Quotulatiousness

May 25, 2022

“What is a reasonable general concern?”

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

In The Line, Paula Simons has a concern that I think is quite reasonable:

What is a reasonable general concern?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I really don’t know the answer. I’m not sure anyone else does, either.

And that’s exactly the problem with Bill S-7, a new piece of government legislation, which amends both the Customs Act and the Preclearance Act.

Bill S-7 set a new standard to allow border services officers to search through our cellphones, laptops, tablets, Apple Watches and other personal computers. If the bill passes, it will allow officers who feel a “reasonable general concern” to search through the emails, documents, texts, instant messages, photos or videos stored on our digital devices, to look for evidence that we may have violated customs regulations.

Reasonable general concern. Or, as it says in the French-language draft of the bill, “des préoccupations générales raisonnables“.

It’s an absolutely novel legal threshold. That phrase, be it in English or French, doesn’t appear anywhere else in Canadian criminal or civil law. It’s not a standard borrowed from any other country. It’s a brand new legal test to authorize an invasive search of your most private personal records and correspondence.

A reasonable concern, one might intuit, is a lower standard than a reasonable suspicion, because a concern is less grave, less specific, than a suspicion.

But a general concern? A general preoccupation?

That sounds even more vague, more subjective, than a good old-fashioned hunch or inkling.

It seems counter-intuitive, to put it mildly, to create a lower, broader standard to search our private data on our private devices than to search our conventional mail, or our suitcases, or our car trunks. Yet that is exactly what Bill S-7 does.

How did we get here? The answer is an ironic one.

Back in 2020, the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled unanimously that portions of the Customs Act were unconstitutional.

The court found the act violated the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, because it allowed for what the court called “suspicion-less and unlimited” searches of our personal digital devices.

That violation, held the court, could not be saved by section 1 of the Charter, because it allowed unfettered and unrestricted access to people’s most personal and intimate information, and because it allowed the state almost unlimited latitude to dig around in the what the court called our “biographical core of identity”.

British lack-of-flair in naming things

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West wonders why the Brits come up with such boring names for, well, everything:

A detail from the Mapping London Tube Zones map – https://mappinglondon.co.uk/2021/tube-zones/

Back in the 1850s, when London was getting its first proper government, the authorities had a problem with street names – they were just so boring that it was actually confusing.

According to Judith Flanders’s The Victorian City: “In 1853, London had twenty-five Victoria Streets, thirty-seven King and twenty-seven Queen Streets, twenty-two Princes, seventeen Dukes, thirty-four Yorks and twenty-three Gloucesters – and that was without counting the similarly named Places, Roads, Squares, Courts, Alleys or Mews, or even the many synonyms that designated squalid backcourts: Rents, Rows, Gardens, Places, Buildings, Lanes, Yards and Walks. One parish alone had half a dozen George Streets.”

Bearing in mind how small London was at the time, no more than zone 1 and bits of zone 2, it’s quite impressive that they managed to have so many Victoria Streets. Impressive, and obviously stupid. The Metropolitan Board of Works forced parishes to rename duplicates; but even as the capital expanded, borough councils continued the practice, so that dozens of new Victoria roads and streets were created (many of which have since been changed).

Perhaps it reflects a deeply content and loyal public, but it’s more a testimony to how dull and unimaginative the British are about naming things. And it’s a fine tradition we continue today with the Elizabeth Line.

[…]

Although the new Elizabethans are in many ways the anti-Victorians – declinist, slow to get things built, filled with civilisational self-hatred – in our naming patterns we are recognisably the same people.

A few years back, when Britain launched its biggest ever warship, weighing in at 65,000 tons, they named it HMS Queen Elizabeth. This came after it was decided we needed a new name for our part of Antarctica – with huge originality, they went for “Queen Elizabeth Land”. Even Big Ben was renamed the Queen Elizabeth Tower in 2012.

The Queen, bizarrely, has twenty hospitals named after her, which led to a small revolt when the South Glasgow University Hospital became the latest. Considering how many brilliant scientists Scotland has produced, you might think they could have found someone else. Alexander Fleming, one of the alternatives suggested, grew up not far away in Ayrshire and saved literally hundreds of millions of lives.

