Quotulatiousness

July 12, 2020

Reforming the police

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Government, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A guest editorial at Catallaxy Files from former Australian senator David Leyonhjelm discusses the original civilian police force, the London Metropolitan Police, and the rules that governed their actions. Contrasting the origins of modern policing, he then discusses the ways police organizations have changed:

“On the bus” by OregonDOT is licensed under CC BY 2.0

One issue is the steady militarisation of the police. This ranges from references to the public as civilians and assertions that the police place their lives on the line every day, to black uniforms, military assault rifles and equipment such as armoured personnel carriers. This is a bigger concern in America, where a lot of military surplus equipment is sold to police and the emphasis on armed conflict is more pronounced, but the trend is the same here.

When they see themselves as soldiers in a war, it is not surprising that some police have no regard for public welfare. The negligence leading to the death of Miss Dhu in police custody in [Western Australia], and of course the notorious deaths in America, are obvious examples of where that leads.

Peel’s principles also stipulate that police should only use physical force when persuasion, advice and warning are insufficient, to use only the minimum force necessary, and that the cooperation of the public diminishes proportionately with the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion.

Yet how often do we see police resort to violence when making an arrest? People are tackled, forced to the ground with knees on their back and neck amid blows, kicks and the vindictive use of Tasers, simply to apply handcuffs. Being “non-compliant” or raising verbal objections is enough to prompt this, and some have died as a result.

Moreover, when the victims of such treatment are not convicted or imprisoned, such rough handling amounts to a form of punishment. That is also in conflict with Peel’s Principles, which require the police to avoid usurping the powers of the judiciary by authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.

Enforcement of the Covid rules, including the authoritarian decrees and fines imposed by state premiers, provide further examples: petty closing of cafes, prosecutions for reading in a park, chasing individuals along a closed beach, stopping fishing from a pier the day after 10,000 have gathered in a demonstration, and even a Police Commissioner who denounces the cruise industry as criminal, are among them. The Australian public are never likely to accept the police as one of them while those sorts of things occur.

Change is necessary. Corrupt and thuggish police must be rooted out and the enforcement of laws that the public does not support, including political and victimless crimes, should never have priority. Moreover, arresting people seldom solves problems that originate in drug use, alcoholism, mental illness and poverty.

The fundamental responsibility of governments is to protect life, liberty and property. If the police were to focus on these while upholding Peel’s Principles, Australians might even come to their aid.

Restoring Notre Dame – “The matter will be solved in a serene manner, and on time”

Filed under: Architecture, France, Government, History, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Sullivan breathes a sigh of relief that the French government is going to properly restore the fire-damaged cathedral rather than — shudder — re-imagine it:

A small note of hope. The fiery destruction of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was one of the more searing occasions for acute depression these past couple of years, and it was not without some stiff competition. Yes, it’s just a building and not a human being. But it is also far more than a building. It’s a reminder to me of what the faith of Europe was once capable of; of a civilization proud, rather than ashamed, of itself; and of a lost world when beauty itself was a virtue and connected to a view of the whole of creation that made sense and provided hope and meaning.

Much of that has disappeared, of course, which is why the physical remains of a previous civilization are so precious. And so I was terrified, to be honest, that our own aesthetically squalid and spiritually devoid ideas of what architecture should be might ruin the rebuilding. And when you take a look at some of the original wackier proposed designs — you can see models for seven modernist monstrosities in this Architectural Digest compilation here — you can see what I was worried about. One tops the cathedral with a greenhouse; another with a swimming pool. One hideous version has the entire roof and new spire made out of stained glass; another re-creates a ball of fire in metallic form. Norman Foster’s design turned the place into a huge greenhouse, or as one Twitter wag put it, like “a conference center in Essex.” This was all because Macron himself hinted that he preferred a “contemporary architectural gesture.”

Mercifully, the chief architect put in charge of the restoration, Philippe Villeneuve, had some strong feelings on the matter. He wanted the original restored in its entirety, period. When I say “strong feelings,” I refer to the following statement he made on television last year: “I will restore it identically, and it will be me, or they will build a modern spire, and it won’t be me.” When President Macron’s somewhat more ambitious adviser on the project, General Jean-Louis Georgelin, testified on the matter to the National Assembly’s cultural-affairs committee, sparks flew when Villeneuve’s statement was brought up. Georgelin said: “The matter will be solved in a serene manner, and on time. I have already explained to the chief architect that he should just shut his big mouth, and I will do it again.” “On time” meant in time for Paris’s hosting of the Olympics in 2024.

