Quotulatiousness

June 3, 2010

US & Canadian funding for War of 1812 bicentennial events

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:33

Colby Cosh floats the notion that one of the reasons for the huge disparity in funding for 1812 bicentennial events between the Canadian and American governments is “Maybe they’re still mad they lost”.

In the eyes of the world, the War of 1812 may always appear insignificant against its Napoleonic backdrop. But it did decide the destiny of a continent, persuading Empire and Union that it was better to have trade crossing the border than troops.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in Niagara Falls, Ont., on May 21, opening a new federally funded expansion to the city’s History Museum, which stands on the site of the ferocious July 1814 Battle of Lundy’s Lane. The federal and provincial governments are each giving the museum up to $3.2 million; for the feds, the money is part of a Throne Speech promise to commemorate the bicentennial of the war, “an event that was key to shaping our identity as Canadians and ultimately our existence as a country.”

Another $9 million in 50-50 federal-provincial cash is going to three Niagara Parks Commission sites: Old Fort Erie, McFarland House, and the Laura Secord Homestead. Ottawa has also set aside $12 million for improvements to 1812-related National Historic Sites along the frontier, including Gen. Brock’s monument at Queenston Heights. And Toronto is putting at least $5 million into a new visitors’ centre at Fort York.

But the only corresponding public funding on the other side of the border, as noted by the Buffalo News in April, has been a measly US$5,000 donation from the Niagara County legislature. Why isn’t Uncle Sam pulling his weight?

It’s more likely that the various levels of government are afraid of being seen to spend money on frivolous activities.

June 2, 2010

New copyright bill introduced

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:21

It’s not yet online, so I haven’t read it myself (and, not being a lawyer, it might not be a good use of my time). Michael Geist has, however, and provides a useful summary of the good and the bad:

The bill contains some important extensions of fair dealing, including new exceptions for parody, satire, and (most notably) education. It also contains more sensible time shifting and format shifting provisions that still feature restrictions (they do not apply where there is a digital lock) but are more technology neutral than the C-61 model. There is also a “YouTube exception” that grants Canadians the right to create remixed user generated content for non-commercial purposes under certain circumstances. While still not as good as a flexible fair dealing provision, the compromise is a pretty good one. Throw in notice-and-notice for Internet providers, backup copying, and some important changes to the statutory damages regime for non-commercial infringement and there are some provisions worth fighting to keep.

Yet all the attempts at balance come with a giant caveat that has huge implications for millions of Canadians. The foundational principle of the new bill remains that anytime a digital lock is used — whether on books, movies, music, or electronic devices — the lock trumps virtually all other rights. In other words, in the battle between two sets of property rights — those of the intellectual property rights holder and those of the consumer who has purchased the tangible or intangible property — the IP rights holder always wins. This represents market intervention for a particular business model by a government supposedly committed to the free market and it means that the existing fair dealing rights (including research, private study, news reporting, criticism, and review) and the proposed new rights (parody, satire, education, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies) all cease to function effectively so long as the rights holder places a digital lock on their content or device.

It’s not quite the total surrender to the entertainment rights holders that many feared, but it’s certainly not the best deal for consumers. Bottom line:

For the glass half-full, the compromise positions on fair dealing, the new exceptions, and statutory damages are not bad — not perfect — but better than C-61. For the glass half-empty, the digital lock provisions are almost identical to C-61 and stand as among the most anti-consumer copyright provisions in Canadian history. Not only are they worse than the U.S. DMCA, but they undermine much of the positive change found in the rest of the bill. In the days and weeks ahead, Canadians must speak out to ensure that the compromise positions found in C-32 remain intact and that the digital lock provisions move from the no-compromise category to the compromise one.

June 1, 2010

Another local outbreak of counterfeit bills in Toronto

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:08

I was just down in the convenience store in my clients’ office building in downtown Toronto and heard from the store owner that there are lots of counterfeit bills appearing today. She showed me an example $10 bill, which looked fine except it was missing the metallic strip on the left side of the bill.

Here’s a guide to recognizing the differences between real and counterfeit Canadian bills from the Bank of Canada:

QotD: The Pascal’s Wager of Economics

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:33

[S]timulus spending is the Pascal’s Wager of economics. Seventeenth century philosopher Blaise Pascal couldn’t prove God existed, but figured he might as well be devout since, if there is a God, he’s saved from damnation. If there wasn’t, well, no harm in trying. Politicians see stimulus spending the same way. They can’t prove it works, but if they sit on their hands during a downturn, they know they’ll be blamed for inaction should things turn worse. If and when the economy recovers, as it has here, the government’s happy to take credit. And if more misery comes? They can at least claim to have staved off larger calamity — which is how it’s gone in the U.S., where they’re now spending their third stimulus package in two years.

