Quotulatiousness

February 17, 2023

Quebec suddenly realizes there are significant problems with Bill C-11

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

Michael Geist, who has been doing heroic work covering the federal government’s attempts to seize control of what Canadians can see and publish online, says that Quebec has finally woken up to the threat to their culture embedded in the federal government’s Bill C-11:

Bill C-11 – and its predecessor Bill C-10 – have long been driven by the government’s view that the bill was a winner in Quebec. Bill C-10 was headed for easy passage in 2021, but was derailed by the government’s decision to remove safeguards over regulating user generated content that came largely from the Quebec-based music lobby. Nearly two years later, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and his staff have ignored the concerns of thousands of digital creators, disrespected indigenous creators, and indicated that he will likely reject Senate amendments designed to craft a compromise solution, all in the name of keeping Quebec lobby interests satisfied. Yet as the government considers the Senate amendments, the Quebec legislative assembly this week passed a last minute motion calling for further changes to the bill, including scope to enact its own rules and mandatory consultations with the province on the contents of a policy direction to the CRTC that Rodriguez has insisted on keeping secret until after the bill receives royal assent (a full copy of the motion is contained at the bottom of this post). The Conservatives have been calling for the Quebec motion and the Senate amendments to be sent back to committee for further study, which the Globe reports may delay the government’s response to the Senate amendments.

It is not clear what prompted the Quebec government to finally wake up to the centralizing power over digital culture that comes from the bill (and just wait until it realizes that Bill C-18 encroaches on provincial jurisdiction with the regulation of newspapers). But this issue has been there from the beginning. In March 2021, Philip Palmer, a former Justice counsel, argued that Bill C-10 was unconstitutional, making the case it fell outside federal jurisdiction. In a post on his submission, I noted:

    Quebec has a long history of taking issue with federal involvement in broadcasting, putting a potential challenge in play. Indeed, it is odd to see this legislation viewed as a political winner in Quebec, when it effectively asserts federal jurisdiction over an area that has long been contested in the province.

Palmer appeared before the House committee studying Bill C-11 and warned MPs about the constitutional jurisdictional overreach. His opening statement noted:

    C-11 lacks a foundation in Canadian constitutional law. Internet streaming services do not transmit to the public by radio waves, nor do they operate telecommunications facilities across provincial boundaries. They and their audiences are the clients of telecommunications common carriers, which are subject to federal regulation. Netflix, for instance, in this case is no more a federal undertaking than a law firm such as McCarthy Tétrault or a chain store like Canadian Tire, both of which rely extensively on telecommunications services.

Liberal MP Anthony Housefather followed up on the issue, asking Palmer to cite caselaw to back his claim. His response:

    The principal case for all federal regulation of broadcasting space is, of course, the radio reference of 1932. In that, the court relied upon the provisions of subsection 92(10) of the Constitution Act to find that, in transmitting radio waves, they necessarily exceeded provincial boundaries and, therefore, could only be effectively regulated at the federal level. The key is that, in order to be regulated by the federal government, the “undertaking”, as the Constitution uses the word, has to be one that has the facilities to exceed provincial limitations and provincial boundaries.

Housefather wasn’t convinced and asked Professor Pierre Trudel, a vocal supporter of Bill C-11, for his view. Trudel didn’t deny the issue. In fact, he confirmed it, suggesting that the Supreme Court would ultimately have to determine the question:

    If this were unconstitutional, it would be because it would be a matter of provincial jurisdiction. The question would then have to be asked: is it better for 10 provinces to put in place regulations on these matters or for the federal authority to do so? There are arguments that radio waves are not the only basis for federal jurisdiction in these matters. There is, among other things, the question of national interest and the inherently interprovincial nature of the activity. In short, all these arguments may have to be argued before the Supreme Court. Either the federal government has authority, or the provinces do. Therefore, it is to be expected that the Canadian state will intervene sooner or later, whether through the provinces or through the federal government.

The takeaway from this exchange – a former justice lawyer citing caselaw to confirm the shaky constitutional foundation of the bill and a professor confirming the Supreme Court would have to decide – should have provided a wakeup call to Quebec, which has a long history of challenging federal jurisdiction in communications that dates back nearly 100 years with repeated efforts to enact provincial laws and policies in the area. Left unsaid is that if the “national interest” dictates federal regulation of anything that touches the Internet, there are few limits on federal powers and little left for the provinces.

February 13, 2023

It’s open season for balloons over North America

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

In The Line, yet another incursion into NORAD air space, and no, this isn’t a re-post from last week:

Holy jumpin’ Jeepers, folks, we’ve got more balloons!

On Friday, the Americans shot down another unidentified flying object — gulp — off the coast of Alaska. By Saturday, NORAD was reporting yet another one, this time over Canadian territory. NORAD jets scrambled, and an American F-22 destroyed the object over Yukon. Canadian military teams are now en route to recover the wreck and find out what the hell we are shooting at.

This was an exciting enough little pick-me-up on Saturday, but it wasn’t done. Later that night, another air defence emergency was declared over Montana, and American F-15 jets were scrambled out of Oregon to intercept an object that had been detected on radar. They were not able to find anything, and as of press time, NORAD has said only that they will continue to monitor the situation.

A few points we’d make about a truly bizarre series of stories.

The first is that there’s nothing wrong or particularly embarrassing about an American plane defending Canadian air space. NORAD is a joint bi-national command. Missions are tasked to the first available aircraft. That might sometimes mean a Canadian jet defending U.S. territory. It’s happened! On Saturday, the object was closer to American bases in Alaska than the nearest CF-18 base in Alberta. There probably is a conversation worth having about whether Canada should maintain a small alert force of jets further north, better able to respond in the future. That’s expensive and logistically complicated, but may still be worth considering. For now, the system functioned as intended. So we say, quite sincerely, thanks, America. We appreciate the help.

