Showing posts with label Government. Show all posts

Canadians have mobiles tracked by Govt.

Canadians' movements, including trips to the liquor store and pharmacy, were closely tracked via their mobile phones without their knowledge during the COVID-19 pandemic, a report sent to a parliamentary committee shows.

Outbreak intelligence analysts BlueDot prepared reports using anonymized data for the Public Health Agency of Canada to help it understand travel patterns during the pandemic.

The federal government provided one of these reports to the House of Commons ethics committee as it probed the collection and use of mobile phone data by the public health agency.

The report reveals the agency was able to view a detailed snapshot of people's behaviour, including visits to the grocery store, gatherings with family and friends, time spent at home and trips to other towns and provinces.

Newsletter sign-up: Get The COVID-19 Brief sent to your inbox

MPs on the ethics committee expressed surprise at how much detail the report contained, even as all identifying information was stripped out.

“Questions remain about the specifics of the data provided if Canadians' rights were violated, and what advice the Liberal government was given,” said Damien Kurek, Conservative MP for Battle River-Crowfoot.

The committee on Wednesday released a report on its overall probe into the agency's collection of phone data during the pandemic. It concluded the government should tell Canadians if it collects data about their movements and allow them to opt out.

The Public Health Agency said it took safeguarding Canadians' privacy very seriously and the analysis on Canadians' movements it received “is not about following individuals' trips to a specific location, but rather in understanding whether the number of visits to specific locations have increased or decreased over time.”

“For example, point-of-interest data from BlueDot identifies the number of visits to grocery stores, parks, liquor stores and hospitals,” a spokesman said. “All we receive is the location of the point of interest and the number of visits for a specific day.”

Adam van Koeverden, parliamentary secretary to the minister of health, sent the sample BlueDot report to the ethics committee on Jan. 31. It covers movements in September 2021.

Canadians have mobiles tracked by Govt.

The report provides information on how many people were moving between specific towns, such as the border community of Abbotsford, B.C., as well as provinces and territories. It shows movements across the Canada-U.S. border, comparing travel to previous weeks and years going back to 2019.

The phone locations allowed the agency to get a picture of gatherings occurring in people's houses, such as over the Labour Day weekend. The report included a graph recording hours spent away from home in each province between Christmas Day 2020 to the week of Sept. 19, 2021.

Kamran Khan, founder and CEO of BlueDot, said the company's role is to produce “infectious disease insights,” not to collect location data directly from mobile devices.

He said BlueDot has no interest in the movements or lifestyles of individuals.

“Our only goal is to help protect lives and livelihoods from infectious diseases, which requires intelligence about overall trends in populations,” he said.

The company procured anonymous and aggregated data from third-party vendors so there was no information about the specific device the data came from.

“None of the information ever includes demographic information or specific identifiers or anything like a name, telephone number, email or address,” he said.

“The data and analysis that we do provide are indicators: statistical summaries of anonymous device information, such as the total number of devices travelling between two cities.”

The public health agency gave The Canadian Press an example of the way the data is presented to them, showing addresses of beer and liquor stores, the number of visits and the date the visits occurred. It included no names or identifying personal information.

Harpers Legacy-Appointments still in obeyance

One of the lingering excesses of the Stephen Harper government has remained largely unaddressed: awarding appointments for positions that would not be vacant until after the Oct. 19, 2015, federal election. Is the Liberal party now accepting this non-constitutional situation?

To the astonishment to many of our colleagues in political science and law, 49 order-in-council appointments were adopted by the Conservative cabinet from Nov. 27, 2014, to July 28, 2015 – all before the dissolution of Parliament – even though the effective dates of the orders were after Oct. 19, 2015, and in one case not until Jan. 1, 2019.

Of these, 48 were reappointments of existing members of agencies, boards and commissions, typically for fixed terms of two to five years, paying salaries as high as $200,000 a year or more.

The one new appointment was to the National Energy Board, for a seven-year term that began on Nov. 23, 2015 – a month after the election was over, and continues until Nov. 22, 2022. I know of no constitutional principle that allows a government to fill vacancies that do not exist until after the end of its mandate – in this instance, when those vacancies occur after an election has been held.

The search for comparable events has been instructive if not troublesome. Last fall, elections in Poland led to the defeat of its previous government. The new government rescinded five appointments made by its predecessor to the country’s Constitutional Tribunal. That tribunal subsequently ordered three of those appointees reinstated, but declined to reinstate the other two because their positions were not vacant until after the new government came into power.

Surely in Canada, with a system of government based on principles of responsible government and democratic accountability, this kind of overreach – making appointments that become effective beyond a government’s democratic mandate – is just as unacceptable as in other democracies.

And yet, thus far, it is not clear that either the Conservatives or Liberals share our view. The Conservatives who made the appointments presumably saw nothing wrong with them. The Liberals knew about them during the election but did not protest. In office, the Justin Trudeau government has only requested that the dubiously appointed officials voluntarily resign. What are the Liberal Party doing about this sad situation and when might we expect acceptance or change?

There is a very real danger that doing nothing more will create the impression that the Trudeau government considers these appointments legitimate even if ill-advised. Our inquiries to the Minister of Justice, and the deputy minister, have gone unanswered for almost two months.

Whether the appointments are legitimate in a strict legal sense, it is important to recognize that they are inconsistent with the principle of responsible, parliamentary government. That principle is incorporated in our Constitution’s Preamble statement that Canada is to have a Constitution “similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom.”

How can a government be held responsible for appointments to positions that do not become vacant until after an election, an election that it might very well lose?

Our constitutional system is bulwarked by a set of “unwritten” principles or conventions to ensure that official conduct is consistent with the underlying spirit of our written Constitution.

One advantage of having unwritten conventions is that they can change and be adapted to new challenges to our constitutional order. However a disadvantage is that when unexpected abuses of power occur, there is no easily identified convention to apply.

