Ottawa appoints new management to ‘strengthen’ pandemic surveillance system

2020/09/16 Leave a comment

Needed given short-sightedness of PHAC-decisions regarding pandemic preparations:

The Public Health Agency of Canada has installed new management to oversee and “strengthen” the country’s pandemic surveillance system, a once-globally renowned unit whose capabilities were curtailed less than a year before the COVID-19 crisis hit.

In a statement provided to The Globe and Mail, the department said Brigitte Diogo, a senior official with 25 years of experience in government, has taken over as the vice-president of the Health Security Infrastructure Branch. The division oversees the government’s pandemic early warning and surveillance unit, known as the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, or GPHIN, among other operations, such as an emergency stockpile of medical supplies.

Sally Thornton, who previously served in that role, left the government last week, the department said. “After a long and distinguished career, Ms. Thornton is retiring from the federal public service,” Public Health spokeswoman Natalie Mohamed said in an e-mailed statement.

Ms. Thornton declined requests for an interview. Ms. Diogo was also not available for comment, the department said.

GPHIN has been at the centre of controversy since a Globe investigation in late July detailed how the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the government’s pandemic early warning system were reduced significantly in late 2018 and early 2019. That effectively shut down much of its surveillance work on international health threats less than eight months before the outbreak in China began to spread, and appears to have impacted Canada’s ability to gauge the risk of the virus.

Throughout January, February and much of March, the government judged the threat from the outbreak as “low” in its official risk assessments, even after the World Health Organization warned in late January that the risk to the world was high.

In her new role, Ms. Diogo’s mandate will include bolstering the surveillance system, although no specifics were provided.

“Ms. Diogo will lead efforts to maintain and strengthen Canada’s public health event-based surveillance system including the Global Public Health Intelligence Network,” department spokesman Eric Morrissette said in a statement.

In late 2018, believing that GPHIN was too internationally focused and could be put to better use on domestic projects, the department reassigned doctors and epidemiologists in the highly specialized unit to projects that didn’t involve pandemic preparedness. A once-prolific alert system operated by GPHIN, designed to track evolving health threats and inject urgency into government responses, was effectively shuttered when a new edict required that Ms. Thornton approve all such alerts.

With no approvals given, the alert system eventually went silent on May 24, 2019, according to 10 years’ worth of PHAC records obtained by The Globe. With it, much of the unit’s surveillance activities – designed to track early signals of an outbreak and inform government risk assessments – effectively shut down as well.

The alert system remained silent for 440 days, and was restarted only last month, less than two weeks after the Globe investigation. During the intervening months, employees inside Public Health say GPHIN’s intelligence-gathering abilities were a fraction of what they once were. Created in the 1990s, GPHIN had garnered international acclaim for its ability to detect and gather continuing intelligence on outbreaks of diseases such as H1N1, Ebola, Zika and others, helping the government formulate a response if needed.

In addition to GPHIN, Ms. Thornton also oversaw the national emergency stockpile of medical supplies, which came under heavy scrutiny this spring after it fell short of supplying the provinces and territories with badly needed personal protective equipment.

In April, Ms. Thornton testified before the House of Commons Health Committee that the stockpile held a “minimum level” of equipment, and wasn’t designed to handle the surge of a pandemic, raising questions about how it was being managed.

The Globe has made several requests since May to interview department officials connected to GPHIN, including Ms. Thornton. All of those requests were declined.

Last week, Health Minister Patty Hajdu ordered an independent federal review of the problems at GPHIN, saying she was troubled that scientists at Public Health told The Globe they were not being listened to within the department. The Auditor-General has also launched an investigation.

Scientists within Public Health told The Globe that over the past decade, the department has suffered from an influx of senior officials from other areas of the government, such as the Treasury Board, Border Services and others, who lacked sufficient grounding in Public Health. Epidemiologist Michael Garner, a former senior science adviser at the agency, said it became difficult for scientists to communicate urgent and complex messages up the chain of command, because those officials often didn’t comprehend the problems.

Ms. Diogo, who moves over from Transport Canada, has no science background, which may add to such concerns. However, Mr. Morrissette said she has extensive experience working on safety and security policy, and on program design and delivery.

“While a newcomer to the agency, Ms. Diogo understands the merit of a well-functioning, event-based surveillance system including the timely dissemination of information such as alerts, to inform decision-making in addressing public health threats,” Mr. Morrissette said.

According to information from the department, Ms. Diogo was director-general of rail safety at Transport Canada from 2015-20, and director of operations at the Security and Intelligence Secretariat in the Privy Council Office, where she oversaw matters related to national security from 2011-14. She also has a background in risk mitigation while at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the department said.

Source: Ottawa appoints new management to ‘strengthen’ pandemic surveillance system

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Bill Blair orders prison data to be turned over, but does the data even exist?

2020/09/11 Leave a comment

Good question in the header (follow-up article to Paul Wells’ Another farce on Bill Blair’s watch:

Public Safety Minister Bill Blair says he has ordered Correctional Service Canada to hand over data to an independent panel reviewing its practises, nearly a year after the panel first requested the information. But new documents from the corrections agency reveal it may be failing to accurately collect the data altogether.

In an interview with Maclean’s, Blair vows that “we are working very hard to make sure that we are able to provide that information and access to what the panel needs before they would consider continuing their job.”

Anthony Doob, the former head of the panel, says he still hasn’t heard from Correctional Services and has not been convinced to continue his work. “I need to know that we can actually do our work,” he told Maclean’s.

