Quotulatiousness

September 26, 2023

Matt Taibbi – “Canada’s Prime Minister solidifies his status as the world’s most nauseating pseudo-intellectual”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s hard to come up with ways to justify Canada’s PM and Parliament for giving a standing ovation for a fucking Waffen SS veteran, and Matt Taibbi doesn’t even try:

Let me get this straight:

A year and a half ago, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced a Jewish member of parliament named Melissa Lantsman for standing with “people who wave swastikas“. Lantsman had criticized Trudeau for fanning “the flames of an unjustified national emergency” in response to the “Freedom Convoy” trucker protests. The “swastikas” Trudeau referenced were, as even Snopes conceded, virtually all “pictured on signs as a way of mocking and protesting government restrictions”, comme ça:

By saying Lantsman stood with “people who wave swastikas”, in other words, Trudeau really meant she was standing with “people who called me a Nazi”. He declined to apologize, which of course is his prerogative.

This week, both Trudeau and House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota are under fire after Rota invited, and Trudeau applauded, a 98-year-old former soldier from the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division named Yaroslav Hunka to attend an address by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Rota praised Hunka as a “Canadian hero” from his time fighting the Soviets in World War II when, not that it matters, they were allies to the United States and Canada. Leaving the elderly Hunka out of this for the moment, these politicians could easily have turned up the man’s blogs about joining Hitler’s army, making the applause scene at least approach the max on the cringe scale:

Amid the subsequent outcry, Trudeau squeaked out a handful of sentences that collectively gave off least a faint aroma of apology, though he personally didn’t apologize for anything, and invoked “mistakes were made” phrasing …

September 24, 2023

A sliver of hope for Indigo?

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte relays some new-ish rumours in the book business that may provide a bit of help for the struggling Indigo chain:

“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0

So what do we make of Heather Reisman’s return as CEO of the Indigo bookselling chain after her unceremonious removal from that role just two months ago?

The short answer is I have no idea, but SHuSH has never shied away from delivering irresponsible speculation on happenings at Indigo. I heard this week from a reasonably reliable source that Indigo is in discussions with Elliott Management Corp., owners of Barnes & Noble and the world’s only buyer of distressed bookselling chains.

This conflicts with some chatter I reported last spring suggesting that Elliott Management was uninterested in Indigo. If what I’m now hearing is true, it’s great news.

I have to emphasize, I have no idea. But if a deal were imminent, it would make sense to bring Heather back to see it through. Indigo wouldn’t want the bother of recruiting a new leader simply to effect the handover, and who would want the job on those terms?

And another thing …

In last week’s piece about Indigo, I noted that the company’s staff, “with exceptions, were young, inexpert, and disinterested”. Amal, clearly one of the exceptions, left an interesting comment:

    No. We became disinterested simply because a) we were all book lovers and had zero interest in selling crap and b) just like the author of this piece, head office and management were beyond dismissive of our knowledge, our book expertise, our genuine love of the written word. I worked at Chapters/Indigo starting in 2006 all the way until 2019, a couple of days a week, simply for my love of books. I am incredibly proud of my time there — especially when I was able to introduce new authors or genres to readers. My staff picks would sell out because I would hand sell them to people with my joy. It certainly wasn’t for the stellar pay or the people who treat retail employees like we are “inexpert”. Fun fact: you were asked in the job interview what your favourite books/genres were.

September 23, 2023

“Canada is, as a whole, a naive, spoiled country that stands a pretty good chance of getting punched in the face by reality”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney praises both the delivery and the content of a recent report by the Business Council of Canada urging Canadian governments to pay a lot more attention to economic security issues that seem to be almost universally neglected in favour of mediagenic gestures and battlespace prep for the next election.

But as I was reading the report, there was this nagging thought in the back of my mind. Why is the Business Council of Canada trying to impress upon the government (and the country at large) the importance of economic security? Why do we need a report from top business leaders to remind our political leadership that poor countries aren’t generally safe and peaceful ones, and that there are countries out there that would wish us harm and that we need to be on guard against? Like, shouldn’t we know that already? Because none of this stuff is revolutionary. It’s all extremely basic stuff that any mature country should just sort of intuitively grasp. Right?

And that’s when the shoulder-slumping realization lands on you like a ton of bricks. We should, but in this country, we don’t. We just don’t. Because, well ….

