Colby Cosh: The lifelike nature of artificial intelligence

2025/07/21 Leave a comment

Interesting test:

…Well, fast-forward a dozen centuries, and along come Copernicus asking “What if Earth isn’t at the centre after all?”; Kepler asking “What if the orbits aren’t circular, but elliptical?”; and Newton, who got to the bottom of the whole thing by introducing the higher-level abstraction of gravitational force. Bye-bye epicycles.

None of these intellectual steps, mind you, added anything to anyone’s practical ability to predict planetary motions. Copernicus’s model took generations to be accepted for this reason (along with the theological/metaphysical objections to the Earth not being at the centre of the universe): it wasn’t ostensibly as sophisticated or as powerful as the old reliable geocentric model. But you can’t get to Newton, who found that the planets and earthbound objects are governed by the same elegant and universal laws of motion, without Copernicus and Kepler.

Which, in 2025, raises the question: could a computer do what Newton did? Vafa’s research group fed orbital data to AIs and found that they could correctly behave like ancient astronomers: make dependable extrapolations about the future movements of real planets, including the Earth. This raises the question whether the algorithms in question generate their successful orbital forecasts by somehow inferring the existence of Newtonian force-abstractions. We know that “false,” overfitted models and heuristics can work for practical purposes, but we would like AIs to be automated Newtons if we are going to live with them. We would like AIs to discover new laws and scientific principles of very high generality and robustness that we filthy meatbags haven’t noticed yet.

When Vafa and his colleagues found is that the AIs remain in a comically pre-Copernican state. They can be trained to make accurate predictions by being presented with observational data, but it seems that they may do so on the basis of “wrong” implicit models, ones that depend on mystifying trigonometric clutter instead of the beautiful inverse-square force law that Newton gave us. The epicycles are back!

The paper goes on to do more wombat-dissecting, using the game of Othello to show how AI reasoning can produce impressive results from (apparently) incomplete or broken underlying models. It is all very unlike the clean, rigorous “computing science” of the past 100 years: whatever you think of the prospects of AI, it is clear that the complexity of what we can create from code, or just buy off the shelf, is now approaching the complexity of biological life.

Source: Colby Cosh: The lifelike nature of artificial intelligence

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Colby Cosh: Is a Canadian a Canadian if he first tortured prisoners for ISIS?

2024/08/16 Leave a comment

Overly simplistic characterization. One of the problems with the previous government’s legislation on post-citizenship revocation was that it allowed for “offloading” of responsibilities to other countries. The best example to date has been the UK government’s revocation of Jack Letts (“Jihadi Jack”), who was born and raised in the UK with minimal to no time in Canada.

However, as his mother is Canadian, his parents are understandably pressing Canada to take on his case. But correctly speaking, his radicalization occurred in the UK and the UK should not have “offloaded” responsibility to Canada. The Canadian government, to its credit, has not responded substantively to the various persons lobbying on his behalf.

Revocation for misrepresentation at the application stage is fully appropriate, including judicial review rather than leaving it only to the Minister. But post-citizenship, countries should assume their responsibilities which the UK has shamefully not done:

…The new government preserved the state’s pre-2015 right to cancel citizenship for “false representation or fraud” in an application, but it added a proviso for appeal by right to the Federal Court. This means that today’s immigration minister initiates the process for revocation, if he can find evidence of falsehood, but that he is no longer the ultimate decision-maker.

Miller knows all this, whether or not he is hoping you remember it. Nobody’s real concern about the latest accused Toronto terrorists is that the elder of them may have filled out a citizenship application form incorrectly, which is itself a purely speculative possibility. The minister is using the shreds of revocation powers left by (and to) his own government to give the general impression that a terrorist might lose citizenship only for terrorism. But this is a possibility that our prime minister explicitly rejected, and whose rejection he campaigned successfully on. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, even if he fought for ISIS not long before becoming a Canadian. Right?

Source: Colby Cosh: Is a Canadian a Canadian if he first tortured prisoners for ISIS?

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Articles of interest: Multiculturalism

2023/12/08 Leave a comment

Poll not surprising given events as debates over Israel Hamas war affect diaspora communities and risk social cohesion and inclusion among other articles.

Poll finds support for deporting non-citizens supporting hatred, terror; mixed feelings over Canada’s ‘diversity’

Of note and not surprising given the events:

It was only two months ago that Canada saw large, disproportionately immigrant-led demonstrations calling for the expulsion of “gender ideology” from public school curricula. As Enns said, there is a social conservatism among immigrant communities that isn’t always sympatico with Canada’s various progressive frontiers.

Source: Poll finds support for deporting non-citizens supporting hatred, terror; mixed feelings over Canada’s ‘diversity’

Highlights of the Leger poll:

MOST CANADIANS SEE THE STRENGTH THAT DIVERSITY BRINGS TO THE COUNTRY, BUT FEEL THERE ARE PITFALLS AS WELL.

  • 56% believe that some elements of diversity can provide strength, but some elements of diversity can cause problems/conflict in Canada.
  • Three-quarters (75%) believe that an individual who has non-permanent status while in Canada and publicly expresses hatred toward a minority group or expresses support for any organization listed by the Canadian government as a terrorist group should not be allowed to stay in Canada.
  • While 69% think that Canadian universities should be places where dissenting opinions can be aired and discussed in a civil and constructive manner, 48% actually believe they are places where this happens.

Source: Diversity in Canada

Tasha Kheiriddin: Canada, the land of imported ethnic conflicts

Of note:

In other words, leaders in all strata of civil society — politicians, business, and academia — have a lot of work to do if we want to diversity to enrich Canadian society instead of tear it apart. That starts by focussing on what Canada stands for, honouring its history and achievements, and ceasing the relentless ideological takedown of our country as a colonial, oppressive state. The reality is that most newcomers came here to escape regimes that perpetrate far worse oppression than Canada ever did. It’s time our leaders stood up and said so.

