Quotulatiousness

June 8, 2019

The sad economics of recycling

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

Kim du Toit on the actual economic value of most recycling efforts:

Turns out that aluminum cans are actually worth recycling — in that they are 100% recyclable (requiring nothing other than melting and reformulating) and it costs less — much less — to recycle than to produce new aluminum.

That’s almost true of newsprint too, except that while pulping it is fine — hardly any energy is used for that — the pulp also has to be bleached, and in the pulping / bleaching process, about 15% of the original paper is lost. And as raw paper production (i.e. from logged wood) has become more efficient over the years, and as trees can be grown to replace those felled, the only real benefit from recycling paper is that overall paper production is less vulnerable to hiccups in supply of fresh wood — such as caused by forest fires, disease and drought.

And, he added, when it comes to recycling other stuff, glass is little better than plastic — which surprised me, but it actually costs much more to recycle glass than simply to produce it new. And the old “plastic into park benches” spiel is likewise stupid, because it costs so much to produce such stuff, and creates so much atmospheric pollution thereby, that it’s easier just to toss plastic into a properly-lined landfill and let nature take its course.

Knowing all that, I’ve always been skeptical of the benefits of recycling — it’s always been about feeewings rather than utility

June 5, 2019

Sensible proposals from the copyright review report

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Michael Geist summarizes the — seemingly quite sensible — recommendations from the copyright review process:

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

In December 2017, the government launched its copyright review with a Parliamentary motion to send the review to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology. After months of study and hundreds of witnesses and briefs, the committee released the authoritative review with 36 recommendations [PDF] that include expanding fair dealing, a rejection of a site blocking system, and a rejection of proposals to exclude education from fair dealing where a licence is otherwise available. The report represents a near-total repudiation of the one-sided Canadian Heritage report that was tasked with studying remuneration models to assist the actual copyright review. While virtually all stakeholders will find aspects they agree or disagree with, that is the hallmark of a more balanced approach to copyright reform.

This post highlights some of the most notable recommendations in the report that are likely to serve as the starting point for any future copyright reform efforts. There is a lot here but the key takeaways on the committee recommendations:

  • expansion of fair dealing by making the current list of fair dealing purposes illustrative rather than exhaustive (the “such as” approach)
  • rejection of new limits on educational fair dealing with further study in three years
  • retention of existing Internet safe harbour rules
  • rejection of the FairPlay site blocking proposal with insistence that any blocking include court oversight
  • expansion of the anti-circumvention rules by permitting circumvention of digital locks for purposes that are lawful (ie. permit circumvention to exercise fair dealing rights)
  • extend the term of copyright only if ratifying the USCMA and include a registration requirement for the additional 20 years
  • implement a new informational analysis exception
  • further study of statutory damages for all copyright collectives along with greater transparency
  • adoption of an open licence rather than the abolition of crown copyright

My submission to the Industry committee can be found here. The submission and my appearance is cited multiple times in the report and I’m grateful that the committee took the submissions from all witnesses seriously.

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

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

In the National Post, Chris Selley points out some odd blindspots in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls:

“The violence the National Inquiry heard amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples, including First Nations, Inuit and Métis, which especially targets women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people,” the report declares. Among the first headlines was one noting that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “avoided” using the G-word in his remarks on its findings, settling for “shameful” and “unacceptable.”

The inquiry’s legal analysis concedes it is a novel deployment of the term. It seems far more comfortable alleging a historical genocide against “Indigenous Peoples” that involved specific targeting of women — for example through forced sterilization, which is acknowledged as a genocidal technique in the 1948 UN convention — than it does a genocide against Indigenous women and girls specifically. But the insistence upon the term speaks volumes about this peculiar inquiry’s tortured birth, and about some of its more perplexing recommendations.