Edward Jenner, meanwhile, has the Viale Edoardo Jenner in Milan named in his honour, and a town in Pennsylvania. While there is a Jenner Road in Stoke Newington, you wouldn’t necessarily know it was in tribute to the man who discovered vaccinations. That is because, when we honour someone with a street, the British shyly only feature their surname; the only time we follow the continental pattern of including the full name is, bizarrely, with local councillors. The people who run local government in Britain are not against honouring heroes in theory, they just think the real heroes aren’t explorers, scientists or military leaders, but the people who run local government.

May 20, 2022

High and low “state capacity” illustrated

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Law & Liberty, Helen Dale recounts a miserable experience getting out of a major US airport and says this is an example of America’s low state capacity:

“TSA Checkpoint” by phidauex is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

At the other end, I found a stretch limo waiting for me. Getting ferried about in a limo after The Trip from Hell is something I’ve experienced before, in Damascus, before the Syrian civil war. Classic third world. Like Syrians, American hosts send limousines to the airport to pick you up because they know you flew in from JFK and will need to be appeased.

My experience is illustrative of something not confined to airports, however. Indeed, if it were only confined to airports, then the phrase I’m about to use (about the US) would be unfair (to the US). America’s dysfunctional airports are instances of widespread low state capacity. And this is bigger than airports. Low state capacity can only be used to describe a country when it is true of multiple big-ticket items, not just one.

State capacity is a term drawn from economic history and development economics. It refers to a government’s ability to achieve policy goals in reference to specific aims, collect taxes, uphold law and order, and provide public goods. Its absence at the extremes is terrifying, and often used to illustrate things like “fragile states” or “failed states”. However, denoting calamitous governance in the developing world is not its only value. State capacity allows one to draw distinctions at varying levels of granularity between developed countries, and is especially salient when it comes to healthcare, policing, and immigration. It has a knock-on effect in the private sector, too, as business responds to government in administrative kind.

Think, for example, of Covid-19. The most reliable metric — if you wish to compare different countries’ responses to the pandemic — is excess deaths per 100,000 people over the relevant period. That is, count how many extra people died beyond the pre-pandemic mortality rate on a country-by-country basis. For the sake of argument, drop the five countries leading this grim pack. Four of them are developing countries, and the fifth is Russia, which while developed, is both an autocracy and suffers from chronic low state capacity.

At the other end of the scale, ignore China, too. It may be lying about its success or, more plausibly, may have achieved it by dint of being an authoritarian state with high state capacity (notably, the latest round of draconian lockdowns in Shanghai commenced after the WHO collated that data).

The US has the worst excess death rate in the developed world (140 per 100,000). Australia has the best: –28 per 100,000. Yes, you read that right. Australia increased its life expectancy and general population health during the pandemic. So did Japan, albeit less dramatically. The rest of the developed world falls in between those two extremes: Italy and Germany are on 133 and 116 per 100,000 respectively, with the UK (109 per 100,000) doing a bit better. France and Sweden knocked it out of the park (63 and 56 per 100,000 excess deaths).

Recall, too, that not only did different countries adopt different approaches to pandemic management; sometimes there were large differences within countries. Like the US, Australia is a federal system, and as in the US, different states did things differently. Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria, had the longest lockdown of any major city in the developed world. Other Australian states, meanwhile, locked down sparingly or not at all. In a European context, Sweden rejected most over-the-top Covid responses, the UK was somewhere in the middle, and Italy was thoroughly draconian, even barring unvaccinated people from supermarkets and groceries.

May 19, 2022

Alas, poor MiniTru … sent off to the knacker’s yard so soon

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Apparently the Biden administration is reconsidering the decision to set up a “Ministry of Truth” — at least for the time being — and as Chris Bray shows, the media wants to talk about the evil, Nazi trolls who brought it down:

Labeling instead of describing; a narrative frame instead of factual discussion. Be grateful for Taylor Lorenz, because her cartoon journalism makes the game so gloriously obvious.

