Regrettably, the world seems to have failed to get the joke about Line Beauchamp’s wacky sidekick at the Bali climate change talks. Instead, Prime Minister Harper is somehow co-opting the agenda. The fun thing about Harper is you don’t have to pay him to behave this way: even in a world without lobbyists he would still do his damndest to give industry of the day free reign regardless of the consequences. He’s honest that way. This is just a bad time to have a colossally narrow-minded think-tanker as a national leader.

Dear Prime Minister:

I am appalled by Canada’s counter-productive and hypocritical negotiating position at the talks on climate change in Bali. If we fail to meet the emerging challenges of climatic change, the damage that will be done to Canada and the world’s social and environmental integrity far outweighs any short-term concerns about preserving the status quo for our extractive and emmissive industries. The Canadian government’s behaviour at the Bali talks is transparently an effort to stall and undermine progress towards effective reduction of climate-altering emissions.

As a progressive democracy and disproportionate contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, Canada should be setting an example to the rest of the world. It is not too late to reverse our position and begin to do so.

Yours sincerely,

Hugh Stimson

“Dear Prime Minister” is the correct way to address email to the Prime Minister (at [email protected], incidentally), although a poke in the eye is an acceptable alternative in person. Charmingly, my Member of Parliament Denise Savoie’s email is [email protected]. I think that was my email address in 1994.

The Living Oceans Society have put together an animated interactive model of hydrologically realistic oil spill scenarios on the BC coastline. It has lots of features, but it can be comprehended faster by using it than having it described, which is a great thing. You can add bird habitat, fish migration routes and the like to the map, then watch them get obliterated when the ocean currents turn the wrong way. It’s super cute, and appropriately scary.

Oil shipping, processing and extraction has been strongly regulated in BC, but a number of serious threats have been coming up in the last few years (e.g. there is a long-standing moratorium on even exploring for oceanic oil off the BC coast, but the government is now claiming that it can’t find the piece of paper where that was written down). Public opposition has been strong and will get stronger. This model contributes to that discourse with a nice mix of modeling, GIS and infoporn.

Footnotes on their data sources and processing techniques are here.

Just so we’re all clear on this point, Line Beauchamp, the Environment Minister for Quebec, will be representing myself and the other Canadians at the Bali climate change conference next week. We’re also sending Prime Minister Harper, but he’s just there for comic effect. To be a portly Canadian Shriner in a fez tootling behind the American bandwagon on a pint-sized scooter, if you will. Don’t for god’s sake take anything he says seriously, especially if it’s regarding any issue with substantial consequence, such as global warming.

Taser International, “market leader in advanced electronic control devices”, have released their inevitable press release in response to the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport.

Taser has been remarkably good at dodging lawsuits. As far as I know, they’ve never even been stuck with a civil suit for injury or death.

Their press release, helpfully reproduced in unedited form as a news article by CNN, scolds media outlets for rushing to blame Dziekanski’s death on his being tasered. They insist that

“We are taken aback by the number of media outlets that have irresponsibly published conclusive headlines blaming the TASER device and / or the law enforcement officers involved as the cause of death before completion of the investigation. These sensationalistic media reports completely ignore the earmark symptoms of excited delirium shown in the video.”

Yes, they’re shocked. Shocked. Furthermore,

“TASER International is transmitting over 60 legal demand letters requiring correction of these false and misleading headlines and will take other actions as appropriate.”

Which suggests an explanation for the lack of successful suits against them: they spend a lot of money on their justice.

So how come people die after getting tasered? It’s the tasered’s fault, not the taser or the taseree.

“This tragic incident appears to follow the pattern of many in-custody deaths or deaths following a confrontation with police. Historically, medical science and forensic analysis has shown that these deaths are attributable to other factors and not the low-energy electrical discharge of the TASER(r).”

Cause-and-effect is a slippery thing, sure enough. When is a thing a cause of another thing, and when are they just correlated in space in time? It’s a question that has vexed philosophers and ecologists and taserologists for centuries. The RCMP are very clear in their own philosophy, as noted previously.

After watching the video of the man dieing at the same time and place as he was being tasered by police I’ll tell you this: if that man hadn’t been tasered, he wouldn’t be dead now. Therefore the taser caused his death. I’ll tell you this too: the police also caused his death.

You know who should get a tasering? The philosophy department at TASER International of Scottsdale Arizona. What’s a low-energy electrical discharge among pure intellectuals?

How is it possible that the US terrorist watch-list has 750 000 people on it, and adds another 500 every day? Are there really 750 000 terrorists cruising around the country?

Well, I suppose if one of the most proven-not-to-be-a-terrorist people in the world still qualifies for the no-fly list based on the State Department’s careful consideration of his case, then, yep, we are all terrorists and none of us should be on planes.

Reuters: Police baffled by Taser death at Vancouver airport

Canadian police are still trying to work out why an agitated passenger died at Vancouver airport after he was hit by two blasts from a Taser stun gun, a spokesman said on Monday.