Indigenous women have certainly been targets for violence and discrimination in particular ways throughout Canada’s history. Today they suffer disproportionately from violent crime, relative to Indigenous men, in a way that non-Indigenous women do not. The rate of self-reported sexual assault among Indigenous women in the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) was more than triple that of non-Indigenous women. An astonishing 61 per cent of Indigenous women aged 15-25 reported violent victimization in the previous 12 months — nearly six times the rate for Indigenous men the same age.

But if Indigenous victims of violence even today can be said to be casualties of colonialist genocide, then the subset who are by far the most “especially targeted” — which is to say dead — are men. Between 2014 and 2017, Statistics Canada reports there were 139 Indigenous female homicide victims, and 428 Indigenous male victims — three times as many. (Similarly, non-Indigenous men were murdered two-and-a-half times more often than non-Indigenous women.)

[…]

But the obsession with half the Indigenous population leads to some bewildering recommendations, especially on the justice file. On the one hand the report inveighs against mandatory minimum sentences as a cause of Indigenous overrepresentation in the prison system, and calls for more robust applications of Gladue principles for all Indigenous offenders, which is to say more alternatives to incarceration; on the other hand it supports legislation that would require judges to punish violent offences more harshly if the victim is an Indigenous woman, and to automatically classify homicides occurring after “a pattern of intimate partner violence and abuse” as first-degree murder. This would almost certainly have the effect of increasing the incarceration rates of Indigenous men and women alike.

June 2, 2019

QotD: Explaining modern female sexuality

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

I have a theory that for many women, sex, or rather agreeing to have sex is difficult, and especially so for the first time with a new partner. How else to explain the fact that so many women admitted that their first time with a new man was generally experienced in an alcoholic haze? (For those who haven’t been keeping up, the source data is here.) So if confronting herself about her “slutty” behavior (even if the sluttiness is only in her own mind), a woman would like to have an excuse like “Oh, but I was drunk…” and thus can excuse away or justify the indiscretion. Or else, as the original study showed, women can even explain away the drunkenness as just a regular part of the dating process, so therefore it’s okay.

I also believe that this is why so many women have rape fantasies, because “Oh, he forced me to do it…” is likewise an expression that denies the woman’s [shameful] complicity in the act. (Of course, now that it’s become okay to accuse a previous partner with actual rape as part of the excuse, the whole thing has become considerably more sinister, especially as such accusations can take place months or years afterwards and still be considered valid by law enforcement. But for the sake of argument, let’s treat this scenario as but a blip on societal consciousness which will disappear at some point when women regain their sanity. We can only hope.) Certainly, this explains female submissiveness (outside a natural submissive personality anyway), which can be regarded (by women) as a kind of watered-down rape fantasy.

The only time, I think, when self-delusion disappears is when a woman encounters a universal object of female desire, such as a hunky actor or popular musician. Even then, there is a “safety in numbers” excuse — “OMG everybody is crazy about him!” — which makes it okay, or at least, provides a figleaf of an excuse for irresponsibility and sexual licentiousness. You only need a sliver of an excuse, and it will be acceptable, in other words.

Kim du Toit, “Seeking Excuses”, Splendid Isolation, 2017-04-24.

May 30, 2019

Doug Ford versus the Ontario neo-prohibitionists, progressive temperance snobs and other social control freaks

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

During the last Ontario election, it was common to disparage Doug Ford as being “Trump-like”, and now that he’s the Premier, it turns out to be true in at least one aspect: Ford does have a Trump-like ability to induce a form of hysteria in his opponents. Ford’s crusade to liberalize Ontario’s alcohol market is a case in point. In the Toronto Star, all the old arguments against liberalization — usually portraying Alberta’s long-since liberalized market as a dystopian hell-hole of alcohol-shattered lives — are being dragged out again:

The key is that the Ford team doesn’t actually care about wine that will be sold in corner stores and more supermarkets. It’s a sop to tourists, which seems reasonable.

No, it cares about beer because beer is a social marker, a shorthand. Wine is considered urban but buck-a-beer is rural/semi-urban. Men drink it. Men with beerbellies drink it. To a government mysteriously seeking a vote that it already has, drinking beer is a signal that a man is a regular guy. But Ford is not a regular guy. He doesn’t drink. He’s not anxious. He’s not renting.