Source: Tasha Kheiriddin: Canada, the land of imported ethnic conflicts

Lederman: The war in the Middle East is creating new divides in CanLit

Sound advice:

Open letters may be performative, but they are also of value. People who are justifiably angry and anguished feel compelled to do something, say something. Writers and other artists especially feel the need to voice their views. But if a letter dismisses the value of human lives on either side – or calls into question (or ignores) sexual assault, please think about what you’re signing. Or posting.

Source: The war in the Middle East is creating new divides in CanLit

Khan: The loss of the Afzaal family reminds us what happens when hate goes unchecked

Agree:

During these unsettling times of rising Islamophobia and antisemitism, the verdict is a stark reminder of what happens when hate goes unchecked. We must be vigilant against the proliferation of ideologies that seek to drive us apart, while ensuring that each member of our society is not fearful for their personal safety.

The human spirit has the resiliency to overcome evil with good. Yumna’s school mural reminds us of the virtues we all share as we strive toward a just, compassionate society. That is her legacy. What will be ours?

Source: The loss of the Afzaal family reminds us what happens when hate goes unchecked

Chris Selley: The fever to cancel Egerton Ryerson has broken

Yes indeed:

I have argued before that Ryerson makes an absolutely ideal subject for a discussion about how to treat otherwise benevolent historical figures who espoused unfortunate views — which is to say most of them. Instead we got a mad rush to rename. The HDSB’s Ryerson Public School in Burlington became Makwendam Public School. “Pronounced muck-kwen-dum,” the board explained, it “is the … word for ‘to remember’ in the Anishinaabemowin language.”…

Clearly, however, the issue has come off the boil. No one is hounding the Toronto District School Board to rename Ryerson Community School, or the City of Ottawa to rename Ryerson Avenue, or the United Church to rename Ryerson Camp in Vittoria, on Lake Erie. And that’s symptomatic of a moral panic: It goes from zero to 60 and back to zero just as quickly.

Blessed are those who who can stand firm on their principles, and on the historical record, in the face of the statue-toppling iconoclasm that overcame Ontario two years ago. Blessed and vanishingly few

Source: Chris Selley: The fever to cancel Egerton Ryerson has broken

Africans are being slaughtered, but with no Jews to blame, the left shrugs

An inconvenient truth:

But at the “civil society” level, the reason is simple: the conflict doesn’t fit the left’s anti-colonial narrative. The oppressors are not white or white-adjacent. This crisis cannot be blamed on capitalism, the United States, or Jews. There is nothing for the left to gain, politically, by calling out a community that is part of its own coalition. So just like feminists stay silent when Jewish women are raped, progressives fail to stand up for Black Africans when they are massacred.

The crisis in Sudan exposes “intersectionality” for what it is: a big, fat anti-semitic lie. The hypocrisy is beyond belief. And the Masalit are the ones to pay the price.

Source: Africans are being slaughtered, but with no Jews to blame, the left shrugs

Au-delà de l’affaire Bochra Manaï 

The dangers of appointing activists:

Quand Bochra Manaï a été nommée commissaire à la lutte au racisme et aux discriminations systémiques à la Ville de Montréal, Valérie Planteassurait les Montréalais qu’elle avait été sélectionnée au terme « d’un processus très rigoureux » qui était « garant de la qualité de la personne qui avait été choisie » et que cette dernière savait qu’elle servait désormais une « institution » et comprenait bien « son [nouveau] rôle ».

Beaucoup de Montréalais s’inquiétaient en effet du fait que la principale intéressée s’était surtout fait connaître comme porte-parole du Conseil national des musulmans canadiens et qu’à ce titre, elle avait publiquement pourfendu la loi 21 sur la laïcité de l’État et le Québec tout entier, devenu, selon elle, « une référence pour les suprémacistes et les extrémistes du monde entier ». Pouvait-on vraiment penser que quelqu’un qui tenait quelques semaines plus tôt des propos aussi provocants et aussi peu objectifs (elle était allée jusqu’à associer la loi 21 aux attentats de Québec et de Christchurch, en Nouvelle-Zélande) allait se muer instantanément, par la magie d’une nomination, en commissaire impartiale ?

Le noeud du problème est là. On recrute des militants politiques pour en faire des fonctionnaires censés être objectifs et impartiaux et on s’étonne ensuite qu’ils soient demeurés avant toute chose… des militants.

Source: Au-delà de l’affaire Bochra Manaï

As incidents of hate speech rise, when can employers legally sanction workers? 

Useful info:

Incidents of Antisemitism and Islamophobia are drastically rising in Canada in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war and the employment-related legal implications are quickly emerging as many workers openly express their personal views and attend protests or rallies. What happens when their employers, or others, take offence?

Source: As incidents of hate speech rise, when can employers legally sanction workers?

Colby Cosh: Court of Appeal rejects idea that math test is racist

Good decision even if largely on process grounds:

The Court of Appeal has taken a very dim view of almost all of this, partly because the concerns about the test turned out to be completely overblown. Aspiring teachers were always allowed to keep writing the test as often as they liked until they passed. Privatized provision of the test meant that opportunities to retake were never more than a few weeks apart. And teachers could take a crack at the MPT at any point in their course of studies; they didn’t have to wait until they were facing the immediate pressures of the job market.

The divisional court didn’t take any of this into account before hitting the Charter of Rights detonator, even though the evidence then before it was statistically slender and concerned only first attempts at the MPT. (Moreover, in voluntary field trials of the test, many candidates didn’t provide racial labels at all, creating possible — nay, virtually inevitable — bias issues in those statistics.)

