule changes surrounding the G20 fence, which weren’t announced and apparently didn’t even exist at all. Then there was the eco-fee debacle, where Ontarians were hit with a tax they weren’t told was coming into effect, with predictable public outcry. But those things may pale in comparison to the completely justified outrage if this government starts suspending licences this weekend. If there is reason to think that this measure will save lives, then I’m all for it, but for heaven’s sake, you have to give people more than six days’ notice.

(Calls placed to the Ministry, and to the office of the Minister herself, were met with total confusion this morning. When asked how the rule change was enacted — through legislation that had been quietly passed, through an order-in-council or through a simple administrative amendment — a Ministry spokesperson claimed not to understand the question.)

Every time the Ontario government does something like this you have to assume either they’re afraid to take any advance heat for new laws and regulations or that they want to ambush as many unsuspecting breakers-of-new-unpublicized-rules as they possibly can. Either way, it’s no way to run a government and retain the support of the governed.

July 19, 2010

Canada well known to Afghan would-be refugees

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Economics, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

Strategy Page updates the story about the 17 Afghan military trainees who disappeared from their assigned quarters in Texas while on a language training course:

Now the air force has carefully checked their records and found that at least 46 foreign troops had walked away from their training courses in the last five years. All but two (one from Iraq, another from Djibouti) were Afghan.

These men had disappeared from a U.S. Air Force language school, where they learned enough English so they could attend U.S. military training courses. The media coverage implied that some of these guys could be terrorists, who joined the Afghan military, qualified for training in the United States, and then disappeared once you got there, so they could carry out attacks. But it appears the reason behind the disappearances was economic, rather than ideological or religious.

That does make a lot of sense, from their point of view: going from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest, the temptation to stay must be considerable. Of interest to Canadians:

After the first 17 missing Afghans was revealed, American immigration officials went looking for them. They soon reported that they had tracked down at least eleven of the missing Afghans, using just Facebook. These men had gone to Canada, using the military ID the U.S. provided them while in the United States. It’s easier to claim asylum in Canada, a fact widely known in Afghanistan (and often exploited by those leaving the country for a better life in the West.) U.S. officials believed they had located all but two or three of the missing seventeen Afghans, and expected to track down the rest soon.

In spite of the fears of pacifists in Canada, apparently our “warmongering” hasn’t seriously damaged our pre-existing reputation as a soft-touch for refugee claimants.

July 17, 2010

QotD: The census as legalized theft of time and resources

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 21:01

Those defending the Census’ mandatory long form have clothed their arguments in the public interest. We need, they argue, a detailed, fair and statistically accurate count of the population to ensure that government services and programs are effectively delivered to Canadians. Without going into how useful many of these programs really are, let’s agree that the Census provides an enormously valuable store of data. Data that is used not only by all three levels of government, but also market researchers, academics, corporations and charities.

The data gathered by the Census is a vital resource for both the public and private sector. But it is not the only valuable product or service used by governments. Governments also large use large quantities cement, asphalt, paper, sophisticated electronic equipment and the services of tens of thousands of Canadians. Yet it is expected that government pay for these products and services, from Canadians who voluntarily exchange their talents and energies.

If employees of the federal government started randomly seizing cement trucks, or conscripting people off the streets to build roads, such conduct would be rightly denounced. It would be the sort of behaviour one expects of thugs like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro, not the government of a free country like Canada. The Census, for the all the recent beating of breasts and furrowing of brows, is just another service the government needs to conduct its affairs.

A mandatory cenus is less about some hazy notion of the public interest, and more about governments, corporations, academics and other consumers of Census data getting a free ride. Rather than having to conduct their own research, and make careful adjusts to compensate for possible distortions between samples and the overall popualtion, these data consumers get the government to force ordinary Canadians to save them the bother.

Publius, “The Census: Government Information Theft”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2010-07-16

July 13, 2010

Invasion of the Giant Hogweed

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:02

As if the poison ivy, mosquito swarms, and other joys of the great outdoors weren’t enough, we’re now getting a new pest in the woods — Giant Hogweed:

A forestry official confirmed two new findings of giant hogweed last week in Renfrew County, west of Ottawa. It has previously been spotted in Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Quebec, southwestern Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. About 50 plants were spotted in Toronto’s Don Valley two weeks ago.

Contact with the weed’s clear, watery sap can be very dangerous, Jeff Muzzi, Renfrew County’s forestry manager and weed inspector.

“What it does to you is pretty ugly,” said Mr. Muzzi. “It causes blisters. Large blisters and permanent scarring. What’s left over looks like a scar from a chemical burn or fire.”

Even a tiny trace of sap applied to the eye can singe the cornea, causing temporary or permanent blindness, he added. The chemicals in the sap, furocoumarins, are carcinogenic and teratogenic, meaning they can cause cancer and birth defects.

It lives up to the “giant” moniker as well: plants can reach 5-6 metres at full growth, with stems up to 10 cm and flower heads up to 75 cm in diameter.

July 12, 2010

QotD: Silly census fuss

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

[. . .] isn’t it just the slightest bit embarrassing for a government whose leader has trashed libertarians for their ethical myopia to have minions and media partisans present a libertarian pretext for an action that is not literally among the first 200 policy changes that would be implemented by an intelligent libertarian given plenary power?