It is very much a problem that any government in power would believe this of the regular guy vote. Alcohol causes hospitalization, crime and early death. It destroys families and jobs, and eventually its victims drink to block out what they lost by drinking.

[…]

They may not know it, they may be doing it instinctively, but it is still madness. Alcoholics are costly to treat and they suffer terribly. Courting their vote comes courtesy of a report by a former health minister in Alberta where booze is sold in private liquor stores.

The problem, as Albertans know, is you’re too afraid to buy it. These stores are often shabby places that are magnets for violence. Watch out, Premier Ford, it’s Ontario and there’s going to be NIMBY.

I am aware that I’m writing like a preacher. Preach on, sister. Anyone over 30 learns to distinguish between people who drink for pleasure and those who cannot cope with it. We are horrified. We offer help.

Back in 2013, Colby Cosh neatly summarized the Ontario neo-prohibitionist rhetoric:

Albertans find it instructive to watch Ontario politicians debate the privatization of liquor retailing, which Klein’s cabinet bulldog, Dr. Stephen West, executed almost overnight in 1993. It was perhaps the representative policy move of the Klein era, the best symbol of his approach to government. Today one will hear Ontarians telling themselves the most bizarre things about Alberta in order to support the idiot belief that booze is a natural monopoly. “You can’t even get red wine there! All they have in the stores is various flavours of corn mash and antifreeze! The streets resound with the white canes of the blinded!” Talk to the saner residents and you rapidly discover the real root of Ontarians’ positive feeling for the LCBO, which is esthetic. It’s just nicer to buy a handle of Maker’s Mark from someone who makes a union wage and has a vague halo of officialdom. You leave the shop feeling okay about your vice.

Klein was liked by Albertans, not because of some mythic popular touch, but because there wasn’t an ounce of tolerance for this sort of thing in him. Alcohol was something he understood very well. (Too well.) People do not need liquor to be flogged to them any harder than the manufacturers already do; put a man in prison and he will make the stuff in the toilet starting on day two. What the old ALCB was really marketing to the public, and what the LCBO markets now, was itself — its own role as social protector/moral approver/tastemaker. Klein identified that part of the system as a parasitic growth, a vestige with no function but its own preservation; and he had West ectomize it with the swiftness of a medieval barber.

May 28, 2019

Rumours of a pending gun ban fuel panic buying at Canadian gun stores

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

During the Obama years in the US, fears of new government restrictions on firearms helped create a booming market for firearms and the same thing is happening here in Canada as the Trudeau government is said to be contemplating some draconian revisions to existing gun laws, especially for handguns and AR-15 style semi-automatic weapons:

Colt Canada’s model SA20, a commercial version of the Canadian C7A2 rifle.
Image from the Colt Canada website.

Federally licensed sport shooters are snapping up $3,000 guns on concern Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will ban new sales to win votes in the October election.

The website of Firearms Outlet Canada showed all AR-15s “Out of Stock” today at 3 p.m. in Toronto. At Al Flaherty’s Outdoor Store, all but 2 of the 17 versions offered online were “Sold Out.” The website of Wolverine Supplies said most are “Out of Stock.”

The Ontario and Manitoba companies are among the biggest independent gun shops in Canada.

“We are completely sold out of AR-15s, AGAIN…except for what’s on consignment,” Select Shooting Supplies in Cambridge, Ontario, said today on Twitter.

[…]

All guns are banned already for everyone who doesn’t have a firearm licence authorized by the federal police.

Anyone who buys, sells, owns or travels with a firearm in Canada is severely restricted by law. They must pass courses, tests, background checks, reference checks and obtain spousal approval to get police permission for a licence. They must disclose breakups and job losses.

More Controls

People who own AR-15s and handguns endure even more controls.

