The lesson of Charlie Hebdo? We need more free speech, not less – Globe Editorial

2015/02/04 Leave a comment

Globe editorial nails it:

In Canada, it appears a growing list of objectionable ideas and beliefs are to be hunted down and subjected to the full weight of the state. And so it was that, on Monday, the borough council presided over by Mr. Ménard amended its definition of a community centre to specifically forbid religious teaching, effectively shutting down Mr. Chaoui’s aspirations.

More rule-tightening will presumably follow; Mr. Coderre has gone so far as to say, “I oppose radicalism in all its forms.”

Otherwise sane provincial lawmakers in Quebec have been involved in a multi-partisan argument, now in its second year, around how to legislate against religious fundamentalism. There hasn’t been much of an argument over whether that’s a good thing to do; it seems to be a given.

In Ottawa, meanwhile, the expansion of the police state continues apace, fuelled by the irrational Islamic State fears ginned up by the Conservative government.

What if the solution to all of this were as simple as more free speech?

In the marketplace of ideas, hateful, offensive and small-minded beliefs can and should be vigorously confronted. But instead of using the law to shut them down, fight back with speech that shows them up. Incitement to violence is a crime, and always has been. But some of the speech politicians are talking about shutting down falls well short of that long-standing legal line.

Opinions can be changed. Bad ideas can be shunted aside. People can stop listening to nonsense, or they can never start in the first place. That is essentially what happened to Mr. Chaoui’s reactionary spiel in Anjou.

The process was working swimmingly. And then the politicians got involved.

The lesson of Charlie Hebdo? We need more free speech, not less – The Globe and Mail.

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Long form census: Duelling backbencher bills revive House debate

2015/02/04 Leave a comment

Continued triumph of ideology over reason, the Government’s refusal to reinstate the mandatory census:

The response rate for the 2006 long-form census was 93.5 per cent, compared with 68.6 per cent for the voluntary National Household Survey that replaced it in 2011.

Statistics Canada withheld information on thousands of smaller Canadian communities because the information was unreliable.

The census tract of Elgin, in Preston’s southwestern Ontario riding, had a non-response rate of 26.1 per cent for the National Household Survey.

Critics say the problems with the data are compounded by the fact that the survey results cannot be compared with the results from the mandatory censuses going back many decades.

Hsu said filling out the census forms is a civic duty, just as Canadians have a duty to pay their income taxes.

“The fight over this bill is a fight over the soul of this country,” Hsu told MPs last week.

“It is a fight over whether Canadians should collect information about ourselves so that we may have solid evidence with which to govern ourselves wisely.”

Long form census: Duelling backbencher bills revive House debate – Politics – CBC News.

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Canadian Public servants have 15 million days in banked sick leave

2015/02/03 Leave a comment

Interesting evidence that suggests less abuse of sick leave than previous government messaging justifying ending the banking of sick leave (i.e., many were keeping banked sick leave as insurance in case of catastrophic illnesses like cancer):

Canada’s public servants have socked away nearly 15 million days of unused sick leave, which would disappear under the Conservative government’s plan to introduce a new short-term disability plan.

That means the 195,330 people who are working today in the core public service — those for whom Treasury Board is the employer — have banked an average of 75 days, or 15 weeks, of sick leave to fall back on in the event of a prolonged illness.

The size of the sick leave bank was released by Treasury Board in response to an order paper question from Ottawa South Liberal MP David McGuinty. The statistics show a stockpile of 14.7 million days is what remains after nearly 63,000 people left the core public service over the past six years because they had retired, resigned, were laid off, fired or died.

… Public servants can’t cash out their sick leave when they leave government, so those credits disappear and are wiped off the books. With those departures, the amount of banked sick leave sick fell from 16 million days in 2008-09 to about 14.7 million days in 2013-14. There are about 261 working days in a year.

With the drop in the overall size of the sick leave bank, the average number of sick leave credits per employee also shifted. The average employee had a bank of 76 days in 2008-09, falling to 72 days when the 2012 budget cuts began but increasing to an average 75 days per worker for the past two years.

The large number of retirements and resignations over the past six years is probably older workers who had a stockpile of sick leave credits that would have been cancelled when they left the public service. Any new hires to replace them haven’t started to build their banks.

Many predicted there would be a run on the sick leave bank over the past couple of years from disgruntled employees deciding to use some of their sick leave credits before they lost them under the government’s new plan. But nothing in the data suggests that is happening in a significant way.

McGuinty said he was hoping the questions would shed some light on the state of the health of the public service and “what’s going on here” as the government negotiates with the 17 public service unions to reform the way sick leave and disability are managed.

Public servants have 15 million days in banked sick leave | Ottawa Citizen.

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Damage from cancelled census as bad as feared, researchers say

2015/01/30 Leave a comment

The impact of an ideologically motivated decision, impacting both social research (the intended target, as suggested by Paul Wells in his book The Longer I’m Prime Minister) as well as the business community and municipalities who use census data for planning purposes (e.g., store and school locations):

“It has certainly impacted my own work on what has been happening to middle-class earnings in Canada,” says Charles Beach, professor emeritus of economics at Queen’s University.

