Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

Tony Fouhse’s photography

Tony Fouhse is an Ottawa photographer doing great work in a range of fields, from commercial advertising to artistic portraits of Ottawa crack cocaine addicts. He has a Flash-based website (sorry, owners of iPads and new MacBook Airs) and a weekly blog.

His work was discussed in the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography I am taking through the School of Photographic Arts: Ottawa. It makes me want to undertake some more involved photographic projects, rather than just taking advantage of what there is to photograph in the general vicinity of my home.

Netflix streaming in Canada

I used to be a subscriber to Zip.ca, a DVD by mail service. I decided to give it up for a trio of reasons:

  • Since I couldn’t really choose the order in which I received films, I often got ones I wasn’t in the mood to see
  • The service was fairly expensive
  • I received a number of scratched and unplayable discs

Now, I am trying the new video streaming service offered in Canada by Netflix.

By far the biggest problem is selection. There are some fairly obscure television shows like Blackadder and League of Gentlemen, but no Simpsons, Seinfeld, Arrested Development, Sopranos, 24, Mythbusters, etc. The same goes for movies. I start searching for high quality films I have been meaning to see, and rarely find what I am looking for. With the Netflix streaming service, you watch what is available rather than what you want. Some of what is available is certainly decent – such as the first three seasons of Mad Men – but it definitely doesn’t have the same scope of options as the iTunes store or Zip.ca.

That said, Netflix streaming is quite cheap. It only costs $8 a month, which probably explains how popular it has become:

According to Sandvine, a network management company that studies Internet traffic patterns, 10 percent of Canadian Internet users visited Netflix.com in the week after the service launched. And they weren’t just visiting—they were signing up and watching a lot of movies. Netflix videos quickly came to dominate broadband lines across Canada, with Netflix subscribers’ bandwidth usage doubling that of YouTube users. At peak hours (around 9 p.m.) the service accounted for more than 90 percent of the traffic on one Canadian broadband network.

My sense is that Netflix streaming is really competing with free streaming sites. Against them, it has a number of advantages. The interface is fairly good, and it is unlikely to be laden with malware. There aren’t heaps of broken links to be dealt with. Also, there are no daily time limits for use.

Given how much bandwidth Netflix is eating up, it seems likely that there will be an outcry from internet service providers (including those rendered more powerful by a recent CRTC decision). Netflix itself will likely face pressure to pay ISPs, while users are likely to find themselves hit with extra charges for bandwidth usage.

The right way to do electronic voting

On Monday, Ottawa held its municipal elections. The physical process of voting achieved the major benefit of electronic voting, while retaining the security associated with paper ballots. This is the right way to handle things.

Each voter was given a piece of paper with lists of candidates for the three positions under contest. The voter selected candidates and filled in small circles beside their names with a pen – a process that should be familiar to anyone who attended high school in recent decades. The paper was then put into a sleeve to cover up the selections before being drawn through a scanner and into a storage box.

Because the scanners allowed quick tabulation of results, the outcome of the election could be known quickly. Because all the paper ballots were retained, there was little danger of an error or manipulation of the voting machines leading to an incorrect result.

I don’t know whether any auditing was done, but it would be a good idea. A certain portion of all the scanners and ballot boxes could be selected at random, with the ballots hand-counted and the tally compared with the electronic one. If significant disparities appeared, a manual recount of the whole election could then be conducted.

The only limitation I can see in the system, compared with all-electronic voting approaches, is that it cannot easily be tailored to help people with disabilities, such as very poor vision. That being said, it seems pretty straightforward for a volunteer to assist people in such situations.

Being a non-driver

When I was in high school, I took the written test that kicks off British Columbia’s graduated vehicle licensing program. I took some lessons, but never progressed through the multiple stages required to get a full license. I left for university without one, and have never since had much opportunity or incentive to get a license. I may never decided to do so.

Quite possibly, that is becoming a less unusual choice for city-dwellers. Treehugger is reporting on a study of Canadian attitudes by GWL Realty Advisors. Some of the results are encouraging from an environmental perspective, such as a growing preference for apartments over houses. The commentary on the views of young people on driving is also of interest:

There is also growing research that younger generations do not relate to the automobile as enabling “freedom.” Instead, their electronic and social media devices–whether a smart phone, small lap top computer, music player, etc.–provide an alternate means for self expression and being free to do what they want. In the United States, kilometers driven by 18-34 year olds is declining, and this is likely the case in Canada as well (Neff, 2010). Younger generations seem to have less interest in automotive use, making apartment living in dense, walkable and transit-oriented urban areas a more natural fit for their lifestyles.

For those living in rural areas – or the 1950s – driving really is freedom. For those living in the cities of 2010, cars probably do more harm than good. Rather than spending money to further accommodate the dangerous, climate-destroying machines, it seems sensible that we should focus on building walkable neighbourhoods and good public transportation networks.

I have written before about driving’s declining appeal. I have also written about how the internet increases the social value of skills other than driving, such as photography.

Federal responsibility in Canada’s oil sands

The Pembina Institute – in cooperation with Environmental Defence and Equiterre – has released a new report on Canada’s oilsands. It concludes that even with optimistic assumptions about carbon capture and storage, greenhouse gas emissions from the oil sands are set to be unacceptably large by 2050, making Canada’s climate change mitigation targets infeasible:

A key finding of the report is that the math on carbon emissions doesn’t add up. If expansion of the oil sands proceeds as planned, the oil sands industry will outspend its proportional share of Canada’s carbon budget under the government’s current target by a factor of 3.5 times by 2020 and by nearly 40 times by 2050, even assuming very optimistic application of carbon capture and storage technologies. The oil sands sector must do its fair share to reach the federal government’s commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or other sectors of the economy will be asked to shoulder the extra burden.