Erm…

Police attempted to restrain the passenger and blasted him twice with a Taser when he refused to calm down. He died shortly after being handcuffed.

“We don’t have the … cause (of death),” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Pierre Lemaitre told CBC television from Vancouver, British Columbia.

Erm…

Based on our review of the B.C. coroner’s service and past cases where individuals have died following the use of a Taser, what we’ve seen is they are usually due to a pre-existing medical condition or the use or abuse of legal or illegal drugs. The Tasers have not contributed to the actual death.”

Erm…

Vancouver lawyer Cameron Ward, who has studied incidents involving Tasers, told the Globe and Mail newspaper that 16 Canadians had died in the last five years after being hit by the 50,000-volt electrical charge the weapon generates.

Erm…

Or failed to come alive. Again.

The elections Ontario “live results” site went dead half an hour after the polls closed and it first went live, but when I last checked, from the first few hundred votes cast, the results stood at:

current election system: 68%
proportional representation: 32%

That’s based on the first tiny fraction of polls, but it could easily be representative. Getting people to buy into a whole new election system is a big task, and from what I could tell from this side of the border, nobody was really taking that task on. But hey, I thought, looking at the results, maybe there’s a silver lining: the particular form of PR they chose was a bit weird, and while it had some advantages, it had some real disadvantages too. The first province that brings in PR is going to be the make-or-break showroom floor model for the whole country. If people don’t love it, there would be a good chance no province would have another crack at it for decades, let alone federally. Maybe we don’t want some particularly iffy variant to carry the perpetual hopes of the Canadian electoral system.

Then I noticed that elections ontario results had an extra column, presumably intended for the actual election results but included by default in the PR referendum results: number of ridings reporting 50% + 1 results.

current election system: 28
proportional representation: 1

(Or something, the site is still down.) 32% support, 3% influence under the first-past-the-post system. Kind of says it all, doesn’t it? Screw it, we need PR and we need it now.

From Pine Beetle, Mr. Opportunity?, The Tyee

“Our forests are in transition,” said Jim Whyte, director of operations at the Provincial Emergency Program. “We’re moving from healthy green forests to dead forests.”

I often hear that, despite all the complaints about privatization and the eroding of social programs, our income is going up so it’s for the best on the balance. Then I look around and see people without much money, and without social programs anymore either. So what’s up? A new Statistics Canada report gives it away: the average income may be going up, but average is only a useful measure if the data you’re measuring fall out on a nice neat bell curve, with most things in the middle and not much at either end. Income may have worked that way in North America in the post-war era (or maybe not, I don’t know), but we’ve been dragging out the disparity between the rich and the rest of us. Nowadays, in Canada (where income is relatively more equally distributed than in the US) 1/20th of the population have 1/4 of the goods.

That disparity is growing. The current data is from 2004, in 1992 the top 5% had just over a 1/5th of the pie. And the difference between the merely really rich (top 5%) and the ridiculously rich (top 1%) grew over that time too.

And here’s another fun fact: the number of woman in the top salaries (well under half of course) is actually trending down.

Bad as that all may sound, at least we’re doing better on the fuedal index than the US:

In Canada, the top 5% of individual income recipients in 2004 had an income of at least $89,000. In the United States, this figure would not have placed them even in the top 10% (using purchasing power parity values). The 5% threshold for the United States was $165,000. Further up the income distribution, the thresholds diverged considerably. The threshold for the top 0.01% of the taxfiler population in Canada was just over $2.8 million; in the United States, it was $9.4 million.

However, these differences paled when comparing average income. In 2004, in Canada, the average income for the top 5% of the taxfiler population was $178,000; in the United States, it was 2.5 times higher at $416,000.

The differences grew even larger higher up the income distribution. For the top 0.01% of the taxfiler population, the average American income was $25.8 million, over four times the Canadian figure of $5.9 million

Office Politics: High-income Canadians poor compared to Americans

When is the ‘middle’ not really the middle?

The US:Canada differences quoted above don’t actually mean that the US has greater income disparity than Canada; if the US lower and middle classes were also proportionately more wealthy than their Canadian equivalents it would be possible for the American rich to be so much rich than the Canadian rich without it being a sign of class division. But, well, I doubt it.

So it’s good new if you’re rich, and probably don’t need good news. But if you’re in the middle or (god help you) lower classes you’ve traded away your political institutions for a deregulated/privatized environment that’s helped the rich get richer. It’s a good time to be rich, and a bad time to be poor.

When I first started schlepping my Canadian pesos to the US, they were worth 60-odd freedom cents each. As of today a shiny loonie will buy you 98.5% of a greenback, and climbing.

You can fit my macroeconomic knowledge on the head of a pin, but I’m still weirded out that something as mammoth as the US economy, with all the inertia that presumably goes with it’s size, is under such perturbation that it’s currency value would shift that far that fast. What the hell is going on down here? And why am I no longer working in Canada for my summers and bringing the money down here in the winter?

Graph boosted from the Bank of Canada website, which is hilariously located at www.bank-banque-canada.ca.