Last month, the panel tapped by the Trudeau government to review the implementation of its Structured Intervention Units (SIUs) was disbanded. Its scathing final report pointed to a lack of cooperation from Blair and Correctional Services, which rendered the panel “powerless to accomplish the job that it was set up to do.”

The new SIUs were supposed to replace an existing solitary confinement regime, which courts in Ontario and British Columbia called unconstitutional and, possibly, torture. Yet when Doob and his panel tried to analyze whether the new units were complying with the court orders and a new legal regime, they were stonewalled.

Doob says the information is crucial to the implementation of these units and that “the bulk, or all of the data, that we’re asking for is stuff they should want for their own purposes.”

But Correctional Services was unable to turn over the necessary data before the panel’s appointment ended in August. It has yet to offer a timeline on when it might supply the statistics.

On Wednesday, Correctional Services posted a request for information to the Canadian government’s procurement platform, seeking companies capable of updating its offender management system. The system, which tracks every inmate in custody, was implemented in the early 1990s and last updated in 2002.

The system governs just about every part of Canadian prisons, and is responsible for tracking the accommodations and mental health status of inmates. It is also the system that monitors inmates placed in the Structured Intervention Units.

Correctional Services first identified the need to update the system in 2015. Today, the database is strained, the document reveals. The systems to input and check crucial information on inmates, including their risk of suicide, “are manual, cumbersome, redundant and open to potential human error in data entry.” Other indicators, such as social history, are “not well integrated into the overall process.”

Correctional Services also notes that, on several fronts including inmate discipline, the process is “cumbersome and relies on paper and humans to ensure that information is gathered.”

Doob says that while their computer systems may be “not ideal,” that technology is no excuse. “They do lots of research themselves using their old system to get data. And, as I’ve said many times, if they truly cannot get the data for the panel, that means that they don’t know what is happening, in a systematic way, in their institutions.”

Often, the only recourse for inmates to contest the conditions of their confinement is to file a grievance. As Correctional Services notes in the procurement documents, the “offender grievance process is approximately 90 per cent paper based. This process has resulted in delays in processing offender grievances from the 60-80 day policy prescribed timeframes to up to three years.”

The service did provide a batch of files to the panel in May but, Doob says, the tables were unusable, inaccurate and essentially worthless for his study. For example, he says, the data noted when an inmate had a mental health issue—but not whether it was noted before, during or after their stay in the Structured Intervention Unit. The service employee responsible for data analysis admitted the information was essentially worthless, Doob says.

Maclean’s asked Correctional Services about deficiencies in their inmate tracking system, but has yet to receive a response.

Blair acknowledges that “Correction Services Canada struggled to collect and then make available the information in a timely way.” The panel first alerted Blair to its issues obtaining data in mid-March, then filed an interim report, noting “this panel has not been allowed to do its work” on July 23, and filed its final report on Aug. 11.

It wasn’t until the details of the report were released by Vice on Aug. 26 that Blair’s office responded. The day after, Blair called Doob to discuss next steps.

Asked why he didn’t intervene sooner, Blair didn’t answer. “When it was brought to my attention, I immediately gave direction that the information was to be collected and made available to the panel,” he says.

Doob says that, even if Correctional Services produces the data, he’s not sure he’ll rejoin the panel. He wants assurances that he’ll be able to properly review the service’s practises, including on-the-ground access to the new cells. “I’ve heard zero from CSC,” he reports.

Zilla Jones, a Winnipeg-based lawyer and a fellow member of the panel, has clients who have been placed in the Structured Intervention Units at the Stony Mountain penitentiary in Manitoba. She says the upgrades to some of the cells have been limited to “cosmetic” changes, such as a new coat of paint and some posters.

In a series of court rulings declaring the old system unconstitutional, the courts of appeal in Ontario and British Columbia ruled that inmates must be given more than two hours outside their cell per day. As part of the new Structured Intervention Units, the Trudeau government vowed that 20 hours per day would be the maximum amount of time per day that inmates would be locked up.

Through the COVID-19 pandemic, Correctional Service Canada has locked some inmates—especially those who are awaiting tests for the virus, or who exhibit symptoms—in the Structured Intervention Units for upwards of 23 hours a day.

Blair disagrees that doing so has run afoul of the courts’ rulings. “That was not for the purposes of either administrative or disciplinary segregation,” he says. “It was medical isolation for those who were ill.”

Given that Correctional Services has not been collecting data on those put in these units, Doob and the panel have questioned if Ottawa even knows whether the new law is being followed.

Nevertheless, Blair is confident. “The law is explicit, in that it eliminates the administrative and disciplinary segregation in those institutions,” Blair says. “We have eliminated [solitary confinement].”

Source: Bill Blair orders prison data to be turned over, but does the data even exist?

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Health Minister orders review of pandemic warning system, concerns raised by scientists

2020/09/09 Leave a comment

Really hope the review will be truly independent, review all appropriate documentation, analysis and memos and identify what level and persons were responsible for the decision (i.e., was the decision made at the bureaucratic or political level):

Canada’s Health Minister has ordered an independent review of the country’s pandemic early warning system, after The Globe and Mail reported that the respected surveillance and research unit was silenced last year, several months before the COVID-19 outbreak hit.

Health Minister Patty Hajdu said the federal review will probe the shutdown of the system, as well as allegations from scientists inside the Public Health Agency of Canada that their voices were marginalized within the department, preventing key messages from making it up the chain of command.