Thus, for example, there is a caretaker convention that requires government to act with restraint between the time Parliament is dissolved and the newly elected parliament meets. Restraint means carrying on with the day-to-day governing of the country but without taking new policy initiatives or making important appointments.

AS I understand it, he caretaker convention emerged in 1896 when Conservative prime minister Charles Tupper, after his defeat in the election but before the summoning of Parliament, presented the governor-general, Lord Aberdeen, with a long list of appointments. The governor-general refused to sign the more important appointments, including those to the Senate and the Supreme Court of Canada. When the House of Commons met after the election, the new prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, supported the governor-general’s refusal and no member of Parliament supported Tupper.

What I believe we need now, in 2016, is for a member of Parliament to challenge the Harper government’s overreach appointments, and get the same kind of support as Laurier received for challenging Tupper’s attempt to make unconstitutional appointments.

In that way, Canada will establish a constitutional convention that a government cannot make order-in-council appointments to positions that will not be open until after an election.

Canadian banks received 'secret' bailout

From 2008 Blog -Canadian banks received 'secret' bailout in 2008

ANALYSIS
A new study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives purports to uncover a “secret” scheme by the federal government to bail out the Canadian banks during the financial crisis.
And while it makes for interesting reading, most of the information in the document has already been widely disclosed by the Bank of Canada and Ottawa.

Canadians were never told the true cost of a $114-billion “secret bailout” for the country’s biggest banks during the financial crisis, says a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
“We’ve had a false sense of security,” said study author and CCPA economist David MacDonald.
“Ever since the global financial crisis struck in 2008, Canadians have been subjected to a constant refrain: Canada has the ‘most sound banking system in the world,’” MacDonald writes in the report. “During the worst of the crisis — 2008 to 2010 — the official line was that Canada’s banks did not require the extraordinary bailout measures that were being offered in other countries, particularly in the U.S.
“At its peak in March 2009, support for Canadian banks reached $114-billion. To put that into perspective, that would have made up seven per cent of the Canadian economy in 2009 and was worth $3,400 for every man, woman and child in Canada.”

A spokesman for Finance Minster Jim Flaherty said MacDonald got it wrong.
“Despite conspiracy theories to the contrary, there was no ‘secret bailout,’” said Flaherty spokesperson Chisholm Pothier. “Even a cursory look at the facts, readily available and published many times, indicates this report is completely baseless.”
To some extent, the report and the rebuttal to it are a matter of how the facts are interpreted.

Where MacDonald says “bailout,” a finance ministry official says “liquidity support.” While MacDonald said the government tried to hide the numbers even from Access to Information requests, the official said the bank funding was “clearly, publicly laid out — repeatedly.”
MacDonald used public filings by banks, government agencies, and financial regulators to provide what he called a composite picture of the flow of money between financial institutions and the individual Canadian banks struggling in the midst of a global recession.

All of the loans provided by the government as part of its relief program for Canadian lenders have been paid back in full, said Pothier.

The problems for the banks began when the credit crunch in the United States put the squeeze on Canadian lenders in late 2007.

The Harper government stepped in and used a number of measures to free up money for Canada’s banks during the financial crisis — including buying mortgage-backed securities and providing short-term loans.
All told, the study counts $114-billion worth of guarantees and financial aid for Canada’s big banks from October 2008 to July 2010 by the Bank of Canada, the United States Federal Reserve, and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.

But it’s not the amount of money that’s at the centre of the dispute —MacDonald claims the government wasn’t honest or transparent about its spending.
“The federal government claims it was offering the banks ‘liquidity support,’ but it looks an awful lot like a bailout to me,” says MacDonald. “Whatever you call it, government aid for the country’s biggest banks was far more substantial than the official line would suggest.”
MacDonald study says that, at one point, three of the country’s biggest banks — CIBC, Bank of Montreal and Scotiabank — were receiving government support that was equal to or more than the value of the company’s shares.
“Government programs could have just purchased every single share in those banks instead of providing support,” he said. “That’s not the story Canadians were told. There was a massive failure in the private-sector market.”

‘Not one bank in Canada was in danger of going bankrupt or required the government to buy an equity stake under taxpayer-funded bailouts’

A spokeswoman for the Canadian Bankers Association said government support was meant to help banks lend to small business, not to protect the banks from failure.
“Not one bank in Canada was in danger of going bankrupt or required the government to buy an equity stake under taxpayer-funded bailouts,” said Rachel Swiednicki.
Swiednicki said comparing the value of a bank’s shares and their participation in a government program the banks say was aimed at boosting small-business lending is like comparing apples to oranges.
Similar efforts were made by central banks around the world when private credit markets froze in 2008 and 2009.
“Not only did these measures play an important role in supporting Canadian business during the credit crunch, they also made money for Canadian taxpayers,” said Pothier.
The CMHC’s purchase of $69 billion in home loans in 2008 and 2009 is expected to net the government $2.5-billion by 2015, according to projections in the 2012 budget.
Pothier said the government laid out its plans to support the banks in a number of public documents, most recently in the 2012 budget.

Big Ego and big numbers

Big numbers don’t scare Canadians.
We’ve been warned so often, and for so long, about the dangers of the national debt we’re accumulating that we’ve developed something of an immunity. When it comes to debt, Canadians are like the frightening new antibiotic-resistant superbugs that can’t be killed even with the most powerful drugs.

A billion dollars? A hundred billion dollars? A trillion dollars? We shrug it off and just keep borrowing. Hasn’t killed us yet, right?
If big numbers can’t penetrate the national psyche, however, perhaps smaller ones might. As in education budgets, social service budgets, childcare budgets and security budgets that are smaller than they could be, because so much of the money collected in taxes is lost to interest payments on past borrowings.