More broadly, it has “inhibited research into inequality and identifying winners and losers in economic growth, research into understanding the national problems of the have-nots in the economy, and research into how best to provision local government services.”

In the private sector, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, whose network represents 200,000 businesses across the country, is publicly calling on the federal government to restore the mandatory long-form census.

Some researchers – such as those working on a sweeping long-term study on income polarization in Canadian cities – are choosing to abandon using the NHS altogether. They may be settling for less-detailed tax-filer data, while others, such as some public health units, are still using outdated 2006 census data.

In Canada’s largest city, “it has definitely had an impact in the way we plan for services” for people such as seniors, single parents, youth and immigrants, says Harvey Low, manager of social research at the City of Toronto. “We are less sure ” about the characteristics of people served in communities.

Damage from cancelled census as bad as feared, researchers say – The Globe and Mail.

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Feds to spend $50,000 for flag’s 50th birthday celebration

2015/01/17 1 Comment

The historic scars of the debate over the Canadian flag still haunt the Conservatives, apparently (under Minister Kenney, the historic flags of Canada were often displayed along with the current flag).

And in contrast to the $1.5 million to commemorate the Holodomor, displaying yet again the political clout of the Ukrainian Canadian community:

The federal government has allotted $50,000 for celebrations for the upcoming 50th birthday of the iconic Maple Leaf flag.

As Maple Leaf approaches 50, some wonder: Where’s the party?

That’s compared to almost $4 million for a campaign marking the 200th anniversary of Sir John A. Macdonald’s birth, and $5.2 million spent on the bicentennial of the War of 1812.

Canadian Heritage said Thursday that the $50,000 includes funds for promotional material, a photo exhibit during Ottawa’s upcoming Winterlude festivities and various “outreach products.”

In an email, a spokesman also said the department has provided more than $200,000 to organizations, including provincial lieutenant-governors, for their 50th birthday projects.

By way of contrast, the government announced earlier this week it will spend $1.5 million on a cross-country project to raise awareness about the Holodomor, a state-sponsored famine in Ukraine in 1932-33 in which millions starved while resisting Soviet collectivist policies.

Feds to spend $50,000 for flag’s 50th birthday celebration – Politics – CBC News.

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NDP MP to challenge Chris Alexander over visa data requests

2015/01/16 Leave a comment

Further to the earlier post (Minister Alexander helped bureaucrats avoid giving full details on visa wait times), more detail on the amount of work required.

Tend to believe the points made by the parliamentary briefings coordinator: if the data base can’t spit out the information and the data needs to be manipulated (technical use of the term) in Excel, this time required would increase exponentially.

Not necessarily a reason to refuse what is a valid request (an extension could have been requested):

She also warned the massive quantity of data involved would lead to server crashes, thus further delaying the process.

“We estimate that the [temporary resident] population being requested corresponds to upwards of 16,000,000 records,” she wrote.

“The tools currently at our disposal do now yet fully integrate all the TR data and would therefore require substantial amount of manipulation in Excel of a very large amount of data, which regularly results in system crashes and slower processing of requests of this magnitude.”

The next day, Gagnon’s colleague, Amanda Morelli, called off the search.

“You can hold this work — [the minister’s office] has come back to advise ADMO that we will use the same response we provided to Q-359,” Morelli wrote in an internal email — a reference to an earlier reply to a similar written question filed by Liberal MP John McCallum.

NDP MP to challenge Chris Alexander over visa data requests – Politics – CBC News.

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More state power, not free speech, the likeliest we-are-Charlie result – Neil MacDonald

2015/01/14 1 Comment

Extensive commentary by Neil MacDonald of the CBC who unfortunately nails it in his somewhat lengthy piece on the aftermath of the Paris killings:

Western governments are, however, quite interested in enforcement and security, and that, not more speech, is the order of the day once again.

With unintended irony, and a very short memory, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared over the weekend that France is now locked in a “war on terror.”

That’s exactly the term George W. Bush used after 9/11. It presaged an unprecedented expansion of the surveillance state and the powers of America’s security apparatus.

Civil liberties were tossed aside. Other countries’ laws, even those of U.S. allies, became irrelevant.

And the frightened American population cheered.

The French, among others, mocked the slogan relentlessly, especially once it became apparent that the U.S. invasion of Iraq, carried out as part of this war on terror, was based on a false pretext.

Eventually, Bush’s own Pentagon quietly dropped the slogan. And when the Democrats took the White House, they repudiated it.

But it’s clearly back on. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder agreed with the French prime minister. America, he said, is at war, too.

Next month, Washington is convening an international summit to discuss new measures.

Canada is preparing new legislation to expand the powers of its security agencies.

The French, and the Americans, and no doubt the Canadians, are considering how better to monitor and obliterate incitement on the internet.

Or, more precisely, what security officials consider incitement. It’s a term that can be interpreted rather broadly, and no doubt will be.

Clearly, the ultimate answer to the Charlie Hebdo massacre will not be freer speech. It will be a mostly secret intensification of police power, with attendant shrinkage of individual freedoms.

And we will all be told not to worry: If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.