And since that time is fast running out, and designing, approving and building a modernist tower would take too long, we found out yesterday that the restoration will be identical after all. It will copy the 19th-century Gothic design exactly. The contemporary gesture that Macron desired will instead be a giant Victorian single finger to all the modernists who would have destroyed it. And who knows how many generations in the future will be thankful.

Two of the “re-imagined” restorations:

Feel like a refreshing dip? One proposal for restoring Notre Dame envisioned a rooftop pool.


Still another proposal included this … thing … stuck on top.

July 11, 2020

Truncating the state of Oklahoma

Filed under: Government, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on what might turn out to be the most important US Supreme Court decision in recent history:

A map of Oklahoma from the mid-1880s showing county boundaries and the tribal areas of Indian Territory.
Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th edition, 1888 via Wikimedia Commons.

On Thursday the court published its judgment in the case of McGirt v. Oklahoma [PDF]. McGirt is Jimcy McGirt, a man convicted in state court in 1997 of heinous sex crimes against a four year old. A creative public defender had tried to argue for years in lower courts that, as McGirt was a member of the Seminole Nation and his crimes had occurred on territory set aside in the 19th century for Creek Indians, he was never subject to state prosecution.

He should have been tried, the argument ran, under the federal Major Crimes Act of 1885, which specifies that accusations of serious felonies against Indians in “Indian country” go immediately to federal court. Under an 1856 treaty between the U.S. and the Creeks, the Creek lands were to be a “permanent home” for the displaced nation for as long as it existed (at a time when Aboriginal-Americans were still widely expected to diminish and disappear as a race).

The formalized concept of an Indian reservation did not yet exist, but the theory, then and now, is that some Aboriginal nations have direct relationships, albeit ones of “dependence,” with the federal government. Sometimes it is said that the U.S. is the “suzerain,” the overlord, of otherwise sovereign Indian nations. The Creeks, and the other four “Civilized Tribes” who had been forced into the “Indian Territory” that once covered the eastern part of future Oklahoma, were given strong written promises that they would be held apart from the U.S. states proper and would have jurisdiction over crimes and civil matters on their lands. Only the United States Congress, as a power contracting with sovereign nations, could act to encroach upon this jurisdiction.

In a fashion familiar to anyone who has read even a shred of the history of the American Indian, these promises just kind of got … misplaced. In the early 20th century the Oklahoma tribes were encouraged by Congress to abandon communal property holding and take up individual “allotments” of Indian-held land. This ought not to have changed the underlying nation-to-nation relationship, any more than assigning homesteading parcels to settlers busted up or negated the ultimate sovereignty of the U.S. elsewhere in the American West. But that constitutional framework was more easily ignored once a contiguous bundle of territory began to be bought and sold. (Some of it became part of the city of Tulsa.) This history has helped to make similar allotment action in Canada impossible, whatever advantages it might have.

July 9, 2020

Austin Bay on how Malawi fixed a crooked election

Filed under: Africa, Government, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Strategy Page, Austin Bay recounts the efforts to overturn an election that was clearly fraudulent in the small land-locked African country of Malawi:

Malawi and surrounding countries in southern Africa.
Satellite image via Google Maps.

Since he retained the title of president, Mutharika believed he controlled the guns and the courts. The protests would fade.

He learned otherwise. Malawi’s military, the Malawi Defense Force (MDF) and the Malawi Police Service, watched the country carefully, keeping order but not taking sides. The opposition appealed to Malawi’s highest court, the Constitutional Court. MDF commanders made it clear their service, as protectors of the constitution, would protect the court’s justices and respect the court’s decision.

Ignoring intimidation and enticements (Mutharika offered splendid early retirement), in February 2020, the court annulled the 2019 results as tainted and ordered new elections in June 2020 — the Fresh Presidential Election.