Colby Cosh, “Census squabble: weak arguments shouldn’t have even worse foundations”, Maclean’s, 2010-07-12

July 10, 2010

More hidden legal changes in Ontario

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:33

Kelly McParland finds yet another sneaky change to Ontario law the government tried to slip in un-noticed:

Here’s a great story about the absurdity that ensues when a government tries to force-feed an impractical policy to the population for the sake of environmental posturing.

If you don’t want to read the original, here’s a capsule version:

Ontario sponsors a program to encourage small users of solar power by giving them subsidies. Except it has proved so popular, especially in rural areas, the province quietly slashed the subsidy late last Friday. (You remember Friday, right — quiet sleepy day between Canada Day and the weekend? If you really really wanted to release something at a time no one would notice, you couldn’t pick a better day. Not that the McGuinty government would deliberately try to hide what it was doing, of course. Oh no). The result is that people who bought into the program won’t get nearly the amount they expected. Now they’re upset — having discovered the ruse despite the government’s effort to hide it — and are bombarding MPPs with complaints.

Great eh? That’s good old Dalton McGuinty — absolutely, totally dedicated to energy conservation and environmental improvement, as long as it’s costing someone else money and not him.

This is yet another example of how the McGuinty government loves to sneak in unpopular changes and hope nobody notices for a while. Stealth nanny state tactics? Ladies and gentlemen, I present your Ontario government.

Update, 12 February 2011: The poor folks who took up the McGuinty government’s solar power subsidy are being shafted again:

Added to McGuinty’s problems with wind are similar signs of trouble on the solar front. After strongly encouraging individual solar projects, and offering outrageously generous pricing on solar-generated power, the province unexpectedly announced last summer it was slashing the rate it would pay on some projects. On Friday, hundreds more Ontarians were told that installations they’d erected at the behest of the government can’t be connected to the provincial grid because of technical problems. Rural residents, some of whom have invested large amounts in solar generating operations, will be left high and dry.

[. . .]

Angering rural voters, and battering your credibility with the environmental crowd, aren’t great ideas if you run a government that faces an election in eight months. So it’s no wonder that Ontario’s Liberals sought to hide the bad news by releasing it when (they hoped) no one was watching. But the excitement in Egypt won’t last forever, and eventually people will notice that Ontario’s government, once again, has been forced into a humiliating retreat at considerable trouble and cost to individual Ontarians.

July 9, 2010

Poll numbers understate unhappiness with police over G20

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 18:11

Publius makes a very good point here:

The Greater Toronto Area holds a population of about 5.6 million, stretching from Burlington in the west to Oshawa in the East. The City of Toronto comprises less than half the total population, and less than one-tenth of the total land area. The summit, protests and general mayhem occurred in the downtown core, itself a small area of the City of Toronto. In the lands north of Bloor, west of Bathurst and East of the Don River, the summit meant traffic delays, not riot cops.

Travelling on the 400 series highways that weekend entailed some delays — much of the Gardiner Expressway was closed — and the most notable police presence was at highway interchanges and on / off ramps. Even for those who live in the City of Toronto itself, the vast majority saw the violence of the summit weekend on television. A large number of Torontonians had simply evacuated the City altogether, either to the suburbs to stay with relatives, or to cottage country. As a result, the images fixed in most Torontonians minds are of police cruisers burning — played again and again — and not of officers dragging middle aged men with prosthetic legs across city streets. As the stories of that weekend seep out, expect those poll numbers to change.

I was one of those who chose not to hang around in the city for the entire week leading up to the summit: I didn’t see the point in putting up with the delay and hassle. I still think it was a remarkably stupid idea to hold the G20 meetings in downtown Toronto, and that the police were handed a duff hand to play. But even given that, the police played their hand very badly.

There may or may not be a serious inquiry into the affair, but the police lost a lot of support between Friday night and Saturday night: letting the geeky nihilists get away with dramatic street theatre on national TV, then turning around and arresting innocent bystanders. It took remarkable effort to squander public support, but the police or the politicians directing the police managed to do it. Bureaucratic bipolar disorder isn’t pretty.

July 6, 2010

The latest set of disruptions to Toronto traffic

Filed under: Cancon, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

Toronto’s traffic, recently noted as being the 2nd worst in the developed world, has had a string of one-off events recently to slow down our already sclerotic commutes:

Toronto, are you crying uncle yet?

First, the G20 Summit ground the downtown core to a halt, landing hundreds of people in jail and crippling all kinds of business.

And then came the Queen, laden with her dainty hats, her fancy BlackBerry, her 3D glasses and her entourage, stopping traffic wherever she goes. She brought with her the heat, the hot, hot heat so hot that even the sidewalks are sweating. And then a power outage plunged our beleaguered city into darkness.

And now: Bring on the Shriners.

Both the Queen and the Shriners will converge on Queen’s Park today, shutting down traffic all around the provincial legislature. More than 10,000 well-meaning men in their little red hats and teeny-weeny cars will parade down University Avenue at 1 p.m. Road closures are expected to last until 7 p.m., meaning they will still be in effect during the nightly commute.