That’s the key warning of a Fraser Institute report on Canadian debt. It has all the usual scary numbers: Combined federal and provincial debt will top $1.3 trillion this year; Ontario will soon owe $300 billion, passing Quebec as the most in-hock province; another $450 billion has been tacked onto the national credit card since the 2008 recession that Canada alone did not have according to Harper. Did Mr. Trudeau and his liberals say we were in recession?

Bah. Canadians are used to those numbers, and used to ignoring them. Who can possibly grasp numbers that come with 12 zeroes attached to the end? Most of us can hardly fathom the salaries of a first-line centre in the National Hockey League.

But the import of those numbers may be easier to absorb when put in another context. For instance, the report notes that the interest spent last year on previous borrowings –$61 billion – is almost equal to the entire cost of public education in Canada last year.

It’s $10 billion more than the total pension benefits paid out through the Canada Pension Plan and Quebec Pension Plan. Imagine: if not for the profligate borrowing of Canada’s governments, benefits to pensioners could be doubled without increasing a single tax, cutting a single program or adding a single cent to the budget.

At almost $1 billion a month, Ontario spends more on debt interest than it did on its entire welfare system. Quebec’s interest payments swallowed double the amount it spends on post-secondary education. All those Montreal street protests a year ago, by university students upset at a minor tuition hike, could have been avoided if the government wasn’t pouring money into servicing debt.
B.C.’s interest costs are double its childcare budget, Newfoundland spends more on interest than it does on elementary and secondary schools.

And remember – none of that money is going to reduce the principal. It’s just paying interest on past borrowings. The principal isn’t being reduced at all – it’s growing steadily. Ontario still spends almost $8 billion a year more than it brings in, and has a mammoth infrastructure plan to finance.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was elected on a promise to add $10 billion to the federal debt load every year for three years, but even his own finance minister doesn’t appear convinced he can stick to that figure. It’s more likely to be double the promised amount, unless some serious new tax, are sharp cut in spending, takes place.

Trudeau portrays it as a necessity. As does Ontario’s Kathleen Wynne, who is fond of saying the province can’t afford not to pursue her many projects, the same argument offered over the past decade, through good times and bad times, thick and thin. Is there ever a time Ontarians can afford not to borrow? Alberta’s NDP government maintains borrowing is such a necessity, it’s willing to use debt to cover operating expenses. Their views reflect the notion that Canadians consider their benefits a birthright, and budgets have to be crafted accordingly.

Borrowing is cheap at the moment, they say. We can afford it … barely … for a little while longer. God forbid interest rates should rise. Because birthrights have a way of disappearing when the lenders come around to collect.

Many Canadians struggle- food insecurity

Many Canadians struggle to put food on the table, five things about food insecurity in Canada

Food Banks Canada recently estimated food bank use for a 12-month period at 1.7 million people, yet the number of food insecure individuals living in Canada is more than double this estimate.

By CAROLYN SHIMMIN , VALERIE TARASUK |
Published: Wednesday, 01/06/2016 6:13 pm EST

For many Canadians, food plays a central role in the holiday festivities. But for those experiencing food insecurity, a bountiful feast was not in the cards this year. More than four million Canadians, including 1.15 million children experience some level of food insecurity.
Food insecurity, also known as ‘food poverty,’ can cause significant anxiety over diminishing household food supplies and result in individuals modifying their eating patterns—adults skipping meals so children can eat or sacrificing quality food choices for cheaper, less healthy options, for example. Food insecurity also often results in physical hunger pangs, fatigue and lack of concentration and productivity at school, work or play.
Then there are the social impacts of food insecurity that most of us wouldn’t consider, such as not being able to invite friends and family to dinner or being unable to afford to meet people for coffee. Food poverty can also create stress and conflict in family relationships and meals are often not a happy gathering opportunity.
Here are five things Canadians need to know about food insecurity:
1.   Food insecurity significantly affects health
Evidence shows that among children, food insecurity is associated with poorer physical and mental health outcomes, including the development of a variety of long-term chronic health conditions such as asthma and depression.
For adults, research shows that food insecurity is independently associated with increased nutritional vulnerability, poor self-rated health, poor mental, physical and oral health and multiple chronic health conditions including diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, depression, epilepsy and fibromyalgia. Studies also show that food insecurity impacts a person’s ability to provide self-care and manage chronic health conditions.
Evidence also shows the health impact of food insecurity exists on a gradient—meaning adults in more severely food-insecure households are more likely to report chronic health conditions as well as receive diagnoses of multiple health conditions.
2.   Household food insecurity is a strong predictor of healthcare utilization and costs
A study in Ontario found that among adults, total healthcare costs—including inpatient hospital care, emergency department visits, physician services, same-day surgeries and home care services—increase significantly with the level of household food insecurity.
In other words, food insecurity costs us all through increased healthcare use. Compared with adults in food-secure households, annual healthcare costs were, on average 16 per cent (or $235) higher for adults in households with marginal food insecurity, 32 per cent (or $455) higher among those with moderate food insecurity and 76 per cent (or $1,092) higher among those with severe food insecurity.
3.   Food bank use is a poor indicator of food insecurity
Food Banks Canada recently estimated food bank use for a 12-month period at 1.7 million people, yet the number of food insecure individuals living in Canada is more than double this estimate. The main reason for this discrepancy is that most people struggling to afford the food they need do not turn to charities for help. The evidence suggests that using food banks is a last resort. Because food banks rely on donated food, both the amount and type of food available for distribution is limited, and agencies are unable to provide for everyone in need.
4.   An adequate and secure level of household income is strongly linked to food security
It is perhaps surprising, but households reliant on wages and salaries make up the majority of food insecure households in Canada at 62 percent. Households whose main source of income was either pensions or dividends and interest had the lowest rate of food insecurity in 2012 at seven per cent—compared to 11 per cent for people in the workforce and 70 percent for people on social assistance (i.e., welfare and disability support programs). Researchers suggest the low rate of food insecurity among Canadian seniors reflects the protective effects of our public pension system.
5.   Relatively modest increases in income have been found to lessen food insecurity among low-income families
Studies have shown that improved incomes and changes in employment can reduce food insecurity. An example of this can be found in Newfoundland and Labrador where evidence shows that from 2007 to 2012 the rate of food insecurity among households living on social assistance in this province fell from a staggering 60 per cent to 34 percent. During this time period, the Newfoundland government made several changes to improve the circumstances of people living on social assistance, including increasing benefit levels and indexing them to inflation (until 2012).
Let’s not let another year go by without addressing food insecurity in Canada. In a country as rich as ours, there’s no reason anyone should go hungry.
Carolyn Shimmin is a knowledge translation coordinator with EvidenceNetwork.ca and the George and Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation. Valerie Tarasuk is a professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and principal investigator of PROOF, a research program funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to identify policy interventions to reduce food insecurity in Canada.