“My hope is that we can get the review off the ground as soon as possible,” Ms. Hajdu said in an interview. “The independence of this review is critically important.”

A Globe investigation in late July detailed how the unit, known as the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, or GPHIN, was effectively silenced in May, 2019. The team of analysts – including doctors and epidemiologists specially trained to scour the world for health threats – were reassigned to other tasks within the government amid shifting department priorities.

Though GPHIN had garnered a stellar reputation internationally, and was dubbed a “cornerstone” of global pandemic preparedness by the World Health Organization, officials within Public Health decided in late 2018 and early 2019 that the operation was too internationally focused and could be put to better use working on domestic projects. The new work did not involve pandemic preparedness.

Those changes led to the shutdown of a special surveillance and alert system that helped Canada and the WHO gather intelligence on potentially threatening outbreaks, particularly in situations where foreign governments were trying to hide or play down the event.

Current and former scientists and doctors at Public Health also said they began to fear that their messages were not being heard, or understood, by layers of department officials who lacked a sufficient background in science. That made it difficult to convey urgent and complex information up the chain of command.

Responding to those concerns, Ms. Hajdu said her office has spent the past month looking into the problems at the departmental level, which led her to order the review.

“I’m concerned when there is an accusation that scientists are not being fully empowered, or in some way feel their voices are being blunted or muted,” Ms. Hajdu said in an interview.

“I can listen to those kinds of worries and do the kinds of things that I’m prepared to do, which is to order a review of the program and to determine whether or not the changes are actually resulting in the kind of information that Canada needs.”

Ms. Hajdu said she has asked that the review be done expeditiously, so that fixes can be identified and the recommendations implemented as soon as possible. She said that could mean having the recommendations back in six months.

“We’re working on [appointing] some professionals that would have the experience and the expertise to be able to do this review thoroughly, but also expeditiously … I don’t want this to be a two-year review,” the Health Minister said. The people leading the review are expected to be named in the coming weeks and will be independent of Public Health Canada.

Created as an experiment in the 1990s, GPHIN became a key part of Canada’s pandemic preparedness capacity after the deadly 2003 SARS outbreak, and was seen as a way to collect intelligence on global outbreaks. The point was not merely to identify the threat early, but also to monitor crucial developments and clues about the spread, often before official announcements were made by foreign governments, to speed up government decision-making.

With a team of roughly a dozen highly specialized analysts working in multiple languages, GPHIN was globally renowned for its ability to collect and disseminate credible information. It scoured more than 7,000 data points a day, including medical data, news reports, scraps of information on social media, and details on internet blogs to gather intelligence on outbreaks.

GPHIN had been credited with detecting some of the most important signals from the 2009 H1N1 outbreak in Mexico, outbreaks of Zika in West Africa, and a potentially catastrophic 2005 bird flu outbreak that the Iranian government tried to hide. As recently as two years ago, the WHO credited the Canadian unit for supplying 20 per cent of its “epidemiological intelligence.”

However, department changes effectively shuttered the operation, and limited the power of scientists inside the agency. The Globe obtained 10 years of internal GPHIN records which showed the system, which had issued more than 1,500 intelligence alerts about potential health threats over that time, went silent on May 24 last year. That coincided with a department edict that all such alerts had to be approved by senior managers inside Public Health. GPHIN analysts were shifted to domestic projects, such as tracking the effects of vaping in Canada, which effectively curtailed Canada’s surveillance of international health threats.

Past and present employees told The Globe that the system was designed to provide information to speed up Canada’s response to a dangerous outbreak such as COVID-19, including measures such as shutting down the border, quarantining travellers, enforcing physical distancing, and locking down long-term care homes.

“A lot of the work that we’ve done [over the past month] is to try to dig a little bit deeper into how this is working and why were these changes made,” Ms. Hajdu said.

GPHIN “has the potential to be a very valuable asset for Canada. It can’t be wasted,” the Health Minister said.

“The intent when there is an emerging pathogen is to close it off, to try and contain it as best as possible – at its source. So that you don’t end up in a pandemic like this again.”

The independent review follows a pair of other developments in recent weeks. Last month, the Auditor-General of Canada launched an investigation into the shutdown of the pandemic surveillance unit. And Public Health officials have restarted the GPHIN alert system.

COVID-19 has been a reckoning for governments around the world, exposing weaknesses in pandemic readiness and responsiveness. Ms. Hajdu said countries must now take stock of what needs to be done to implement stronger measures, including early warning and surveillance capacity, that will remain effective and not be eroded over time, when the memories of the crisis fade.

The federal review will look at “governance and what works best” for GPHIN, Ms. Hajdu said, adding that the messages raised by scientists inside Public Health, who took risks by speaking out publicly, resonated with her.

“In [The Globe’s] reporting, the plea from the scientists and the researchers that work in that team were particularly profound,” Ms. Hajdu said.

“There is still enough there to save, and to boost, and I think this independent review is going to be very helpful,” she said. “Obviously there is a lot of work to do.”

Source: Health Minister orders review of pandemic warning system, concerns raised by scientists

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UK: Culture wars now a proxy for political debate

2020/09/04 Leave a comment

UK perspective on culture wars and how they debase political debate and discussion:

Should those Shelbourne Hotel statues have remained in situ? Was Winston Churchill a great statesman or should he be viewed as a callous racist? Are the lyrics of Rule Britannia offensive or should Britons sing the patriotic number with pride? Are mandatory face masks a crude imposition on our basic civil liberties?