Cartoon Lady sort of “reports”, this morning, on the apparent demise of another cultural cartoon: Nina Jankowicz is on her way out at DHS, which is probably disbanding the Disinformation Governance Board. Here, via Revolver, is a non-paywalled copy of the story:

The story is an assemblage of right-out-of-the-gate assumptions, all relentlessly untested. Jankowicz is a “victim”, all disagreement with the decision to start the Disinformation Governance Board was part of a campaign of “coordinated online attacks”, the work of the board was good, disagreement with its creation was bad. None of that is established or explained — it merely is. Here’s the Big Frame, the here’s-what-it-all-means:

    Jankowicz’s experience is a prime example of how the right-wing Internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. It also shows what happens when institutions, when confronted with these attacks, don’t respond effectively.

The federal government created a new organization, and people discussed its existence. Criticism and questions necessarily centered on, wait for it, the person identified as the executive director of the new board, the only person publicly identified as a staff member at the organization. The far-right monsters used the tactic of attempting to “identify a target” by … talking about the person chosen, and publicly identified by government, as the leader and public face of a government operation. See how cleverly the extremists choose their targets!?!?!? I mean, who else would you talk about if you wanted to discuss the Disinformation Governance Board? She ran it.

Then, known demon Jack Posobiec tweeted stuff, the monster, and his “early tweets shaped the narrative and Jankowicz was positioned as the primary target.” Again, the person positioned as the primary target of criticism of a government board was the director of the board — after the building burned down, cruel extremists maliciously singled out the fire chief as their target — but Cartoon Lady presents it as a dark and ominous maneuver:

    Just hours after Jankowicz tweeted about her new job, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec posted a tweets accusing the Biden administration of creating a “Ministry of Truth”. Posobiec’s 1.7 million followers quickly sprung into action. By the end of the day, there were at least 53,235 posts on Twitter mentioning “Disinformation Governance Board”, many referencing Jankowicz by name, according to a report by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts public-interest research. In the days following, that number skyrocketed.

My goodness, people referenced her by name! They referenced the executive director of the board while discussing the creation of the board! nOw dO YoU SeE HOw thE DaRK ArTs oF thE NaZI tRolLs WoRk!?!?!?

May 18, 2022

For the Canadian government, announcing new programs is far more important than implementing them

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

It often appears that the Liberal government in Ottawa operates almost exclusively on an “appearance only” basis: whatever the situation, it’s the “optics” that matter the most and actual delivery on announcements barely counts at all. It doesn’t help at all that the media generally has the same set of priorities, because they need things to talk about on news shows and the headlines don’t write themselves in the newspapers — and legacy media’s social media concerns are even more about flash and clickbait than their primary product.

Canada has been quick to announce new initiatives to help Ukrainian refugees, but true to form, very slow to actually make any of these initiatives happen, as Joti Heir discusses in The Line:

Justin Trudeau has always had a strong affinity for the symbolic gesture, especially when the media are around to record it.

It’s almost as though the Canadian federal government is working buttocks-backward when it comes to the Ukrainian refugee file. After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, helping Ukrainian refugees get to a safe place fast was the biggest concern. However, now, close to three months later, the bigger concern is how to help the refugees that are in Canada or making their way here.

“We are seeing an increasing amount of frustration within our community about the pace with which programs and announcements are being implemented,” says Orest Zakydalsky, senior policy analyst with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC).

“For example, a month ago, the prime minister announced income support when he co-hosted the [StandWithUkraine] telethon with the European Council president, he announced there would be income support for people coming to Canada. A month later, they’re not available.”

The announcement on April 9 indicated that Ukrainian refugees would be able to access $500 per week for a period of up to six weeks. At the same time, it was also announced that housing support in the form of two-week hotel stays would be provided. Both programs do not appear to have been implemented.

“We appreciate this is a very difficult situation for governments, this is a crisis that emerged very suddenly,” says Zakydalsky.

“On the other side, the other problem is that the people that are in Europe, that have left Ukraine, that are looking to come to Canada, see these announcements and quite reasonably think that when a program is announced it is available.”