Uh oh.

It seems to me that a country shouldn’t need a report to impress upon key civilian leadership that economic prosperity is the cornerstone of all security, or that, on the flip side, security is a prerequisite for prosperity. Toronto is a fair bit rougher than it used to be these days — join us at our event next month! — but when I leave the house to run an errand, I’m reasonably confident I’m not going to be abducted by a band of roving pirates prowling the leafy streets of Leaside. When I head up north for the weekend, it doesn’t occur to me that there’ll be a checkpoint along the route, looking to shake me down or carry off my children into slavery. In the mornings, when I lurch out of bed with a groan that gets louder with each passing year, I expect that the light switch will indeed result in light and that the faucet in the bathroom will provide clean water. I don’t have to worry about whether the water treatment plant has been bombed or the power lines shelled.

Many of my Canadian readers may find the above absurd or, at least, a bit of hyperbole. But that’s the point. As I have written many times before, almost everything we do in this country, and almost our entire self-identity as Canadians, accepts internal security and safety from military attack as an ironclad given, just by default. That makes sense: that has been the norm for us, for a long time. It seems absurd precisely because how distant it seems from our normal.

But it isn’t the norm in any historical sense much beyond a human lifetime or two or three, even in Canada. And more to the point, as the voice-over guys in the commercials say, past performance may not be indicative of future results.

We are not owed prosperity in perpetuity. We are not guaranteed security by virtue of our niceness. These are precious things that require more than just good luck — and good luck, thank God, is something Canada still does seem to have. In addition to luck, though, we need realistic understandings of our strengths, weaknesses and the threats we face. We need political leadership that is mature and aware enough to understand the difference between political interest and national interest, and that is seized enough with these issues to devote the necessary resources to building up and preserving our security, from all reasonably foreseeable threats. That includes not just investments of money and people, but also simply intellectual bandwidth and emotional toil. We have to think, hard, about things that aren’t nice to think about, and have robust, effective institutions and a critical mass of people with the necessary combination of mindset, academic and professional training and lived experience to be effective at foreseeing, heading off and, when necessary, managing crises that threaten our safety and prosperity. We need a supportive bureaucracy that is efficient and task-focused and doesn’t get in the way of all this vital work.

Does any of this sound like Canada to you?!

Does it sound like the leader of any of our governments, or any of the people who’ll replace those leaders? Does it sound like any of our institutions except the ones specifically tasked with security and defence? You know, the ones we habitually starve so we can spend a few extra bucks and a bit more political capital on something a bit more pleasing to the average voter? Does it sound like the sort of thing smart, well-read and educated Canadians spare a single solitary moment thinking about as they go about their day to day lives?

Of course not. No one does, and our politics reflect this. These just aren’t issues of concern in Canada outside of the military, the intelligence agencies and a few fellow journalists and academics I could probably recount here in their totality by their first names.

“Even before it began, the protest was denounced as a hatefest”

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

Tasha Kheiriddin on the parents’ 1 Million March 4 Children protest against teaching LGBT issues to school children and the counter-protest by teachers, unions, and a disturbing number of sitting politicians:

Fractal Pride flags

On Wednesday, thousands of parents and supporters took to the streets across Canada for the 1 Million March 4 Children protest, chanting “leave the kids alone.” They were protesting the teaching of “gender ideology” in schools, including lessons about gender identity, transgenderism and schools’ refusal to inform parents of their children’s use of preferred pronouns.

Even before it began, the protest was denounced as a hatefest. School boards sent letters to parents decrying the event. The Ontario Federation of Labour organized counter-protests with the slogan “Trans rights are workers’ rights.” NDP leader Jagmeet Singh stood on Parliament Hill, chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, transphobia has got to go!” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted, “We strongly condemn this hate and its manifestations.”

Here’s something we can all agree on: there is no room for hate in schools. If a kid bullies another kid for any reason, including gender identity, they should be disciplined. But the counter-protestors go further: in their view, unless you actively instruct children about gender, sexuality and inclusiveness at an early age, it is you who is being hateful. There are no shades of grey: you are either a full-on supporter of drag story time or a transphobic bigot.

When it comes to gender identity, it is wrong for educators to dismiss all parental concerns as homophobia. Yes, there are some bigoted parents who teach their kids that being gay or trans is a sin. Some of them were in the crowd Wednesday.