If you care about the answers to these questions you have – perhaps unwittingly – embroiled yourself in the latest instalment of the culture wars.

It seems nothing of late can escape our fervour for mud-slinging and social media spats over the cultural values we hold dear. Most recently the BBC has found itself at the epicentre of the tedious charade – with the broadcaster’s new director general, Tim Davie, reportedly believing the BBC’s comedy output is too one-sided and in need of a “radical overhaul”, thanks to its supposed left-wing slant (pray tell, what is a “right-wing joke”?).

For politicians, the answer to this question is an easy one

And only weeks earlier, when the BBC announced an orchestral-only version of Rule Britannia! would be played on the Last Night of the Proms, an almighty row was triggered over the propriety of the anthems lyrics (“Britons never, never, never shall be slaves” is the line that draws the most ire).

The BBC said the decision was due to the fact there will be no audience to sing along to the song (due to Covid-19 restrictions), while conflicting reports emerged that the conductor believed the lyrics to be inappropriate in view of Black Lives Matter protests.

In his first week on the job Davie reversed the decision and scrapped the orchestral-only version in favour of singers on the screen – in what has been gleefully described by right-wing pundit Dan Wootton as the “first major anti-woke move” by the new boss.

What is it with our inclination to reduce everything to a culture war? In the case of the Proms, what could have been a gentle dialogue about history, philosophy and patriotism is instead siphoned into a vituperative conflict between two groups: the anti-Woke brigade versus the enlightened progressives; the bleeding heart liberals versus the true patriots.

For politicians, the answer to this question is an easy one. The Proms was too good of a moment for Boris Johnson to pass up. Wading into the debate he said: “I think it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions and about our culture, and we stopped this general bout of self-recrimination and wetness”.

As the culture wars emerge as a proxy for political debate, Johnson was smart to capitalise on the row. He could signal his political values, bolster his conservative credentials (credentials that, so far, have been lacking throughout his tenure), all the while avoiding substantive discussion on his patchy track record in government.

That the culture wars can provide a compelling distraction from the substance of politics might be true but there is something more sinister going on. Johnson’s political primacy may so far leave a lot to be desired, but this is a sacrifice his electorate ought to make (he might argue). Rule Britannia may just be a song, but what the row symbolised was something far greater. Patriotism, British values, a history to be proud of – these things require protecting at all costs, and Johnson is the only man who can do it. The deluge of policy failings that might come along with this brave stance will have to be tolerated for the greater good.

Way of life

If you were to ask Johnson why he was so keen to make his case on Rule Britannia he might reply: this is not just politics at stake, but our very way of life.

The Remainer vs Leaver divide, which emerged in a meaningful way in 2015, has consolidated this notion that our politics and our cultural values are inseparable.

“Remainer” emerges not just as a position you might hold on the function of the European Union to the British State, but as shorthand for the exact person you want to present as: liberal, urban, a champion of multiculturalism, you name it. No matter that this has eradicated vast swathes of nuance from the political landscape of the Brexit vote – nuance is the enemy of the culture warriors.

As the battleground before the electorate has becomes songs at the Proms, or the cultural capital you gain by being a Leaver or a Remainer, we are witnessing in real time cultural arguments overtaking economics and policy “as the driving force of our political debate” (as Helen Lewis put it two years ago in the Financial Times).

It is unedifying at best, dangerously and myopically divisive at worst. But it seems the nation’s favourite pastime is simply too tempting (for politicians, pundits and the electorate alike) to pass up.

Source: Culture wars now a proxy for political debate

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Software likely to blame for CSC’s ‘unfortunate’ failure to report solitary confinement data, says watchdog

2020/09/03 Leave a comment

Hard to understand why, if technical issues were the problem, why the radio silence to the independent panel. Hard to blame it only on incompetence. Look forward to an update by Paul Wells on his previous piece (Another farce on Bill Blair’s watch – Macleans.ca:

Technical issues and a new “Cadillac” software system to track inmates likely explains the Correctional Service of Canada’s failure to provide promised data to an independent panel monitoring the new system meant to end solitary confinement, says Canada’s prison watchdog.

The challenge rests primarily with a new tracking technology the Correctional Service of Canada picked that doesn’t yet blend with its existing “antiquated” software, though it was ultimately the right choice, said Correctional Investigator of Canada Ivan Zinger, echoing the CSC’s public defence after outcry last week over the panel’s term having ended without any work done.

In September, a volunteer panel was struck to track the prison system’s adoption of Structured Intervention Units (SIUs)—the Liberal government’s response to the court-mandated end to the use of administrative and disciplinary segregation in all federal correctional institutions. The legislation, Bill C-83, guaranteed prisoners a right to four hours daily outside of cells, and two hours of meaningful human contact. The United Nations defines solitary confinement as 22 or more hours a day in a cell without human contact, and 15 straight days in such conditions as torture.

A scathing report released Aug. 19 by the SIU Independent Advisory Panelwarned that the eight expert appointees were unable to complete any work.

“We cannot equate the fact that CSC cannot give the data with that there was no compliance or, or there was ill motive on the part of the service to provide the data,” said Mr. Zinger.

He said it’s often difficult to get information from the CSC, and it’s “very unfortunate” that was the experience of the panel, which he hoped could assure his office the service was living up to its promise. He remains concerned and critical of the “flawed” SIU model, which he said affects approximately 225 to 250 inmates and will likely face a court challenge, but his job is to ensure compliance with the law.