May 17, 2022

The Canadian government has a much more expansive view of “use of journalistic content” than most Canadians do

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

Michael Geist continues looking at the differences between what the Canadian government says they’re trying to do with their Online News Act (Bill C-18) and how the actual wording of the bill will operate:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

But is it reasonable to legislate that posting a news headline constitutes making that news content available? Can Canada even do that and still remain compliant with international copyright laws under the Berne Convention which require countries to feature an exception for quotation? Indeed, international copyright law recognizes the critical importance of enabling quotation free from limitations as an essential element of expression, yet Bill C-18 adopts an approach that may violate that principle by requiring compensation for quotation.

Sub-section (b) moves far beyond reproduction into a realm that bears little resemblance to use or a reasonable definition of “making available”. It covers facilitating access to news by any means. In what way is facilitating access to news the same as making it available (much less using it)? A facilitating access to news standard is virtually limitless: newsstands, news screens in elevators or taxis, television manufacturers, or newspaper box makers can all be said to be facilitating access to news. The bill limits its scope to DNIs, but the policy principle that this bill is simply compensating for the use of content is twisted beyond all recognition.

In fact, it is clear that this extreme approach is precisely what the government intends. By citing examples such an indexing, aggregation or ranking of news content it is saying that virtually anything that a platform does – linking to news articles or merely to news organizations, indexing content at the request of the news organization (even if the actual content is not openly available as is the case with paywalled sites), or creating a list of news articles on a given topic are all “facilitating access to news content” which requires compensation.

Would Canadians agree that this link to the front page of the Globe and Mail is making the Globe‘s available? If this link appears on Google or Facebook, the government says that it is. If someone searches for newspapers in Montreal to learn more about developments in the city, is the list of newspapers in that city making the content available? Once again, the government says that it is.

The initial debate on Bill C-18 featured several interventions about the problems of misinformation. In light of the actual provisions in the bill, claims that it simply requires compensation for use might ironically be fairly characterized as misinformation. Unfortunately, the problematic claims associated with the bill don’t stop there as tomorrow’s post on market intervention will illustrate.

May 15, 2022

QotD: Parliament

Filed under: Britain, Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What is the use of Parliament if it is not the place where true statements can be brought before the people? What is the use of sending Members to the House of Commons who say just the popular things of the moment, and merely endeavour to give satisfaction to the Government Whips by cheering loudly every Ministerial platitude, and by walking through the Lobbies oblivious of the criticisms they hear? People talk about our Parliamentary institutions and Parliamentary democracy; but if these are to survive, it will not be because the Constituencies return tame, docile, subservient Members, and try to stamp out every form of independent judgment.

Winston S. Churchill, speech around the time of the Munich crisis, 1938.

May 12, 2022

Too many cannabis retailers? “… a scrappy band of politicians is coming together to save main street from the excesses of the free market”

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

Steve Lafleur points out that the temporary surplus of cannabis stores will inevitably self-correct, as most retail situations tend to do on their own without needing the “helpful” hand of government to intervene:

Lately there has been a moral panic brewing in Toronto about the number of marijuana stores in Toronto. Take this New York Times article, for example, which captures the mood with the quotes from various Torontonians. Or this BlogTO piece. And here is a link to a story about two city councilors (including my own) pushing for a moratorium on new pot shops.

At least on its face, the panic hasn’t been about the availability of cannabis products or any kind of (unsupported) claims about pot shops attracting crime. Rather, the concern is that there is simply an unsustainable number of shops that may be cannibalizing other retail opportunities. So a scrappy band of politicians is coming together to save main street from the excesses of the free market.

What could possibly go wrong?

The boom in pot shops is real. Legal marijuana retailing is a new phenomenon, and there has been a gold rush in the sector. This was first evident in financial markets during the 2018-19 weed stock boom (which went bust) as investors sought to capitalize on the rollout of legal marijuana sales in Canada. There are now nearly 2,000 pot shops in Ontario, and it’s not hard to find two on the same block. People aren’t wrong to point out that there has been a rapid buildout of marijuana retailers. Hence the push by City Council and now the Ontario Liberal Party, to restrict clustering of pot shops.