They need special police permission to buy each gun or to take one to another province. They can go to prison for having a standard-capacity AR-15 ammunition magazine, for shooting anywhere besides one of the 1,400 government-approved target ranges, or for taking a detour on the way to the range.

As we all know, crime involving weapons — especially firearms — is widely reported in the media, and many Canadians seem to have the belief that the majority of these criminals are somehow going to be deterred from using firearms if we just pass one more law. Urban Canadians generally have little or no contact with legal gun owners, and tend to assume that gun crime is directly linked to legal guns (often through the totally nonsensical “gun show loophole” that doesn’t exist in Canada).

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

May 24, 2019

Ontario universities’ “quarter-million dollar club”

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

Being a tenured university professor is generally a well-paid job, even in Canada. But thanks to an unintended interaction between pension legislation and retirement policies, older tenured professors are required to draw their pensions (which are pretty damned good by themselves) and their salaries from the university, which boosts many of them well into the quarter-million a year range:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

Ontario is a weird place sometimes. One month ago, the government announced that it was implementing a performance-based funding plan which – if you took the government’s half-thought-out comments seriously – raised the possibility that hundreds of millions or perhaps even billions of dollars currently projected to be spent on institutions might be snatched away if institutions failed to hit some ill-defined targets in a type of contract-based funding system. You’d think this would be a big deal, something people would want to talk about and discuss.

But no. Somehow, this is not what is currently obsessing the Ontario university sector. Instead, apparently, we need to talk about how it’s a human rights violation for professors to be asked to enjoy their retirement on a six-figure annual pension.

Crazy? Well, yes. Here’s the deal. Time used to be that universities could tell professors to retire at age 65 or 67 or whenever. Over the course of the 2000s, provinces gradually got rid of mandatory retirement; in Ontario this occurred in 2006, when the provincial government amended the Human Rights Code to that effect. It should have surprised absolutely no one that more and more full professors, who towards the end of their career routinely make over $180,000 per year, decided to delay retirement not just past 65 but pretty much forever. In 2011, only 6.7% of professors were over 65 and 0.9% 70 or over. Just five years later in 2016, that was up to 10.2% and 3.3% respectively. At the time, I estimated that the compensation costs for the over-65s amounted to $1.3 billion, or enough to hire about 10,000 new junior faculty. The share of that going to the 70-pluses would amount to a little north of $400 million.

But here’s the thing: federal pension legislation requires individuals to start drawing down their pensions at age 71. You can’t opt-out. And so as a result you get individuals who are in what Carleton University economist Frances Woolley recently called the “quarter-million dollar club” (do read Frances’ piece – everything she does on higher education is excellent, but she is extra-excellent on this one). Even if you understand the legislative path that led us here, you probably – rightly – think this is an outrageous sum, particularly in light of the fact that research productivity tends to decline over time and teaching loads among full professors are not all that onerous.

On the other side of the pond, a recent tribunal ruling at Oxford’s St. John’s College points in a very different direction:

Oxford and Cambridge universities can force old professors to retire in order to boost diversity, a tribunal ruling suggests.

Prof John Pitcher, a leading Shakespeare scholar and fellow at St John’s College at Oxford, claimed that he had been unfairly pushed out at age 67 to make way for younger and more ethnically diverse academics.

He sued the College and university for age discrimination and unfair dismissal, claiming loss of earnings of £100,000 – but Judge Bedeau dismissed both claims.

May 23, 2019

The Supreme Court of Canada goes on a roadtrip

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

John Carpay explains why the Supreme Court’s junket in September isn’t a good idea:

While hearing two cases in Winnipeg rather than Ottawa is a friendly gesture, the Court’s choice of which groups to meet with – and not meet with – in Winnipeg is necessarily a political choice. If you thought the Court would meet with Ukrainians and Germans (Manitoba’s two largest non-English ethnic communities), prisoners, seniors, taxpayer groups and English language rights activists opposed to official bilingualism, you would be wrong.