That being said, we do think this is a useful reminder that the long and repeated delays by Canada to both replace the aging CF-18 jets and modernize NORAD with new sensors and capabilities were reckless and dumb. It was obvious that the CF-18s needed replacing when Stephen Harper took office, but we only got that underway in recent months. NORAD, for its part, functions well as an institution but needs upgraded technology. That project also should have begun many years ago. In both cases, we delayed because we didn’t want to spend the money and because defence projects in this country are almost always politically fraught. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and now the weird series of aerial intruders is a useful reminder that neglecting your own defences is never a good idea. We are realists about Canada’s ability to field a massive military, but our geography, in so many ways a blessing, does impose a few costs back on us. It’s not easy to patrol and police such massive territories, especially with a relatively small and concentrated population. But we have to do it. It’s what being a country means. Too often, we haven’t. We hope that changes. With the NORAD modernization announced and the F-35s ordered, perhaps we’re finally making right some of these failures. We hope so. But we are jaded, friends. We admit that.

Our final point is an appeal to calm. We don’t really know what the hell is happening with all these aerial intruders either, but there could easily be a pretty mundane explanation. Radar sets have programmable software filters that are intended to avoid cluttering up the scopes with too much information. Without these filters, clouds, snow storms and birds can cause returns that may look like planes and missiles. One way of filtering out such clutter is by establishing a minimum speed for flagging an object. Balloons are likely normally below that minimum. Your Line editors suspect that part of what is happening right now is that we’ve adjusted those filters, and are suddenly seeing things that were already there all along.

Is that better, or worse? We don’t know. We can make that argument either way. In any case, that may be what’s happening.

Or hell, maybe it’s aliens, and Canada and the U.S. just declared war on a more sophisticated race that travelled across the vastness of the stars only to end their journey by being murdered by Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden. We doubt it, to be honest. But it’s been a weird few years already, no?

Appliance futility by design

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tal Bachman recounts a miserable — but increasingly common — experience with modern “energy efficient” home appliances:

The LG 5.8 cubic foot Capacity Top Load Washer sat in the laundry room, brand new. Maybe it was my imagination, but it looked insouciant.

Dad said it was the latest and greatest in laundering technology. Supposedly, some sort of internal sensor system (having something to do with a computer) fine-tuned water levels depending on clothing weight. Or something. I can’t remember exactly what he — or was it the moving guy? — said.

I did notice the washing machine had several preset wash cycles — Allergiene, Sanitary, Bright Whites, Towels, Heavy Duty, Bedding, and more. You could select them with a shiny, space-age-looking chrome dial. (I would later discover the machine had other fancy features with names like TurboWash™ 360, ENERGY STAR® Qualified, Smart Diagnosis™, and ThinQ™ Technology [Wi-Fi Enabled]).

[…]

Well, it was win-win-win, with a minor caveat. The caveat was the washing machine. Turns out that for all its razzle-dazzle features, it didn’t actually clean clothes. Even worse, it took hours to not clean clothes. The “Allergiene” cycle, for example, took almost four hours. Yet when you pulled your clothes out, you could still make out the orange juice or tomato sauce stains. I’d never encountered a more useless washing machine.

“How you feeling about this new washing machine?”, I asked Dad, a few days after the hunkering down began.
“Great!”, said Dad.

Okay, I thought. That’s not unusual. Music — as opposed to the mundane or practical — occupies most of Dad’s awareness, and always has. Besides, most of his clothes are black, and he probably hasn’t noticed it’s not removing the ketchup stains. Maybe he will in a few weeks.

And maybe in the meantime, I thought, I could figure out a way to reprogram the machine for cycles which actually washed. And were faster.

But no. That turned out to be way too much to hope for. The machine allowed no independent control over water volume, cycle time, or water temperatures. It only allowed selection of a preset computerized cycle — none of which got your clothes clean.

[…]

Yet more irritating was the reason it skimped on water and power: it was trying to stop global warming. Oops — I mean “climate change”. It was “environmentally friendly”. Except it wasn’t, because you usually had to run at least two cycles to get your clothes clean. That’s right: you had to use the same amount of water in the end anyway, and double the electricity.

And so — not for the first time — I had stumbled upon yet another example of technological “progress” which exacerbated the very (pseudo) problem it purported to solve. The new useless LG “Save the World!” piece of garbage was the home equivalent of Hollywood stars taking private jets to a carbon reduction conference in Switzerland.

[…]

The US Department of Energy, I discovered, had begun imposing energy efficiency regulations in the early 1990s. A decade later, they made the regulations even stricter (see here also). Then, as the years passed, they made them even stricter. And then stricter. And then stricter. All the while, the feds offered appliance manufacturers huge tax incentives — i.e., huge cash rewards — to accelerate their phase out of functional washing machines.

Government succeeded. Today, minus the loophole-exploiting Speed-King (which the feds will probably crush soon), you cannot find a new washing machine — front- or top-loading — which washes clothes anywhere near as well as its predecessors. The rationale for this — saving the world from global warming — doesn’t even rise to the level of ludicrous. Just for starters, as I type this, we’re enduring one of the coldest winters ever recorded. New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Observatory just recorded a wind chill calculation of minus 109 degrees Farenheit, an all-time record for the United States (and approaching midway between the average temperatures of Jupiter and Mars). Temperatures are thirty degrees Farenheit colder than average in many places. Why would anyone want to bring temperatures down even further? And at the cost of destroying washing machine functionality? And what loon could actually believe home washing machines change the climate?