Politicians are only acting rationally. Last year, they were convinced they faced another Great Depression. [. . .]

Get used to this. Since the narrative that stimulus spending pulled us back from the abyss works for Ottawa, it virtually guarantees that, when dark economic clouds are again sighted from Parliament Hill, we’ll see this routine recur: Dire recession warnings from politicians, followed by stimulus as insurance to cover political hides from any economic blame. As long as future taxpayers get the bill, via future debt payments, it’s as risk-free a gambit as Pascal’s: The latest stimulus added tens of billions in national red ink with little political distress for the Tories.

Kevin Libin, “The Stimulus Bluff: There’s Mounting Evidence That Government Spending Has Had No Impact On The Economic Recovery. Too Bad Politicians Aren’t Listening”, National Post, 2010-06-01

This is a solution in search of a problem

Filed under: Cancon, Soccer — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

The wise heads at the Gloucester Dragons Recreational Soccer league have decided to stamp out all the evils of competitive soccer once and for all:

In yet another nod to the protection of fledgling self-esteem, an Ottawa children’s soccer league has introduced a rule that says any team that wins a game by more than five points will lose by default.

The Gloucester Dragons Recreational Soccer league’s newly implemented edict is intended to dissuade a runaway game in favour of sportsmanship. The rule replaces its five-point mercy regulation, whereby any points scored beyond a five-point differential would not be registered.

Kevin Cappon said he first heard about the rule on May 20 — right after he had scored his team’s last allowable goal. His team then tossed the ball around for fear of losing the game.

I coached children’s soccer for more than a decade, and my teams sometimes lost by more than five goals (and occasionally won by similar margins). That’s inevitable, given that recreational soccer teams are not balanced for skill or experience, just for age level. Sometimes random selection puts together three or four very good players (who are not, for whatever reason, playing competitive soccer). Sometimes, otherwise good teams have bad games.

As a parent and as a coach, you know within the first few minutes of a game whether the kids are “in to the game” or if they’re just counting the minutes ’til the final whistle. There’s one thing worse than being beaten by an opposing team by lots of goals . . . and that’s the other team obviously, ostentatiously, not scoring the goals.

I’ve only had it happen against my team once, about six years ago. We were the last-place team in the division and we were facing one of the top teams. It was late in the season, and my kids didn’t have much hope to win, but were still trying. The other team had a higher proportion of bigger players, in addition to having a few really good players. We were down six goals by halftime, and although we were still playing hard, they were out-playing us.

If the second half had gone the same way, it would have been just a bad loss. But the other coach decided to “take it easy” on my team, and loudly and repeatedly directed his players not to score. My players were humiliated for another 30 minutes of “play”. I was surprised we didn’t have fights breaking out on the field: it was that bad.

Next week, I barely had enough players show up for the game. Ironically, even with the few we had, we won that game handily.

Update, June 11: The league has decided to modify the rule:

In response to the feedback, the league decided to get rid of the rule, which will be rescinded starting June 14.

In its place, a new mercy rule will be instituted under which a game will be called once one team has a lead of eight goals. Whichever team is ahead at that time will be credited with the win, Cale said. Teams can then play on if they wish for player development, wrote Cale.

May 28, 2010

Is it too late to cancel?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:33

Chris Selley rounds up the (almost unanimous) pundits’ opinions about the billion-dollar-boondoggle-summit-set:

Is it too late to cancel the G8 and G20 summits?

The National Post‘s Don Martin for the win: “No amount of righteous government bluster about living in post-9/11 protection paranoia, last week’s bank firebombing in Ottawa or the precedent of hosting two back-to-back summits can explain how an $18-million security tab for the G20 in Pittsburgh last September, which involved 4,000 police, must balloon to a billion dollars in Toronto requiring 10,000 cops on the ground.” Yup. It’s outrageous, and the government seems very oddly . . . proud of it. We can hardly wait for the Auditor-General and Parliamentary Budget Officer to find out just where this money went. Especially in a climate where Canadians are thoroughly cheesed off about government spending in the first place, it’s not too much of a stretch to say this is the sort of issue that might bring down a government.