But there are also many parents who are legitimately concerned that encouraging children to question their sexual identity at a very young age is confusing and inappropriate. We label movies PG-13 or higher when they contain sexuality and nudity. Why then introduce sexual identities such as aromantic (absence of romantic attraction) asexual (absence of sexual attraction), pansexual (attraction to any gender) or demisexual (attraction that requires an emotional bond) to grade school kids? And more importantly, why is this the purview of the school system at all?

On Twit-, er, I mean “X”, Jason James responded to a Justin Trudeau Xpost with this counterfactual:

September 22, 2023

“The Online News Act … has been an utter disaster”

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

Michael Geist on the ongoing disaster the federal government created with the Online News Act:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked this week about concerns with the implementation of Bill C-18, to which he responded that other countries are quietly backing Canada in its battle against tech companies. I posted a reality check tweet noting that Meta is not returning to news in Canada, the law’s regulation stipulating a 4% fee on revenues is not found anywhere else, and that Bill C-18 has emerged as a model for what not to do. With the House of Commons back in session, it is worth providing a more fulsome reality check on where things stand with the Online News Act. While the government is still talking tough, the law has been an utter disaster, leading to millions in lost revenues with cancelled deals, reduced traffic for Canadian media sites, declining investment in media in Canada, and few options to salvage this mess.

For those that took the summer off, Bill C-18 received royal assent in late June. Over the past three months:

1. Meta has blocked all news links in Canada and cancelled existing deals with Canadian news outlets. The blocked links covers both Canadian and foreign news in light of the broad scope of the law. While the Australian experience lasted a few days, the blocking in Canada has now gone on for weeks and there is little reason to believe that the company will reverse its position to comply with the law by simply not linking to news.

2. The government responded to the blocked news links by stopping to advertise on Facebook and Instagram and encouraging others to do the same. The boycott has had little effect as the Liberal party is still advertising on the platforms with a new round of ads this week, the Prime Minister is still posting on the platforms, and reports indicate that Facebook has not experienced a reduction in user activity. In fact, reports suggest that the experience on Facebook without news has improved. Further, a Competition Act complaint has not sparked any action.

3. Google responded to Bill C-18 by advising it too would remove news links from its services before the law takes effect in December. That position enabled it to wait for the government to release draft regulations that provide further detail on the application of the law and the standards for obtaining an exemption from the mandatory bargaining process that can lead to final offer arbitration overseen by the CRTC.

Several more items of concern at the link.

September 21, 2023

A new paper on the cancellation of the Avro Arrow in 1959

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The National Post republished a Canadian Press article about a new research paper by Alan Barnes in the Canadian Military History journal:

In the years after the Second World War, Canada developed its ability to prepare strategic intelligence assessments on defence and foreign policy, the paper notes. It would no longer have to rely entirely on assessments from the United States and Britain.

The analytic capability allowed Canada to fully participate in preparing the assessments on the Soviet threat to North America that would underpin joint Canada-U.S. planning for continental defence, Barnes notes.

“The CF-100 Canuck, a jet interceptor developed and manufactured in Canada, was just entering service, but there were already concerns that it might soon be outclassed by newer Soviet bombers operating at higher altitudes and faster speeds.”

In November 1952, the Royal Canadian Air Force called for an aircraft with a speed of Mach 2 and the ability to fly at 50,000 feet. “These demanding specifications contributed to the escalating costs and frequent delays in the CF-105 program.”

The Soviets would soon display a new long-range jet bomber, the Bison, at the 1954 May Day parade in Moscow. At an airshow the following year, a fly-past of 28 Bison seemed to indicate that the bomber had entered serial production, two years earlier than predicted, the paper says. In fact, only 18 prototype aircraft participated in the airshow, flying past several times to give the impression of larger numbers.

Even so, this display, along with the appearance of a new Soviet long-range turboprop bomber, the Tu-95 (dubbed the Bear), raised fears that the Soviet Union would soon outnumber the United States in intercontinental bombers, sparking a “Bomber Gap” controversy that figured prominently in American politics, the paper says.

[…]

A January 1958 assessment, “The Threat to North America, 1958-1967”, by Canada’s Joint Intelligence Committee, a co-ordinating body, ultimately had the greatest impact on decisions related to the Arrow, the paper says.

