Category: Law

Posts about law-making, the courts, and legal concepts in general

350.org oil sands petition

As usual, Bill McKibben is saying sensible things and calling for appropriate actions. He is a non-Canadian who is concerned about the ethics of digging up and burning the oil sands, in a world where the climate is changing at a frightening pace.

He is asking Canadians to sign a petition:

“As a Canadian, I stand with people all over the world who are opposed to burning the oil sands, and demand that our leaders stop their campaign to discredit the movement to stop the pipeline.”

Please consider signing. He is hoping to get 10,000 signatures before he visits Vancouver in March.

SOPA blackout

Many websites in the United States, Canada, and around the world are joining together to protest SOPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The bill, which could become law in the United States, would have unfortunate consequences for the internet as a whole. I agree with Michael Geist that Canadians should be concerned.

I remember the exciting beginning of the internet, where people thought it was a medium that effectively could not be censored and which would allow people to freely and honestly share information. Some of the sites that still do that most successfully – sites like Wikipedia – are threatened by laws that make them excessively liable for copyright violations and by imposing other restrictions.

As Wikipedia puts it:

The United States Congress is currently considering striking out major rights of free speech and other laws which make Wikipedia possible, forcing us to censor our editor discussions and the information we show you for the benefit of lobbyists. If passed, it would destroy the freedom of individuals to write without censorship, on every website we have, in any language, anywhere in the world.

Here’s hoping this show of opposition from some of the most important sites on the web will help kill this legislation.

Ironic liberal / big government libertarian

When I think about how to characterize my political views, it seems as though there are philosophical positions that I find appealing, but which need to be tempered in response to the strong counterarguments against them.

Ironic liberalism

I can see the sense in what Richard Rorty calls ‘ironic liberalism’. All that old-fashioned stuff about the rights of human beings deriving from god is woefully out of date. All the evidence we have suggests that there is no god (or, if there is, that it is a malicious or indifferent entity). Furthermore, the conversation in political philosophy has largely abandoned theological justifications. Now, we don’t have a terribly convincing story about where rights come from. That being said, I think it is clear that treating people as bearers of rights is a good way of ordering the world. As I understand it, ironic liberalism is about taking that observation and running with it. We have no fundamental reason for believing that people have rights, but the world seems to work better when we act as though they do – so let’s act that way, and let the feelings and consequences follow. Let’s take it seriously when someone asserts that they have a right to do something or have something provided for them (though, upon reflection, we may disagree with their claim). Similarly, we should take it seriously when someone asserts that their rights have been violated.

Rights are not an inherent property of the universe, but they are a good concept that allows us to evaluate the rightness or wrongness of different kinds of human interaction.

Big-government libertarianism

In my experience, libertarians say two kinds of things: rather convincing ones, and exceptionally stupid ones.

A good example of the first case is: “People should have the right to do what they wish with their bodies”. I don’t think it’s an absolute right, necessarily, and I realize that there are situations where people can be pressured into acting against their own best interests. That being said, the general principle that people have a greater interest in their bodies than anybody else – and that our bodies can realistically be thought about as our own property – seems convincing to me.

This general libertarian strand, which asserts that we should be free to make choices as we like so long as they do not harm other is both convincing and politically pertinent. It is connected to debates on topics like drug policy and legislating morality.

A good example of a stupid thing libertarians say is: “We don’t need to regulate health or the environment, because the market will handle it”. Without government regulation, I am sure the abuses committed by corporations and individuals agains their fellow citizens would be hugely more severe. Nuclear power plants would probably routinely dump radioactive waste directly into rivers; sugar pills would get sold as essential medications; the most awful stuff would end up in the meat people buy; and problems like climate change and ozone depletion would be totally ignored, at least until they became incredibly extreme.

Libertarians simply fail to understand how willing people are to act in a selfish way that is harmful to their fellow human beings. The allure of the quick buck at somebody else’s expense is considerable, as demonstrated by much of human history.

We need government to act as a fair dealer, and as an entity that thinks about the long term. Government needs to do things like recognize when dangerous excesses are building up in the economy – whether they take the form of frothy stockmarket conditions, bubbles in property values, or overly rapid inflation. We need a government that acts as an effective intermediary between individuals and large, powerful entities like corporations. We also need a government that keeps itself honest, by having mechanisms to prevent the capture of politicians or civil servants by the industries that they are meant to regulate.

We also need government to provide things that are good for society as a whole, but which individuals are usually unwilling to provide. This includes assistance to the sick, mentally ill, homeless, and so on. It includes education for everybody and fair access to the legal system. We need to have a government with the resources to perform these tasks well. That is partly because it is good for everybody when these kinds of public goods are provided. It is also because the provision of such goods is necessary to respect the rights of individuals (even if those rights are just a highly convenient fiction).

To summarize, we should take rights seriously even if we cannot say with an entirely straight face that they even exist. At the same time, we should be libertarians who truly recognize the essential and unique role played by government and who are happy to make the contributions in terms of time, taxes, and political participation that it takes to keep an effective government operating.