Canada in for another dramatic downturn?

But when will we know Canada’s economy is truly out of a recessionary slump and once again batting above its dismal average recorded so far this year?

Could the coming months be a case of déjà vu all over again?
Many economists believe the chances of another dramatic downturn are slim, but still within the strike zone. Some others, like David Madani at Capital Economics, worry Canada could well have been in recession — with a minor blip or two — since the start of 2015 and might remain there a little longer.

We fear that the economy may never have escaped the recession that began earlier this year

“While non-conventional oil production rose modestly, declines elsewhere indicate that the economy is struggling to deal with the broader fallout from the oil price shock,” Madani opined in the wake of last week’s surprising no-growth reading for October.
“As things stand now, we fear that the economy may never have escaped the recession that began earlier this year,” he said in a note to investors, titled “Canada may never have escaped recession.”
After all, the economy had only a month earlier gone into reverse — contracting 0.5 per cent in September — and clearing the plate for possibly more disappointing data to crunch in November.
And given that gross domestic product had already spent the first half of 2015 in contraction — the technical threshold for recession being two consecutive quarterly declines — and with the final month of Q3 also falling back, is there any wonder some analysts are calling a timeout on future growth as well?

“Overall, with the economy now looking like it may have stagnated this quarter, the amount of excess slack will increase, creating more downside risk to the Bank of Canada’s longer-term outlook for underlying inflation,” wrote Madani.

Other analysts are also taking a pessimistic outlook at the economy. Among them is Derek Holt, vice-president of Scotiabank Capital Markets, who says Canada’s economy “is off to a difficult start to Q4.”
“It’s early yet to draw final conclusions regarding the fourth quarter, and there should be a bounce back in GDP in November and December as a good chunk of the weakness so far in Q4 is a function of weak output in the oil sector to end Q3,” Holt cautioned in an investment note.
“Still, a bounce would only pull GDP up from its current very-low level,” he said. “There will be a quite steep uphill climb for the economy to hit the 1.5-per-cent (quarter-over-quarter) annualized print forecast by the BoC for Q4.”

Madani, at Capital Economics, has consistently gone against the grain with his interest-rate forecasts, calling for the central bank to cut its key lending level well before governor Stephen Poloz did just that — beginning in January with a 25-basis-point drop and followed by a similar reduction in July, taking the rate to 0.5 per cent.
The recent performance by the economy “supports our view that another interest-rate cut is likely early next year, probably in April, though possibly sooner if oil prices fall any further,” Madani said.
Charles St-Arnaud, an economist at Nomura Global Economics, agrees that weakness in the Canadian data “increases the probability that the BoC will need to cut rates next year.”
“The fact that activity in the service sector has been virtually flat for the past four months is particularly concerning, especially if the recent decline in oil prices leads to renewed contraction in the resource sector and in manufacturing,” St-Arnaud said in note to clients.
The latest GDP tally “suggests that growth in Q4 is likely to be close to zero per cent and could even be negative.”
I guess, “the future ain’t what it used to be.”

Harper cheats again - Changed the Election Rules

Canada Changed the Election Rules So It Could Negotiate the TPP

The Canadian government found itself in a tough spot when Prime Minister Stephen Harper called an election right in the middle of Trans-Pacific Partnership talks, a hugely controversial international trade deal that’s so far been discussed in secret.

Past election rules would have made it difficult for the government to continue negotiations until a vote was held, since the “caretaker” phase of elections the government is now in prevent it from doing things like signing a deal that could result in an overhaul of the country’s copyright law.

So the government again changed rules.

For the first time, the Privy Council Office (PCO) released updated guidelines that describe how government officials should act during the caretaker period. Why now? Well, rather suspiciously, the document contains a section seemingly tailor-made to allow the government to continue trade negotiations during an election—and according to a representative from the PCO, the new guidelines were indeed crafted especially for this election, and for just the TPP.
“It has been clear for months that the TPP negotiations could overlap with Canada's fixed election date, and that questions would arise,” Raymond Rivet, director of PCO corporate and media affairs, wrote Motherboard in an email. “As such, it was decided to add some clarity in this edition of the guidelines.”

“It is definitely a tricky position for Canadian negotiators to be in"

Notably, while the government is free to continue negotiations, the PCO rules state that a treaty cannot be ratified until after the final vote has been counted on election night. What this means is that, whatever happens during negotiations, when a government is formed after the election, whether or not the TPP stands will be up to them. While all three major parties have come out in support of the agreement, they disagree on key details.

“It is definitely a tricky position for Canadian negotiators to be in,” Liberal member of parliament and party trade critic Chrystia Freeland said in an interview. “Being in a caretaker government puts them in a more complicated position.”
And the political stakes are high. If Harper comes out on top in negotiations, pundits believe it will cement his persona as a leader that’s strong on trade. NDP leader Tom Mulcair has resorted to calling the Prime Minister “weak” and “vulnerable” during talks.