In fact, the Court has announced that it will meet with “indigenous communities, the francophone community, the legal community, and students.” What message does this send to the Canadian public, which wants an impartial court deciding on aboriginal claims? What does meeting with the francophone community in Winnipeg say in relation to the Court hearing a case about minority language educational rights? And what if university tuition payments were at the heart of a case that came before the SCC, with its Justices having met only with students, but not with taxpayers?

As Canadians, the Supreme Court judges already interact with the public in their private lives, in Ottawa and elsewhere. One could reasonably assume that the nine lawyers appointed to this Court each meet individually with various people regularly, on the basis of friendship, shared interests, or family obligations. The people with whom any one judge meets over the course of a year would likely not form a perfect microcosm of Canadian society, in terms of race, religion, political views, income, and level of education. This is to be expected, and there is nothing wrong with it, because the personal connections formed by any one judge are not publicly endorsed by the Court. Not so for these meetings of “the Court” as a whole in Winnipeg, which is what makes the Court’s exclusion of many groups worrisome.

Chief Justice Wagner would no doubt respond to the above by saying that he and his colleagues will do their very best to decide all cases impartially, regardless of which groups they chose to meet with (and not meet with) in Winnipeg. And he would be right.

But that doesn’t solve the problem. The Court has made a political decision to meet with francophones, not English language rights activists; lawyers not prisoners; students not seniors; aboriginals not Germans or Ukrainians. In view of the ancient and centrally important legal maxim, “Not only must justice be done; justice must be seen to be done,” the Court should not be making these political decisions in the first place, in order to avoid even the appearance of possible bias.

It’s bad enough that the Prime Minister is seen to be putting a thumb on the scales of justice, but much worse if the highest court in the land is perceived to be doing the same thing.

May 22, 2019

QotD: A “conservative” argument for regulating social media companies

Filed under: Business, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There should be a high barrier for any company seeking to interfere with the marketplace of ideas in which the right of free correspondence is practiced.

Critics of regulating dot com monopolies have made valid points.

Regulating Google or Facebook as a public utility is dangerous. And their argument that giving government the power to control content on these platforms would backfire is sensible.

Any solution to the problem should not be based on expanding government control.

But there are two answers.

First, companies that engage in viewpoint discrimination in response to government pressure are acting as government agents. When a pattern of viewpoint discrimination manifests itself on the platform controlled by a monopoly, a civil rights investigation should examine what role government officials played in instigating the suppression of a particular point of view.

Liberals have abandoned the Public Forum Doctrine, once a popular ACLU theme, while embracing censorship. But if the Doctrine could apply to a shopping mall, it certainly applies to the internet.

In Packingham v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court’s decision found that, “A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen.”

The Packingham case dealt with government interference, but when monopolies silence conservatives on behalf of government actors, they are fulfilling the same role as an ISP that suspends a customer in response to a law.

When dot com monopolies get so big that being banned from their platforms effectively neutralizes political activity, press activity and political speech, then they’re public forums.

Second, rights are threatened by any sufficiently large organization or entity, not just government. Government has traditionally been the most powerful such organization, but the natural rights that our country was founded on are equally immune to every organization. Governments, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, exist as part of a social contract to secure these rights for its citizens.

Government secures these rights, first and foremost, against itself. (Our system effectively exists to answer the question of who watches the watchers.) But it also secures them against foreign powers, a crisis that the Declaration of Independence was written to meet, and against domestic organizations, criminal or political, whether it’s the Communist Party or ISIS, that seek to rob Americans of their rights.

A country in which freedom of speech effectively did not exist, even though it remained a technical right, would not be America. A government that allowed such a thing would have no right to exist.

Only a government whose citizens enjoy the rights of free men legally justifies is existence.

If a private company took control of all the roads and closed them to conservatives every Election Day, elections would become a mockery and the resulting government would be an illegitimate tyranny.

That’s the crisis that conservatives face with the internet.