The assessment laid out clear judgments concerning the imminent transition from crewed bombers to ballistic missiles and described the limited size and capabilities of the Soviet bomber force, Barnes notes.

It observed that the Soviet ballistic missiles which were on the verge of being developed were likely to be markedly superior to the foreseeable defences, and concluded that missiles would progressively replace aircraft as the main threat to North America.

The assessment said this meant there would be little justification for the Soviet Union to increase the number of bombers, or to introduce new ones, after 1960.

“The (Joint Intelligence Committee)’s January 1958 assessment was correct in foreseeing Moscow’s shift from bombers to missiles over the subsequent decade,” Barnes writes.

He points out that following the Sputnik launch, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev came to see missiles as a panacea for a range of defence problems and as a cheaper alternative to conventional weapons. “With the Soviet bomber force now looking irrelevant and obsolete, it was relegated to a secondary position in Soviet military thinking.”

September 20, 2023

“Future Edward Gibbons’ [will] have no problem piecing together precisely how our society went down the toilet”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Andrew MacDougall finds something good to say about social media:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Say what you will about social media, but one unalloyed good is the future Edward Gibbons’ of this parish are going to have no problem piecing together precisely how our society went down the toilet.

Future historians will not only know what happened as we cratered, but, thanks to our ubiquitous digital sketch pads, they will have all of the horrific micro detail. They will know how many times we circled the bowl, what we were saying about circling the bowl as we were circling it and which streaks we were or weren’t arguing about as we went down. Social media is an infinite canvas home to a limitless number of voices and — while we might not be richer for it in the present — our future societal homicide detectives will be forever grateful that we left so many stains to analyze.

For example, when historians consider — as they surely will — whether the moment Canada truly began to crumble was when a WestJet cabin crew allowed Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre to grab the conch and address a planeload of (mostly) Conservative Party of Canada delegates on his way back from a successful party convention, we will have a panoply of voices to consult. From all walks of life and social stations, too. What, for example, did a famous singer like Jann Arden have to say about the whole episode?

Well, thanks to our good friend ex-Twitter we don’t have to guess; we know. And what Arden said was: “Hey @WestJet you and I will not be doing business ever again. This is so ridiculously disappointing.”

In life, I try my best not to be insensitive, but imagine having so little going on that this is considered a good use of your time? Imagine possessing such a delicate constitution that you would rather chain yourself [to] the be-vomited reclining seats of Air Canada than ever fly WestJet again. When you live in Calgary. And what has to be going on to then quote-tweet a bunch of nasty replies and joust with a network of digital cretins, as Arden went on to do. Dozens of them. Who stirs the sewage and then pins the best turds to their page?

As someone who has spent (far) too much time wasting time on platforms like ex-Twitter, I feel I speak from experience. I’ve picked a fair few fights I didn’t need to pick. Both with randoms, and rock stars. I have fed the trolls and I have done performative tweeting. And you know what I’ve learned? The only people who win are our algorithmic overlords. People like Arden are the modern-day Olds-and-Milner lab mice hammering the dopamine reward button — look at me get likes and retweets! — until they (metaphorically) die.

How the feds could lower grocery prices without browbeating CEOs

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

Jesse Kline has some advice for Prime Minister Jagmeet Singh Justin Trudeau on things his government could easily do to lower retail prices Canadians face on their trips to the grocery store:

What exactly the grocery executives are supposed to do to bring down prices that are largely out of their control is anyone’s guess. Do they decrease their profit margins even further, thereby driving independent retailers out of business and shedding jobs by increasing their reliance on automation? Do they stop selling high-priced name-brand products, thus decreasing their average prices while driving up profits through the sale of house-brand products?

If the government were serious about working with grocers, rather than casting them as villains in a piece of performative policy theatre, here are a number of policies the supermarket CEOs should propose that would have a meaningful effect on food prices throughout the country.

End supply management
Why do Canadians pay an average of $2.81 for a litre of milk — among the highest in the world — when our neighbours to the south can fill their cereal bowls for half the cost? Because a government-mandated cartel controls the production of dairy products in this country, while the state limits foreign competition through exorbitantly high tariffs on imports.

The same, of course, is true of our egg and poultry industries. Altogether, it’s estimated that supply managements adds between $426 and $697 a year to the average Canadian household’s grocery bill. It’s not a direct cause of inflation, but it’s a policy that, if done away with, could save Canadians up to $700 a year in fairly short order.