In any case, thanks to an essentially totalitarian government run by bought-and-paid-for liars, control freaks, and imbeciles, we have gone technologically backward — certainly in the appliance domain, but in others — for no good reason at all. (Regulations have also downgraded dishwashers, toilets, showers, and other appliances, but we can discuss those another time)

Back in 2019, Sarah Hoyt expressed her frustrations with “modern” “energy-efficient” appliances which matched our experiences exactly.

February 9, 2023

Attractive VTOL autogyro with unrealised potential; the story of the Avian 2/180 Gyroplane

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

Polyus
Published 10 Jan 2019

The Avian 2/180 Gyroplane was a project that rose from the ashes of the Avro Arrow cancellation. Five former employee formed their own company and set out to build a new kind of autogyro. Their Gyroplane could take off and land vertically and could fly at speeds up to 265 km/h. Although it never made any sales, it is an impressive project that deserves some attention.
(Also sorry for the flickering in the video. I did my best to limit it but the source video didn’t give me much to work with.)
(more…)

February 7, 2023

Making Canada’s gun laws more illogical, but appealing to urban Liberal voters, regardless of the political cost elsewhere

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney recounts the federal government’s political gyrations over their attempt to ban vast numbers of rifles and shotguns owned by law-abiding Canadians:

Classifying guns is complicated. There are a lot of ways to do it. You can do it by the “action”: is it a pump action? A lever action? Is it semi-automatic, or even fully automatic? You can do it by the length of the total firearm, or the length of just the barrel. You can do it by the caliber of the ammunition. You can do it by the type of magazine the firearm uses, and what its capacity is (the magazine is the compartment, which can be removable or integrated with the firearm, that holds the ammunition). You can try and be targeted with your definitions, or you can just go across the board and say “All rifles are allowed but all handguns are banned.” The point here isn’t to argue what the policy should be, but simply to note that whatever your policy is, you have to be able to define it in a way that makes sense.

Canada’s current gun laws date, more or less, to the 1990s. They’ve been changed a bunch of times since, for better or worse, but that’s when the current overall system of firearms legislation began. We came up with three broad categories of firearm then. There are “non-restricted” firearms, which you must be licensed to own, and mostly mean very typical rifles and shotguns, of which millions of licensed Canadians own many millions. There’s also the “restricted” category, which basically meant handguns — either semi-automatic pistols or revolvers. These require extra licensing, more background checks and training, and are subject to much stricter conditions for storage and use. And then there’s the very rare “prohibited” firearms, which are mostly either very compact handguns, or fully automatic weapons, including machine guns, which were owned by Canadians already when the new laws came in almost 30 years ago. These owners were given a special and highly limited rights to retain the firearms they already owned, but not to transfer them to others, except to someone else with a rare prohibited licence, or to a direct descendent. (That last bit was to cover family heirlooms.)

None of the above is as simple as I’ve just described it. Weird absurdities have been part of the system from the outset. The reason for these absurdities was always political. Back in the 1990s, the Liberals, under then-prime minister Jean Chrétien, realized that the categories above would result in certain kinds of rifle (including the AR-15) being classified as non-restricted, and subject to the least onerous controls. Unhappy with the optics of that, and other similar examples, they wrote in exceptions to the way some firearms are categorized. A firearm would be categorized by its technical specifications unless the government specifically ordered it classified as something else, is probably the easiest way to summarize a complicated policy.

Using the AR-15 again, according to the “evergreen” technical definitions we settled on in the 1990s, that’s a non-restricted gun. To avoid awkward political questions, the then-Liberals deemed it a “restricted” firearm, and therefore subject to tighter controls.

There were other similar examples, and they resulted, as noted above, in a lot of absurdities, with very similar guns categorized differently, but since only a relatively small number of firearms were so specially categorized, the system more or less functioned reasonably well for decades. The absurdities were limited enough to be broadly known and adapted to, and the overall system made enough sense to function coherently enough to do a reasonably good job regulating the sale, ownership and use of firearms in Canada. And very successfully: gun crime by licensed gun owners in Canada is, as is well known, quite rare. The system basically worked, and was working.

[…]

But hey, then politics happened. The sunny ways days ended. Liberal fortunes waned. Scandals and baggage and awkward photos of the PM in his younger days accumulated. And suddenly, the Liberals were talking a lot about banning assault rifles. They talked about it even more after the 2019 election reduced them to a parliamentary minority, leaving them dependent on a cluster of urban and suburban ridings in Quebec and Greater Toronto where support for just about any half-coherent sounding gun-control measure is typically high. The Liberals didn’t do much of anything — mostly just talk, as is their style. Then, in early 2020, there was the horrific massacre in Nova Scotia, and within days, the Liberals announced they were banning 1,500 models of assault rifle. (It was actually far fewer — closer to 20 — but the Liberals counted each different version and brand as an entirely different rifle to get to a more-impressive sounding figure. Those fierce opponents of disinformation at work again!)

Anything even close to meeting a broadly shared definition of “assault rifle” was already banned in Canada, of course — it had been classified “prohibited” back in the 1990s. There’s no universally agreed upon definition of an “assault rifle”, but those who know guns could agree in broad terms what it would mean — and in Canada, they were all banned, and had been for decades. So the Liberals, keen to have their lookin’-tough-and-bold moment, started talking about “assault-style” rifles.

Appending “-style” to anything is a gigantic red flag for bullshit, as I’ve noted here before. That somehow failed to deter them, alas, setting the stage for their current woes.

February 6, 2023

Food prices going up? Destroying “excess” production? That’s Canada’s Supply Management system working at peak efficiency!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Food, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jon Miltimore reports on recent comments about some of the weird requirements for quota-holding dairy farmers under the Canadian Supply Management system:

Canadian dairy farmer is speaking out after being forced to dump thousands of liters of milk after exceeding the government’s production quota.