Source: Colby Cosh: Court of Appeal rejects idea that math test is racist

Amira Elghawaby victime d’actes islamophobes

Threading the needle on the Israel Hamas war but clarity on Merry Christmas:

Lorsqu’elle a pris connaissance de l’offensive surprise du Hamas contre Israël, au matin du 7 octobre,  Mme Elghawaby a été « choquée » par ces événements « douloureux », raconte-t-elle.  Mais le silence qu’elle a maintenu sur la place publique dans l’immédiat a été dénoncé par plusieurs.

Il a fallu attendre une dizaine de jours avant qu’elle ne publie une déclaration, une prise de parole qui ne mentionnait pas explicitement les attaques du Hamas. « Les communautés musulmanes me mentionnent que nous ne pouvons pas laisser le conflit israélo-palestinien rouvrir un chapitre aussi douloureux. L’héritage de cette période sombre est ravivé aujourd’hui », avait-elle alors fait valoir, faisant référence au « profond traumatisme » vécu au lendemain des attentats du 11 septembre 2001 aux États-Unis par les communautés musulmanes et arabes.

… Noël férié, du racisme ?
Est-ce que souhaiter « joyeux Noël » est raciste ? Sa réponse est claire : « Non, pas du tout. C’est beau d’être dans une société pluraliste. On a plusieurs religions et on veut comprendre tout le monde et leurs fêtes. » Elle mentionne en appui une chronique qu’elle a écrite dans les pages du Toronto Star en 2018, intitulée « Est-il acceptable de dire “joyeux Noël” ? Oui », où elle affirmait que dire « bonnes vacances » pour éviter toute référence religieuse n’était pas « une panacée » pour l’inclusion. 

Jeudi après-midi, le Bloc québécois a déposé aux Communes une motion condamnant la position de la Commission canadienne des droits de la personne. Elle a été adoptée à l’unanimité par les élus, à l’image de celle déposée la veille à l’Assemblée nationale du Québec.

Source: Amira Elghawaby victime d’actes islamophobes

Yakabuski: Rights commission’s humbug view of Christmas is just the gift the CAQ needed

Indeed. What were they thinking (or not):

…But hark! Out of the dark November sky, by what could only have been the grace of some higher power, this week emerged the gift of fate that Caquistes had been needing. It came in the form of a Canadian Human Rights Commission discussion paper that the CAQ seized on as a frontal attack on Christmas, allowing it to present itself as the defender of the faith against the woke zealots.

“Honestly, we’re going to continue to celebrate Christmas, and we’re not going to apologize for celebrating Christmas,” CAQ Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette insisted after the National Assembly voted 109 to 0 to approve a motion denouncing the CHRC paper. The offending tract referred to statutory holidays related to Christianity as examples of the “present-day systemic religious discrimination” that is “deeply rooted in our identity as a settler colonial state.”

Source: Rights commission’s humbug view of Christmas is just the gift the CAQ needed

Douglas Todd: It’s dangerous to bring modern-day blasphemy laws to the West

Valid concern:

Canadian senators have recommended it. An Australian state has already done it. And some Danish politicians are preparing for it.

They are all pushing new laws that would, in different ways, make it a criminal offence to mock a religion. Some now call it “religious vilification” — even while it used to be known as “blasphemy.” The subject is in the air more than ever this fall because of hot-blooded enmities arising in the wake of the Hamas-Israel war.

Canadian Sen. Salma Ataullahjan this month said she wants legislation to combat “mischaracterization of religious Islamic concepts.” Chris Minns, premier of New South Wales in Australia, just brought in a fine of up to $100,000 for anyone who “severely ridicules” a religious belief. Denmark votes in December on whether to ban “improper treatment of scriptures,” particularly Quran burnings.

As much as I personally oppose the ridiculing of religious beliefs or symbols, I also believe legislators need to approach this crucial issue of free expression with extreme caution. It is dangerous for any society to forbid people from casting profane aspersions, however offensive, on that which others consider sacred.

Source: Douglas Todd: It’s dangerous to bring modern-day blasphemy laws to the West

If diversity is our strength, then why are diaspora news outlets being silenced?

There’s a dangerously naïve sentiment among some that Canada’s pluralism is immune from erosion. 

But in reality, Canadians from virtually every nation on the earth, of every political persuasion and religion, living side by side in peace is not something that magically happens. It takes constant work, strong leadership and information to understand the context of plural (e.g. cultural, regional, etc) goals and grievances and to resolve tensions peaceably.

Non-biased, smart journalism has a big role to play in this regard. But with Canadian mainstream media outlets closing regional offices and firing international bureaus en masse, there’s virtually no consistent mainstream coverage of how Canadian policies or politics are being felt by Canadian diaspora groups. Instead, the primary source of coverage many rely upon to understand factors that might impact different groups are stories found by using Google to search for minority community media outlets, often called Canadian “ethnic media” or “diaspora media.”

However, after December 19, 2023, thanks to the Canadian federal governing Liberal’s bill C-18, that capacity will be eliminated. December 19 is the day the bill comes into force, and the megalithic search engine Google said they would begin blocking search results for all Canadian news sources, including ethnic media. Google’s move will come months after Facebook’s parent company, Meta, blocked access to Canadian news sites across its platforms

Source: If diversity is our strength, then why are diaspora news outlets being silenced?

After ‘Sinicization’ of Islam in Xinjiang, China is closing and destroying mosques in other Muslim areas: report 

Telling:

“I do think it’s been quite shocking to see the lack of outrage from Muslim governments, which are quite rightly critical of what is happening now in Palestine and have also come to the defence of the Rohingya in the past,” Ms. Pearson said. “What we want to do is really open the eyes of Muslim-majority countries to what is happening in China.”