Gabor Maté on addiction and drug policy

Please listen to this podcast:

Gabor Maté on The Human Face of Addictive Behavior

Maté makes some excellent points about the psychological basis for addiction, as well as the serious problems with our current approach of treating addiction as a crime.

Maté makes a powerful case that criminalization of drug use is ineffective and unethical, and that we could do much more to lessen human misery by pursuing harm reduction approaches.

[Update: 28 Oct 2020] Broken link replaced

The Northern Gateway pipeline

With the commencement of hearings, the political fight over the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline is now beginning in earnest. The proposed pipeline would carry bitumen from the oil sands to the Pacific coast for export. It would encourage the development of the oil sands and contribute to the fastest-growing category of emissions of greenhouse gas pollution in Canada. It would increase the total fraction of the world’s fossil fuels that will be burned, affecting how much climate change the world will experience. Having walked away from the Kyoto Protocol – and with no effective mechanism for curbing emissions in place – it is difficult to argue that Canada is doing its part to respond to this serious global problem.

In addition to the climate arguments, there is always some risk of a spill, either along the pipeline or with tankers off the B.C. coast. If what I read in John Vaillant‘s The Golden Spruce is at all accurate, the Hecate Strait is a particularly treacherous waterway. As anyone who has visited the coast of British Columbia knows, it’s also a beautiful and environmentally rich part of the world, both on land and in the sea. It would be a really awful place for another Deepwater Horizon-type disaster.

At present, the hearings on the pipeline are expected to last for 18 months. As we have seen from the Keystone XL pipeline, however, timetables are clearly subject to change as the debate progresses.

Where Macs come from

This week’s episode of This American Life is powerful and thought- provoking. It’s about manufacturing in China, the ten million person city of Shenzhen, and how most of our computers and phones and miscellaneous gadgets are made by hand by millions of workers working at least twelve hours a day.

Apple has been conducting its own investigations of labour practices among its suppliers and has been publishing annual reports about them since 2007.

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Posted from my iPhone

[Update: 25 March 2012] This American Life discovered that the episode they broadcast on Apple factories contained a number of fabrications. They have retracted the episode and released another detailing what went wrong in their fact checking process: “We’ve discovered that one of our most popular episodes contained numerous fabrications. This week, we detail the errors in Mike Daisey’s story about visiting Foxconn, which makes iPads and other products for Apple in China. Marketplace’s China correspondent Rob Schmitz discovered the fabrications.”

Inside Canadian Intelligence

Edited by Dwight Hamilton, Inside Canadian Intelligence: Exposing the New Realities of Espionage and International Terrorism is an interesting read, though I would say that there are some important counterarguments to the main ideological positions adopted by the various authors.

The book describes Canada’s various present and historical intelligence services, including the intelligence branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), military intelligence, and others. There are chapters on counterintelligence, on the Air India attack and subsequent investigations, on special forces (including JTF-2), and on various other topics connected to matters of Canadian security and intelligence. For those wanting to get a better understanding of the history and present operations of these organizations, it is probably a worthwhile read. There is also some interesting information on technical capabilities and techniques, such as some information on the RADAR and infrared data fed into NORAD, how internal government security screenings are conducted, automated facial recognition, how some information from human sources is validated, and voice recognition in mass surveillance of telecommunication.

Most books written by people closely linked to intelligence organizations have a tendency to represent the officers of those organizations as heroes who can do no wrong, opposed by inhuman monsters, and hampered by meddling politicians and judges (for example). What this ignores is the dangers posed to the general public by intelligence services themselves, as well as the willingness they sometimes demonstrate to protect their own interests at the expense of the general public. Oversight may occasionally prevent good things from being done, but it surely prevents abuses as well.

Another assumption I question is that it is appropriate to categorize counterterrorism efforts as a ‘war’. First, I don’t think that is accurate. Terrorism is a tactic, not an entity that can be defeated. Secondly, I think it causes problems when we describe the fight against terrorism as a war. It justifies a lack of oversight, and can be used to justify human rights violations. It also creates the misleading impression that the ‘War on Terror’ could end. In reality, as long as there are people willing to use violence for political purposes, there will be terrorism. It can no more be ended than tax evasion or petty crime.

Above all, what this book lacks is a sense of perspective. Terrorism really isn’t such a huge problem. It kills far fewer people than chronic or infectious diseases, war, or accidents. It’s a mistake to turn our society upside down or spend an excessive amount of money trying to stop people from using certain violent tactics. We need to remain aware of the importance of other priorities, as well as the ways in which ‘being at war’ corrodes the integrity of democratic states. One example of such corrosion is the dangerous tendency of states to spy on everybody, in hopes of catching the few people who may be up to no good. Because it is so powerful, and has so many abilities to hide its mistakes and abuses, the state is far more dangerous than any terrorist cell, and it is critical to human freedom that the power of states be kept in check.