To be sure, new trends can push out old trends. And this can be frustrating. For instance, one insidious trend recently replaced two of my two favourite hole-in-the-wall restaurants: poke bowls. The trendy Hawaiian rice bowls have taken cities by storm. Businesses, understandably, want to capitalize on the trend. If people want it, businesses will sell it.

Trends can create dislocations. No one knows in advance how many poke restaurants — or pot shops — the market will bear, where they should locate, or what their operating hours should be. But through a process of trial and error, retailers and consumers will figure this out. And if it is just a flash in the pan trend, many will fail.

But that’s okay. That’s just the creative destruction of the market at work. It’s not always pretty, but it’s how we get new products and services. It’s a process. Sometimes the market rewards annoying things. But trying any effort to plan these things in a way that avoids over-saturation of short-lived trendy businesses would be rife with unintended consequences.

May 11, 2022

City governments that can’t even set a budget want to spend, spend, spend to fix global problems

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s one of my standard quips that the more government tries to do, the less well it does everything, but Chris Bray‘s city government shows that I’m being far too Pollyanna-ish:

We’ve built political systems that are astoundingly disconnected; they go where they go, and you can’t turn them, or even try to communicate with them. I just spent weeks trying to get basic information about the operation of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County, where I live — a problem I started writing about here. Just as I was getting really frustrated that I couldn’t get anyone in county government to tell me anything about anything, I saw an interview with Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who says that he’s never met our district attorney, and has only managed to speak to him on the phone once. Then a staff member in the office of our county supervisor finally responded to my repeated questions about local criminal justice statistics with a quick message letting me know that, as Supervisor Barger’s criminal justice staff assistant, she doesn’t have local criminal justice statistics. So, no, you’re probably not going to communicate with your government; it doesn’t even communicate with itself. The sheriff has never met the DA. That’s the world we’re living in.

I live in a tiny suburban city, a little over three square miles. As I’ve written before, the city is a relentless shambles, constantly fumbling its simplest tasks while holding city council meetings to offer bold pronouncements on the city’s direct role in managing the climate of the planet. We went the better part of the last fiscal year without a budget, because the fifth finance director in two years screwed up the budget proposal so badly that the council couldn’t vote on the worthless thing.

Cities are supposed to regularly adopt an updated general plan that makes educated guesses about business and residential growth, so they can prepare for change around questions like do we have enough fire stations for the population we expect to have in five years? Our current general plan was adopted in 1998; the city is now in its sixth year of a fumbling effort to write a new plan, with no sign that it’s moving toward success. Meanwhile, our small-town city council is focused on getting electric patrol cars for the police department — to control the climate of the planet — and banning the sale of tobacco products, to take the fight to Big Tobacco. (Three square miles.)

I can’t get my city government to fix a bunch of basic and obvious problems, in a city where I pass members of my city council in the supermarket. I send out email messages to them, but nothing comes back from them in response. They go where they feel like going, endlessly pursuing lawn sign politics in a city government that struggles to complete budgets and basic planning documents; currently they’re signaling that their next interest is in developing a local mandate for residential greywater systems, and they won’t be talked out of it in favor of completing their endlessly incomplete basic tasks.

Now: Put your hands on the levers to stop the madness of the United States of America sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine. Right?

May 9, 2022

Canada has no abortion law on the books: this is extremely convenient for the federal Liberals

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

In the free-to-cheapskate-freeloading readers portion of The Line‘s weekly dispatch, the editors explain why we should expect exactly zero change to Canadian law on the abortion issue regardless of what happens in the United States in the wake of a leaked US Supreme Court draft decision that has agitated and carbonated the debate there all over again:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

… given the extent to which Canadian media and politics has become thoroughly Americanized in the past few years, it was inevitable that the draft ruling immediately took over the front pages of our national papers and became the dominant topic of debate in the House of Commons. And while we are loath to contribute to what we see as a very unhelpful trend, there are some Canada-relevant aspects of this that at least one of your editors thinks are worth discussing.

The first is the obvious glee with which the Liberal party greeted the leak. Of course they all acted appalled, with a parade of cabinet ministers taking to Twitter to talk about the “concerning” news out of the U.S. and to make it clear that they would never allow anything like this to happen in Canada.