Source: After ‘Sinicization’ of Islam in Xinjiang, China is closing and destroying mosques in other Muslim areas: report

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Colby Cosh: Multiculturalism takes some well-deserved criticism

2023/09/30 Leave a comment

As noted earlier, largely a repeat of 2011 criticisms in UK, France and Germany. Not a particularly insightful column and noteworthy that UK PM Sunak has already walked away from Braverman’s speech:

The concept of multiculturalism, whether you like it or not, is of acknowledged Canadian origin. So perhaps we should all flinch a little when it is grumblingly condemned by European leaders — an increasingly common phenomenon that may have reached a new pinnacle on Tuesday.

Suella Braverman, the United Kingdom’s Conservative home secretary, appeared at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the American Enterprise Institute to deliver a resounding critique of the postwar framework for refugee protection and of the “misguided” and “toxic” multiculturalism doctrine that has bent it out of shape.

Braverman’s speech is meeting with an orgy of denunciation among British liberals and celebrities. On the other hand, the inevitable fate of the speech is to be laughed off by anti-immigration critics who have heard British and European politicians warn for decades that humanitarianism cannot be a suicide pact for Old World nation-states — without ever doing anything much themselves to change migration policy.

In Braverman’s account, European countries devised the United Nations Refugee Convention largely to sort out the continent’s own affairs in the aftermath of the Second World War. Refugees are defined in the text as those with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted,” but the treaty is now interpreted so as to permit ill-disguised economic migration, to encourage unlawful and risky crossings of seas and borders, and to facilitate prolonged shopping by migrants among desirable destination countries.

The result, for better or worse, is that refugee protections are now potentially available to nigh on a billion people, creating a “promissory note that the West cannot fulfill.” (Or, as French President Emmanuel Macron put it a few days ago, “We (Europeans) cannot accommodate all the misery in the world.”) Braverman enumerates four critiques of a period in which “there has been more migration to the U.K. and Europe … than in all the time that went before.”

The first is the conservative “civic” argument: integration of newcomers to a nation-state is desirable, but it takes time, and is bound to take even more time in places where a ruling philosophy of multiculturalism discourages complete assimilation and homogenizing patriotism. (This is a critique likely to land on deaf ears in Canada, where multiculturalism is popularly regarded as successful — but, then, Canada isn’t really a classic nation-state, and it doesn’t exist within walking or sailing distance of hundreds of millions of much poorer people.)

Braverman adds the “practical” argument that state services and housing markets can’t adapt quickly to mass uncontrolled immigration by asylum-seekers; the “national security” argument that some asylum-seekers are threats to public order, the public treasury and public safety; and the “democratic” argument that domestic voters almost everywhere in the West strongly favour, but rarely receive, tight control of national borders.

I’m not sure whether this enumerated list is the best way for Europeans to think about their immigration problems, but Braverman’s four points all deserve to be considered, even here in the original fastness of multiculturalism.

It’s certainly not a coincidence that the list format seems designed for future political campaigning: the U.K. Conservatives are still headed for an epic electoral disaster, and Braverman is obviously lining herself up to be a potential successor to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

In any event, the critics seem determined to ignore the actual content of Braverman’s argument in favour of unsubtle ad hominem, asking how a half-Tamil, half-Goan child of (thoroughly legal 1960s) immigrants can possibly harbour such terrible views. The awkward implication is that only pur laine Brits are entitled to critique British immigration policy — or, in practice, that nobody at all is.

Source: Colby Cosh: Multiculturalism takes some well-deserved criticism

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Colby Cosh: Ontario math case is mirror-image racism disguised as racial sensitivity

2023/09/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Canadian Constitution Foundation announced in a press release on Thursday that it has been granted intervenor status in an appeal, approved a year ago but not yet scheduled, that will concern Ontario’s famous racist math test for teacher candidates. In 2018, as you might recall, the Ontario government, concerned about sluggish student math performance, introduced a new math proficiency test (MPT) that teachers would have to pass before being admitted to the profession.

The test was based on the kinds of questions that students in grades 3, 6 and 9 would themselves be expected to answer in a classroom, and it was checked closely for explicit indications of racial bias and sensitivity. Nevertheless, in both trials of the MPT and the first year it was given officially (2021), some groups of test-takers — notably candidates self-described as being of African, Caribbean and Indigenous descent — didn’t score quite as well as the white ones.

Yes, friends, it’s one of those “disparate impact” issues that is constantly raising the political temperature in the United States, but that we haven’t yet fought about much here. This is the struggle that has a chance of spreading the American race-panic infection when the Ontario Court of Appeal and perhaps the Supreme Court get around to hashing it out.

In late 2021, a hastily assembled “Teacher Candidates’ Council” brought an application for judicial review of the MPT on the grounds that it violated Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which forbids the state from racial discrimination. A panel of the Divisional Court, wielding novel Supreme Court doctrine on “disparate impact” cases, ruled that the MPT was discriminatory and struck down the statutory requirement for teachers to pass it.

The Divisional Court’s ruling is a truly dismal, laborious document: it exhibits a logic that the legal commentator Leonid Sirota has described as “Bonkerstown.” Section 15 says that the law cannot engage in “discrimination based on race,” and nothing in or about the test does that — except, well, that it’s a test. The court comments in the decision, as a matter of uncontested and universally recognized fact, that “Black and Latinx teacher candidates are much more likely to fail standardized teacher tests than their White peers,” and that standardized tests, perhaps by their very nature, “are biased against almost all vulnerable classes of potential teachers other than women.