MDF soldiers prepared to secure the FPE’s paper ballots. In a June briefing, an MDF general told motorists to “maintain a distance of at least one kilometer between them and vehicles” carrying ballots. Enter the security zone and get a warning, but “(overtly) following the vehicles can lead to loss of lives if one is not careful.” Beware political thugs — MDF weapons prevent ballot hijacking.

Voters need protection, too. On June 22, MDF soldiers in central Malawi detained 16 men local citizens identified as intruders seeking to disrupt the vote. When police officers questioned the 16, they admitted they worked for Mutharika’s governing Democratic Progressive Party.

On June 23, opposition leader Chakwera received 60% of the vote in the untainted do-over. Mutharika got 38%. An MDF contingent immediately began protecting Chakwera.

Voting irregularities occur in mature democracies. However, election fraud does severe harm to developing nations where the disenfranchised have little or no systemic recourse and free speech is risky. Hope and nascent civil participation give way to wrath and alienation, which produce violence and destruction, not stability and economic development.

In the six decades since decolonization, election rigging by sub-Saharan Africa elites has stunted economic and social progress in nations whose people deserve far better (see Ghana). Disregard of constitutional law and violent intimidation of opposition voters by the party in power inevitably accompany election theft. Burundi and Congo are examples.

July 6, 2020

Cold War Two is upon us, but it’s not all Trump’s fault (believe it or not)

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Niall Ferguson on the rapid drop in temperature in US/Chinese relations in the last eight years:

President Donald Trump and PRC President Xi Jinping at the G20 Japan Summit in Osaka, 29 June, 2019.
Cropped from an official White House photo by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons.

“We are in the foothills of a Cold War.” Those were the words of Henry Kissinger when I interviewed him at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing last November.

The observation in itself was not wholly startling. It had seemed obvious to me since early last year that a new Cold War — between the U.S. and China — had begun. This insight wasn’t just based on interviews with elder statesmen. Counterintuitive as it may seem, I had picked up the idea from binge-reading Chinese science fiction.

First, the history. What had started out in early 2018 as a trade war over tariffs and intellectual property theft had by the end of the year metamorphosed into a technology war over the global dominance of the Chinese company Huawei Technologies Co. in 5G network telecommunications; an ideological confrontation in response to Beijing’s treatment of the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang region and the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; and an escalation of old frictions over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Nevertheless, for Kissinger, of all people, to acknowledge that we were in the opening phase of Cold War II was remarkable.

Since his first secret visit to Beijing in 1971, Kissinger has been the master-builder of that policy of U.S.-Chinese engagement which, for 45 years, was a leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy. It fundamentally altered the balance of power at the mid-point of the Cold War, to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union. It created the geopolitical conditions for China’s industrial revolution, the biggest and fastest in history. And it led, after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, to that extraordinary financial symbiosis which Moritz Schularick and I christened “Chimerica” in 2007.

How did relations between Beijing and Washington sour so quickly that even Kissinger now speaks of Cold War?

The conventional answer to that question is that President Donald Trump has swung like a wrecking ball into the “liberal international order” and that Cold War II is only one of the adverse consequences of his “America First” strategy.

Yet that view attaches too much importance to the change in U.S. foreign policy since 2016, and not enough to the change in Chinese foreign policy that came four years earlier, when Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Future historians will discern that the decline and fall of Chimerica began in the wake of the global financial crisis, as a new Chinese leader drew the conclusion that there was no longer any need to hide the light of China’s ambition under the bushel that Deng Xiaoping had famously recommended.

July 5, 2020

Andrew Sullivan – “There is no doubt at this point that communist China is a genocidal state”

Filed under: China, Government, Liberty, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his latest column, Andrew Sullivan discusses China’s latest outrages against groups within China:

Protest against the Chinese government in Hong Kong, 25 November 2019.
Photo by Studio Incendo via Wikimedia Commons

Genocide is not measured simply by the number of human beings in a demographic group who have been killed. Such numbers vary. The pogroms in Europe of the 14th century killed far, far fewer Jews than died in the 20th-century Holocaust, but it would be crazy not to see a very similar eliminationist impulse. It’s the genocidal intent that defines a genocide. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines it as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Their definition includes the following five categories:

  1. Killing members of the group.
  2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
  3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
  4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
  5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

There is no doubt at this point that communist China is a genocidal state. The regime is determined to coerce, kill, reeducate, and segregate its Uighur Muslim population, and to pursue eugenicist policies to winnow their ability to sustain themselves. The Associated Press just published an exhaustive and chilling account of the extent of the campaign, which was reportedly supported and seconded by the president of the United States when speaking with President-for-life Xi.