When asked by reporters on Monday whether the government would sign a TPP deal during elections, Harper replied, “We will make sure, should there be a deal, we will get the best possible deal for this country,” according to a transcript provided to Motherboard by a Conservative Party spokesperson.

But ratification, although prevented by the PCO’s election rules, is actually the last step before a treaty can go into effect, according to University of Ottawa policy researcher Michael Geist. Before that, there’s signing, which the rules don’t explicitly ban. But it’s unclear whether even that can be done.V
“Once the agreement is signed, it’s not that you’re bound by anything; you’re only bound by a treaty once you’ve ratified it,” said Geist. “But signing signifies that you largely agree with the agreement and have an intention to ratify. It’s sometimes described as the difference between becoming engaged and becoming married.”

Canadian economy shrank again- into Recession

The Canadian economy shrank again in the second quarter, putting the country in recession for the first time since the financial crisis, which of course accoring to our Governmant did not happen with no bailout and now with a plunge in oil prices taking a toll as business investment fell and inventory accumulation slowed.

Gross domestic product contracted at an annualized 0.5 percent rate in the second quarter, Statistics Canada said on Tuesday. That was better than forecast, though revisions showed the first quarter's contraction was steeper than first reported.

Two consecutive quarters of contraction are typically considered the textbook definition of a recession. The confirmation of a modest recession is likely to figure heavily into the election campaign as Canadians head to the polls next month.

Some economists and members of the Conservative government have argued that such a definition is too narrow and that other economic measures should be taken into account, such as unemployment, which has remained relatively subdued.

Encouragingly, the economy grew in June for the first time in six months, suggesting the recession may be short-lived. While the price of oil and other natural resources have weakened since June, many expect non-commodity Canadian exports to benefit from a strengthening U.S. economy.

The Canadian dollar pared losses after the data. [CAD/]
"Despite the technical recession materializing, it does look like the Canadian economy is jumping back, is rebounding strongly in the third quarter," said Derek Burleton, deputy chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank.

The last time Canada was in recession was in 2008-09, when the U.S. housing market meltdown triggered a global credit crisis.
In the second quarter, Canadian business investment sank by an annualized 7.9 percent as spending on non-residential structures, machinery and equipment fell. Inventory accumulation slowed by C$4.91 billion ($3.74 billion).

Activity in the goods-producing industries declined 2 percent on a quarterly basis, with a 4.5 percent drop in the mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction component. But a rebound in that same sector helped the economy perk up by a better-than-expected 0.5 percent in June.

Following the data, traders saw a slightly lower probability the central bank will cut rates again next week. The Bank of Canada has cut interest rates twice this year in an effort to revive the economy. BOCWATCH
"They'll wait and see how the third quarter's unfolding to get more information," said Burleton. "But it does look like the weakness in the first half is in the rear view mirror."

Harper:preventing federal scientists from freely sharing their results

As an outsider, I have been following with great interest and deep unease the ongoing story of the federal government’s fight to prevent federal scientists from freely sharing the results of their work. I include myself in the word "we"

This government has used a culture of fear— achieved by de-funding, and the strategic dismissal of key leaders— as a means to suppress the flow of information from federal scientists. This ‘muzzling’ of researchers has been noticed in Canada and indeed around the world.

It has even, astonishingly, become an election issue. When was science ever an election issue? Never before to the best of my knowledge — which shows how bad the situation really is.

For all of these reasons, I was highly suspicious, and unfortunately not the least bit surprised, to learn that Dr. John Wilmshurst, Resource Conservation Manager for one of Canada's most precious natural resources, Jasper National Park, had been fired.

Dr. Wilmshurst is the same scientist who was quoted in the Canadian Press around this time last year for his observations regarding the rapid shrinking of the Athabasca Glacier within Jasper National Park.

In a recent article, Jasper’s Fitzhugh newspaper mentioned the ‘mystery’ of Wilmshurst’s dismissal. While the reason for Dr. Wilmshurst’s dismissal has not been revealed, its news keeps the chill wind blowing on the Canadian scientific community, and on federal researchers in particular.

It is a mystery, but it is also tempting to connect the dots: federal government scientist notes environmental issue relating to climate change, communicates that information to the press, and about a year later that scientist is summarily fired.

Is this yet another skirmish in the government’s ongoing war on information? It could scarcely be more obvious by now that this government does not welcome information, particularly when it reveals instances of economic weakness, environmental decline, or both. Indeed, Jasper’s success as a park and a town that attracts two million visitors a year is directly connected to its fragile environment.

The role of scientists is to acquire and communicate information. In fact, scientists generally believe that it is their responsibility to publish or otherwise publicize data they perceive to be important to the public interest.

Im my opinion no scientist paid with public funds should be compelled to filter the information they collect away from the public simply to keep our politicians happy. We all have the right to decide for ourselves what information is of value. That our government appears to be working so very hard to keep information from us should be deeply troubling to all Canadians who value their democracy and the roles of our institutions within it.

Yet another federal scientist fired may be lost in the noise of the daily news cycle, but as a scientist, I cannot let it pass without voicing my concern for the overall trend. The government of Canada seems to be fighting hard to not just spin but actually suppress the flow of information that we all require to effectively engage in the conversation about the state of our expansive, shockingly beautiful, and vulnerable country.

This is in my opinio,n fundamentally undemocratic and even dangerous in the long term, particularly if we allow ourselves to become accustomed to it. Don't underestimate the insidious decay that will ensue if we continue to allow this government to bury information vital for our nation's integrity.

Just as scientists have a responsibility to communicate research in the public’s interest, Canadians have a responsibility now to stand up for their right to hear what our federal scientists and researchers have to say about issues related to their safety, health and prosperity.

I sincerely hope that Canadians seize the opportunity this October to elect a smart, science-friendly government that respects our democratic values of transparency and accountability.