Daniel Greenfield, “Americans Paid for the Internet, We Deserve Free Speech On It”, Sultan Knish, 2019-05-16.

May 21, 2019

The Brexit Party may be getting dirty foreign money! Call out the plod!

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Guardian, totally neutral and disinterested journalists report on former Labour PM Gordon Brown’s call to investigate where the Brexit Party is getting its funding from:

The Electoral Commission is under mounting pressure to launch an investigation into the funding of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party because of concerns that its donation structure could allow foreign interference in British democracy.

Before Thursday’s crucial European elections, Gordon Brown has written to the Electoral Commission calling on it to urgently examine whether the party has sufficient safeguards on its website to prevent the contribution of “dirty money”.

The former Labour prime minister will use a speech in Glasgow on Monday to say an investigation into the Brexit party’s finances is urgent and essential.

“Nigel Farage says this election is about democracy. Democracy is fatally undermined if unexplained, unreported and thus undeclared and perhaps under the counter and underhand campaign finance – from whom and from where we do not know – is being used to influence the very elections that are at the heart of our democratic system,” he will say, according to pre-released extracts.

As Tim Worstall points out:

It’s actually an entire 13 paragraphs later that we get to the meat of the matter:

    Only donations over £500 have to be declared under British law.

The Brexit Party is obeying every jot and tittle of electoral and fundraising law. This is the very system that the federast establishment set up itself. But, you know, the wrong people are succeeding under it so aspertions must be cast.

And guess what? The Electoral Commission isn’t going to get anything done by Thursday. Not even to be able to confirm that the law is being obeyed as it should be. But we’ve managed to get the propaganda out there that Nigel’s posse are bought by the Russians and that’s the point of it all anyway.

You might think me a little cynical here. But sadly I’m not. When I was working for Ukip the Times – Sam Coates it was – announced that we simply weren’t going to contest the next election. No reason given, no analysis performed, an apology of any prominence never was forthcoming. Just a bit of disinformation dropped into the public conversation there.

That’s how the federasts play and any governance system that has to play that way isn’t one we desire to be a part of, is it?

The Hell with the EU.

Of course, dirty anonymous foreign money sources can fund other groups too.

Four “youths” vandalize model railway show

Filed under: Britain, Law, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There don’t appear to be any details online about the four “youths” who were arrested then released, so I assume their anonymity is protected by a British equivalent of the “Young Offenders Act”. The Market Deeping Model Railway Club describes the crime on their website:

We were all immensely upset to discover that overnight the school where our show was to be held had been broken into and almost everything totally ruined. This has devastated not only our own members but those of other clubs and the traders who had already set up shop. In the circumstances we felt we had no option other than to cancel the show.

Some of the models destroyed were irreplaceable and while we will of course be seeking to replace and rebuild wherever possible, this will take time and money. We have been overwhelmed by the many messages of support we have received together with offers of financial assistance. Please do help raise funds via our Just Giving page.

Click the image to go to their Just Giving fundraising page.

More on the incident from Deepings Nub News:

Bill Sowerby, Market Deeping Model Railway Club exhibition manager, told Deepings Nub News: “I arrived at 7.30am to be met by one of our members who told me the terrible news.

“Four of the layouts were completely trashed – two of our club’s, one privately owned and one from St Neots club.

“Four demonstrator stands and one for Bourne U3A stall, which would have raised funds for their organisation, was also smashed.

“Fortunately five other layouts in another room were undamaged and we had nine more left to install early this morning.

“It’s really hurtful for us all, not just because of the thousands of pounds we have lost in income – we were expecting between 400 and 500 visitors – and have paid out a lot of money to put on what is the club’s main fundraising event. Demonstrators and trade stands have also lost income.

“But it’s also the time and effort that members put into building the layouts. The St Neots layout took 25 years to construct and our Woodcroft layout took 26 years and involved more than 100 people over those years spending thousands of hours.

“Woodcroft will be repaired, but it’s so sad because a large number of the people who dedicated their time to build it are no longer with us. It has real sentimental importance to the club.