“CSC did the right thing initially, purchasing a computer system and software to ensure they could demonstrate compliance, they went for a Cadillac model,” he said, complete with cellphone technology and a remote keyless system at every cell door. “I think eventually it’ll be bulletproof.”

Nearing a year since the units came into use, panel members and critics argue the CSC should be able to prove compliance and report even basic data for the relatively small number of inmates, and say oversight is essential to ensure conditions the UN defines as torture aren’t occurring in Canada’s prisons. The CSC was not forthcoming throughout the now-shutteredpanel’s lifespan since launching in September 2019, said its chair Anthony Doob, a professor emeritus of criminology at the University of Toronto.

For example, the panel had expected its first data dump in February, with information like the average and shortest number of hours inmates were out of their cells, with updates every two months to determine improvements. By February, the CSC informed the panel that might not be coming. The panel in turn notified Public Safety Minister Bill Blair’s (Scarborough Southwest, Ont.) office, but got no response, only to later get a “useless” batch of bad data, and then learn from the CSC that its information-management technology was out of date and it ultimately wouldn’t be sharing the requested information.

CSC spokesperson Marie-Pier Lécuyer said by email Sept. 1 that the CSC continues to “actively work” on the panel’s requests. She said the service has technology in place to track “what we set out to track,” but the two systems, one older and one launched for the SIUs, “limit the integration of the data, and we continue to work through this.”

Mr. Zinger said his office’s investigators have observed the system tracking data that he believes will eventually be available to the public—though he’s also not clear on when that CSC will have that capability, and neither the service nor the minister responsible, Mr. Blair, have committed to a timeframe.

Having the data in-hand is the only way Prof. Doob said he’ll be back on the job, pushing against Mr. Blair’s promise to renew the panel’s appointments so it can complete its work in the wake of the fallout.

Mr. Blair told The Hill Times by email he had spoken to Prof. Doob about the panel’s “serious concerns” and has asked his officials “to develop a work plan that will help ensure the panel gets all the information it needs to complete its work in a timely manner.”

That statement “was a little vague, to put it politely,” said panel member Ed McIsaac, who previously spent 18 years as executive director of the Correctional Investigator’s office.

There’s “no question” Mr. Blair shares some of the blame for the CSC’s failure to hand over data, said Mr. McIsaac. But while he was “terribly disappointed” the CSC failed to provide the needed data, he said he wasn’t surprised.

Panellist Alexander Simpson, chief of forensic psychiatry at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, said he’s willing to come back because he believes the work is important, but the minister needs to provide public assurances that the issues will be addressed and make it “absolutely clear that the problem that we’ve encountered will not continue.”

The CSC also reiterated in its Sept. 1 statement that it gave the panel some data, an assertion Prof. Doob said is misleading when the agency months ago admitted the data it provided was essentially useless. It feeds into a feeling—shared by two other panelists The Hill Times spoke with—that they’ve been “jerked around,” he said.

“CSC has said a number of different contradictory things about the data and it’s unfortunate,” and the explanations don’t add up, he said. “We don’t have data… Nobody has any information about the way these units are actually operating. And we don’t even know when we’re going to get it.”

How CSC tracks compliance

Ms. Lécuyer stressed the SIUs have “not gone unchecked since their implementation,” as independent bodies were set up ahead of the new units, as required by the enacting legislation to work as oversight and accountability measures. One is a group of Independent External Decision Makers, who provide oversight related to an inmate’s conditions and duration of confinement in an SIU and review cases, she noted, and the correctional investigator also follows up on complaints.

Asked if it’s complying with the new laws surrounding the structured intervention units, Ms. Lécuyer said the service has “worked hard to implement the SIUs” which are a brand-new correctional model.

She pointed to more than 1,100 decisions and reviews completed by the Independent External Decision Makers, of which 75 per cent determined that the inmate should remain in an SIU. Of the IEDM reviews, less than 25 per cent led to recommendations that the CSC “take additional steps,” and less than 2.5 per cent resulted in an order to remove an inmate from the SIU.

As for how it records compliance, she said an application tracks several different data points, including every inmate who is transferred into and out of an SIU.

That application is loaded onto a guard’s handheld device so they track in real-time the number of hours an inmate spends out of their cell as well as their activities, such as participating in correctional programs, receiving interventions from parole officers or health services, or interacting with other inmates.

“Policy requires a daily review by a manager of all information that is logged in the application about an inmate’s daily time out of cell and their activities,” she said.

Record likely ‘abysmal’ amid COVID

If the data for the last six months had been turned over to the panel, Mr. Zinger said it would likely show failure to meet the requirements of the new law—at least four hours every day out of cell and “meaningful” human contact—a development he said is a separate, and troubling, matter tied to the pandemic.

“Since November [the CSC has] been struggling to train and comply, and they’ve put a lot of effort in place to get to a desirable level,” he said, and most prisons with SIUs were complying with the majority of their obligations.

“As soon as the pandemic hit, compliance went back to zero,” and by mid-March the SIU’s were on lockdown, said Mr. Zinger, whose office has made two COVID updates, the last in June, warning the new units had returned to their former function. “It was solitary confinement, [prisoners] were lucky to have an hour outside their cell, let alone the yards.”

The numbers will likely show implementing the SIUs, in part because of COVID-19, has been an “abysmal failure,” agreed Catherine Latimer, executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada.

“I think it’s a rampant, flagrant violation of the law in terms of isolated confinement. They will try to justify this on the back of COVID,” she said, but “nothing, not even a pandemic justifies the wholesale violation of prisoner’s rights and that’s what we believe we’re seeing now.”