We already know about the reeducation camps. We found out this week the grisly detail that China may even have been exporting human-hair products taken from Uighur political prisoners in those camps. What the AP helps us better understand is how the regime is forcibly sterilizing Uighur women inside and outside the camps, attempting to control the Uighur population by assaulting basic reproductive freedom. Uighur families with multiple children are now in danger of being sent to camps for the crime of bringing Uighur kids into the world: “Time in a camp — what the government calls ‘education and training’ — for parents with too many children is written policy in at least three counties, notices found by [scholar Adrian] Zenz confirmed. In 2017, the Xinjiang government also tripled the already hefty fines for violating family planning laws for even the poorest residents — to at least three times the annual disposable income of the county.”

And the campaign of terror is working: “Birth rates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60% from 2015 to 2018, the latest year available in government statistics. Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24% last year alone — compared to just 4.2% nationwide, statistics show.” In the Uighur city of Hotan, over a third of all married women of childbearing age were sterilized in 2019 alone. And this is taking place in the context of a new campaign to increase the fertility and offspring of the majority Han Chinese. This is pure racial social engineering.

This genocidal dictatorship also took this past week to stomp all over what’s left of freedom in Hong Kong. Just before the anniversary of the end of British rule in Hong Kong, Beijing has introduced a new security law that all but eviscerates any freedom for dissent in the former British colony. It renders a variety of offenses that involve pro-democracy activism and criticism of the regime punishable by up to a lifetime in jail. The law is deliberately vague, was passed with no input from Hong Kong’s own government before its details were revealed, and criminalizes offenses such as “secession, subversion against the central Chinese government, terrorism, and colluding with foreign forces.”

The effect has been immediate: Key members of a leading dissident group, Demosisto, resigned, and the party has been disbanded. Throughout Hong Kong, businesses that had posted messages of support for the pro-democracy forces are swiftly removing them. People are deleting their social-media accounts for fear of imprisonment. A BBC reporter notes the immediate impact: “One contact of mine, a lawyer and human-rights activist, sent me a message shortly after the law was passed. ‘Please delete everything on this chat,’ he wrote.”

July 4, 2020

Australian defence expansion – “We’re not talking about Canada”

Filed under: Australia, China, Government, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Australian government has embarked on a ten-year military expansion program that is clearly directed against recent Chinese bullying in the region:

HMAS Adelaide (LHD 01) and HMAS Canberra (LHD 02), based on the Spanish navy’s Juan Carlos I landing helicopter dock built by Navantia, and commissioned in November 2014 (Canberra) and December 2015 (Adelaide).
Photo by Tony Hisgett via Wikimedia Commons.

[Australian PM] Scott Morrison has unveiled a more aggressive defence strategy aimed at countering the rise of China, while warning that Australia faces regional challenges on a scale not seen since World War II.

The strategy increases the focus on the Indo-Pacific region, with the Prime Minister warning that Australia needs to prepare for a post-COVID-19 world that is “poorer, more dangerous and more disorderly”.

Australia will build a larger military that is focused on its immediate backyard, including new long-range anti-ship missiles, signalling a major shift in the nation’s defence strategy.

“We have not seen the conflation of global economic and strategic uncertainty now being experienced here in Australia in our region since the existential threat we faced when the global and regional order collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s,” the Prime Minister warned.

Mr Morrison also announced a commitment to spend $270 billion over the next decade on defence capabilities, including more potent strike weapons, cyber capabilities and a high-tech underwater surveillance system.

Over the four years, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) is expected to grow by 800 people, comprising 650 extra personnel for the Navy, 100 for the Air Force, and 50 for the Army.

According to Defence’s 2019-20 Budget Statement, the ADF was estimated to grow to 60,090 by this year, with 16,272 full-time public service staff.

Its budget was expected to grow to 2 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product by 2020-21, “equating to approximately $200 billion in Australia’s defence capability over 10 years”, making the new announcement an increase of $70 billion to the department.