Yet not only have politicians been unwilling to address it, they have been fighting some of our closest trading partners to ensure that foreign food products don’t enter the Canadian market and drive down prices. Ditching supply management would be a no-brainer, if anyone in Ottawa was willing to use their brain.

Reduce regulations
The best way to decrease prices in any market is to foster competition. As the Competition Bureau noted in a report released in June, “Canada’s grocery industry is concentrated” and “tough to break into”. Worse still, “In recent years, industry concentration has increased”.

So why don’t more foreign discount grocery chains set up shop here? Perhaps it’s because they know our national policy encourages Canadian-owned oligopolies. While grocery retailers don’t face the same foreign-ownership restrictions as airlines or telecoms, the products they sell are heavily regulated, which acts as a barrier to bringing in cheaper goods from other countries.

Although it wasn’t the primary reason for the lack of foreign competition, the Competition Bureau did note that, “Laws requiring bilingual labels on packaged foods can be a difficult additional cost for international grocers to take on”.

Other ways the federal government could help Canadians afford their grocery bills include:

  • Jail thieves
  • Stop port strikes
  • Don’t tax beer
  • Axe the carbon tax

Don’t hold your breath for any of these ideas to be taken up by Trudeau’s Liberals.

September 17, 2023

Why Indigo’s struggles are far from over

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

Following up from last week, in this week’s SHuSH newsletter Ken Whyte explains why Indigo went in the direction it chose and why it seemed like the thing to do at that time:

“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0

Bookselling is a difficult business and it’s been especially difficult over the last twenty years. The Internet captured a lot of the used book business and shifted it online. Amazon captured a lot of the new book business and shifted it online (and bought Abebooks.com, one of the largest used book sites).

Former Indigo CEO Heather Reisman tried and failed to convince the federal government to keep Amazon south of the border back around 2002. She went so far as to sue the feds on the grounds that Amazon, as a cultural entity, was not majority-owned by Canadians and therefore operating in contravention of the Investment Canada Act. The suit went nowhere because Amazon then had no physical presence in Canada; it operated primarily through Canada Post. By the time Amazon did announce its intention to build a warehouse north of the border, early in 2010, the government had given up enforcing the Investment Canada Act. It was happy to have Amazon create new jobs.

It was when Amazon opened its Canadian warehouse that Heather began backing Indigo out of the book business. She cursed Amazon for its anticompetitive practices, not least its habit of selling books below cost to destroy competitors, and adopted the term “cultural department store” as a pivot from bookstores.

I’ve made it clear in newsletter after newsletter that I don’t like the direction Heather took Indigo but it’s only fair to look back at prevailing circumstances in 2010 and wonder if she really had a choice.

I’m sure she had stacks of research and hordes of people telling her that abandoning books was the only move. Attempting to compete with Amazon’s enormous scale and superior logistics would have struck many as a fool’s errand. Amazon would always have the largest selection, the best price, and the fastest delivery.

There was also a widespread belief that print was dead. E-books, e-readers, and tablets were the future, along with the “one very, very, very large single text“. Global e-reader sales were growing like this:

They were expected to keep growing. So were sales of e-books. In 2012, the Financial Post quoted data from Indigo predicting that e-books would capture 50 percent of the market in five years.

So, having played the Canadian Nationalist card and discovering that the government was willing to bluster but not to meaningfully act, Heather Reisman took the advice of her consultants and diversified away from books and into all the utter crap that currently befoul at least half of the retail space in every Indigo store. After all, the big box bookstores in the United States were clearly failing in the face of Amazon, with Borders filing for bankruptcy and Barnes & Noble staggering in the same direction. From 1999 to 2019, fully half of all the bookstores in the country disappeared.

The story isn’t as bleak as it looked in 2019, as Barnes & Noble is staging quite a comeback by concentrating on the book business. It’s a radical move, but Indigo could do far worse than cooking up a maple-flavoured version of the Barnes & Noble strategy. It might fail, but they’ll definitely fail if they keep on pretending to be a department gift store that also has a few books.