Many prisoner advocates were concerned the legislative regime the Liberals introduced was inadequate and lacked safeguards, said Ms. Latimer, and the government used the promise of an independent panel of respected people to allay those concerns.

She doesn’t accept the technology defence, saying it’s “absolutely essential” that data be provided to the advisory panel to verify and validate the extent to which the structured intervention units are following the law.

“If they’re not getting the data then we all need to be worried,” she said.

It leaves the public and prisoners in “a rather precarious situation,” agreed Mr. McIsaac, because if the CSC is proclaiming it’s running the units in compliance with the law, but there’s no data to support that, he’s not sure where to turn.

“I think there needs to be public concern expressed [and] perhaps a revisiting at the court level what is currently going on within these units,” he said.

If Prof. Doob doesn’t get the requested data and doesn’t return to the panel, Ms. Latimer said Canada likely needs a judicial review of isolated confinement at the CSC, and not just structured intervention units.

“We’ve just taken a giant step backwards and in a way that’s inconsistent with judicial rulings in Canada,” she said, calling the situation so serious that she considers Canada to be in the worst corrections crisis in the last 50 years.

“The challenge is that this is less visible to the public, and damage to individuals is less visible but  it is horrific.”

Source: https://www.hilltimes.com/2020/09/02/software-likely-to-blame-for-cscs-unfortunate-failure-to-report-solitary-confinement-data-says-watchdog/261887

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‘The Plot Against America’: A Dire Warning For Election Season

2020/09/03 Leave a comment

Having watched the series, agree:

The one problem with Philip Roth’s tour de force 2004 novel, “The Plot Against America,” is that it’s too feel-good.

I know this is a strange accusation to make about an alternative history about a fascist United States. In Roth’s version of the 1940 presidential election, Americans choose the Nazi-sympathizing aviator Charles Lindbergh, who goes on to institute insidious and then overt programs of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism. The nation is riven and people are killed.

But in the end, everything is set right. In 1942, Lindbergh goes missing while flying his airplane, a special election is called, and Franklin D. Roosevelt is re-elected against Lindbergh’s vice president, Burton K. Wheeler. The United States enters the war against the Axis, and history continues, more or less, on the track that we know.

It’s a sober, unsettling story, but it ends on a note of optimism in America’s ability to right itself — too easily, I would argue, given everything we saw before it.

Earlier this year, HBO aired “Plot” as a six-part series, adapted by David Simon, who is not known as one of TV’s great optimists. His best-known series, “The Wire,” was a five-season lament for American cities. His website is titled “The Audacity of Despair.”

Simon’s confident, chilling adaptation stuck largely to Roth’s story, with few changes. The biggest was to that ending, which he reimagined in ways that get more unsettling and relevant as our own election season goes on.

The final sequence begins on Election Day, 1942, which, because history has a sense of humor, was Nov. 3, just like this year’s. On the soundtrack, Frank Sinatra croons “The House I Live In (That’s America to Me).” Citizens line up in the Weequahic High School gym in Newark. They go into the booths and cast their ballots. The citizenry is turning out. America is showing its best side.

As Old Blue Eyes keeps singing (“A certain word / Democracy”), a few discordant notes begin to sound. A man with an F.D.R. pin is told he is “not on the list” at the precinct where he has voted for 20 years and is hustled out by police. More officers wheel away a voting machine, telling puzzled onlookers, “It’s broken.” In a country field, men open a car trunk, unload ballot boxes — marked with the number of an election district in which we just saw lines of Black voters — and burn the contents.

We cut to that evening, in the living room of the Levins, the Jewish family the story was told through. A host on the radio reports on the first returns from precincts on the East Coast. Herman Levin (Morgan Spector) — a mainstream F.D.R. supporter who believes the system is ultimately good and self-correcting — leans in toward the set. “We are seeing some conflicting results early on,” the announcer says.

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Feds creating ‘inventory’ of racial minorities to fill senior public service posts

2020/08/29 Leave a comment

Reasonable approach. I recall when I worked for Global Affairs in the 90s, that a similar practice existed, run by HR, to identify promising women foreign service officers for development assignments and advancement. Some 20-30 years later, most of the names became senior officials:

The Liberal government wants to create an “inventory” of Black, Indigenous and other racialized people who could play high-ranking roles in the federal public service.

It is looking for an executive search firm to create and maintain the list of candidates from minority groups, as well as people with disabilities, who could be considered for deputy minister and assistant deputy minister positions.

Details of the planned database are contained in a request for proposals posted on the federal government’s procurement and public tenders website.

They were first reported by the True North Centre for Public Policy on its news site.

The call for the staffing consultant to do this work was put out by the Privy Council Office, a bureaucratic operation that supports the prime minister and cabinet.

The request for proposals does not disclose how much the contract will cost.

“The federal public service is stronger and most effective when it reflects the diversity of the Canadians it serves,” says the request for proposals.

“While progress has been made in recent years to achieve gender parity in the senior leadership community, there is more progress to be made in increasing representation of Black people and other racialized groups, Indigenous people, as well as persons with disabilities.”

Ordinarily, public servants rise through the ranks before attaining the most senior executive posts of deputy minister and assistant deputy minister.

However, the Employment Equity Act, which applies to federally regulated industries, Crown corporations and some portions of the federal public service, designates women, Indigenous Peoples, other visible minorities and people with disabilities as groups requiring special measures to overcome barriers to employment.