In a video shared on TikTok by Travis Huigen, Ontario dairy farmer Jerry Huigen says he’s heartbroken to dump 30,000 liters of milk amid surging dairy prices.

“Right now we are over our quotum, um, it’s regulated by the government and by the DFO (Dairy Farmers of Ontario)”, says Huigen, as he stands beside a machine spewing fresh milk into a drain. “Look at this milk running away. Cause it’s the end of the month. I dump thirty thousand liters of milk, and it breaks my heart.”

Huigen says people ask him why milk prices are so high.

“This here Canadian milk is seven dollars a liter. When I go for my haircut people say, ‘Wow, seven dollars Jerry, for a little bit of milk'”, he says, as he fills a glass of the milk being dumped and drinks. “I say well, you have to go higher up. Cause we have no say anymore, as a dairy farmer on our own farm. They make us dump it.”

[…]

In the United States, the primary regulations are high-level price-fixing, bans on selling unpasteurized milk (which means farmers have to dump their product if dairy processors don’t buy it), and “price gouging” laws that prevent retailers from increasing prices when demand is low, which incentivizes hoarding.

In Canada, the regulations are even worse.

While the price-fixing scheme for milk in the US is incredibly complicated and leaves much to be desired — there’s an old industry adage that says “only five people in the world know how milk is priced in the US and four of them are dead” — in Canada the price is determined by a single bureaucracy: the Canadian Dairy Commission.

The Ottawa-based commission (technically a “Government of Canada Crown Corporation”), which oversees Canada’s entire dairy system (known as Supply Management), raised prices three times in 2022, citing “the rising cost of production”.

Food price inflation remains a serious issue in Canada, but the problem is particularly acute in regards to dairy products, which has seen their annual inflation rate triple over the past year, to almost 12 percent.

If the farmers were doing this sort of price-fixing themselves, it would be illegal. Instead, because it’s the government doing it, it’s mandatory. You aren’t allowed to produce any of the supply-managed products outside the system, and the government helpfully protects Canadians from being “victimized” by cheaper imports by high tariffs on anything competing with supply managed output.

As with any rigged market, the costs of “protecting” the market are diffused among all Canadian consumers, but the benefits are concentrated in the hands of the quota-holders (and the bureaucrats who oversee the system). My issues with the supply management system are one of the “hobby horses” I’ve ridden many times over my nearly 20 years of blogging.

February 4, 2023

Federal regulation of the Canadian book market has resulted in 95% of the market now being foreign owned

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

For the record, I don’t think this kind of cultural regulation is a good idea to start with, but as Ken Whyte points out, if staving off foreign ownership was the primary intent, could it have failed any more comprehensively than this?

Sometime last year, the Association of Canadian Publishers, which represents most of the independent book publishers in English Canada (Sutherland House is not a member), began discussing a radical — some might say dangerous — new form of regulation for the Canadian book industry.

The ACP started from the reasonable position that the existing federal approach to regulating the Canadian book industry has failed. That approach is to encourage a Canadian-owned book sector and, ipso facto, to discourage foreign ownership of Canadian publishing. Successive Canadian governments, Conservative and Liberal, have paid lip-service to the policy and failed to enforce it. The multinational publishers — Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins — have moved into Canada in a big way. Great chunks of the Canadian-owned industry, including McClelland & Stewart and Harlequin Books, have been sold to foreign buyers.

The multinationals now account for about 95 or 96 percent of book sales in Canada. All but the last 5 or 6 percent of their revenue comes from sales of imported books, most of them produced in the US or UK.

The Canadian-owned component of the book sector, which produces the vast majority of Canadian author books, has shrunk to about 4 or 5 percent of the market and sales of Canadian-authored books, says the ACP, have “flatlined”.

So you can see why the ACP is interested in a new approach: for more than half a century, while pursuing an official policy of encouraging Canadian-ownership, our government has managed to hand almost the whole of our book industry to foreign-owned firms.

I, too, am interested in a new approach. It’s the ACP’s next step that worries me.

The ACP has been watching over the past couple of years as the federal government rewrites its Broadcasting Act. The thrust of Bill C-11 is to bring foreign-owned streaming services operating in Canada — the likes of Netflix, Apple, YouTube — under the jurisdiction of the Canadian Radio-televison and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The bill would grant the CRTC the power to impose on streaming services the same rules it imposes on the likes of CTV and Global and the companies that own them. It would compel streamers to use Canadian talent, abide by Canadian diversity requirements, prioritize Canadian content on their platforms, and give a percentage of their revenues to a fund to support the production of Canadian content.

It has occurred to the ACP that no one in government is asking foreign-owned book publishers to abide by Canadian content quotas or to deliver percentages of their revenue to a fund to support Canadian-owned book producers: “The absence of a CRTC or related regulatory body, along with the policies and programs that such a body can enact, has meant that non-Canadian firms enjoy unfettered access to the Canadian marketplace.”

That’s not quite right. Non-Canadian firms dominate Canadian publishing because the feds won’t enforce their existing policy, not because we don’t have a CRTC for books. In any event, the ACP is embracing the spirit of Bill C-11.

Oh, goody! Government bureaucratic oversight is bound to make Canadians more interested in reading Canadian books, right? I see no way that this could possibly fail.

February 3, 2023

A spectre is haunting Ontario politics: the spectre of [Shock! Horror!] American-style healthcare!

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

Everyone in Canada has heard alarming stories of people in the United States being presented with five- or six-figure bills for hospital care, and any hint that one of our provincial healthcare systems might move in that direction scares the pants off almost everyone. Politicians know this well, and salivate at the chance of deploying charges that their opponents favour “American-style” changes to our system because it’s a guaranteed vote-winner. None of it has to be true — very few Canadians know much about US systems aside from the horror stories — but it’s always effective.