Why Operation Market Garden Failed and Its Devastating Consequences

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

OTD Military History
Published 5 Apr 2023

Why did Operation Market Garden fail and what were the consequences of this failure? This video covers the operation, the reasons for the failure, and its devastating aftermath. The impact Market Garden had on the Dutch during the Hunger Winter and Allied soldiers during the Battle of the Scheldt is explored.

There is footage of the 101st US Airborne, 82nd US Airborne, British 1st Airborne Division, and the troops of the British XXX Corps featured in the video.
(more…)

September 16, 2023

Is Canada knowingly running a massive educational swindle on poor Indian students?

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

If even half of what Stephen Punwasi reports here is true, then the Canadian government and higher education ministries in the provinces deserve nothing but abuse:

The thread continues:

4/ 🇨🇦, addicted to the cash, cooked up a $148m plan to replace those students with new ones—primarily in developing countries.

Permits to students from India spiked fast… strangely fast. Who are these students? Get a spoon to bite, because this is where it gets f*cked.

5/ India is a FAST growing country, forecast to have the world’s largest middle class soon. It has wealthy families, but they aren’t moving here. An Indian university study found most students looking to study in 🇨🇦 are from low-income farming regions & know little about it.

6/ What they “know” is what the recruiter told them: It’s filled with opportunity, automatic PR, guaranteed gov jobs, etc. Sometimes, the recruiters “get them in” to prestigious schools they could never actually get into. All lies—they’ll say anything for the commission.

7/ Recruiters tell these families their kid is brilliant & just in the wrong country. Find a way to pay their education, & all of the parents’ hard work pays off. Bet the farm, like good parents do. So they round up their savings (& sometimes relatives). They take out loans.

8/ Heck, some literally bet the farm. Oh, some recruiters know people that specialize in high interest loans secured by your farm? Super convenient. Oh, they have a secure stream of capital, a lot of it from investors in 🇨🇦? So lucky, what are the odds‽

9/ So the kids get to 🇨🇦 & don’t arrive at UBC or U of T, but a private career college in a strip mall. Sometimes not even the school they applied to. Some schools popped up almost overnight, others don’t have classes some semesters, & some have no domestic students.

10/ Some are run by swell folks who are strangely close with alleged organized crime groups. Opportunity is everywhere! Anyway, once you’re registered—you can start vouching for visas, there’s no limit. 🇨🇦 wanted this, after all.

11/ So they:
– spent $50k to go to a diploma mill;
– don’t speak english, because of testing fraud;
– have no money;
– often rent mattresses, taking 8/hr shifts w/other students;
– if this doesn’t work, their parents lose everything

A TO funeral home sends 5 dead back per month.

12/ Don’t worry. 🇨🇦 will help, right? In 2022, it lifted the restriction of 20 hours of on-campus work, to “help” 🇨🇦 solve its low-wage labor crisis. Those viral videos of hundreds of people waiting in line for a low-wage job interview? Those are mostly international students.

13/ To reiterate, 🇨🇦 scoured the world for poor families. Promised opportunity if they risked everything. It turns out there was no opportunity, so now they’re stuck paying off debt while most of their income is consumed by shelter costs. It sounds familiar, but why evades me

14/ but here’s the kicker. Other countries where this scam was brewing signed an inter-country agreement to refuse unethical student visa brokering. Did 🇨🇦? Nope, it actively rejected it. Once again, because this is a part of its strategy.

Public health officials don’t seem to realize just how badly they’ve damaged their credibility

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley on the apparantly huge gap between how ordinary Canadians view their public health officials and how those officials think they’re viewed:

Throughout the pandemic, polls have shown a decline in confidence in public health: Researchers at McMaster University and Vox Pop Labs found that in March 2020, 59 per cent of Canadians had “a great deal of trust” in public health officials. Two years later that had plummeted to 37 per cent.

We have recently enjoyed months of being able to ignore COVID-19. Even the relentlessly, uniquely pessimistic Canadian media seemed to have exhausted themselves. So I found it a bit jarring to see Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, suddenly back on the TV this week admonishing us to “get your mask ready” for fall and book yourself in for a booster. Dr. Kieran Moore, Tam’s counterpart at Queen’s Park, is due in the coming days to give Ontarians what will likely be a similar update.

If this year’s flu/RSV/COVID season is as bad as last, it will be fascinating to see how Canadians react. Perfervid opposition to masking and vaccination are minority positions: In the midst of last year’s autumn surge in childhood hospitalizations, a Nanos Research poll found 69 per cent of Canadians would support a return of mask mandates “if authorities deem(ed) it necessary”.