But for all their bluster, the Liberals long ago perfected a curious little two-step here. On the one hand, they never tire of asserting that the debate over abortion is “settled”, and that the pro-choice position is and will always be the law of the land. Yet on the other hand, Liberals are constantly acting as if we’re just one private member’s bill away from Canada becoming the Republic of Gilead. But as Chris Selley pointed out in a recent column, if abortion rights are so fragile and tenuous, why haven’t the Liberals done anything about it? Perhaps the imminent overthrow of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. might provide the government with the perfect occasion to finally put abortion rights on Canada on a proper legislative footing. Or, at the very least, define and defend the status quo.

That will never happen, for two reasons.

The first reason the Liberals won’t move to do something has to do with a philosophical equivocation at the heart of Canada’s pro-choice movement. In some guises, the pro-choice position is framed as a harm reduction policy, not completely dissimilar to needle exchange programs or safe injection sites for drug users. That is, while we may legitimately debate and disagree over the moral worth of the activity itself, there is no question that it is something that is going to happen regardless. Given that, the best thing for the state to do is make sure that the circumstances under which it takes place are as safe and accessible as possible, while withholding moral judgment.

But there’s another position, which holds that abortion is akin to a victimless crime: the fetus simply deserves no moral standing, so getting an abortion is no more morally controversial than getting your appendix removed.

The advantage to the status quo is that it allows the government, as well as pro-choice supporters, to remain formally agnostic on this question. There is no law, so the law needs to take no position. But any attempt to put a legal framework around abortion would probably require that the fetus be given some status at some point in development. And that opens a huge can of worms, not least for someone like Justin Trudeau who, at times, has claimed to be personally opposed to abortion but a pro-choice practicing Catholic. Why would he be against abortion personally, unless he believed that it was, at some level, wrong?

This brings us to our second point. In his column, Selley called on Trudeau to “grow up” and defend the status quo on its principles. But why would he do that? The Liberals benefit enormously from the status quo, including the lack of clarity around it. Abortion is legal (in the sense that there is nothing in the criminal code forbidding it), and reasonably accessible, depending on which part of the country you live in. But it’s also tenuous, which means the Liberals get to spend a good part of every election campaign wedging the ever-loving crap out of the Conservatives, whose benches are chock full of people who are anti-abortion, or at least, anti-the-status-quo on abortion.

Given how successful this strategy has been, there is no reason for the Liberals to change it, since for them the tenuous status of abortion is a feature of the current regime, not a bug.

May 6, 2022

“Canadians might not know their constitutional history or even the text of the Charter, but they know in their bones that these orders were unconstitutional”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Long before the Freedom Convoy protests earlier this year, I’d been somewhat skeptical of the value of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms — not that I thought it was a bad thing to have a clear enumeration of Canadians’ rights, but in the degree to which those rights could be ignored or abrogated whenever the government found it convenient to do so. The invocation of the Emergencies Act proved that lacking strong and effective absolute rights, the Charter was merely a bit of tissue paper. In The Line, Josh Dehass shows he’s not as cynical as I am about the value of the Charter and provides some history predating the current document:

In a Boston courtroom in 1761, lawyer James Otis Jr. made one of the most consequential legal arguments of all time.

Otis was challenging the legality of “writs of assistance”, a form of general warrant giving unfettered discretion to customs agents to force their way into people’s homes to search for and seize smuggled goods, and to require the “assistance” of bystanders.

“It appears to me (may it please your honours) the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty, and the fundamental principles of the constitution, that ever was found in an English law-book,” Otis inveighed.

John Adams later described that day in court as “the first scene of the first Act of opposition to the Arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the Child Independence was born. Every Man of an immense crowded Audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take Arms against Writs of Assistants.”

This hard-won right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, affirmed by Section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is the reason so many of us felt queasy about the Emergency Economic Measures ordered by the Liberal cabinet under the Emergencies Act in February to quell the trucker protests. Canadians might not know their constitutional history or even the text of the Charter, but they know in their bones that these orders were unconstitutional.