In The Line, Harrison Ruess makes the sensible point that there are more healthcare systems in the western world than those of Canadian provinces and our closest neighbour:

Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

First, to be emphatic on this point, we need to be realistic about where our system ranks globally.

It is truly bewildering to me the lengths that otherwise smart and empathetic Canadians will go to to defend the status-quo approach to health care in Canada. The results we get, versus the money we spend, is simply not brag-worthy. The argument that our system works great, if only we threw more money at it, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Is our health care okay? Sure. Decent? Probably. Is it great? Hardly. Could we do better? Yes, much. Do we need to spend more? Maybe a tad, but not likely much, if any. To wit:

    According to OECD data, on life expectancy Canada ranks 16th. On mortality rates from avoidable causes, we’re 23rd. On cancer survival rates we range from 13th down to 18th, depending on the cancer type. On the number of one-year-olds vaccinated for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, we rank an abysmal 37th (even the U.S. is higher here at 27th. Gulp.). One area where we do rank closer to the top is spending as a proportion of GDP, where we sit seventh.

World Health Organization (WHO) data wasn’t any more flattering, where Canada’s health care ranked 30th in overall performance despite being 10th in spending. The Commonwealth Fund ranks Canada 10th out of 11 in performance and 6th out of 11 in spending. In report after report Canadians aren’t getting the outcomes we need or want based on the money we’re spending on our current system.

Besides for reasons of nostalgia, why would anyone spend their energy defending these sorts of results? “We’re 16th! We’re 16th!” is hardly a chant you’d hear at a rally. It’s time to do better. And I get the feeling most people recognize this – certainly when you get onto Main Street.

Ipsos polling from December 2021 reported that 55 per cent of Canadians are “somewhat satisfied” with their health care, alongside 22 per cent that are “somewhat dissatisfied.” I.e. three quarters of Canadians find themselves in the middle of the road on the quality of our health care. This seems about right — mediocre support for mediocre health care. (The strongly satisfied and strongly dissatisfied were about even, at 12 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.)

But today Canadians are also, rightly, very worried. Leger polling in January 2023 showed that 86 per cent of Canadians are worried about the state of our health care.

January 30, 2023

Crime on Toronto’s public transit system is merely a symptom of a wider social problem

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

As posted the other day, Matt Gurney’s dispiriting experiences on an ordinary ride on the TTC are perhaps leading indicators of much wider issues in all of western society:

“Toronto subway new train” by BeyondDC is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Caveats abound. Toronto is, relatively speaking, still a safe city. The TTC moves many millions of people a week; a large percentage of whom are not being knifed, shot or burnt alive. And so on. We at The Line also suspect that whatever is happening in Toronto isn’t happening only in Toronto, but Toronto’s scale (and the huge scope of the TTC specifically) might be gathering in one place a series of incidents that would be reported as unconnected random crimes in any other city. A few muggings in Montreal or Winnipeg above the usual baseline for such crimes won’t fit the media’s love of patterns as much as a similar number of incidents on a streetcar or subway line.

Fair enough, duly noted, and all that jazz.

But what is happening out there?

Your Line editors have theories, and we’ve never hesitated to share them before: we think the pandemic has driven a portion of the population bonkers. We’d go further and say that we think it has left all of us, every last one, less stable, less patient, less calm and less empathetic. For the vast majority of us, this will manifest itself in many unpleasant but ultimately harmless ways. We’ll be more short-tempered. Less jovial at a party. Less patient with strangers, or even with loved ones. Maybe a bit more reclusive.

But what about the relatively small majority of us that were, pre-2020, already on the edge of deeper, more serious problems? What about those who were already experiencing mental-health issues, or living on the edge of real, grinding poverty?

It’s not like the overall societal situation has really improved, right? COVID-19 itself killed tens of thousands, and took a physical toll on many more, but we all suffered the stress and fear not just of the plague, but of the steps taken to mitigate it. (Lockdowns may have been necessary early in the pandemic, but they were never fun or easy, and that societal bill may be coming due.) Since COVID began to abate, rather than a chance to chill out, we’ve had convoys, a war, renewed plausible risk of nuclear war, and now a punishing period of inflation and interest-rate hikes that are putting many into real financial distress. We are coping with all of this while still processing our COVID-era stress and anxiety.

The timing isn’t great, is what we’re saying.

And on the other side of the coin, basically all our societal institutions that we’d turn to to cope with these issues — hospitals, social services, homeless shelters, police forces, private charities, even personal or family support networks — are fried. Just maxed out. We have financial, supply chain and, most critically, human-resource deficits everywhere. The people we have left on the job are exhausted and at their wits’ end.

This leaves us, on balance, less able to handle challenges than we were in 2020, due to literal exhaustion of both institutions and individuals. Meanwhile, against the backdrop of this erosion of our capacity, our challenges have all gotten worse!

It’s not hard to do the mental math on this, friends. It seems to us that in 2020, the policy of Canadian governments from coast to coast to coast, and at every level, was to basically keep a lid on problems like crime, homelessness, housing prices and shortages, mental health and health-care system dysfunction, and probably others we could add. One politician might put a bit more emphasis on some of these issues than others, in line with their partisan priors, but overall, the pre-2020 status quo in Canada was pretty good, and our political class, writ large, basically self-identified as guardians of that status quo, while maybe tinkering a bit at the margins (and declaring themselves progressive heroes for the trouble of the tinkering).

But then COVID-19 happens, and all our problems get worse. And all our ways of dealing with those problems get less effective. It doesn’t have to be by much. Just enough to bend all those flatlined (or maybe slightly improving) trendlines down. Instead of homelessness being kind of frozen in place in the big cities, it starts getting worse, bit at a time, month after month. The mental-health-care and homeless shelter systems that weren’t really doing a great job in 2020, but were more or less keeping big crises at a manageable level, started seeing a few more people fall through the cracks each month, month after month. Those people are just gone, baby, gone.