THE prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, his peculiar hatred for sharing information.

THE prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, has called an election for Oct. 19, but he doesn’t want anyone to talk about it. .He has chosen not to participate in the traditional series of debates on national television, confronting his opponents in quieter, less public venues, like the scholarly Munk Debates and CPAC, Canada’s equivalent of CSPAN.

His own campaign events were subject to gag orders until a public outcry forced him to rescind the forced silence of his supporters."

Mr. Harper’s campaign for re-election has so far been utterly consistent with the personality trait that has defined his tenure as prime minister: his peculiar hatred for sharing information."

Americans have traditionally looked to Canada as a liberal haven, with gun control, universal health care and good public education.But the nine and half years of Mr. Harper’s tenure have seen the slow-motion erosion of that reputation for open, responsible government. His stance has been a know-nothing conservatism, applied broadly and effectively. He has consistently limited the capacity of the public to understand what its government is doing, cloaking himself and his Conservative Party in an entitled secrecy, and the country in ignorance.

His relationship to the press is one of outright hostility.

At his notoriously brief news conferences, his handlers vet every journalist, picking and choosing who can ask questions. In the usual give-and-take between press and politicians, the hurly-burly of any healthy democracy, he has simply removed the give.

Mr. Harper’s war against science has been even more damaging to the capacity of Canadians to know what their government is doing. The prime minister’s base of support is Alberta, a western province financially dependent on the oil industry, and he has been dedicated to protecting petrochemical companies from having their feelings hurt by any inconvenient research.

In 2012, he tried to defund government research centers in the High Arctic, and placed Canadian environmental scientists under gag orders. That year, National Research Council members were barred from discussing their work on snowfall with the media. Scientists for the governmental agency Environment Canada, under threat of losing their jobs, have been banned from discussing their research without political approval. Mentions of federal climate change research in the Canadian press have dropped 80 percent. The union that represents federal scientists and other professionals has, for the first time in its history, abandoned neutrality to campaign against Mr. Harper.

His active promotion of ignorance extends into the functions of government itself. Most shockingly, he ended the mandatory long-form census, a decision protested by nearly 500 organizations in Canada, including the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Catholic Council of Bishops.

I beleive, in the age of information, he with the aid of Canadian apathy has stripped Canada of its capacity to gather information about itself. The Harper years have seen a subtle darkening of Canadian life. Has anyone else notiuced it besides me?

The darkness has resulted, organically, in one of the most scandal-plagued administrations in Canadian history. Mr. Harper’s tenure coincided with the scandal of Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto who admitted to smoking crack while in office and whose secret life came to light only when Gawker, an American website, broke the story. In a famous video at a Ford family barbecue, Mr. Harper praised the Fords as a “Conservative political dynasty.”

Mr. Harper’s appointments to the Senate — which in Canada is a mercifully impotent body employed strictly for political payoffs — have proved greedier than the norm. Mr. Harper’s chief of staff was forced out for paying off a senator who fudged his expenses. The Mounties have pressed criminal charges.

After the 2011 election, a Conservative staffer, Michael Sona, was convicted of using robocalls to send voters to the wrong polling places in Guelph, Ontario. In the words of the judge, he was guilty of “callous and blatant disregard for the right of people to vote.” In advance of this election, instead of such petty ploys, the Canadian Conservatives have passed the Fair Elections Act, a law with a classically Orwellian title, which not only needlessly tightens the requirements for voting but also has restricted the chief executive of Elections Canada from promoting the act of voting. Mr. Harper seems to think that his job is to prevent democracy. Sadly in my opinion he is backed by Canadian apathy

But in my opinion, the worst of the Harper years is that all this secrecy and informational control have been at the service of no larger vision for the country.

The policies that he has undertaken have been negligible — more irritating distractions than substantial changes. He is “tough on crime,” and so he has built more prisons at great expense at the exact moment when even American conservatives have realized that over-incarceration causes more problems than it solves. Then there is a new law that allows the government to revoke citizenship for dual citizens convicted of terrorism or high treason — effectively creating levels of Canadianness and problems where none existed.

For a man who insists on such intense control, the prime minister has not managed to control much that matters. The argument for all this secrecy was a technocratic impulse — I beleive he imagined Canada as a kind of Singapore, only more polite and rule abiding.

The major foreign policy goal of his tenure was the Keystone Pipeline, which Mr. Harper ultimately failed to deliver. The Canadian dollar has returned to the low levels that once earned it the title of the northern peso. Despite being left in a luxurious position of strength after the global recession, he coasted on what he knew: oil. In the run-up to the election, the Bank of Canada has announced that Canada just had two straight quarters of contraction — the technical definition of a recession. He has been a poor manager by any metric.

The early polls show Mr. Harper trailing, but he’s beaten bad polls before. He has been prime minister for nearly a decade for a reason: He promised a steady and quiet life, undisturbed by painful facts. The Harper years have not been terrible; they’ve just been bland and purposeless.

Mr. Harper represents the politics of willful ignorance. It has its attractions.

Whether or not he loses, I think he will leave Canada more cenrally governed, ignorant police state than he found it. The real question for the coming election is a simple but grand one: Do Canadians like their country like that?

Art

Harper finds an Engineering Job

Social engineering (read bullying and fear mongering) is a Harper engineering discipline in social science and refers to efforts to influence popular attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale, whether by governments, media or private groups. Social Engineering can also be understood philosophically as a deterministic phenomenon. As Dr. R. D. Ingthorsson alluded to, a human being is a biological creature from birth but is from then on shaped as a person through social influences (upbringing/socialisation) and is in that sense a social construction. Just look at what is happening to our health and welfare

A social engineer often a sociopath (bully) is one who tries to influence popular attitudes, social behaviors, and resource management on a large scale. Social engineering is the application of the scientific method for social concern. Social engineers use the methods of science to analyze and understand social systems, so as to arrive at appropriate decisions as scientists, and not as politicians. In the political arena, the counterpart of social engineering is political engineering. So maybe Harper has two jobs?