The emergency measures required financial institutions to search their records for customers suspected of “directly or indirectly” engaging in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace”, or “directly or indirectly” using their money to facilitate such protests, and then seize their accounts.

That’s a classic general warrant, a writ of assistance in fact, enlisting banks to help King Trudeau and Queen Freeland hunt down their political enemies without going before a judge to prove reasonable grounds that a specific offence had been committed by a specific person. Section 8 is designed to keep us secure against unreasonable searches and seizures by the executive, and the only way for individuals to maintain this security is by requiring specific warrants from an independent judiciary, barring exigent circumstances.

This profound assault on our section 8 right will hopefully be raised during Justice Paul Rouleau’s inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act, despite Trudeau’s attempt to focus the inquiry on the truckers themselves. Even if section 8 doesn’t get examined during the inquiry, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association expects to raise it in Federal Court if they’re successful in convincing a judge to review the decision to declare the protests a national emergency.

I don’t expect anything useful to come out of this inquiry process, otherwise Trudeau wouldn’t have let it get started in the first place.

May 5, 2022

Paul Wells reviews Davos Man by Peter S. Goodman

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

Paul Wells — now on Substack — considers an unusual-from-a-Canadian-perspective critical book on the World Economic Forum and the people who attend their exclusive shindigs in Davos, Switzerland:

I’ve been reading Peter S. Goodman’s Davos Man, a tough, angry — not entirely persuasive — critique of the sort of people who get top-level access to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Because Goodman’s vantage point is left-by-centre-left, his book provides fascinating counterpoint to a polemic about the WEF that is, in Canada, the almost exclusive preserve of the right.

[…]

Politicians who make a show of having a problem with Davos should explain what the problem is; why they didn’t raise their concerns when cabinet colleagues were lining up to go; and what solutions, if any, they propose. Otherwise they might seem to be faking their indignation to lure a few votes.

Second, it’s easy to see why Davos catastrophism has taken root in some corners of the electorate. We are coming off a COVID pandemic, after all. Very early, only weeks into this historic disaster, the WEF was quick to start discussing visions of a green egalitarian future with prominent roles for green progressive governments and Davos regulars. This was the “Great Reset”, which I discussed here in a magazine. Soon Trudeau was on video calls saying, “This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems.” Which was jarring. Still is. Soon people were digging up old video of Klaus Schwab, the WEF founder, bragging about “penetrating the cabinets” of Western countries with “Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum”.

People who didn’t like everything that’s happened since — vaccines, lockdowns, restrictions — started reading great significance into all kinds of perceived Davos connections. Often Trudeau has seemed eager to help. Replacing his finance minister with the only member of his cabinet who sits on the WEF Board of Trustees, while yet again blathering on about how “we can choose to embrace bold new solutions to the challenges we face and refuse to be held back by old ways of thinking” was … loopy, sure, but it probably only accidentally resembled the second act of a Bond movie.

Bringing an element of novelty to all this is Peter S. Goodman, the Global Economics Correspondent of the New York Times. Even if he were Canadian, nobody should expect Goodman to support Poilievre for Conservative leader. Davos Man is a furious diatribe, not against the WEF as an institution but against many of Davos’s richest regulars — and it’s written from a consistently social-democratic perspective.

From its subtitle, “How the Billionaires Devoured the World”, Davos Man relentlessly skewers some of the most glamorous Davos habitués — Amazon gillionaire Jeff Bezos, Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, banker Jamie Dimon, Salesforce guy Marc Benioff. And their, you know, ilk.

“Over recent decades, the billionaire class has ransacked governments by shirking taxes, leaving societies deprived of the resources needed to combat trouble,” Goodman writes. Davos Man — Goodman has borrowed the term from Samuel Huntington — “is a rare and remarkable creature, a predator who attacks without restraint … expanding his territory and seizing the nourishment of others.” Goodman’s language is consistently violent. The billionaires “eviscerate financial regulations”, “defenestrated antitrust authorities”, “squashed the power of labor movements”.