The health-care system that used to function well enough to keep people reasonably content, if not happy, locks up, and waitlists balloon, and soon we can’t even get kids needed surgeries on time.

The housing shortage goes insane, and prices somehow survive the pandemic basically untouched.

The court system locks up, meaning more and more violent criminals get bail and then re-offend, even killing cops when they should be behind bars.

None of these swings were dramatic. They were all just enough to set us on a course to this, a moment in time where the problems have had years to compound themselves and are now compounding each other.

Here’s the rub, folks. The Line doesn’t believe or accept that any of the problems we face today, alone or in combination, are automatically fatal. We can fix them all. But we need leaders, including both elected officials and bureaucrats, who fundamentally see themselves as problem fixers, and who understand right down deep in their bones that that is what their jobs are, and that they are no longer what they’ve been able to be for generations: hands-off middle managers of stable prosperity.

January 27, 2023

Canada’s worsening refugee problem

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

Paul Wells discusses some of the frustrations being aired on the French-language Radio-Canada news channel about the increasing, possibly record-breaking flow of asylum seekers entering Canada at the Roxham Road pedestrian border crossing from Champlain, New York:

An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.

The issue at hand is Roxham Road, a pedestrian border crossing between small-town Quebec and upstate New York, 45 minutes’ drive from Montreal City Hall. Thousands of people walk into Canada there every month and demand asylum. Caring for them and processing their claims takes money and work. Along comes [former Parti Québécois leader Jean-François] Lisée with a suggestion.

If Justin Trudeau can’t get changes to the bilateral Safe Third Country Agreement to slow this human traffic — and colleagues report that he can’t — then, Lisée says, Quebec should make the newcomers the rest of Canada’s problem.

Within 24 hours after somebody walks across Roxham Road, Lisée says, “We’ll sort them, we’ll keep all the francophones and those who have immediate family in Quebec. And the others, we’ll put them in a nice air-conditioned bus and we’ll take them to Immigration Canada in Ottawa.”

I should emphasize a few things here, to salvage any hope of a civil discussion.

(1) What Lisée is suggesting won’t happen. In particular, it won’t happen because the party he used to lead has three seats out of 125 in Quebec’s National Assembly.

(2) The very suggestion made the other panelists uncomfortable. They took turns criticizing Lisée.

(3) The panel show’s host, Sébastien Bovet, immediately drew the obvious parallel: This is what governors in the U.S. south do. “Ron DeSantis charters flights and buses to send migrants north”, Bovet said, and indeed it is true. We shall see whether there are legal repercussions for DeSantis’ lurid stunt.

(4) Finally, I don’t think asylum seekers should be sorted by language ability and sent packing if they fail either. What’s going on at Roxham Road is a policy crisis, but it’s also a human drama. Lisée spoke during the same week as the funeral for a Haitian man who died trying to cross back into the US after his claims in Canada got hung up in procedural limbo.

Having said all of that, perhaps we can notice the scale of what’s happening at Roxham Road, and ponder how it fits into a generalized sense of Canadian bewilderment.

If you’re wondering why so many in Quebec are freaking out about a single pedestrian border crossing, it may be because the numbers are a bit breathtaking. This chart shows that 39,171 asylum claimants were intercepted by the RCMP between regular ports of entry in Quebec in 2022, compared to 369 in the entire rest of the country combined. So if asylum claims are a problem — and whatever else they are, they’re at least an administrative challenge — then 99.1% of the challenge is in Quebec.

That figure of 39,171, or 107 people a day, is more than twice as many as in any previous year in the last decade and, I’d guess without having statistics dating back further, the most in any province in any year in Canada’s history. (Much of this statistical background was covered in a column by the Toronto Sun‘s Brian Lilley earlier this week.)

Post-pandemic travelling on the TTC: ride the Red Rocket … cautiously

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

Matt Gurney posted a series of tweets about his recent subway experiences in Toronto:

I rode the TTC three times today. Once to downtown from my home in midtown. Once within downtown to a different place. And then home from downtown.

On two of those three rides, there was someone having a very obvious mental-health crisis on the vehicle with us.

The first one was a young man who clapped his hands over his ears and shrieked incoherently at random intervals. And then he got off.

The second, an older man sat in a chair and screamed nonsense constantly for ten stops. Maybe more. That’s just when I got off.

I’m working on a bigger piece for later so I’ll save any complex thoughts and big conclusions for then. But there was something interesting I noticed today. I’m a regular TTC rider. Not daily but frequent. And for the first time today, I’m noticing gallows humour and planning.

“Good luck to everyone,” cracked one guy. There was laughter. Everyone knew what he meant.

But I’m also seeing little groups of strangers agreeing to each keep watch on one direction or another. Sometimes also joking about it.

None of this is funny, but my gut tells me that if Torotonians are now so thoroughly convinced that riding the TTC is so risky that it’s worth a dark joke, any politician who reacts to the next unprovoked attack or murder with a proposal for a national summit is gonna get smoked.

I like the TTC. I have great access to it. It’s super convenient and affordable. It’s a huge asset for me. I have token cufflinks. I’m a fan, is what I’m saying.

I’m now at the point where I’d think twice before taking my kids on it. And we used to ride it just to kill the time.

My son used to stand on the couch in our living room looking out the window counting buses as they went by, loudly shouting to announce each one. Getting to go on a bus or subway or a streetcar was an event for him. My daughter, maybe a bit less excited. Still loved it.

Ah man.

Anyway. I hope tomorrow is better.