But are people ready to hear it, again, from the same public-health officials who have all-but destroyed their entire field in the last three years — seemingly without realizing it? It will be intriguing to see.

Tam’s original sins remain totally unexplained — at an official inquiry, for example, hint hint — never mind expiated. For days and weeks in early 2020, while our peer countries were closing borders and preparing for a pandemic, Tam assured us “the risk to Canada is low”. She lied that World Health Organization rules prohibited us from closing borders. She told us masks were worse than useless, and the only excuse anyone can offer is that she was fibbing to prevent Canadians from hoarding PPE. (I think she actually believed it. Either explanation is a firing offence.)

Remember the utterly incoherent advice the Public Health Agency of Canada provided to incoming travellers in the early days? Remember the built-to-fail, purely political quarantine hotels that Tam said weren’t necessary until they suddenly were — just as she said 14-day quarantine at home wasn’t necessary until it suddenly was? We were weeks if not months behind most of our peer countries. Regardless of your position on any given restriction, none of it made any sense.

September 14, 2023

Canadians’ opinions have flipped on the immigration issue this summer

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

Tristin Hopper covers the rapid change in public opinion from majority in favour of the Liberal government’s expanded immigration targets to majority opposed in recent polling:

A billboard in Toronto in 2019, showing PPC leader Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message.
Photo from The Province – https://theprovince.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-berniers-legitimate-position-on-immigration-taken-down-by-spineless-billboard-company/wcm/ecab071c-b57d-4d93-b78c-274de524434c

A majority of Canadians now seem to think that immigration is too high, according to a recent Nanos poll. Of respondents, 53 per cent said that the government’s plan to accept 465,000 new permanent residents was too high. It’s a sharp turnaround from just a few months prior, when a similar Nanos poll in March found that only 34 per cent of Canadians thought immigration was too high.

Canada has long been one of the most pro-immigration countries on earth, and since at least the 1990s the mainstream Canadian position on immigration levels was that they were just fine. On the eve of Justin Trudeau’s election as prime minister in 2015, an Environics poll found that a decisive 57 per cent of Canadians disagreed with any notion that there is “too much immigration in Canada.”

But if this sentiment is changing, it might be because Ottawa has recently dialled up immigration to the highest levels ever seen in Canadian history. Below, a quick guide to just how many people are entering Canada these days.

Immigration is nearly double what it was at the beginning of the Trudeau government (and way more when you count “non-permanent” immigrants)

In 2014 — the last full year before the election of Justin Trudeau — Canada brought in 260,404 new permanent residents. This was actually rather high for the time, with Statistics Canada noting it was “one of the highest levels in more than 100 years”.

But last year, immigration hit 437,180, and that’s not even accounting for the massive spike in “non-permanent” immigration. When the estimated 607,782 people in that category are accounted for, the Canadian population surged by more than one million people in a single calendar year. Representing a 2.7 per cent annual rise in population, it was more than enough to cancel out any per-capita benefits from Canada’s GDP rise for that year.

It’s about on par with the United States (a country which is eight to 10 times larger)

Proportionally, Canada has long maintained higher immigration than the United States. But in recent months immigration has gotten so high that Canada is even starting to rival the Americans in terms of the raw number of newcomers.

Last year, while Canada marked one million newcomers, the U.S. announced that its net international migration was about the same. Given the size of the U.S. (331 million vs. 40 million in Canada), this means that Canada is absorbing migrants at a rate more than eight times that of the Americans.

When these trends first began showing themselves in early 2022, CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal credited it with driving down Canadian wage growth. “The last time I checked, the U.S. is 10 times larger than we are,” he said.

September 13, 2023

Michael Geist on the “relentless misinformation campaign that ignores the foundational principles of copyright law”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Education, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Geist discusses a recent public statement from the Canadian Federation of Library Associations on how changes to copyright rules in Canada may seriously impact the public:

Assignments of copyrights photostat copies by mollyali (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/5JbsPE

Last month, the Canadian Federation of Library Associations released a much-needed statement that sought to counter the ongoing misinformation campaign from copyright lobby groups regarding the state of Canadian copyright and the extensive licensing by libraries and educational institutions. I had no involvement whatsoever with the statement, but was happy to tweet it out and was grateful for the effort to set the record straight on what has been a relentless misinformation campaign that ignores the foundational principles of copyright law. Lobby groups have for years tried to convince the government that 2012 copyright reforms are to blame for the diminished value of the Access Copyright licence that led Canadian educational institutions to seek other alternatives, most notably better licensing options that offer greater flexibility, access to materials, and usage rights. This is false, and when the CFLA dared to call it out, those same groups then expressed their “profound disappointment” in the library association.