According to an analysis by Andrew Griffith, a former director general at the Immigration Department, in the October 2017 issue of Policy Options, less than four per cent of executive positions in the federal public service were Indigenous and less than 10 per cent were other visible minorities.

Caroline Xavier is the only Black assistant deputy minister, appointed in February at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

“We are in 2020. How come it took so long? It shouldn’t have,” she told the CBC in June.

The winning bidder will be required to update the list every two months.

Source: Feds creating ‘inventory’ of racial minorities to fill senior public service posts

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Quebec won’t use COVID-19 notification app for now

2020/08/27 Leave a comment

Again, surprising given Quebec’s overall poor performance in managing and containing the pandemic. And another kudos to Premier Ford for his plain language messaging “Just do it…”:

Quebec won’t use a smartphone application to notify the public about potential exposure to COVID-19 for now, arguing its testing and contact-tracing capability are sufficient at this stage of the pandemic.

While the province is not closing the door on using an app in the future, Premier François Legault says he would rather use one that was developed in Quebec.

“We would prefer a Quebec company, but I don’t think this is our main argument,” Legault said Tuesday afternoon in Saint-Hyacinthe, Que.

He says there is a lack of broad support for such an app in the province, due to privacy concerns.

“Maybe in six months we will come to another decision,” he said.

The decision puzzled the federal Health Ministry. Thierry Bélair, a spokesperson for Health Minister Patty Hajdu, pointed out that the app offered by the federal government, COVID Alert, does not track a user’s location nor collect any other personally identifiable information.

“It’s also an additional tool we can use as we prepare for a possible increase in cases this fall. So why not make it available now in Quebec?” said Bélair.

COVID Alert, which uses open-source technology built by a volunteer team of engineers at Ottawa-based Shopify, is designed to warn users if they’ve spent at least 15 minutes in the past two weeks within two metres of another user who later tested positive for the coronavirus.

It was launched at the end of July and currently only works in Ontario, where it has been downloaded more than two million times.

Adoption of one app across Canada would be “very helpful” to ensure those who travel between provinces are notified of possible exposure to the virus, Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, said at a Tuesday news conference.”From the federal perspective, we want as many Canadians as possible to be participating,” she said.

Experts in both technology and public health stress that the more people who use the app, the better it will be.

Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam says more widespread adoption of the COVID Alert app is one more layer of protection. This comes as Quebec announces it will not sign on to the app for now. 1:03

Éric Caire, Quebec’s minister responsible for digital transformation, said the government is interested in a made-in-Quebec app and is also running tests on the federal app to ensure it is secure.

He said the province has learned from public consultations and legislative hearings that a solid understanding of the technology used in an app makes Quebecers more open to installing it.

“The more that people are told what it does and does not do, the more they will be reassured,” said Caire.COVID Alert relies on Bluetooth technology to detect proximity to other users, instead of GPS data.

The province heard from 16,456 Quebecers in online public consultations about the use of a COVID-19 notification app. Seventy-seven per cent believed such an app would be useful, and 75 per cent said they would install it, the province said in a statement.

But the voices heard at hearings, held by the Institutions Committee in Quebec City, about a possible contract-tracing app were more skeptical.

“Quebec’s legal framework is inadequate in terms of data and personal information protection and access to information, informed consent and the fight against discrimination,” said a report prepared by the committee once those hearings concluded.

Committee members acknowledged that almost all of the 18 experts who testified at the hearings expressed serious reservations about the effectiveness and reliability of the technology.

Dr. David Buckeridge, an epidemiologist at McGill University’s School of Population and Global Health, said the right time to start using such an app would be before the number of daily new cases reaches the crisis levels seen in the spring.”I think the risks, frankly, from this app are relatively quite low, and it was designed in that way,” he said.

“The main issue here is going to be trust and adoption.”

Caire said the province will continue to watch how widely the app is used in Ontario and that Quebec will consider using an app in the event of a second wave.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he would ask Legault to reconsider his government’s decision.

“Just do it. It protects everyone,” he said to reporters Tuesday afternoon. “It’s not a big deal.”

Source: Quebec won’t use COVID-19 notification app for now

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Conservatism Is A Collection Of Losers. It Doesn’t Have To Be.

2020/08/11 Leave a comment

A American conservative criticism of current American conservatives, with some parallels with some Canadian conservatives:

“I’m a conservative but at this point who cares?” said Donald Trump in 2016. “We’ve got to straighten out the country.”

Perhaps the only reason to care about conservatism today is that a preoccupation with the concept itself often presents an obstacle to “straightening out the country.” Indeed, it mostly prevents self-identified conservatives from achieving their own political goals. Going forward, whatever valuable causes might be associated with conservatives—and in my opinion there are many—will need to be rescued from conservatism.

I am not the first person to point out that conservative political coalitions are mostly just collections of losers, but the point nevertheless bears repeating. Today’s conservatism is merely the name used to categorize the rejects of the post–Cold War order: this includes a few oddball financiers who can’t play nicely with others, extractive industries and other declining sectors, the small businesses most reliant on low-wage, low-skill labor, and a group often referred to as social conservatives who have been almost totally marginalized from mainstream culture. At bottom, nothing holds this gang of misfits together except exclusion from the dominant group of big tech oligarchs, more respectable financial rent seekers, and the leading cultural tastemakers in media and academia.