“A case of bureaucracy gone wild,” is Jeffrey Simpson‘s uncontroversial verdict in The Globe and Mail, “or planning gone crazy, of fear sinking itself into every official’s and security person’s heart.” Imagine what we could have bought with that $1-billion! A bunch more Canada Research Chairs, or a whack of “clean-energy projects,” or assistance for “cultural groups” — so sleepy — or, hey, now we’re talking, a massive injection of cash for infrastructure on aboriginal reserves. Or, as Simpson says, “whatever.” Almost literally anything would be better. We’d arguably be better off flushing the $1-billion down the john.

For those of you looking forward to suffering through the event, here’s the official map of the restricted area around the Metro Convention Centre:

The best advice — unless you’re hoping for a run-in with the police — is to avoid Toronto for that weekend (plus a few days in either direction).

The copyright issue in Canadian law

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

I’ve always understood that under Canadian copyright law, as long as you bought the original CD, you were allowed to rip the tracks to play on iPods and other MP3 players. I was wrong — that sort of thing breaks Canadian copyright law:

Industry Minister Tony Clement has an admission to make: He built his impressive music library on his iPod in part by breaking Canada’s copyright law.

Mr. Clement, stickhandling the copyright file for the Conservative government along with Heritage Minister James Moore, is poised to introduce new copyright legislation within days. But until the law is updated to permit Canadians to transfer music onto MP3 players from CDs they have purchased, Mr. Clement stands on the wrong side of Canada’s copyright law.

“Well you see, you know I think I have to admit it probably runs afoul of the current law because the current law does not allow you to shift formats. So the fact of the matter is I have compact discs that I’ve transferred, I have compact discs from my children or my wife that I’ve transferred onto my iPod. None of that is allowable under the current regime,” Mr. Clement, a music buff who also legally purchases songs from iTunes to build a digital database that now stands at 10,452 songs.

If the guy in charge of the relevant ministry admits that he’s breaking the law, are the media providers going to slap him with a lawsuit, claiming their traditional multi-millions per track in damages? If not, why not?

Update: Amusingly, the first piece of spam that someone attempted to post on this article said “The compilation of all content on this site is the exclusive property of WaySpa and protected by Canadian and international copyright laws.” So I guess now we know who to blame . . .

May 27, 2010

The absurdity of spending $1 Billion for G20 meeting security

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:30

Hard to disagree with anything Rex Murphy says here:

Summits are useless, expensive and potentially dangerous anachronisms.

Let’s take the G20 summit, which will be held June 26-27 in Toronto. No one from the general public will be meeting with the world leaders — summits are not for mingling. So why are the leaders gathering in the middle of Canada’s most populous city when the very idea of interacting with any of the city’s population is absolutely impossible?

Once inside the summit venue the leaders — and their insanely bloated retinues — will be almost antiseptically sealed off from every other bit of Toronto. It’s all fortified meeting rooms and security-proofed hotels for them. Effectively, they will come to Toronto, stay behind a shield of impassable security and talk to leaders they’ve already met. It makes zero sense.

If you’re of a Toronto-centric, anti-Stephen Harper mindset (that would be most Toronto voters), you might attribute it to Harper recreating the famous pacification policy of Henry II: imposing the costs of supporting the royal court by visiting the powerful nobles (that is, the victim can’t refuse the honour of hosting the King, and then has no money or time to plot or scheme against same).

Update: Kelly McParland makes another good point:

Hard as it is to fathom, the Conservatives appear to have successfully created a bigger waste of money than the Liberal gun registry. It took a long time — they’ve had 15 years to study how the Liberals went about wasting so much money on an agency that costs a lot and doesn’t work — but they’ve managed.

In doing so, they’ve disqualified themselves from ever complaining again about money-wasting Liberal schemes, or the gun registry itself for that matter. If Tories can blow a billion forcing everyone in Toronto to find somewhere else to spend the weekend of June 26-27, Liberals can force farmers to get shotgun licences.

Canada’s positive experience of US Prohibition

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

I knew that individual Canadians did well out of supplying booze to thirsty Americans during the period of Prohibition, but I didn’t realize how well:

. . . Prohibition — perhaps the maddest of mad American dreams [NR: in a dead heat with the current War on Drugs, I think] — did pretty well by our nation from 1920 to 1933. As American writer Daniel Okrent points out in his fine social history of the era, Last Call, the rivers of Canadian booze that flowed south enriched not only the Bronfman liquor empire, but our federal government. Canadians did make and smuggle illegal liquor, evading both Canadian taxes and American law, but we also made millions of litres of the legal, taxed stuff, the ultimate destination of which was of no concern to Ottawa. The amount of alcohol subject to excise tax — most of which went south one way or another — went from 36,000 litres in 1920 to five million 10 years later, and the excise tax on it rose to a fifth of federal revenue, twice as much as income tax.

