Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

Precedents and interpretation on privilege

Those following the news may find it interesting from a legal and historical perspective to read up on the precedents involving privileges and immunities within the Parliament of Canada.

The most authoritative text on the subject is probably House of Commons Procedure and Practice. It includes an entire chapter on privileges and immunities. It makes being a Member of Parliament sound pretty good, though the rights of the House as a collectivity far eclipse those of individual members.

If you really want to read up on the rules of Parliament – specifically the Confidence Convention – O’Brien and Bosc recommend:

For further information, see Forsey, E.A. and Eglington, G.C., “The Question of Confidence in Responsible Government”, study prepared for the Special Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons, Ottawa, 1985. Also of interest are the First and Third Reports of the Special Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons (the McGrath Committee) respectively presented to the House on December 20, 1984 (Journals, p. 211) and June 18, 1985 (Journals, p. 839), as well as Desserud, D., “The Confidence Convention under the Canadian Parliamentary System”, Canadian Study of Parliament Group: Parliamentary Perspectives, No. 7, October 2006.

Or you could have a life and not be a total procedural nerd – your choice.

Adrian Harewood on Black History Month

As part of Black History Month, I attended a speech by Adrian Harewood, a journalist with the CBC. One of the things he spoke about was the importance of interrogating received versions of history – going back and uncovering the more complex story that has usually been streamlined into a simpler narrative. He gave the example of Viola Desmond, from Nova Scotia, who has arrested and tried for sitting in the portion of a movie theatre in New Glasgow designated for white people in 1946. People like to think such segregation was something that happened in the southern United States, but it seems it was something that happened in Nova Scotia too. He also talked about the two teenaged black women who did exactly what Rosa Parks later did in Montgomery, Alabama but who were deemed unappealing test cases by the black community, given that they seemed radical and unsavoury, in comparison with Rosa Parks herself.

There are a number of lessons to draw from all of this. It reinforces the important point that history serves a purpose, and that dominant narratives can be highlighted while more awkward counter-narratives are suppressed. For instance, the second world war is often presented as a response to the Holocaust, whereas the historical evidence for that claim is weak. Indeed, Canada refused to accept at least some Jewish refugees during WWII. Similarly, while people are quick to point out the war crimes committed by the Axis powers, they are much more hesitant to consider whether the indiscriminate bombing of German civilians was a war crime. Similarly, embarrassments like the 1967 Klippert decision of the Supreme Court of Canada are not much mentioned.

We should not allow ourselves to get too comfortable with official histories that only tell the stories that flatter us. It is only be recognizing the grave errors in our own histories that we can really appreciate our own potential for error. When we recognize that people who we admire were dead wrong about critical moral issues in the past, we also open our own minds to the possibility that we are passively accommodating – or even facilitating – grave injustice today.

Spring election?

It won’t be news to the subset of Canadians keeping the newspaper industry afloat, but it seems worth noting that Ottawa’s election sense is tingling. People say that you know when an economic bubble has blown up when you hear hairdressers talking about the stock market. People often care more about where they can earn some money than about which group of disagreeable old people are deciding their country’s political future, and yet there is something similar (yet much milder) that probably happens in politics as well, as significant contests draw near.

And so, with that, I will throw open the door to wild speculation.

The CBC is growing on me

I wasn’t always the biggest fan of the CBC. I found the argument that we have plenty of diversity in commercial stations relatively convincing. More recently, I have found myself more appreciative of public broadcasters including the CBC and – for international news – the BBC. They do cover politics well.

In addition to providing good content with no advertising, they both run very useful websites.

Ontario and offshore wind

Yesterday was an insane day – guest lecture, work, then a commercial photo project – so I have fallen behind on blog updates. Apologies.

That said, how crazy is it that the government of Ontario has called for a moratorium on offshore wind farms? This is a province with a government that is relatively serious about climate change. It is also a province that has not yet phased out coal, despite the many serious risks associated with it, and which is pondering new nuclear plants, despite all the special risks they involve. Writing in The Globe and Mail, Jatin Nathwani implausibly suggested that offshore wind farms raise ‘red flags’. A savvier letter to the editor declared that: “If offshore wind farms are enough to raise red flags about the environment, then fossil fuels should be raising flags that are redder than red.”