The report calls for oil sands operations to be subject to a carbon price, which would be applied equally across the economy.

The report stresses how, if the government gives the oil sands soft treatment, everybody else will need to work harder to achieve Canada’s climate targets.

The report does not particularly stress the sheer size of the fossil fuel reserve embedded in the oil sands, which may actually be the biggest problem from a climate change perspective.

Your Money: The Missing Manual

J.D. Roth’s Your Money: The Missing Manual is a sensible and accessible guide to personal finance. It covers the psychology of money and happiness, goal-setting, budgeting, managing debt, frugality, banking, credit, taxes, investing, and more. While at least some of the contents are likely to be familiar to any reader, before the pick up the book, I found it valuable as a kind of checklist. It helped to identify areas in which I didn’t know as much as I should, and helped me come up with a half-dozen financial tasks I should undertake.

The book places particular emphasis on the importance of cashflow: getting into a situation where income each month is serving sufficiently to cover basic needs, work toward reducing debt, set resources aside for emergencies, and advance long-term financial plans like home ownership and retirement. The book isn’t shy about giving advice. For instance, it expresses the view that actively managed mutual funds are an exploitative industry from the perspective of investors, and endorsing regular contributions to index funds as the best long-term investment strategy.

Two flaws with the book, from my perspective, were an inconsistent level of detail and a U.S. focus. I cannot legitimately complain about the latter, since that is the target audience. Still, Canadians should know that some of the content on insurance, retirement, and taxes is not appropriate to them.

One nice little thing about the book is that it is printed on unusually good paper, with a pleasantly robust cover for a paperback. The author points out how getting value for money doesn’t mean going for the cheapest option, but rather for the one that serves your needs best relative to its price. The book’s philosophy is reflected in its construction.

Science and politics in Canada

I think it’s fair to say that political conservatives have long had a rocky relationship with science. While they approve of the chain from basic science to technology to economic growth, science has also repeatedly brought to light facts that undermine conservative ideologies and religious perspectives. With that in mind, this is an interesting development:

Today, the union that represents federal government scientists launches a campaign to put the spotlight on science for the public good.

“Federal government scientists work hard to protect Canadians, preserve their environment and ensure our country’s prosperity but they face dwindling resources and confusing policy decisions,” says Gary Corbett, president of the Institute.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada is a national union. Among its 59,000 federal and provincial members are 23,000 professionals who deliver, among other knowledge products, scientific research, testing and advice for sound policy-making.

The recent decision to end the mandatory long form census is the latest step in a worrying trend away from evidence-based policy making. Restrictive rules are curtailing media and public access to scientists, while cutbacks to research and monitoring limit Canada’s ability to deal with serious threats and potential opportunities.

This follows an editorial in Nature criticizing the Canadian government:

Concerns can only be enhanced by the government’s manifest disregard for science. Since prime minister Stephen Harper came to power, his government has been sceptical of the science on climate change and has backed away from Canada’s Kyoto commitment. In January, it muzzled Environment Canada’s scientists, ordering them to route all media enquires through Ottawa to control the agency’s media message. Last week, the prime minister and members of the cabinet failed to attend a ceremony to honour the Canadian scientists who contributed to the international climate-change report that won a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

While factual claims about the nature of the universe do have political ramifications – think of the reality of climate change, or evolution – that doesn’t mean that the expression of factual information is a political act. Further, society has an enormous interest in the dissemination of accurate information, and the formulation of policy on the basis of such information. As such, it is encouraging to see scientists asserting their right to express their expert opinions, even when doing so is politically challenging for the government.

High schools should teach about mortgages

In high school, every year I had to take a course called ‘Career and Personal Planning’ (CAPP). For the most part, it combined invasiveness with uselessness. Most memorably, in my final year of high school we were all asked to prepare binders full of personal information: bank statements, medical records, etc. These were to be submitted for grading, and were kept in heaps in unlocked classrooms. For mine, I submitted a bunch of documents that were heavily redacted in CIA style, along with a copy of British Columbia’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. I admit that it was a good idea to encourage high school students to collect copies of important documents in a safe central location, but it was definitely inappropriate to them gather all that information.

The course also featured a number of methodologically dubious exercises designed to help people choose a career, along with some more useful segments on things like resume preparation.

One thing CAPP never discussed – as far as I can recall – is mortgages. This seems like a rather serious omission, given how most Canadians will probably be associated with a mortgage at some point. It seems like common sense to teach people about interest rate options, down payments, and matters like what happens if you decide to move before paying a mortgage off.

Generally speaking, I think people put too much emphasis on home ownership. As the recent economic crisis has demonstrated, houses are not assets guaranteed to appreciate in value at all times. While it is true that ‘at least you have a place to live’ if you invest most of your savings in a home, I think it is smarter overall to invest in a more diversified way. Of course, the decisions made by each person reflect their preferences and personalities. Given the high proportion of Canadians who will deal with mortgages, it just makes sense to teach about them in high school. That is, after all, the last stage of compulsory schooling in Canada, and meant to convey the basic skills necessary to function in Canadian society.