Yet what has been disappointing is that despite repeated Supreme Court of Canada decisions that have eviscerated the foundation of those groups’ claims, they insist on running back the same failed strategy again and again. The reality of Canadian copyright isn’t complicated: libraries and the education community spend more than ever before on licences that provide the right to access and use materials for teaching, course materials, text and data mining, and a myriad of other purposes. When combined with the gradual disappearance of course packs, the emergence of open access materials, and a reasonable interpretation of fair dealing consistent with Canadian jurisprudence, education and libraries are fulfilling their mandate by responsibly using public dollars to maximize public access, enable student learning, and ensuring fair compensation for authors.

The lobbying efforts to convince government to restrict fair dealing by requiring unnecessary licences would increase student costs, make education less affordable, and render Canada less competitive. Further, it would mean less access to materials for Canadian students. Universities spend hundreds of millions of dollars on licences that grant both access to materials (purchasing physical books has declined dramatically) and the ability to use them. The outdated Access Copyright licences only grant rights to use already acquired works for a limited series of purposes. Reverting back to the unnecessary Access Copyright licence would mean access to fewer works and reduced investment by the education sector and libraries in new works.

I wrote a six-part series on these issues earlier the year including posts on setting the record straight, the shift to electronic licensing, transactional licences, the disappearance of course packs, the emergence of open text books, and a fair reading of fair dealing. Once you get past the rhetoric, the data leaves little doubt that education and libraries are still actively paying for copyright materials through licensing and the claims of mass illegal copying in education in 2023 is a fabrication unsupported by the evidence.

“It is premature to write the epitaph for a politician that has defied gravity as many times as Justin Trudeau”

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

I have to admit that Justin Trudeau is a very talented political campaigner and Canadian politicians always need to take that into account in dealing with him. I’m very much not a fan, but he has accomplished something I didn’t think was possible — his efforts in office have persuaded me to move Pierre Trudeau down to second-place in my personal list of “Worst Prime Ministers of Canada”:

For the longest time, Justin Trudeau was the party’s best asset. It didn’t matter if the Liberals trailed the Conservatives by a few points, the prime minister was viewed by Canadians as the best choice to continue to lead the country when compared to the other party leaders.

That hope now lies in tatters. Trudeau now trails Pierre Poilievre by double digits for preferred prime minister. More importantly, Trudeau trails his party on the generic (“who would you vote for?”) ballot question by nine points. What this means in plain language is that a significant number of people are still willing to vote for the Liberals, even though they no longer believe that Justin Trudeau is the best candidate to be prime minister. In only one demographic — women over the age of 55 — does the prime minister lead Poilievre. More importantly for Trudeau, only 45 per cent of Liberals believe he would make the best prime minister; 77 per cent of Conservatives believe the same thing about Poilievre.

For the first time in his decade as leader, Justin Trudeau is a drag on the Liberal Party of Canada.

This has been wondered about for months. I have always believed that Trudeau gave the party a better chance of success in the critical places in which it absolutely must win (in Quebec, in the B.C. Lower Mainland and in the GTA) than any other hypothetical leader would. He is a uniquely talented political campaigner. He went from third to first in the campaign in 2015, he recovered from a blackface scandal that would have ended a lesser campaigner in 2019, and he almost-single-handedly saved a Liberal campaign in 2021 that fell flat out of the gate and needed almost three weeks to find anything that even remotely resembled a coherent message.

That was then, though, and today, this is the longest and most significant stretch of time since election night in 2015 where Trudeau has been a personal liability for Liberals. This is a massive change that I’m not sure the public, and even many Liberals, have fully appreciated.

There is still an argument to be made, even at this late stage, that Trudeau remains the sole unifying force for a party whose main objective is the pursuit of power. That he is the only leader capable of forging the fractured elements of the current Liberal coalition together. You could convince me of these arguments.

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