Does this mean that any kind of state-administered proficiency test yielding a “disparate impact” is thereby outlawed? The ruling “disparate impact” case, Fraser v. Canada, dates only from the fall of 2020, and was written by, you guessed it, the now-retired Justice Rosalie Abella. Abella’s disparate impact doctrine, summarized helpfully at paragraph 57 of the Divisional Court ruling, says that the legislature’s intentions in writing a law are irrelevant, and that there is no need for a court to demonstrate or show how a law causes a disparate impact on racial groups. If there is any difference at all in the between-group outcomes of a law, Sec. 15 is activated.

This essentially throws disparate-impact questions in the hands of the classic Oakes test. In a given case, is there a sufficiently urgent and compelling reason for Sec. 15 to be violated? The Divisional Court agreed that the MPT was a way of addressing a “pressing and substantial objective” — improving the dismal math education in Ontario. The government’s choice to adopt the test was proportionate and rational: there is some evidence that teachers who do better on math tests themselves get better results from students. This takes us to the question of “minimal impairment,” which is the hurdle at which the MPT fell.

The Divisional Court panel acknowledged that high deference to lawmakers is required when it comes to “complex social problem(s) with many potential solutions.” As often happens, this high-flown language was a warning sign that the court wasn’t going to defer at all. The panel acknowledged that the government did what it could to mitigate the disparate effect of the test, screening it for biases and letting teacher candidates take it as often as they needed to. But the government did have alternatives to imposing the MPT at the end of teacher education. It could have added, and did consider adding, more math requirements and math courses to bachelor of education programs themselves.

The government was reluctant to do this, and preferred to have an MPT, because altering bachelor of education requirements would involve the province poking its nose into higher education and treading on the independence of universities. Moreover, there’s no real indication that this approach would necessarily be any better for education students who are bad at math exams. But simply because the MPT had been tried, and shown to yield disparate outcomes, the existence of a hypothetical alternative was enough to engage the “minimal impairment” part of the Oakes analysis in the eyes of the Divisional Court judges.

In short, you can’t say you minimally impaired the rights of racial minorities if there was anything else you could have done to uphold a training standard or a proficiency requirement. Nobody needs me to hector them about the grotesque nature of this chain of reasoning — which involves deciding that there are groups inherently bound not to cut the mustard on tests of their capability, and reading the Charter of Rights in a way that protects them from those tests. Most of you will see this as mirror-image racism disguised as racial sensitivity, and that’s just what it is.

Source: Colby Cosh: Ontario math case is mirror-image racism disguised as racial sensitivity

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Colby Cosh: Nonsense for Trudeau to open immigration, but not the economy

2023/08/17 Leave a comment

Kind of funny column as he turns around the left wing critique of mobility of capital and restrictions on mobility of people to a critique of mobility of people and restrictions on capital. Reflects his ideology but nevertheless interesting contrast:

This week, the Wall Street Journal, a strong candidate for “best newspaper in the English-speaking world,” became the latest news outlet to lift a questioning eyebrow at Canadian immigration policy. WSJ’s superb Ottawa reporter Paul Vieira gestures, for the benefit of his paper’s international audience, at facts most of our readers already know well. Inflexible, highly regulated parts of the economy like housing, medicine and transport are screaming under the burden of immigration levels with few precedents anywhere — levels the Liberal government has done nothing but increase.

Recent immigrants themselves are starting to become disillusioned with the promise of Canada, and pollsters say the broad public is beginning to balk at the “more, more, more” approach to immigration — no wonder, because our per-capita economic output is now in active decline. Our multi-decade embrace of super-high immigration was supposed to flood our country with entrepreneurs and innovators; the practical overall result appears to be stagnant labour productivity, along with frank inattention to research and development on the part of our businesses. Everywhere you look it is economists who are shooting warning flares into the sky, and even the central bank is making Marge Simpson dissatisfaction noises. Only federal politicians, fearful of a third rail that may soon be totally disconnected from any power, remain quiet.
Something maddening struck me for the first time while reading Vieira’s piece, even though there’s nothing in it you and I don’t know. It’s that when it comes to economic policy, Canada’s philosophy has strong, inherited cultural-nationalist premises. In law, large parts of our economy are protected from the taint of foreign capital, lest it serve as a wedge for the destruction of our precious sovereignty.
Some of the economic ills I just mentioned are attributable to this. We’re subject to a strangling oligopoly in telecom services because our phones, for some damn reason, require cultural protection (culture is the explicit legal pretext for the foreign-ownership limits in that line of business). Our news industry, up against similar fences, grows ever leaner; our airlines subject us to unapologetic unredressed abuse; the internet, a realm of unlimited bandwidth, turns sludgy before our eyes as our government quarrels with foreign “tech giants” of a sort we could never grow here. And if I so much as mentioned foreign corporate involvement in a super-protected setting like health care, I’d probably be picketed by my own readers before the end of business.So let me ask: isn’t this double stupidity? How can our besetting economic nationalism be reconciled with haphazardly controlled mass immigration? Something called our “economy” is a precious national treasure that might come to harm if we let Verizon or Gannett or KLM trod our sacred soil. But when it comes to nose counts, no one will admit that anything valuable, anything distinctively Canadian, is at stake or might be threatened by unruly immigration. (Such as, say, your ability to afford a house or find a doctor.)

I’m a libertarian: I think the classic economic story of immigration’s benefits is essentially true, or can be true in a free and liberal economy. But Milton Friedman is supposed to have once remarked that you cannot have both free immigration and a welfare state. I suspect that’s right, but what seems especially clear, whether you regard Friedman as a hero or a devil, is that you really cannot have both free immigration and economic nationalism. And why would you want that? For one purpose we are Fortress Canada, and for another closely related purpose we have walls made intentionally from Kleenex?

Source: Colby Cosh: Nonsense for Trudeau to open immigration, but not the economy

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Cosh: The Incredibly Exploding Canada

2023/02/18 Leave a comment

More on the wake-up cry on immigration related to housing availability and affordability.