The conservative favorite Lord Acton famously quipped that power corrupts, but as the self-described Marxist Slavoj Žižek is fond of pointing out, powerlessness corrupts, too. One effect of conservatives’ waning economic and social power has been a retreat into their own self-referential identity groups and subcultures—bizarre little cults ranging from Straussians to Burkeans to the various branches of “Austrian economics.” Conservatives applaud themselves for this apparent devotion to “ideas,” but it’s actually just an effect—and a cause—of their irrelevance with respect to matters of practical importance and almost total intellectual incoherence. Despite this obsession with theoretical inquiry, however, conservatives have been nearly banished from the academy, prestige media, and cultural institutions. The leading “conservative thinkers” of the last 20 years have influenced hardly anyone beyond the next generation of downwardly mobile graduate students.

As Gladden Pappin, deputy editor of American Affairs, has argued, contemporary conservatism is an attempt to articulate the role of non-state institutions rather than a serious approach to wielding political power. The result is an abundance of platitudinous books on Tocqueville and treacly essays on civility, but little serious study of how today’s economy actually works or how to coordinate diverse interests across complex institutions. Thus, even when conservatives happen to win office, typically all that they can imagine doing is reducing their own capacity to exercise power. Conservative foundations and donors have plowed millions into producing mind-numbing Adam Smith documentaries—last year, they even created a virtual pin factory, along with an absurdist farce featuring the Dalai Lama—but they have shown little interest in, say, planning for economic and technological competition with China or understanding the effects of financialization. In part, this may be owing to the fact that conservatism has become nothing more than an ideological gloss retrospectively applied to the machinations of lobbyists and grifters. Yet on a deeper level it seems that the conservative corpus is simply no longer capable of anything but reflexive spasms.

I state these matters so harshly—in a magazine called The American Conservative of all places—not to rub salt into the wounds of long-suffering conservatives, but rather because vast new possibilities have opened up for those willing to throw off the constricting ideologies of the “end of history.” The neoliberal economic system is falling apart under the weight of its own contradictions, while its intellectual and cultural energies appear increasingly exhausted. New policy options and even novel directions in culture are coming into view. New electoral coalitions are emerging to support, for example, more family-oriented economic policies, to strengthen communities from the neighborhood to the nation, and to challenge the moral-cultural dominance of radical liberal individualism.

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Ottawa must put data first and tie to health funding

2020/08/11 Leave a comment

Agree in principle but politically hard to achieve (Quebec doesn’t even automatically share its data with CIHI):

The federal government looks yet again about to transfer billions of dollars to the provinces with essentially no strings attached.

We’ve seen this before with $40 billion in the 2004 First Ministers’ Health Accord and then $11 billion in the 2017 Health Accord, both highlighting home care, without evidence of significant progress.

And the prime minister just announced $19 billion for the Safe Restart Program, though without any details, especially as to what the federal government receives in return.

One major quid pro quo could address Canada’s profound lack of high-quality data, especially highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. While U.S. analysts are able in near real time to estimate and project COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths down to the county level, Canada is barely able to produce comparable data by province.

Some of this $19 billion is meant for COVID testing and tracing, and improvements in long-term care.

A major failing in the tragic and disproportionate COVID-19 mortality rates in nursing homes was due to poor staffing levels, an issue that has been known for decades and pointed out in myriad reports and studies. But there are essentially no comparable and complete national data in this area.

As strongly recommended in the recent Royal Society of Canada report, high quality data on current staffing levels, connected at the individual level to health outcomes, are essential, especially for the federal government to develop the evidence-based national standards for long-term care so many have been calling for.

The provinces have typically argued that health care is a provincial jurisdiction, so the federal government cannot compel them to provide sorely needed data. However, in another example, we have had almost two decades of cajoling the provinces with federally funded Canada Health Infoway paying at least half the cost to develop and implement standardized and interoperable software systems for electronic health records.

Most relevant for the current pandemic, Infoway was specifically tasked with producing a system for anticipating and dealing with infectious disease outbreaks. This system, had it been working even 15 years after its initial funding in 2004, would have enabled a very different outcome this year, likely with far fewer cases and deaths from COVID-19.

Paper agreements and cajoling the provinces with optional subsidies have clearly failed. It’s time for a much tougher stance.

The federal government has the necessary constitutional powers, including explicit jurisdiction for statistics, criminal law, spending powers, and the general peace, order and good government (POGG) power, to compel the collection and flows of 21st century kinds of data.

Monique Bégin, as federal minister of health, successfully ended the practice of physicians’ extra-billing by amending the Canada Health Act to deduct any extra billing from an offending province’s fiscal transfer. The Supreme Court has just upheld the federal government’s genetic privacy legislation as constitutional despite objections from Quebec.

In the current pandemic emergency, high-quality, standardized, real-time data on “excess deaths,” COVID cases and hospitalizations, and details on the operations of the thousands of nursing homes and retirement residences across Canada are essential.

For nursing homes, we need these data to learn why some were completely successful in avoiding any novel coronavirus cases amongst residents and staff, while others suffered tragically. In turn, such statistical information will provide the federal government the strong evidence base needed to take the lead in establishing national standards for nursing home staffing levels, though action on staffing must not wait for perfect data.

And once we have standardized individual-level data on COVID cases, including factors like age, sex, neighbourhood, other diseases, individuals’ household composition, race, hospitalization rates, disease severity, and deaths, as the U.K. has been able to do for 17 million of its residents in near real time, then Canada will be able to support far more sophisticated analysis and projections to deal with the current top pandemic issues — not least, whether to open bars or schools.

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