At least one French demonstrator seemed to recognize some of this over the weekend. The sign he hoisted read: “Je marche, mais je suis conscient de la confusion et de l’hypocrisie de la situation.”

I march, but I am aware of the confusion and hypocrisy of the situation.

More state power, not free speech, the likeliest we-are-Charlie result – World – CBC News.

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The monumental politics behind Ottawa’s newest memorials

2015/01/13 Leave a comment

Good piece on the history of the Holocaust and Communism memorials and the Government over-riding experts, particularly with respect to site location:

The advisory committee on which Bedford serves is chaired by Larry Beasley, Vancouver’s retired director of planning, and arguably the biggest star in Canadian urban planning circles. Beasley is now a University of British Columbia professor, and heads an international consulting firm. (He was not available to comment when the version of this article that appears in the print edition of Maclean’s was being written, but has responded by email to questions for this updated online version.) Not only did Beasley confirm that his advisory committee concluded that “the chosen site was not a good site, and that it was needed for a higher priority government purpose over the next few years,” he added that, beyond the location issue, the committee didn’t like the winning design, by ABSTRAKT Studio Architecture of Toronto.  “We did not vote on the actual design, but the selected one was not the one the majority of our group preferred, as advisers on the urban design aspects only,” Beasley said.

Asked why the government ignored or rejected the advice of Beasley’s committee, particularly on the site for the memorial, a spokesman for the Department of Canadian Heritage said in an email: “The National Capital Commission’s role in this project is not to advise or approve a location but to oversee the design competition.” That description of the NCC’s function seems more limited than is suggested by the commission’s own website, where the role of Beasley’s committee is described as providing advice on “long-range plans and policies for the use of public lands and properties in Canada’s Capital Region; design proposals affecting these federal lands; [and] real property matters.”

The future court building previously slotted for the contested site was to have been named after Pierre Elliott Trudeau—hardly a mark in its favour for the Conservatives. Soon after the election of the Harper government in 2006, the memorial alternative gained powerful political backers, particularly Employment Minister Jason Kenney, who also spearheads Harper’s political outreach to ethnic communities. Tribute to Liberty, the private group formed in 2008 to support the memorial, is led by Canadians who immigrated from former communist countries in Eastern Europe, as well as Asia, communities Kenney has tirelessly courted.

The Holocaust Monument site, a short walk west beyond the built-up Parliament Hill area, has attracted no significant criticism. Both Bedford and Abel said this site—next to the Canadian War Museum in an open area slated for major new development—is far more suitable than the location for the Victims of Communism memorial. Still, its ultimate popularity is not guaranteed. The monument is expected to cost $8.5 million, with Ottawa matching up to $4 million in private donations. The design calls for six slanting triangular concrete segments, suggesting a broken Star of David, enclosing a space big enough for 1,000 people to gather. Its key designer is Daniel Libeskind, the Polish-American architect, perhaps best known to Canadians for his jutting addition to Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, called the “Crystal,” which opened to mixed reviews in 2007, and has not proven to be a conspicuous hit with the public.

With Canadian Heritage saying that “major elements” of both monuments are slated to be largely completed by fall, this highly visible aspect of Harper’s legacy seems assured no matter who wins this year’s federal election. The verdict that matters most will be rendered by visitors, when they decide whether or not to add two sombre stops to the must-see circuit of Ottawa landmarks.

The monumental politics behind Ottawa’s newest memorials – Macleans.ca.

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Minister Alexander helped bureaucrats avoid giving full details on visa wait times | Toronto Star

2015/01/12 1 Comment

While there is some validity to the concerns regarding officials about the workload, one has to question whether or not CIC’s computer systems cannot generate these kinds of reports relatively easily (it’s not as if officers are looking at the 16 million records individually, they are using the CIC databases to extract the information):

The emails have officials describing the “enormity of the request,” estimating it would involve some 16 million records.

The emails also say the team tasked with crunching these numbers had to keep putting it aside to work on “high-priority requests to respond to public discussion and interdepartmental analysis around the (temporary foreign workers) file.”

Relief came when an official wrote on May 2: “You can hold this work — MINO (minister’s office) has come back to advise ADMO (office of the assistant deputy minister for operations) that we will use the same response we provided to Q-359.”

That was an order paper question about processing times submitted by Liberal immigration critic John McCallum, which was almost identical to the part of the question from Blanchette-Lamothe officials were scrambling to answer in time.

The response Alexander provided in the Commons last May 12 — there was no accompanying paperwork — is nearly verbatim to the response Blanchette-Lamothe received in writing two days later, although it also refers to “an excessive number of taxpayer-funded man-hours.”

A spokesman for Alexander said that was appropriate.

“It was at the advice of the department that we took the chosen approach. The questions posed by both Mr. McCallum and Ms. Blanchette-Lamothe were detailed, multi-part questions which could not be answered within the prescribed time frame. The answer to this (order paper question) reflects the advice of (Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s) professional, non-partisan public servants,” Kevin Menard wrote in an emailed statement Friday.

Chris Alexander helped bureaucrats avoid giving full details on visa wait times | Toronto Star.

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