In a speech at the Australian Defence Force Academy Mr Morrison argued the Indo-Pacific is the “epicentre” of rising strategic competition and “the risk of miscalculation — and even conflict — is heightening”.

July 1, 2020

Toronto Police won’t be facing a 10% budget cut after city council votes down proposal

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

Chris Selley on the vote by Toronto city councillors to retain the existing budget for the city’s police force at $1.22 billion:

On Monday, Toronto City Council debated and passed a variety of proposed police reforms, the newsiest of which had been asking the department to table a 10-per-cent budget cut for 2021. That idea was voted down 16-8. Further proposed changes included asking the Toronto Police Service for a line-item budget, and subjecting police to the municipal auditor-general’s oversight — utterly revolutionary concepts, you will agree. (Both passed.)

The budget cut might at least have been a useful exercise: It would be interesting to know what the police would and wouldn’t do with $1.1 billion instead of $1.22 billion. If I had been a consensus-seeking councillor on the virtual floor, I might have moved a motion asking the police to table line-item budgets for both — and maybe push for 20 or 30 per cent, too. But the question of the budget sucked up too much oxygen.

That’s certainly understandable. The “defund the police” movement in all its permutations is having a moment. There are North American police departments and police unions that might as well be begging to be disbanded, as much with their banal and petulant misbehaviour as with their needless use of lethal force. A few might even get their wish.

Canadian departments haven’t been begging quite as hard, however, and too many Canadians take false solace in that. When it comes to police-involved fatalities, we fare quite poorly against Western nations other than the one next door. Our accountability mechanisms are, generally speaking, a sick joke; indeed, it seems considerably easier to fire flamboyantly terrible cops in the United States than it does here.

James Forcillo, the Toronto officer who was caught on tape fatally unloading nine shots at 18-year-old Sammy Yatim for no good reason, was on the payroll for two-and-a-half years until his criminal conviction. He was at least suspended. Simon Seguin, the Alberta RCMP officer caught on camera in March rugby-tackling, punching and choking Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam in a dispute over an expired vehicle registration, was at the time awaiting trial for assault!

June 30, 2020

In the final analysis, there is only one taxpayer – you

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

Ted Campbell comes out in favour of some form of negative income tax for Canada:

Cartoon that appeared with Michael K. Spencer’s article “Is Universal Basic Income really a solution?” at https://medium.com/@Michael_Spencer/is-universal-basic-income-really-a-solution-c0d6d95f100e

My first and, I believe, the most important thing to understand about taxes is: there is only one taxpayer; it is you and me and individuals like us. Corporations do not pay taxes ~ they pass every single penny of the taxes assessed to them on to us, their customers. You and I and your and my family and friends pay 100% of all corporate taxes.

A tax on income is a tax on savings which is, in turn, a tax on investment which means it is a tax on jobs.

Flate rate taxes are unfair to the poor, but progressive income taxes, while fairer, take money away from investment in jobs.

Consumption taxes (sales taxes and the HST/GST) are, to some extent, voluntary: consume less and you pay less in taxes. Where consumption is not discretionary ~ say on food ~ the tax system may be used to make consumption taxes at least somewhat progressive.

Corporate taxes ~ ALL corporate taxes ~ are just consumption taxes that are collected in an inefficient and expensive manner. It would be much, much better tax policy to raise the federal GST by 1 or 2 points and cancel ALL corporate taxes. Having a zero federal corporate tax rate would make Canada a much, much more attractive place in which to do business; companies would want to open plants and offices here ~ meaning more, new, good jobs for Canadians.

Income taxes have far too many exceptions and exemptions and deductions and so on. Federal income taxes should be clear and simple and the Canada Revenue Agency should be able to automatically provide a tax bill to about 98% of Canadians. That may mean a thorough (and time-consuming and politically unpopular) overhaul of the complete tax system.

June 27, 2020

Maximilien Robespierre: The Reign of Terror

Filed under: France, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Biographics
Published 5 Jul 2018

Maximilien Robespierre promised to usher a fairer, more representative form of government to the French people. What they got was a reign of terror that saw thousands facing the horror of the guillotine.