Decision-making can affect the safety and survival of literally millions of people. Society can no longer operate successfully using outmoded methods of social management. To achieve the best outcomes, all conclusions and decisions must use the most advanced techniques and include reliable statistical data, which can be applied to a social system. In other words, social engineering is a data-based scientific system used to develop a sustainable design so as to achieve the intelligent management of Earth’s resources with the highest levels of freedom, prosperity, and happiness within a population.

For various reasons, the term has been imbued with negative connotations. But not Canada wher it is cultured at all levels of Government the culture being the ‘mushroom Technique (keep them in the dark and feed them manure) However, virtually all law and governance has the effect of seeking to change behavior and could be considered "social engineering" to some extent. Prohibitions on murder, rape, suicide and littering are all policies aimed at discouraging undesirable behaviors.

In Canadian jurisprudence, changing public attitudes about a behaviour is accepted as one of the key functions of laws prohibiting it. Governments also influence behavior more subtly through incentives and disincentives built into economic policy and tax policy, for instance, and have done so for centuries.

Canadian taxpayers lose $3.5-billion

$3.5-billion on 2009 bailout of auto firms

Canadian taxpayers will fall about $3.5-billion short of breaking even on the money the federal and Ontario governments invested in the bailouts of Chrysler Group LLC and General Motors Co. in 2009.
The federal government’s sale of the remaining 73.389 million common shares it held in GM will close the book on the investment and the auto maker’s period of being derided as “Government Motors.”

Ottawa will raise about $3.2-billion from the sale, based on a report from Bloomberg Tuesday that the stake it sold to Goldman Sachs & Co. was priced at $35.90 (U.S.) a share.

A report on the auto rescue done by the Auditor-General last year said the two governments had received $5.4-billion (Canadian) of the $13.7-billion they contributed to the bailouts of the two auto giants.
Since then, GM bought back about $400-million (U.S.) in preferred shares and the Ontario government sold its remaining shares for $1.1-billion (Canadian), before the final sale by the federal government this week. That brings the total proceeds to the governments to around $10.2-billion.

The share sale by Ottawa will help federal Finance Minister Joe Oliver balance the federal budget.
But Jerry Dias, president of Unifor, which represents workers at GM plants in Oshawa, Ont., St. Catharines, Ont., and Ingersoll, Ont., said the government should have kept its shares and used the ownership as leverage to force GM to re-invest in Oshawa and St. Catharines.

“It is remarkably short-sighted of the federal government to sell off its shares in GM at a time when there has been widespread agreement that securing GM’s future in Canada is critical,” Mr. Dias said in a statement.

Unifor has been meeting with GM officials both in Detroit and the Canadian head office in Oshawa to lobby for new investment in St. Catharines and Oshawa. General Motors of Canada Ltd. announced earlier this year that the auto maker and suppliers will invest about $540-million at the plant in Ingersoll to make the next generation of the Chevrolet Equinox crossover utility vehicle.

“The federal government is selling off its shares for short-term political gain, as it prepares its last budget before the next federal election. We need leaders with more vision, strategy and savvy than this,” Mr. Dias said. “At some point very soon, the federal and provincial governments are going to have to take decisive action to secure the future of GM.”

New watchdog old tricks maybe?

Public service whistleblowers have a new integrity commissioner who says he’s committed to moving his beleaguered office forward, but critics and the official opposition maintain he’s too closely associated with its failures and that an outsider is needed to protect whistleblowers.
Joe Friday was confirmed last week as Canada’s new public sector integrity commissioner, a position he had held on an interim basis since the start of the year, after appearing before the House Operations and Expenditures Committee and the Senate’s Committee of the Whole.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper nominated Mr. Friday, formerly the deputy commissioner, on March 23. The commissioner, an officer of Parliament, is responsible for investigating wrongdoing in the public sector and helping to protect whistleblowers from reprisals.

Created in 2007, the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner has been embroiled in controversy in its short existence and critics of Mr. Friday’s nomination said someone without a history in the office or from outside the public service altogether is needed for it to be effective.

The first commissioner, Christiane Ouimet, retired abruptly in 2010. Her office investigated seven of the 228 cases brought before it and found no instances of wrongdoing or of reprisals for reporting wrongdoing. Then-auditor general Sheila Fraser found Ms. Ouimet “failed to properly perform her mandate,” that she berated and marginalized her staff and did little to help federal employees who complained to her office of wrongdoing.

Mario Dion initially took over the commissioner role on an interim basis following Ms. Ouimet’s departure before being formally appointed a year later. He announced his resignation for “personal reasons” last summer, partway through a seven-year term set to expire in 2018.
Mr. Friday joined the office in 2008, where he served as general counsel under Ms. Ouimet before taking on the deputy commissioner role in 2011. The office staffs 26 people.

Last year, Auditor General Michael Ferguson found that Mr. Dion and Mr. Friday were guilty of “gross mismanagement” in their handling of two whistleblower complaints that originated during Ms. Ouimet’s tenure and were handled with excessive delay.

Mr. Friday told the committee on March 26 that the office was a “different organization” from Ms. Ouimet’s time at the helm, with safeguards to ensure “Parliamentarians and Canadians that what may have happened in the past simply cannot or will not happen again.” Meanwhile he gets paid.

He said in an interview that he had learned from his experiences in the office, “both difficult and pleasant,” about the leadership the organization needs, and that his promotion should be viewed as a sign of his commitment.
“The reason I’m still here is that I believe in the importance of the work and I believe in the mandate given to us by Parliament,” he told The Hill Times.