Few in Canada had the slightest inclination to aid the American government in cracking down on alcohol use. When a U.S. Coast Guard cutter in pursuit of a Lake Erie rum-runner ran aground near Port Colborne, Ont., locals looted the vessel, then filled its engines with sand. About the only Canadians Okrent could unearth who thought the Dominion should help Uncle Sam seal his border were those making a fortune selling alcohol to American visitors. One way or another, most Canadians agreed with the smug satisfaction of CNR president Sir Henry Thornton, whose railway was growing fat off liquor tourism: “The dryer the U.S. is,” opined Sir Henry, “the better it will be for us.”

If there was an upside to what was known — at first, without a trace of irony — as “The Noble Experiment” in the U.S. itself, Okrent is hard-pressed to find it. America had always been awash in alcohol. (Johnny Appleseed’s fruit was inedible, but Americans still embraced his trees — virtually every homestead kept a barrel of hard cider by the door for visitors.) During the sodden 19th century, adult Americans downed 27 litres of pure alcohol each annually. That kind of demand wasn’t going to disappear no matter what the law said.

And yet the lesson has been forgotten. When drug prohibition finally comes to an end, historians will have a field day drawing the obvious comparison between the War on Drugs and the “Noble Experiment”. The theses practically write themselves . . .

QotD: This isn’t what we mean by “the invisible hand”

Filed under: Cancon, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Another Example of Your LCBO Hard at Work, Screwing You . . . If you’re feeling a pained sensation in your rear end, like a sandpaper wrapped glove entering your rectum, don’t worry fellow wine drinkers, that’s just the hand of the LCBO doing what they do best — sticking it to you. The LCBO has decided to take advantage of yet another potential money saving opportunity and has turned it into a money grab at your wallet. A recent article in the Toronto Star (“HST will lower tax on booze, but the price is going up ” – May 13, 2010) uncovered that the LCBO, instead of passing the HST savings on to you, which would have lowered the tax on booze from 12% to 8%, has decided to raise the price all in the name of “social responsibility”. Oh happy day, thank you LCBO for keeping me on the straight and narrow while lighting my pockets and lining yours in the process. Oh thank you — thank you.

Michael Pinkus, Ontario Wine Review, 2010-05-27

May 26, 2010

The pandemic juggernaut of doom . . . that failed to materialize

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:07

Lorne Gunter has a good wrap-up of the bone-headed approach of public health officals in Canada to the Swine H1N1 flu “pandemic”:

Good on ordinary Torontonians. Despite all the H1N1/swine flu hype this past winter, just 28.2% of that city’s residents bothered to get vaccinated against the “pandemic;” that’s less than the 35% who usually get shots each year against the seasonal flu.

Even Toronto health care workers couldn’t be stampeded into getting the shots. Only 60% of them bothered.

[. . .]

Even from the start, the World Health Organization and other experts where told this strain of flu was weak and easily defeated. Infection rates never came remotely close to forecasts and death tolls were thankfully much, much lower than for typical seasonal infections.

The trouble, I think, was that so many public health officials have predicted so many pandemics for so long — SARS, bird flu, swine flu — that they simply got caught up in their own warnings and projections. They wouldn’t listen to contrary evidence.

The relevant public health authorities would have served the public interest (and their own credibility for the future) if they’d been much more forthcoming as the early stages of the pandemic showed H1N1 not to be the second coming of the Black Death. Instead, they doubled-down and raised the propaganda bar even higher.

October 27, 2009: Given that regular seasonal flu causes thousands of deaths annually, you’d think it would be good statistical discipline to count the cases of H1N1 separately, both the gauge the severity of the disease and to chart the effectiveness of the vaccination program. Lumping seasonal flu and “flu-like symptoms” together with H1N1 seems a big step backward from normal public health practice.

This would have been a good opportunity for de-escalating the panic mongering (and perhaps even attempting to rein-in the media, who were equally to blame for the tone of the information getting to the public). They chose, instead, to actively hide the fact that H1N1 cases were running below the level of ordinary seasonal flu cases (total H1N1 deaths: approximately 18,000 — typical annual death toll from seasonal flu: 250,000-500,000).

The biggest problem isn’t that they over-reacted this time, it’s that it has reduced their credibility the next time they start issuing health warnings. And that’s a bad thing. Unless they pull the same stunt next time, too. In which case, we may start hearing talk about setting up competing organizations to do the job the current entities appear to have given up on.