“Although our Knowl End – a children’s layout – was completely destroyed.”

May 17, 2019

QotD: Mark Steyn and the “Human” “Rights” Tribunals

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s statements like these that have landed Steyn on various hit lists, including, most famously, those of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which are strange quasi-judicial bodies that were stirred to action a decade ago by the Canadian Islamic Congress. Between 2005 and 2007 the weekly news magazine Maclean’s published eighteen articles by Steyn, including an excerpt from America Alone, that were all deemed “Islamophobic” by the human rights tsars. Without going into excruciating detail about the various legal jockeying that took place — who knew one country could have this many commissions and tribunals that could all attack simultaneously? — Steyn and Maclean’s were charged with inciting hatred against Muslims, setting in motion an endless process of discovery and hearings.

“We were trying to lose,” said Steyn. “We wanted them to find us guilty so that we could appeal to a real court, hopefully the Supreme Court, and prove that these hate-speech laws are more absurd than any laws outside North Korea. Before I came along, these human rights tribunals had a 100 per cent conviction rate! The fact that we fought back meant that I became an albatross around their neck. The Thought Police were exposed to massive unrelenting publicity for the first time, and they didn’t expect that. They didn’t expect us to push back. But free speech is on the retreat, and this was not a time for a faint-hearted defence.”

The Canadian Human Rights Commission eventually bowed out of their part in the imbroglio, saying the articles were “polemical, colourful and emphatic” but failed to satisfy the definition of writings “of an extreme nature” as defined by the Supreme Court. But the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal was not so sure, holding a five-day hearing during which the Canadian Islamic Congress presented evidence that twenty articles in Maclean’s presented Islam as a violent religion and Muslims as violent people, with the Islamist lawyer using words like racist, hateful, contemptuous, Islamophobic and irresponsible. Mahmoud Ayoub, a Harvard historian of religion, testified that Steyn didn’t understand the meaning of the word jihad and that, of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, less than a million interpreted jihad to justify violence against non-believers. (I don’t know of any other religion in the world that has merely a million devotees willing to kill, but that’s what the man said.)

Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.

May 9, 2019

MV Asterix delivers for the Royal Canadian Navy and breach of trust charge is dropped

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

Amid rumours that the Trudeau government is contemplating dropping the charge against Admiral Mark Norman, Matthew Fisher retweeted a link to his article from last year, praising the ship and suggesting that it should be renamed in honour of the man who did everything he could to get the RCN’s only current replenishment ship to sea:

MV Asterix
Photo via Canadian Defence Review

Aboard MV Asterix and HMCS Charlottetown – The Trudeau government would have fits, but the Royal Canadian Navy should consider renaming the MV Asterix the HMCS Admiral Mark Norman.

The controversial new replenishment ship, which entered service on time and on budget this past January, has been performing brilliantly for the navy during sea trials. That was the unanimous opinion of sailors on HMCS Charlottetown and on MV Asterix after a series of refuelling exercises with the Canadian frigate and American destroyers during a hunt for three U.S. nuclear subs that I witnessed recently in the Caribbean.

The only hiccup during the five-day war game was on the American side. The crew on one of the destroyers was unable to establish a good seal on the fuel probe Asterix sent over as the vessels sailed at 15 knots in a two-metre sea with about 30 metres of water between them. However, it only took about 10 minutes to fix the problem.

Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, who ran the RCN before becoming the military’s second-in-command, strongly supported leasing or buying Asterix. The admiral was suspended early last year and subsequently charged with breach of trust for allegedly violating cabinet confidences. He is accused of passing on information pertaining to doubts that the Trudeau government was believed to have had about leasing the vessel. Although there were strong signals that it wanted out of the deal, the government eventually decided to honour a contract that Davie had with the Harper government to lease Asterix for five years at will be a cost of $677 million,according to the Globe and Mail.