But whistleblower advocates said the appointment would mean more of the same from the office.
“I think the primary objective is just to keep the waters calm,” said Ian Bron, a former naval officer and a director of Canadians for Accountability, an organization that assists whistleblowers and advocates for government accountability.

Mr. Friday is too close to the failures of the previous commissioners, Mr. Bron said in an interview, and someone “not solidly locked into the Ottawa bureaucratic community” is needed in the role.
David Hutton, who served as executive director for six years of whistleblower group FAIR (Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform), said the public service culture works against someone steeped in it from being an effective watchdog.
“People don’t progress in the public service as bureaucrats unless they very quickly realize that their main job is to protect the higher-ups, to protect the senior bureaucrats, and protect the minister above all,” he said in an interview.

“When there’s a conflict between that and serving the public or doing the job honestly, then they have to finally rationalize that set of priorities. So someone who’s been in the bureaucracy for any length of time and been successful and climbed the ranks doesn’t need to be told that’s the priority.”
Mr. Friday said his public service experience—22 years of it—was of “essential importance” to the role.
“You have to understand the machinery, you have to understand the culture,” he said in an interview, adding that his background was “less problematic” than others’ since he had only worked at the Justice Department before moving to the office, where he’s been for seven years.
During that period he’s been distancing himself from his public service background, he said.
“I don’t think it would necessarily be appropriate for me to act as if I was part of the regular public service when I’m working in an agent of Parliament external watchdog capacity.”
He also said the job, which comes with a seven-year mandate and an opportunity for renewal, would likely be his last position in the public service.

“I think it would be difficult to reintegrate into the regular public service,” he told The Hill Times.
Mr. Friday was questioned at the House Operations Committee about the number of complaints the office receives. It averaged about 80 per year before dipping to around 50 last year, which isn’t a significant number given the 400,000 workers covered under the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act.
“There was an expectation, I think, that when we finally beefed up the Office of the Integrity Commissioner through the Accountability Act, that there would be a windfall of whistleblowers coming forward, there would be a flurry of wrongdoing exposed in the public sector. And we really haven’t seen that,” said NDP MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, Man.), who chairs the committee.
“Either there isn’t a great deal of wrongdoing going on, or whistleblowers still don’t feel confident that they can come forward and tell their story without fear of reprisal.”
Mr. Friday told the committee that trust in the office dealing with complaints was needed for people to report wrongdoing and that it’s reaching out to the public service, outlining the options for whistleblowers. The permanent challenge facing the office is ensuring whistleblowers feel safe and confident coming forward, he said.

“[The act] has not fully addressed the issue of fear, of confidence, of—I don’t know if it’s institutional culture or it’s human nature—but it is something that we accept as a permanent feature of our professional landscape and it’s something that we have to continue to address to the extent we can, through our communications, through our decision-making process, through the [external] advisory committee,” he said.
Mr. Friday told MPs that he would like to see changes to the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act—a review of which is long overdue—including allowing his office to acquire and use evidence held by people in the private sector or by retired public servants.
He also talked about his desire to remove the word “whistleblower’s” negative associations, often connected to disloyalty. And he described his office’s mandate as acting on behalf of whistleblowing, rather than individuals.
“We don’t represent whistleblowers. I’d like to say that we advocate on behalf of whistleblowing, we don’t advocate on behalf of individual whistleblowers. We don’t represent a party,” he told the committee.
The House Government Operations and Expenditures Committee’s Conservative majority supported Mr. Friday’s nomination, as did Mr. Byrne, the lone Liberal at committee, while the two New Democrats, Mathieu Ravignat (Pontiac, Que.) and Tarik Brahmi (St-Jean, Que.), voted against it.
Conservative MP Chris Warkentin (Peace River, Alta.) told The Hill Times that Mr. Friday has the qualifications to move the office forward.
“He’s demonstrated that competency during the time he’s served as interim commissioner,” he said.
Mr. Byrne said that he made the distinction between the office’s previous conduct and Mr. Friday, whom he said would make an excellent commissioner, but Mr. Ravignat said the appointment sends the wrong message, even if Mr. Friday is well qualified.
“We’re talking about an insider. It sends the message to whistleblowers in this country that this government is not serious,” he said in an interview.
A “robust commissioner” would need to be found outside the federal public service, he said.
Mr. Bron said the position needed someone like Ontario ombudsman André Marin.
“No deputy minister wants an aggressive integrity commissioner coming in asking hard questions in his department. The Prime Minister sure doesn’t want a scandal coming up. PCO, Treasury Board—nobody wants this to be effective. Every now and then you get an André Marin or a Kevin Page, but it always sort of catches them off guard,” he said, referring to the former Parliamentary budget officer who was often challenging the Conservative government.
“If they want to avoid that they picked the right guy.”
Allan Cutler, president of Canadians for Accountability who applied for the commissioner position, said a change of culture is required in the office and that it’s up to Mr. Friday to prove that he’s accomplished it.
“I can hope that things will change but I don’t see any reason to believe that things have changed or will change. This office was set up to smother whistleblowers the way it has operated,” he said in an interview.

Labels

My Blog List

About this blog

Lorem Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum

Lorem

Lorem

Labels

Blog Archive

About Me

Picture

Bookmarking Us:

Browse This Website In:

Subscribe To

Pages

Pages

Ads 468x60px

Featured Posts

About Me

Social Icons

Labels

Popular Posts

Links

Canadians have mobiles tracked by Govt.

Canadians have mobiles tracked by Govt.

From 2008 Blog -Canadian banks received 'secret' bailout in 2008

Many Canadians struggle to put food on the table, five things about food insecurity in Canada

Food Banks Canada recently estimated food bank use for a 12-month period at 1.7 million people, yet the number of food insecure individuals living in Canada is more than double this estimate.

“It is definitely a tricky position for Canadian negotiators to be in"

$3.5-billion on 2009 bailout of auto firms

My Blog Archive