By all means, we should be grateful for the good work done by the security services, but we must also recognize the danger that they will go too far and become violators of rights, as well as the much greater importance of other governmental undertakings. Dealing with cancer and providing a better education for children are far more important to the welfare of Canadians than stopping terrorist attacks. It’s a shame that we are continuing to spend billions on the latter, while government is cutting back on virtually everything else.

Unproductive investments that harm the world

Since the 2008 credit crunch, the governments of the world have been obsessed with economic conditions: trying to find ways to increase growth, improve the stability of the financial system, and cut unemployment. All other societal projects have taken a back seat. Given reasonable concerns about the economic future of the world, it seems like common sense to say that governments and societies should be investing their wealth and effort into things that will yield a beneficial return in the future. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the course Canada is following. We are making big investments in things that are bad for our own economic health, and even worse for the world at large.

Take the F-35 stealth fighter jets. They have no conceivable use. Canada is not going to war with any country that is capable of shooting down lesser jets, at least at any time in the foreseeable future. In the longer term, the jets still look useless, as it is increasingly clear that the age of manned combat aircraft is ending. Canada is spending tens of billions of dollars on weapons we do not need now, and which will probably be obsolete long before they go out of service. We should just skip this generation of killing machines, and perhaps invest later if some credible threat to Canadian security actually emerges.

The new crime bill is an even worse example of putting good money to counterproductive uses. There is no crime epidemic that requires a government response. There is no evidence that imprisoning more people will reduce crime below the already-low level where it is now. Indeed, the only things we can be sure about is that imprisoning people for longer will do more to wreck their chances of living a productive life, while harming their families and communities.

The oil sands may be the biggest example of Canada’s misplaced priorities. Look at the big picture. There are two possible futures for the world:

  • A world where we do nothing about climate change, and warming of well over 4˚C takes place
  • A world where we wake up and begin the process of aggressively phasing out fossil fuels

The first possibility is a suicide pact. We would probably be condemning the world to radically destabilizing climate change, with sea level rise of many metres, dramatic changes in precipitation patterns, and enormous human suffering as a consequence. In the second possibility, there is no place for an industry like the oil sands. Indeed, unconventional oil and gas production serves only to lengthen humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels. The smart investment is figuring out how to live on carbon-neutral sources of energy. Spending billions of dollars on an industry that will either be dismantled soon or will persist as a witness to a burning planet doesn’t make either economic or moral sense.

Even if Canada never wakes up and takes the obligation to address climate change seriously, it is quite possible that the rest of the world will do so. The people who say that oil sands extraction are inevitable are the same people who said that the Keystone XL pipeline was a sure thing. As people become aware of the dangers of climate change and the ethical imperatives that flow from them, they will be less and less inclined to invest in the suicidal fossil fuel industry, and less and less willing to buy its lethal products. The billions Canada is investing in fossil fuel infrastructure may end up rusting unused. Leaving the Kyoto Protocol is just one indication that Canada is out of step with the international community, and risks becoming an international pariah based on its selfish focus on fossil fuel profits.

There are so many things we could be spending money more usefully on. We could be investing in the skills and training of the Canadian workforce. That would be a sensible recognition of how global patterns of trade and production continue to change. We could be investing in sustainable infrastructure: buildings, transport links, power generation and storage facilities, and an agricultural system that can function without fossil fuels. We could be investing in assistance to those who are suffering from extreme poverty, both in Canada and around the world, as well as those who struggle with serious mental illnesses.

Canada can make smarter choices, not to mention choices that cause less needless harm. We just need to think a bit more about what sort of world we want for our children and examine whether our current priorities are aligned well with those goals.

Boycott Canada over climate?

As Canada’s statement at the UNFCCC conference in Durban demonstrates, Canada’s political system is currently working for those groups that want Canadian greenhouse gas pollution to remain unlimited, ignoring the costs it imposes on other people around the world. Contrary to the slogan of market-based liberal environmentalism, the slogan of the current approach could be interpreted as: “Keep externalities external”.

Dealing with climate change requires a more productive attitude.

How, then, can Canada’s position be changed so as to be compatible with avoiding dangerous or catastrophic climate change? Right now, the political debate is being dominated by groups that see reducing greenhouse gas pollution as harmful to their business interests – particularly the oil and gas industry. If the rest of the world wants to put pressure on Canada to stop being such an environmental laggard, they may need to convince the rest of Canadian business that it doesn’t pay to be an environmental pariah.

What sort of boycott, I wonder, might be able to achieve that outcome? Something that would catch the attention of the majority of Canadian businesses that do not depend fundamentally on increasing pollution for their continued growth. General economic sanctions might be reasonable: increased tariffs on all Canadian exports, along with a reduced willingness to do trade deals, for as long as Canada refuses to do its fair share in dealing with climate change. After all, the flaws in Kyoto are not a license for inaction.

It would be very reasonable for states with domestic carbon pricing schemes to impose carbon tariffs on states like Canada that do not. As long as the tariff level for emissions embedded in imports is set at the same level as the domestic carbon price, such a policy would be compatible with World Trade Organization rules.

What do other people think?