But why Cosh or his editors have to include a juvenile aside on the Globe “inferior national newspaper,” in general and at a time of Postmedia cuts, is beyond me:

It seems like only a few weeks since us newspaper halfwits were trying to absorb the astonishing news that the population of Canada had grown almost one per cent in three months. (“A few” turns out to mean “eight.”) In the meantime, nobody in Canada’s press has said very much about a Jan. 25 economics memorandum from the CIBC’s Benjamin Tal, which carries a somewhat disturbing message: we ain’t seen nothing yet. 

Tal’s concern is how we analyze the immediate future of housing markets in Canada. Newspapermen focus, perhaps naturally, on the headline details of federal-government targets for new permanent residents. These are already being increased at full throttle, with universal approval from the general public: new permanent resident (NPR) approvals are expected to hit 465,000 in 2023. Does this mean we need to somehow create housing (to say nothing of other infrastructure and social resources) for 465,000 new people and then more each year going forward? 

Well, the good news is that the answer to that question is “no.” Many new permanent residents are people who were already living in the country as students or temporary workers. While international travel was choked off during the pandemic, most new permanent residents were people already here, and so immigration figures didn’t represent new demand for housing and other socioeconomic supports. 

But this changed in 2022, which accounts for the remarkable spike in the observed population. Most new permanent residents last year came from outside the country, and this was coupled with a surge in arrivals of non-permanent residents, including about 140,000 Ukrainians who took immediate advantage of the humanitarian Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) program. CUAET includes a three-year, more-or-less-unconditional work visa. 

The Ukrainians are merely a small part of this story, but they provide a hint as to why NPR numbers are more volatile and harder to forecast than the permanent-resident approvals, which are relatively easy for the federal government to enumerate and limit. Even as Ottawa crowbars the permanent resident-based immigration mainstream ever wider, industry is demanding more permits for temporary workers (don’t you know there’s a labour shortage?) and universities are frantically trying to rebuild their international student numbers. Actual NPR arrivals to Canada jumped from 258,000 in 2021 to at least 700,000 in 2022, Tal thinks. 

I hardly need to add that, this being Canada, reaching this estimate required digging into customized data from the immigration department. “Official published sources” don’t break down new permanent residents into “already here” and “newly arriving,” and Statistics Canada’s population projections have a habit of underestimating future NPR flows. 

“Together,” Tal concludes, net “permanent residents and NPR arrivals from outside Canada in 2022 amounted to an estimated 955,000, representing an unprecedented swing in housing demand in a single year that is currently not fully reflected in official figures.” He goes on to remind the reader that 340,000 Ukrainian holders of approved CUAET visas have not yet come to Canada, and there is a backlog of another 300,000 applications that haven’t been looked at. (The war in Ukraine, one should add, shows no sign of immediately ending; and who knows what unforeseen conflicts might inspire the creation of a second or third or nth emergency visa program?) 

Meanwhile, if you believe the inferior national newspaper, the feds are considering dealing with their notorious and awful immigration backlog by slashing the Gordian knot of visitor visas, waiving the eligibility rules for those and rubber-stamping 500,000 applications all in one wad. This would help Canadian tourism and conference organizing a great deal — but it would also be likely to send that unpredictable “net arrivals” figure through the roof. The discussion memorandum obtained by the Globe, let us note, explicitly considered the possibility that this might be best done in secret without an official announcement.

Source: Cosh: The Incredibly Exploding Canada

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Colby Cosh: Vancouver’s birth-tourism issue could soon become Ottawa’s problem

2019/05/20 Leave a comment

More on birth tourism and good summary of some of the issues involved.

Will remain to see if the Conservatives decide to address the issue or not in their election platform or one of Andrew Scheer’s policy speeches beyond his earlier policy statement (SCHEER STATEMENT ON BIRTH TOURISM | Press & Media, “ending birth tourism will be among the objectives of our policy”):

It would be faintly ludicrous to suggest children born in Canada to mere visitors cannot have their entitlement to auto-magical citizenship compromised or questioned

Is birthright citizenship doomed in Canada? An omen appeared in Friday morning’s Vancouver Sun: B.C. Liberal MLA Jas Johal did some research and presented the paper with a number of examples of online advertising from Chinese websites that tout the benefits of intentionally delivering an anchor baby on Canadian soil.

The ads suggest that brokers are offering “one-stop shopping” for pregnant women: they promise to set up housing, transportation, and perinatal care, all so that the blessed event itself can happen in a comfortable, clean, high-quality Canadian hospital. This gives your child the golden ticket of Canadian citizenship — coming as it does with access to superior Canadian education, Canadian welfare and social insurance, and widespread visa-free international travel.

In turn, your Canadian infant can one day serve as your own access point for Canada’s family-reunification immigration stream. Or you may set your eyes on higher vistas: one ad says enticingly that “Canadian passports mean immigration to the U.S.” (The Sun says that it checked Johal’s translations from the Chinese.)

Last year there was a controversy over birth tourism when the Conservatives voted at their annual convention to eliminate automatic citizenship for the children of non-citizens born in Canada. This policy plank was contentious at the time, and the Conservatives were denounced for even discussing the issue. Nobody, of course, was willing to defend birth tourism as such. You would have to be a pretty extreme advocate of open borders to say, on being presented with Chinese ads for birth-tourism brokers, that these are legitimate businesses serving a noble purpose to the benefit of Canada. (Although it might be true!)

The complaint against the Conservatives was not that automatic “jus soli” citizenship for everybody born here makes sense as an eternal, universal principle, but that birth tourism just doesn’t happen enough to be a problem. The question now being raised — the question that Johal’s folder of ads is likely to emphasize — is whether anybody was really bothering to check.