Visit our companion website for more: http://biographics.org

Credits:
Host – Simon Whistler
Author – Steve Theunissen
Producer – Jack Cole
Executive Producer – Shell Harris

Business inquiries to biographics.email@gmail.com

Canada’s “Gang of 19” urges abject surrender and hostage exchange with China

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

As Canadian political life continues to revolve more and more around the Chinese model, we now have our very own political “gang”, just like China did!

“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought”, 1969.
A poster from the Cultural Revolution, featuring an image of Chairman Mao.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

A former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada. A former Conservative foreign minister. Two former Liberal foreign ministers. Four former Canadian ambassadors to the United Nations, under Liberal and Tory governments. Two former Canadian ambassadors to the United States, under Liberal and Tory governments. A former Supreme Court justice. A former Liberal justice minister. A former Conservative senator. A flock of name-brand diplomats. Former CBC host Don Newman, for some reason.

This is the panoply of 19 elite opinion-makers that gathered in the Laurentian Boardroom at an online hotel and drafted a letter, released Wednesday, calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to intervene in the extradition process, set Huawei CFO Meng Wangzhou free, and thereby secure the release of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.

China, last seen denying the two men’s detention had anything to do with Meng, had changed its tune just hours earlier on Wednesday: Freeing her might “open up space for resolution to the situation of the two Canadians,” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said.

And who stands in the way? A prime minister who was perfectly happy to stick his thumb on the scales of justice to save a cherished member of Quebec Inc. from the indignity of prosecution for rather flamboyant alleged corporate malfeasance in and concerning Gaddafi-era Libya (or to “save jobs,” if you prefer, although it emerged no one in Justin Trudeau’s government had bothered to inquire how many jobs might actually be lost if SNC-Lavalin were convicted).

You can hardly blame China for noting the precedent. And it’s sorely fitting that the Gang of 19 addressed their letter to Trudeau rather than to the fellow who would actually have to give the order: Justice Minister David Lametti. We all know who calls the shots in that particular relationship. Perhaps it’s best we just admit it.

Colby Cosh also finds the advice proffered to the Prime Minister to be … less than admirable:

Screen capture of a BBC News report on Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor facing espionage charges in China.

I wanted to discuss the letter written by the 19 geriatric Canadian worthies who encouraged the Prime Minister to trade Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, in Canadian custody fighting extradition to the U.S., for the “two (Canadian) Michaels” detained on ill-defined espionage charges in China. Colleague Chris Selley has gone over the ground, but that’s show biz for you. Selley concluded his overview by pointing out that the letter argues perversely for “surrender, then victory.” With the Meng-Michaels standoff out of the way, the various ex-diplomats and superannuated politicians argued, Canada could use the opportunity for a fresh foreign-policy start, deciding what “tough steps” ought to be taken against China. If any.

The letter, part of a campaign on the two Michaels’ behalf led by ex-Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour and ex-justice minister Allan Rock, is self-refuting in parts. Yielding “to bullying or blackmail” is “repugnant,” the authors admit, while advising just that. But “resisting China’s pressure is no guarantee that it will never be applied again in the future … China might well decide that next time it will need to escalate by detaining more than two Canadians.”

The implication, if this argument is to have any force, is that actively rewarding China’s abduction of our citizens is a jim-dandy way of making sure it never happens again. The problem with this reasoning is obvious, but the authors are also careful not to define victory too precisely. They say that letting Meng go and getting Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor back would permit Canada to “declare its position on Huawei’s involvement in the deployment of 5G technology in Canada,” a decision “that has been postponed time and again.”

Sooo … the authors think we should slam the door on Huawei, whose CEO is Meng’s father? They don’t say so! They only say that settling this quarrel would make it easier for us to decide. And they are only slightly clearer on issues of human rights in China and Hong Kong, which our current government and foreign service are allegedly being shy about “so as not to make the situation worse for the Canadian prisoners.”

QotD: The cost of military equipment

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Major military hardware is produced in only limited quantities and involves a massive amount of research, development, and engineering before the first unit goes into service. Because of this, the companies that build it are rarely willing to take the risk of paying for the development themselves and recovering the cost from the units that they sell. What if the customer suddenly decides to cut their buy in half? To avoid this problem, development is paid for by the customer separately from procurement of each item. Well, more or less. The actual answer varies with each particular system, accounting method, and time of the month. But in general, costs break down that way.