Update: You might think the increased concern over using the TTC might be merely a bit of confirmation bias informed by recent reporting, but apparently the situation is serious enough that Toronto Police will be stepping up their presence on the system.

January 23, 2023

Five Dumb Canadian Cartoons

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 11 Nov 2017

5 dumb cartoons from Canada I remember from my childhood.

(more…)

January 22, 2023

It’s not plunder if you wrap it into a “communications contract” with a “consultant”

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

Paul Wells notices an oddity with current federal government ministers’ continued dependence on outside contractors to help them with “communications”:

Immigration minister Ahmed Hussen at the Toronto Caribbean Carnival in 2017.
Photo by Bruce Reeve via Wikimedia Commons.

We’ll circle back to some specifics in a minute, but I’m fascinated by the notion of “communications” embodied here. I have questions.

  1. Four, five and seven years after being elected, who still needs communications help? You tell your voters the world will end if they elect the other team. A reporter calls, you send them bullshit. This isn’t exactly tricky.
  2. In what sense is this “communications”? Look at what Munch More Media did when Global came calling. (1) They erased their website. (2) They scrubbed their IG. (3) They shut down their Twitter account, which Global says had a single follower. (4) They left their Instagram account, whose last post was from 2018, and their LinkedIn account, which lists four followers and names no employees, intact. This is not a company with a proud story to tell. There’s a term for a communications firm that uses no social media. It’s “A firm that had damned well better have a sister in the minister’s office.”
  3. Hussen’s office hopes you’ll believe that a cabinet minister’s constituency office and his ministerial office never talk, but they sure seem to have closely studied the example of Munch More Media when it comes to fielding reporters’ queries. “Hussen’s office — over multiple conversations this week — did not acknowledge any connection between the director of Munch More Media and one of his most senior advisers,” Global reports. Now that’s gold-star communicating.
  4. This approach to communications is having its desired effect. Quick: What on Earth is Ahmed Hussen the minister of? How about Mary Ng? Don’t worry, I’m stumped too. Can you quote anything either person has ever said about anything? Of course not. If Hussen — or, might as well shoot for the moon, Ng — resigned from cabinet today, a resolution I here heartily advocate, you’d have to spare some sympathy for the poor wire-service reporter who’d be expected to come up with some kind of ending for the sentence beginning, “The minister is best known for ____.”
  5. Hussen’s riding has been held by the Liberals (and one apostate Liberal, John Nunziata, after he left the caucus to sit as an Independent) since Hussen was three years old, except for four years after the 2011 election. It’s one of the most reliably Liberal ridings under the eye of God, except for four years after the 2011 election. The only communications material a Liberal in York South-Weston needs is a billboard saying, “Michael Ignatieff Is No Longer the Liberal Leader.”

Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks. Because that’s where the money is, he said. Well, communications contracts are the new banks. There will always be money in communications contracts, and, gloriously, the simple answer — “Answer the question” — is never correct. The goal of communications is not to communicate. It’s to figure out how to communicate as little as possible.

One year later

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

Last year, the Freedom Convoy 2022 from all parts of Canada began to assemble and move toward Mordor, er, I mean Ottawa. Patrick Carroll remembers:

It’s hard to believe, but the one-year anniversary of the Canadian Freedom Convoy is upon us. It was January 22, 2022 when the convoy began to form across the country. Over the following week, thousands of trucks made their way to Ottawa, and on January 29 they arrived in the nation’s capital, loud and determined as ever.

The following month was one of the most tumultuous times in modern Canadian history. Downtown Ottawa was completely gridlocked, bridges were blocked, and politicians along with the media took every opportunity to smear the protesters.

Four weeks later, it ended quite a bit faster than most people expected. Armed with special powers from the never-before-invoked Emergencies Act, the government successfully dismantled the protest in a matter of days.

In hindsight, the practical effect of the protest on legislation is difficult to detect. Some Covid policies were probably relaxed a few months earlier than they otherwise would have been, but for the Convoy organizers, this was far from a decisive victory.

A debate has been raging in Canada ever since: were the protestors within their rights to do what they did? Those who support the convoy argue that they were, since the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly. Those who oppose the convoy largely agree with these freedoms, but argue that such freedoms should be subject to certain reasonable restrictions. Major obstructions to traffic, and especially obstructions to critical infrastructure such as bridges, are simply going too far in their view. Is the government supposed to stand by and let a group of hooligans bring the country to its knees?

That’s certainly the line the governments (city, provincial, and federal) generally chose to take and the media were almost chanting the governments’ line in unison. Of course, the governments were not all that well synchronized, which led to some blatant examples of deliberate misinformation/disinformation/gaslighting from one or another level, as Donna Laframboise points out:

During the inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act, witnesses talked about misinformation as if it were a problem confined to contrarians on social media. But the Closing Submission of former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly shows that government officials are, themselves, a fertile source of misinformation.

If someone in our federal government had demonstrated genuine leadership by going out and talking to the truckers, the protesters would likely have dispersed after the first weekend. Instead, a government that meets with professional lobbyists on 24,000 occasions a year refused to have a single meeting with working people who’d driven thousands of miles to the nation’s capital. Rather than being a grownup, the Prime Minister called them names. Rather than negotiating with the protesters, he told police to get rid of them.

According to Chief Sloly, the Ottawa force was understaffed at the best of times. Even after cancelling vacations and days off, there still weren’t enough personnel to deal with a significant, extended protest on top of normal duties.

From the beginning, the media failed to behave responsibly. It whipped up hysteria. It smeared and sneered. It sowed suspicion and fear of small town Canada, of those who see the world differently, of people who’d reached their breaking point. Big surprise a portion of the public did, in fact, become hysterical. As the protest dragged on, the pressure became intense. In lieu of pursuing a political resolution to what were clearly political grievances, slimy politicians pointed fingers at the Ottawa police. While simultaneously hamstringing them behind the scenes.