“I think the Asterix is fantastic,” said Chief Petty Officer 2nd Class Mark Parsons, the Charlottetown’s chief bosun’s mate, who oversaw two approximately hour-long, problem-free fuel transfers from the tanker to his warship. “We have missed that capability since (HMCS) Preserver was retired in 2014” because of electrical problems and corrosion.

Parsons’ opposite number on Asterix, CPO2 Steve Turgeon, served on the 48-year old Preserver until 2013. Since January he has been training four deck crews of 11 navy sailors each to handle refuellings. This has allowed Canada to once again be an independent blue-water navy after several years in which it depended on NATO allies and leased Chilean and Spanish navy tankers for fuel at sea. A fresh group of navy sailors has just begun training on the Asterix, which is participating with two Canadian frigates in the vast U.S.-led, 25-nation Rim of the Pacific naval exercise off Hawaii this month.

And on the legal front:

Later in the day, the news was finally made official: the government has dropped the charge and Vice-Admiral Mark Norman wants his job back:

The newly exonerated Vice-Admiral Mark Norman says he was alarmed by the persistent belief among senior government officials that he was guilty, and that their false assumptions took a significant financial and emotional toll on him and on his family.

On Wednesday, prosecutors stayed the single criminal charge of breach of trust laid against Norman, a major victory for the senior naval officer who has always maintained his innocence in the face of allegations he leaked confidential information about a project to procure a supply ship for the Royal Canadian Navy. In announcing the decision, Crown prosecutor Barbara Mercier told the court it was necessary in part due to new evidence the defence produced in March.

“This new information definitely provided greater context to the conduct of Vice-Admiral Norman, and it revealed a number of complexities in the process that we were not aware of,” Mercier said. “Based on the new information, we have come to the conclusion that given the particular situation involving Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, there is no reasonable prospect of conviction in this case.”

She did not provide any details on what exactly that information was.

The announcement ends the two-year legal battle against the officer and heads off what would have been a politically explosive trial for the Liberal government in the middle of a federal election campaign.

A fascinating little detail is also reported:

[Admiral Norman only] learned from a reporter’s question that Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan had announced the government would pay for his legal fees. “Wow,” was all he could muster in response. In 2017, the Department of National Defence had denied Norman’s request for financial assistance, concluding he was likely guilty.

So even though they’re finally making the right gestures, they still manage to be as ungracious as humanly possible while doing so. It’s not the kind of reputation you’d want to encourage.

QotD: Respect for the law

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in “the law” as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like “They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong”, or “They can’t do that; it’s against the law”, are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney’s Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan’s Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a “miscarriage of British justice”. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

George Orwell, “England Your England”, 1941-02-19.

May 8, 2019

Your electronic devices and the Canadian Border Services Agency

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

A few years ago, many civil libertarians were upset that the US government allowed warrantless searches of electronic devices at the border, but it was less well known that the Canadian Border Services Agency does the same at the Canadian border:

According to the CBSA, it has the right to search electronic devices at the border for evidence of customs-related offences — without a warrant — just as it does with luggage.

If travellers refuse to provide their passwords, officers can seize their devices.

The CBSA said that between November 2017 and March 2019, 19,515 travellers had their digital devices examined, which represents 0.015 per cent of all cross-border travellers during that period.

During 38 per cent of those searches, officers uncovered evidence of a customs-related offence — which can include possessing prohibited material or undeclared goods, and money laundering, said the agency.

While the laws governing CBSA searches have existed for decades, applying them to digital devices has sparked concern in an era where many travellers carry smartphones full of personal and sometimes very sensitive data.

A growing number of lawyers across Canada argue that warrantless digital device searches at the border are unconstitutional, and the practice should be stopped or at least limited.

“The policy of the CBSA of searching devices isn’t something that is justifiable in a free and democratic society,” said Wright who ran as a Green Party candidate in the 2015 federal election.

“It’s appalling, it’s shocking, and I hope that government, government agencies and the courts, and individual citizens will inform themselves and take action.”

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