So why does this cause so much confusion? Well, it all has to do with what gets reported. Someone who is trying to make the case that some program is outrageously expensive and should be cancelled is going to lump together development and procurement, divide by the number of systems involved, and then publish the resulting number. But, particularly when we’re discussing the cost of a system about to enter production, that’s very different from the actual numbers. To give a well-known example, the B-2 is generally reputed to have cost about $2 billion/plane in the 90s. However, this is the total program cost divided by the 21 airframes. If we’d decided to buy 22 B-2s instead of the 21 we did buy, the extra plane would have cost only $700 million or so. Admittedly, the B-2 is a rather extreme case, and usually the share of R&D cost is less than the procurement (flyaway) cost, but it’s illustrative of the power of this kind of framing.

“bean”, “Military Procurement – Pricing”, Naval Gazing, 2018-03-09.

June 24, 2020

Trudeau government wants to introduce an Internet “link tax”

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

Michael Geist on the Trudeau government’s latest indications of support for a tax grab to benefit certain favoured groups and organizations:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.

Last week, Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault called into question his own government’s policies on supporting news media, suggesting that those programs should be replaced by copyright rules that would open the door to payments from internet companies such as Google and Facebook. Mr. Guilbeault indicated that a legislative package was being prepared for the fall that would include new powers for Canada’s communications regulator and what are commonly referred to as Netflix taxes and internet linking taxes.

My Globe and Mail op-ed notes the government’s support for new internet taxes should not come as a surprise. There were strong signals that the spring budget – postponed indefinitely due to the current public health crisis – was going to include expanding sales taxes to capture digital sales such as Netflix or Spotify subscriptions.

[…]

It is Mr. Guilbeault’s plans for a link tax that should spark the most concern, however. The government has long promoted its policies designed to support the Canadian media sector, including direct funding for local journalism as well as labour and subscription tax credits. The taxpayer cost runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, but is justified on the grounds that journalism is an essential service that requires public support.

Yet Mr. Guilbeault now says that government should not be funding media, characterizing the policies as short term measures aimed at mitigating a media emergency. Instead, Mr. Guilbeault supports a controversial copyright reform measure that would establish a news publisher’s right to demand payment for services that link to their content.

This payment – effectively a tax on linking – raises a host of concerns, not the least of which is that the proposal was not recommended by the government’s own copyright review last year. Copyright reform in Canada is always complicated, particularly given that responsibility for it is shared with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains, but delving into reforms that sparked protests in Europe could be politically risky for a minority government.

News organizations already benefit from large platforms linking to their content since the links generate visitors that increase advertising revenues and paying subscribers. Organizations that do not want the links can easily opt-out of appearing in services such as Google News or Facebook. In fact, after Google shut down its Google News service in Spain, studies found publisher website traffic dropped by 10 per cent.

June 20, 2020

“What did you do in the Wuhan Coronavirus war, Daddy?”

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

Chris Selley metaphorically dons the garb of a war correspondent to report on how the Canadian government systematically mishandled the epidemic “war”:

Toronto General Hospital.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

At first, comparisons to wartime seemed a bit silly. All we were being asked to do, after all, was stay indoors. As the World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic 100 days ago, the commanders had everything under control: the borders, the epidemiology, the strategy, support for shuttered businesses and their employees. Traditionally, wartime puts those of us left on the home front to work whether we like it or not. This was entirely the opposite: the worst we would have to put up with — in theory, assuming government aid was as advertised — was the indignity of idleness. Collective inaction would flatten the curve, the forces of COVID-19 would be beaten back, and summer would be saved. Peace in our time.

And then it instantly turned to quagmire. Canadians watched slack-jawed as COVID-19 breached our most fundamental defences. You don’t need Sun Tzu’s perspicacity to inform people arriving in Canada of their responsibility to self-isolate, and exactly what self-isolation means — go directly home, do not stop for groceries, do not receive visitors. I just did it, right there, in half a sentence. But we couldn’t manage it: Where information was distributed at all, it was excessively complex even as it failed to deliver the central message. Provincial forces threatened mutiny. Alberta Commander-in-Chief Jason Kenney stormed into the Edmonton airport demanding answers. It took weeks to sort out.