Knowing that my usual parking lot would be inaccessible by the time I got downtown, I took the GO train in to Toronto’s Union Station. Last summer, when I took the train in, I just walked up University Avenue . . . which was swarming with Shriners today. I risked getting totally lost in the PATH underground system instead. Fortunately, I had a guide: I met my accountant walking into the Whitby GO station, so I just followed him up as far as Adelaide before venturing out into the muggy air. In the couple of blocks I walked north, I felt I was nearing the end of a marathon — I’m not a hot weather fan.

July 1, 2010

Happy Dominion Canada Day

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

It’s the 143rd anniversary of Confederation. The prime minister’s Canada Day message is here.

Oh, and remember, if you live in Ontario or British Columbia, you’ll find lots of things are more expensive now that Harmonized Sales Tax is being added to what you buy. Even if (as the Fraser Institute says) the HST is more efficient than the Provincial Sales Tax, it will still mean higher prices at the point of sale for most of us. Thank your respective provincial governments for the sneaky way it was implemented.

June 30, 2010

The CCLA weighs in

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

Clive sent me an email this morning, with a link to the preliminary report from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, saying:

The fourth paragraph of the Executive summary ends with a cautionary note about the police chasing after 100-150 protester and in the process disregarding the rights of thousands.

My thought was, what do you expect. In Ontario we let the police do this ALL the time. We encourage it. We even applaud it. It is called RIDE.

This is just the next logical step.

The police demonstrated a bipolar attitude to the disturbances, with the “good cop” sitting back on Saturday and letting the nihilists get away with all sorts of property damage (including three police cruisers), while the “bad cop” showed up later on, like the punchline to a Monty Python skit, to arrest the bystanders (“Society is to blame.” “Right, we’ll arrest them instead!”).

Questionable police tactics at the G20 protests

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me a link to this video, saying “My support for the police evaporates with [this] video. What the hell were the police thinking?”:

He then suggested that this is a Toronto Police Services training video:

Update: Even better than the ragged charge shown in the first video, now the police are showing off some of the “weapons” they collected during the G20, including LARP (Live Action Role Playing) gear confiscated from a gamer:

Toronto Police are on the defensive this week as they attempt to defend their heavy-handed tactics during the G20. To prove the seriousness of the threat to public security, they took police on a tour of weapons confiscated from activists.

Only there’s a problem: some of these weapons were taken from people who weren’t demonstrators. And some of them weren’t weapons — the police proudly displayed the blunt arrows and chainmail they confiscated from a live-action role-player who was taking the train to a game

If they’d found a random SCA heavy fighter to take the armour and weapons from, they might have a slightly better case: SCA heavy combat gear would be comparable to (in many cases better than) police riot gear. SCA weapons are solid rattan covered with silver duct tape to make them appear to be metal — LARP weapons are non-functional foam or other light material (similar “weapons” are called “boffers” and are used as safe toys for kids). SCA shields are fully functional as protection — LARPers generally carry lightweight shields that just look like protection but would not do much in a real confrontation.

I liked this comment to the BoingBoing post:

I remember seeing this same police press conference, only it was in Miami in 2004 during the FTAA summit. Among the items they presented as having seized from activists:

– Tire iron
– Gas can
– A map of Miami (see, they could use it to plan out their terrorist strike!)

It took me a minute to realize they had just pulled all this stuff out of the trunk of some unfortunate activists’ car, where you’d totally expect to find it.

This kind of press conference is a standard component in the “new model” of protest suppression. It gives the police the hilarious task of taking a whole bunch of mostly innocuous stuff they seized and making up stories about how it could be used to maim, kill, and generally cause mass destruction.

I mean srsly – an empty water bottle could be used to fill with gasoline and throw at cops?

Bruce Schneier would be proud.

June 29, 2010

QotD: Canada’s ongoing self-esteem binge

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Quotations, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:48

In light of Thursday’s Canada Day celebrations, pointing out that efforts to outlaw hurt feelings is now a regular part of this country’s modus operandi may make me a party-pooper. But waiting for another time won’t make the truth any easier to bear: From human rights commissions to hate crime laws to civil law suits, Canada has made an art of punishing otherwise perfectly legal behaviour simply because it happens to make someone feel bad. We’ve become a nation of petty grievance-hoarders and tip-toers terrified of offending.

The big problem with this state of affairs (besides how generally unbecoming it is)? It’s slowly making us a spiritless, brittle people. The ability to navigate the ups and downs of life — with a particular emphasis on the downs — is what fosters resilience and flexibility.

If you never have to face the consequences of getting cut from a team, or turned down for a job, or insulted by a heartless idiot, you never develop the sense of perspective (or sense of humour) that it takes to be a well-rounded and capable individual who has the confidence to handle defeat. That’s something parents have to teach their kids, and countries have to teach their citizens. Losing hurts, but you can’t expect mom and dad or a human rights commission to shield you from everything but sunshine and roses.

Marni Soupcoff, “Hockey dads need to grow up”, National Post, 2010-06-29

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