Page 43 of Chief Sloly’s Closing Submission says federal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino falsely told the world — on February 3rd — that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had provided all the resources the Ottawa police had asked for. Four days later — on February 7th — he insisted 250 RCMP officers had been dispatched to Ottawa.

But the reality was quite different. Until mid-February, say his lawyers, the maximum number of RCMP officers available to the Ottawa force on any given day was 60 — far less than the number required.

It was the same story with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). On February 6th, Ontario’s Solicitor General Sylvia Jones falsely stated in an official document that “more than 1,500” OPP personnel had already been sent to Ottawa. In the words of Chief Sloly’s lawyers, this was “grossly inaccurate” (pages 80, 107).

Government ministers at both the provincial and federal level, they insist, made misleading statements about the degree of assistance Ottawa police had received. Statements that were “clearly incorrect” (page 53).

Which means Cabinet ministers were spreading misinformation. Misinformation that just happened to deflect blame away from themselves. That just happened to make the Ottawa Police Service look incompetent while turning the chief into a scapegoat. Ottawa’s first black police chief, a Jamaican immigrant, got thrown under the bus.

January 20, 2023

Christopher Snowden on our latest “Clown World” alcohol guidelines

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

At Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, Christopher Snowden pokes gigantic holes in the stated justification for the latest Canadian drink consumption recommendations (also mentioned in this post yesterday):

Canada is on the brink of making itself an international laughing stock by cutting its drinking guidelines from two drinks a day to two drinks a week. The previous guidelines were only set in 2011 so Canadian drinkers can be forgiven for being suspicious about this dramatic change. The evidence base has not significantly changed in the interim. The evidence for the health benefits of moderate drinking has continued to pile up.

The only thing that has really changed is that neo-temperance zealots like Tim Stockwell have tightened their grip on alcohol research. Stockwell and his “no safe level” pal Tim Naimi both live in Canada and are both authors of the report that has made the ludicrous new recommendations.

I have been saying for over a decade that the “public health” plan is to get the guidelines down to zero so they can start regulating alcohol like tobacco. The evidence does not support this fundamentally ideological campaign and so the evidence has been dropped in favour of fantasy modelling and cherry-picking.

[…]

A Canadian “standard drink” contains 13.45 grams of alcohol. Three standard drinks equals 40 grams. Four standard drinks equals 53 grams. The meta-analysis has no data on people who drink so little, so the claim that colon cancer risk increases at three or more standard drinks is not supported even by the authors’ own preferred source.

As for breast cancer, which can only affect half the population and is partly why most countries have different guidelines for men and women, the report cites this meta-analysis of 22 studies, 13 of which found no statistically significant association with drinking. It pooled the studies and reported a 10 per cent increase in risk for people drinking 10 grams of alcohol a day. As with the colon cancer study, this was the minimum quantity studied so it tells us nothing about Canadians who drink 3-5 standard drinks.

In terms of mortality, another meta-analysis found that light drinking was not positively associated with any form of cancer, including breast cancer, and was negatively associated with cancer in a couple of instances […]

As countless studies have shown, heart disease and stroke risk is substantially reduced among light and moderate drinkers. For example, a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies (which track people’s drinking habits and health status over a number of years and are the most reliable studies in observational epidemiology) found that drinkers were 25 per cent less likely to die from coronary heart disease than teetotallers. The evidence for strokes is similar.

This is main reason why life expectancy is longer for moderate drinkers and the relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality is J-shaped.

The authors of the Canadian report essentially ignore all this evidence and instead focus on a cherry-picked meta-analysis written by Stockwell, Naimi and pals which massively adjusted the figures to arrive at their desired conclusion. This is inexcusable.

At The Line, Jen Gerson points out the utter absurdity of public health officials doing their best Carry Nation bar-smashing imitations while at the same time pushing for “harm reduction” policies for cocaine, heroin, and other illegal narcotics:

“Bayer Makes Heroin” by dog97209 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

“The guidance is based on the principle of autonomy in harm reduction and the fundamental idea behind it that people living in Canada have a right to know that all alcohol use comes with risk,” noted the CCSU and, hey, yeah!

I like to understand my risks so that I can make informed decisions.

But you know what else poses significant risk?

Lots of morphine and cocaine.

I think this is generally known. But God help you if you want to engage in a conversation about the risks society might be courting with safe supply or even harm-reduction strategies, and have fun being labelled a Conservative troglodyte who just wants suffering addicts to die in the street. You’re probably just a rich, callous asshole who opposes all of these evidence-based policies who blows second-hand smoke into the faces of your children while drinking your sixth beer of the night at the local pub. Just shut up and pick up those discarded needles in your yard, you monster.

I was picking on Health Canada previously, but they’re hardly the only ones who display a bizarre split-personality on these issues. Any story by or on the CBC on the matter of alcohol use now sounds like something straight out of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Yet just try to find critical reporting on safe consumption sites or safe supply policies. Almost all of it is uniformly glowing.

[…]

Obviously, I don’t think that our public-health officials are telling Canadians that heroin takes the edge off a hard day better than a glass of red or a pint of beer. But did we learn nothing over the course of the pandemic about the importance of consistent and clear public-health communications? The target audience for this is not those who have carefully studied harm reduction and substance use disorders. It’s people who just like to have a drink with dinner.

If our governments want to maintain any credibility, they can’t be uptight about how many glasses of pinot noir we drink, and then appear to be loosey goosey on heroin. It’s just impossible to take that kind of suck-and-blow at face value, but that’s exactly how this messaging will come across to people who aren’t closely engaged with this issue. “The government wants to give free hard drugs to junkies but thinks my cocktail is a problem?”

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