[…]

If it didn’t seem like a war before, it sure did once the real live army was drafted in to bail out long-term care homes in Ontario and Quebec that had descended into horrifying squalor. We learned the appalling details from leaked military reports. And now, in an almost poetic act of military pigheadedness, the Ottawa Citizen reports the Armed Forces are trying to hunt down and punish the leakers.

The war must go on. But sitting here in still-locked-down Toronto, stewing in my own bile, I cannot say this is filling me with patriotic fervour. I find myself simultaneously envious of other provinces that are in the process of reopening, and sympathetic to their residents: If it weren’t for the two sick men of the federation [Ontario and Quebec] dominating the narrative, they would likely have reopened much earlier.

Indeed, jealousies have bloomed as weeks turned to months. Apartment dwellers envy other apartment dwellers who have balconies. All apartment dwellers envy homeowners. Everyone envies cottage-owners. Some cottage-country mayors have told cottage-owners to stay put and keep their infestations to themselves. People cooped up with their kids sometimes envy those with time to themselves; singletons who have had enough alone time to last a decade occasionally envy those trying to juggle kids with working from home. The pleasant novelty of Zoom-based socializing faded ages ago, as everyone realized that Zoom-based socializing sucks.

More than 8,200 Canadians are dead, most having lived long lives but many having died in grim and lonely circumstances. In future, considerably more deaths and distress will be associated with the lockdown itself. The psychological effects of this will be studied for decades. If war isn’t quite the right analogy, it’s certainly closer to a war than anything that has been contested on Canadian soil in my or my parents’ lifetime, and it will come at a greater cost to the whole of society than any actual war that Canadian forces have fought over that time. It’s a terrible shame that as a nation, we didn’t win.

Opposition to home schooling is merely a side-issue for those who want government to control everything

Filed under: Education, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kerry McDonald recently took part in a debate with a Harvard academic who has called upon governments to ban homeschooling. She’s written up some of the things she took away from the discussion and from the many questions submitted before the event:

While this event was framed as a discussion about homeschooling, including whether and how to regulate the practice, it is clear that homeschooling is just a strawman. The real issue focuses on the role of government in people’s lives, and in particular in the lives of families and children. In her 80-page Arizona Law Review article that sparked this controversy, Professor Bartholet makes it clear that she is seeking a reinterpretation of the US Constitution, which she calls “outdated and inadequate,” to move from its existing focus on negative rights, or individuals being free from state intervention, to positive rights where the state takes a much more active role in citizens’ lives.

During Monday’s discussion, Professor Bartholet explained that “some parents can’t be trusted to not abuse and neglect their children,” and that is why “kids are going to be way better off if both parent and state are involved.” She said her argument focuses on “the state having the right to assert the rights of the child to both education and protection.” Finally, Professor Bartholet said that it’s important to “have the state have some say in protecting children and in trying to raise them so that the children have a decent chance at a future and also are likely to participate in some positive, meaningful ways in the larger society.”

It’s true that the state has a role in protecting children from harm, but does it really have a role in “trying to raise them”? And if the state does have a role in raising children to be competent adults, then the fact that two-thirds of US schoolchildren are not reading proficiently, and more than three-quarters are not proficient in civics, should cause us to be skeptical about the state’s ability to ensure competence.

I made the point on Monday that we already have an established government system to protect children from abuse and neglect. The mission of Child Protective Services (CPS) is to investigate suspected child abuse and punish perpetrators. CPS is plagued with problems and must be dramatically reformed, but the key is to improve the current government system meant to protect children rather than singling out homeschoolers for additional regulation and government oversight. This is particularly true when there is no compelling evidence that homeschooling parents are more likely to abuse their children than non-homeschooling parents, and some research to suggest that homeschooling parents are actually less likely to abuse their children.

Additionally, and perhaps most disturbingly, this argument for more state involvement in the lives of homeschoolers ignores the fact that children are routinely abused in government schools by government educators, as well as by school peers. If the government can’t even protect children enrolled in its own heavily regulated and surveilled schools, then how can it possibly argue for the right to regulate and monitor those families who opt out?

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