In November, Andrew Griffith, a former senior bureaucrat in the federal Citizenship and Immigration department, did some research using hospital finance statistics from the Canadian Institution for Health Information (CIHI). Griffith found that the numbers of non-residents giving birth in Canadian hospitals was growing, that they are approaching 10 per cent of all births at a few urban hospitals, and that for one enormous outlier they are twice that. And, surprise! The outlier is the Richmond Hospital in Richmond, B.C.

These numbers are still not enormous (against a national background), and they include some births that obviously are not “tourism,” within families that are in Canada for study or business. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine a non-tourism explanation for the patterns Griffith found. The situation at the Richmond Hospital had already been noticed locally, and had become a pet issue of local Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido.

Johal challenged B.C.’s health minister, the former provincial NDP leader Adrian Dix, on birth tourism in a legislature committee this week. Dix did not give the natural New Democrat answer that jus soli citizenship is sacred. He said he was concerned about the tourism issue, that he doesn’t support or favour birth tourism, and that only Ottawa can do something about it — “if they want to act.”

This does not sound to me like an issue that is likely to remain confined to B.C. in the long run, or to be easy for the federal Liberals to deflect if it emerges. It is hard to imagine the provinces being able to limit birth tourism at the hospital level: a woman standing in a Canadian emergency room in a pool of amniotic fluid is going to receive care whatever her own citizenship or other bona fides are. Preventing anchor-baby births by means of the visa process, Griffith acknowledges, “would be virtually impossible.” The humane solution to the problem, if it is a problem, must involve putting new restrictions on birthright citizenship.

Canada’s constitution does not specify automatic jus soli citizenship, explicitly or otherwise. The enterprising gadfly lawyer Rocco Galati tried to argue the opposite in a case that reached the Federal Court in 2015, and he got his head handed to him by Justice Donald Rennie, who piled up eons of British and Canadian law and concluded that “Nationality and citizenship are entirely statutory constructs.” Canada has tinkered with the rules concerning the children of its citizens born abroad several times, and now restricts “jus sanguinis” (inherited citizenship) to one generation in most cases.

It would be faintly ludicrous to suggest that we can make such a change affecting persons descended solely from undoubted Canadian citizens, but that children born in Canada to mere visitors cannot have their entitlement to auto-magical citizenship compromised or questioned. I sense, however, that making exactly this argument will be the initial instinct of a Trudeau government, if it comes to that.

Source: Colby Cosh: Vancouver’s birth-tourism issue could soon become Ottawa’s problem 

Filed under Birth Tourism, Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Colby Cosh: The Supreme Court faces the emo drama of expatriate voting

2018/03/21 Leave a comment

Good if somewhat disjointed commentary:

On Wednesday the Supreme Court will hold a hearing in Frank vs. Canada, a test case on the voting rights (in federal elections) of expatriate Canadian citizens. Everybody agrees that they definitely have some. The Charter is unambiguous about assigning such a right to all Canadian citizens. The question is whether this is a right that can be temporarily withdrawn, as the law now does, from a Canadian who has been apart from Canada for some time and is outside the reach of its law and institutions.

Lower courts have already offered conflicting answers, so it is hard to be sure what the Supreme Court will do. But emotional framing is bound to weigh a great deal in the final argument. In the court of origin, the government made an argument that letting long-term expatriates vote was unfair to the poor wretches who are trapped in Canada and who have no choice but to live with its government.

This was a sort of “dilution of voting power” argument, but it had the effect of sounding like the legal arguments that used to be made against prisoner voting — arguments that were ultimately thrown out. The Supreme Court approved inmate voting in 2002; having been asked “Hang on, you’re going to let a convicted rapist have the same voice in government as his victim?”, it returned what is now the accepted answer. “Yes, that’s the nature of a right. Like it or not, rapists have ’em too.”

This involves us in some logical awkwardness, because convicts have plenty of other rights whose free exercise we forbid after due process of law. But on the other hand, prisoners are definitely stuck with the Canadian state, and with its exclusive privilege of retaliatory violence, in an even more obvious sense than free residents are. It would thus be a bit weird to make Canada’s determination to count convict votes part of an argument, by extrapolation, for expatriate voting.

Weird or not, that’s what the originating judge did. He saw these as analogous questions of personal dignity. We don’t want to devalue or question the Canadian-ness of people who have been away for many years, but who feel Canadian and insist on being Canadian.

The majority on the Ontario Court of Appeal panel that next heard Frank vs. Canada cleared its throat and said, as it were, “Whoa, let’s start over.” Those judges chose a guiding metaphor that had not been used in the original contest: the philosophically notorious “social contract.” Resident citizens have duties and obligations that expatriates don’t: obvious ones include taxes and compulsory jury service (how would expatriates like to be reeled back in for that?), but there is also the big, obvious one of “being subject to Canadian law,” the vast obsidian bulk of which applies only on Canadian soil. Moreover, we exclude non-resident citizens from social entitlements like public health insurance.

But there is nothing in the text of the Charter that requires or urges a “social contract” framing of core democratic rights. The appeal court was, as I see it, trying to find a way of dressing common sense in legal language — asking, in effect, “Hang on: we’re really going to let U.S. taxpayers with Canadian passports vote in Canadian elections?” We have seen what often happens to such “Hang on …” arguments at the Supreme level.

Until recently, no one had considered letting expatriate citizens vote as a matter of right. The whole issue cropped up because Canadian law had, from the First World War on, to devise obviously desirable provisions for voting by Canadians who are abroad in uniform and in the foreign service. Citizens who are away from Canada just because there is more money or opportunity or sunshine somewhere else are not in the same position as those who are actual living tendrils of the Canadian state. But since the law makes a distinction between mere economic expats and offshore agents of Canada, the expats have an opportunity to denounce the distinction and wriggle through the hole.