May 4, 2022

Good intentions to rectify problems caused by earlier good intentions in Charleston, South Carolina

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

Everyone seems to agree that affordable housing is a major need across North America … it certainly is in the Toronto area! In South Carolina, local politicians are doing what they can to make legal changes to encourage more affordable residences to come to market … even when the problem is at least partly caused by earlier attempts to encourage more affordable housing to come to market:

“A converted carriage house, Tradd Street, Charleston, SC” by Spencer Means is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The City of Charleston is considering new legislation that would deregulate accessory dwelling units in hopes of increasing the supply of affordable housing in the city. Also known as carriage houses or mother-in-law suites, accessory dwelling units are small structures that are built in the backyards of homes, and they can be a great source of affordable housing for those in need.

The initiative, which was proposed by Councilmember Ross Appel two weeks ago, would remove red tape that is currently presenting a significant barrier for building this kind of housing. The ironic part is that the regulation which is primarily to blame for stopping the creation of these units was passed specifically to make these units more accessible.

“The city is looking at taking away a rule that requires these buildings to be affordable for 30 years,” WCSC reports, “which, Appel says, has been an obstacle for developers and homeowners.”

“We don’t want people to be artificially limited in terms of what they can charge,” Appel said. “The affordability requirement was a good-intended measure, but actually, that’s been currently in effect for the past year and a half, and we haven’t had a single accessory dwelling unit permitted since that time.”

Put simply, the affordability requirement backfired big time. Its goal was to make new accessory dwelling units more affordable, but by restricting the price people could charge it actually made them so unprofitable that people just stopped building them altogether. For all practical purposes, new accessory dwelling units might as well have been banned.

The implications are not hard to tease out. With no new accessory dwelling units to live in, people have been forced to bid up other kinds of housing, which has no doubt contributed to soaring housing prices. This is why Appel is eager to repeal this rule. He knows that building more supply is the key to bringing prices down, and he knows that regulations like this have been getting in the way of that process.

There’s a maxim in economics that this story highlights: the solution to high prices is high prices. The reasoning goes as follows. When a good like housing becomes scarce, prices naturally rise. But as prices rise, producers see an opportunity for profit and begin expanding the supply. Then, as additional supply comes to market, prices begin to fall.

QotD: Masking a young child

Filed under: Government, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I am not usually one for issuing trigger warnings, but this video of an unhappy two year old child is genuinely disturbing:

New York, where two-year-olds are forced to wear masks all day in nursery.

I have a single memory – a three second “video clip” of my brother’s fourth birthday – that I can confidently date as having happened before I was three. Humans do not seem to lay down recoverable memories of most of what happens to them before the age of four or so. Yet a child’s experiences in those early years have a profound effect on their later personality. That little boy will probably never remember that he tried again and again to push away the damp thing that made it hard to breathe but that his carers, with pitiless good cheer, always forced it back on. But he will have learned the lesson of the powerless. You are weak, they are strong. Crying and protesting do not help.

I am told that in Muslim societies where women must go fully veiled it is difficult to get the little girls into their coverings at first. But even they wait until the girls are at least five.

Natalie Solent, “The carers”, Samizdata, 2021-09-19.

May 1, 2022

QotD: How Thomas Sowell abandoned Marxism

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The brilliant Thomas Sowell, when in college, considered himself a Marxist. Asked what changed him, Sowell said, “Evidence.”

After completing undergrad at Harvard and obtaining a master’s in economics, Sowell landed a summer internship with the Department of Labor. While there, he researched the impact of minimum wage law on employment. Sowell learned two things, both of which he found startling. First, minimum wage laws create job loss by pricing the unskilled out of the labor force. Second, Sowell discovered that “the people in the labor department really were not interested in that, because the administration of the minimum wage was supplying one-third of the money that was keeping the labor department going. … I realized that institutions have their own agendas and their own incentives.” In short, Sowell found that the Department of Labor did not care about the real-world effects of the minimum wage law. He credits this experience, this search for evidence, with having the “biggest” impact on his thinking.

Larry Elder, “If $15 Minimum Wage Is Such a Good Idea, Why Did AOC’s Bar Close Down?”, TownHall.com, 2019-03-21.

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