More on the Michael Bryant case

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:17

It’s rather surprising how strongly this Globe and Mail editorial expresses the paper’s approval of the decision not to press charges against former Ontario attorney-general Michael Bryant:

Everyone deserves justice, even a former Ontario attorney-general driving an expensive car who finds himself in an altercation with a cyclist in which the cyclist is killed. Irrespective of whatever wealth, power or connections Michael Bryant may have, he was an Everyman. Anyone might find himself in his place one day, reacting in fear and panic to a wild, unexpected aggressor, and subject afterward to police charges and condemnation by the community. When criminal charges were dropped against him yesterday, it was a good day for justice.

Much of what was publicly believed about Michael Bryant’s fatal encounter on Aug. 31, 2009, with Darcy Sheppard turns out to have been false. He did not swerve across a street and ram Mr. Sheppard into a light post or tree or mailbox. He was not speeding along at 60 to 100 kilometres an hour.

Nor were any of the terrible events that night emblematic of the problems that car drivers and cyclists have sharing the road. Mr. Sheppard was simply a man out of control. Given that he paid for his actions with his life, it may seem an unnecessary further blow that he now be publicly judged. But it is necessary, because another man, Michael Bryant, was facing up to life in prison if convicted of criminal negligence causing death. He, not Mr. Sheppard, had the power of the state lined up against him. And everything that happened proceeded inexorably as a result of Mr. Sheppard’s own actions.

Other than the initial flurry of interest in the case immediately following the incident, I didn’t follow the details. This is an excellent example of media coverage severely biased against the defendant: what little I thought I knew about the case made it seem to be an open-and-shut case of vehicular manslaughter. As the Globe editorial points out, very little of what I “knew” about the case (from the media) turns out to have been true.

May 25, 2010

Charges against Michael Bryant unexpectedly dropped

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Just in from National Post:

All criminal charges have been withdrawn against former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant.

Special prosecutor Richard Peck made the surprise announcement in a Toronto courtroom Tuesday morning.

Mr. Bryant was charged after an altercation with a cyclist in downtown Toronto last summer; the cyclist, Darcy Allan Sheppard, died in hospital afterwards.

If the speculation went wild after a former backbench federal Conservative MP got off with a (relative) slap on the wrist, it’ll pale in comparison to the outrage this development is likely to provoke.

Initial discussion of the incident here and here.

May 24, 2010

Why the Canadian political sphere lacks zest

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:33

It’s a fundamental issue that prevents any form of excitement from being discussed, or acted upon:

In Britain, even post-Blair, many of the best and brightest still go into politics. Until the expenses scandal, there was something of a cache to being an MP, something which will probably return in time. The typical Canadian Cabinet is, by comparison, made of poorer quality timbers. The average minister of the crown, here in the Elder Dominion, might make it as a parliamentary secretary back in the Mother Country. Our best and brightest go into business, science and down South. In Canada, those who can’t do, teach, those who can’t teach, teach gym, and those who fail at that run for elected office. There are exceptions. Very few.

The other reason British parties are, relatively, more principled than their Canadian derivatives is national unity. Until about the mid-1990s, no one seriously talked about the break up of the United Kingdom. Even the bleeding ulcer of Ulster was unlikely to be resolved by uniting North and South. This is not the case in Canada. On pretty much every major national issue of the last century and a half — Catholic Schools, prohibition, conscription, foreign policy, Medicare, Afghanistan — English speaking Canada leans one way, and French Canada the other. Raise controversial issues and you might start reminding the Solitudes how much they dislike each other. Thus our national politics has the colour, consistency and firmness of oatmeal. It’s why Mackenzie King, the Great Equivocator, was our longest serving Prime Minister.

May 23, 2010

Jinxed train? Or jinxed by-standers?

Filed under: Cancon, Railways, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 21:41

Amtrak train #63 claimed two lives in separate incidents yesterday:

The Amtrak train struck two people within a space of roughly nine hours, including a man in Toronto, who was killed on Saturday.

Police say a man was walking on the tracks in Toronto, near Lake Shore Boulevard and Dunn Avenue, when he was hit and killed in the early morning.

[. . .]

About nine hours earlier, as the train made its way from New York City to Toronto, it had struck a woman on the Niagara Bridge in Buffalo. She also died, Ms. Connell said, but officials were still trying to determine the cause of death.

Not to be too snarky, but being hit by a train generally provides sufficient kinetic energy to kill people unfortunate enough to be in the way . . .

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