Wind farms would seem like the least of their worries, and actually a contribution to solving their troubles. Of course, NIMBY forces are strong, and politicians are thinking about elections.

P.S. Also in the news, yet more reason to worry about methane and permafrost: Melting permafrost to emit carbon equal to half all industrial emissions: study.

Prosecuting high-level Western war criminals

Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, Dan Gardner argues convincingly that the admission of former President Bush that he ordered people tortured makes him a war criminal who can be prosecuted as such:

Do laws apply to the United States and its president as they do to other nations and men? On the weekend, Swiss officials were very nearly forced to answer that explosive question. Depending on George W. Bush’s travel schedule, Canadian officials could be put on the spot next.

In his memoirs, published late last year, and in subsequent interviews, Bush explicitly said he ordered officials to subject terrorism suspects to waterboarding and other torture techniques. The fact that he had done so wasn’t much of a surprise. There was already heaps of evidence implicating the Bush administration, up to and including the president. What was shocking was that Bush admitted it. He even seemed to boast about it. “Damn right,” he said when Matt Lauer asked whether he had ordered waterboarding.

Gardner goes on to recognize that Bush is unlikely to actually be charged by any state, given how much doing so would probably harm that state’s bilateral relationship with the United States.

Under the terms of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT), an official doesn’t need to engage in torture directly to be in contravention. The torture needs to happen at “the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity”.

By that standard, there are probably a lot of war criminals around. It’s not clear whether President Obama has stopped all American-initiated interrogation techniques that constitute torture. Similarly, given what is known about the Afghan security services, it is quite possible that officials from states including Canada have violated international law by handing over prisoners to people who were likely to torture them (potentially violating Part II of the Third Geneva Convention).

In a related story, British journalist George Monbiot has helped to establish a bounty for those who attempt to arrest former British Prime Minister Tony Blair for committing war crimes.

The CRTC and UBB

Regarding all the furor about usage based billing, I don’t think that basic concept is really so objectionable. Someone who uses 100 times more bandwidth than someone else should probably pay more for it.

What I object to is the rate at which the big telecommunication companies are being allowed to charge for bandwidth: $1.90 a gigabyte (GB), above a low limit. Movies, especially, are rather large. One ordinary definition movie from iTunes is about 1.5 GB – 2.0 GB. High definition movies are even more. The cost of actual providing the bandwidth is much lower, and letting the big firms charge such a high amount risks choking off promising new uses for the internet, such as increased videoconferencing. My relatively modest internet use in December (67 GB, well below my previous 200 GB cap) would have resulted in an added charge of nearly $80 to my monthly bill.

It would be fine to have an internet pricing regime that included some variability, it’s just important that it be set up in a way that allows upstart firms to challenge monopoly providers, lowering costs for consumers and improving service. Letting the big companies squeeze their competitors to death with hefty overuse fees doesn’t serve the best interests of Canadians.

[Update: 11:24pm] Michael Geist has a good piece about all of this: Fixing Canada’s Uncompetitive Internet.

Rideau canal skating

Somehow, over the course of my two years in Oxford, I never managed to go punting.

Lest my Ottawa experience be similarly impoverished, I got some skates today and gave the famous Rideau Canal a try. My high-school era rollerblading experience seems to have been surprisingly well maintained, given the comparative ease with which I took to skating. Over the course of the day, I went from Argyle (near the Elgin Street diner) to the pavilion at Dow’s Lake, then back to Argyle, then back to Dow’s Lake, then back to the Bank Street Canal Bridge, and back once more to Dow’s Lake.

The ice is certainly rougher than in an indoor arena, and you need to watch for fissures. That said, the experience is much more enjoyable than looping round and around a generic ice rink. You get some sunlight for vitamin D synthesis, and you feel like you are participating in a part of civic life. For certain friends, the canal is actually a pretty useful mode of transport for me. If you live somewhere along it and ever need to get to the southern end of Preston Street, it provides a nice alternative to the random timing of Ottawa’s non-transitway buses.

I am going to try and skate a couple of times a week, at least, between now and when the canal skating season ends. If people have skating plans, please let me know. I now live five minutes from the canal, and have skates at the ready.