For some reason, everyone recognizes that the “expatriates have a right to express Canadian identity” argument does not quite work for provinces. A Quebecer living in B.C. is likely to have a meaningful, even essential personal connection to Quebec, but there exists no legal concept of Quebec citizenship, or at least none recognized by the federal government.

I wonder, though, whether the resident citizen’s right to vote in federal elections could be logically severed from mere geographic accident, if we are going to adopt that view of things. Shouldn’t I be allowed to vote for a member of parliament in my hometown, although I no longer know much of its concerns and circumstances in detail, and almost never visit? Bon Accord, Alta., did form my character! And I suppose I care about it! From a polite distance!

Some Canadian citizens might be able to claim a right to cast a vote in many places with which they have some prior connection — maybe even an ancestral one. The opportunities for tactical voting would be hilarious. On what grounds could this kind of frenzy be ruled out, in logic, if the emotional principles of disfranchised expatriates are admitted by the law?

Source: Colby Cosh: The Supreme Court faces the emo drama of expatriate voting

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Colby Cosh: Thought Canada solved its census problems by booting Harper out of office? Think again

2017/05/29 Leave a comment

I found this piece by Cosh of interest as it indicates some of the less known challenges to the Census (and I am never bored by Alberta stories…):

Wow, this interim report on Alberta electoral boundaries is fascinat—

All right, I can already hear some of you saying “It’s called the NATIONAL Post, you hayseed; don’t bore us with trivia from your crummy Alberta backyard.” Well, everything happens in someone or other’s backyard. And this boundary reshuffle is an unusually consequential one—not just for the next Alberta election, but for the New Democrat cause across the country, and for the chess game of “right-wing unity” that continues to be a subplot of Canadian history.

But it really is interesting in its own right, if only for one reason. Much of the city of Fort McMurray, as you know, was destroyed by fire on May 3, 2016. The date of our country’s quinquennial census fell on May 10, 2016. This has presented an unprecedented problem for the five-person Alberta boundaries commission. And its interim report, designed to be discussed more before being finalized in October, admits that the commission does not yet have a good solution.

Door-to-door enumeration of Fort Mac on the May 10 date was impossible. A census is supposed to be a near-perfect snapshot of the country, taken at the same moment across the land. But such a snapshot of Ft. McMurray on May 10 would have returned a population of near zero, which would have obviously been useless for any policy purposes. Census respondents in the scorched city were therefore asked to report personal data pertaining to May 1, and so the figure in the census (66,573 persons) is not very realistic either—it may be little more than an accountant’s tribute to Fort Mac at a peak that it may never quite regain.

So how many Fort McMurrayites are there now? The boundaries commission asked the Alberta treasury for its own estimate—but that one is implausible too: it’s just the census figure minus about 9,000—an inference that “arises solely from the fact that 2,000 homes were destroyed in the fire.” This figure assumes that everybody who lost a home is gone from the city for good—an assumption that is patently untrue, and not much use for a commission that has to make reasonable election maps to last a decade.

So the present population of Ft. McMurray turns out to be irritatingly uncertain, and even if we knew it, no one can guess how much the city will rebound within the next year, or two, or five. The commission, trapped in a dead end of data, begs the public for “specific, reliable information upon which it could act.”

Fortunately, this problem mostly effects how two particular northern ridings will be split up, so the commission was able to devise provisional election boundaries for most of the province without worry. The rest of the report tells the typical story of a decade of Alberta population evolution. The cities of Edmonton and Calgary gain one extra seat apiece: Calgary was eligible for almost exactly one and a half, but is getting just one. The strongly Edmonton-centric NDP government will like that, but the fast-growing commuter zone between Calgary and the Rockies—a picturesque land of cowboy hipsters that is not quite “suburbia”—is also getting an extra seat.

One of the commissioners, the Carstairs businesswoman and artist Gwen Day, has filed a minority report arguing against this small (but possibly important) shift of voting power to the cities. Normally any sign of dissent within a boundaries commission is taken as a bad sign, but in this case one detects a simple determination to ignore the making of an embarrassing scene. Rural ridings everywhere in Canada often have a little extra power because of travel considerations, which ought to be weaker in abundantly-paved Alberta than they are almost anywhere else. But Day offers an entertaining novelty: “The concept of ‘one person, one vote’ is not a Canadian construct,” she argues.

She comes awfully close to saying that the votes of rural residents should count for more because rural people are more important humans. Day declares that Alberta has three kinds of economic activity: “primary industries” mostly in the countryside, “service industries” allegedly “driven by” the primary ones, and industries funded by tax dollars. I am not quite sure how department stores or Chinese restaurants fit in to this scheme, but it leads her to proclaim that “Rural Albertans control the land, access to the land and provide a significant portion of the labor force that most of our primary industries depend on.”

It is a wonder, one is left thinking, that city folk are allowed to vote at all; fortunately, the other commissioners chose not to embrace petro-agrarian fascism. I also appreciated that the majority is calling a halt to the odious practice of naming election constituencies after well-liked dead politicians, which is how we have ended up with a “Calgary-Klein” and a “Dunvegan-Central Peace-Notley” commemorating the father of the current premier.

Some Calgarians wanted to create a “Calgary-Bhullar” to commemorate Manmeet Bhullar, the young MLA killed in a road accident in 2015 while helping victims of an earlier collision. The commission said an apologetic no, noting that a school named for Bhullar is under construction, and states that electoral ridings should be given party-neutral, geographically descriptive names from now on. Manmeet Bhullar was a gem, but the commission’s suggested rule is the proper one, and its members’ resistance to sentiment should be applauded.

Source: Colby Cosh: Thought Canada solved its census problems by booting Harper out of office? Think again | National Post

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