Targeting the non-Cons

During the Harper Conservatives’ time in power they railed against the long gun registry as being heavy-handed, unfair to duck hunters and farmers. “We must stop targeting law-abiding gun owners and instead focus our resources on real criminals,” was, and remains, a popular refrain. And now they’re going to make good on their promise to abolish the registry once and for all, although not without, I expect, milking it one last time for contributions from the party faithful.

But now, instead of going after the true believers the Harper Cons have a new target in sight – the young, urban, technologically comfortable who are the very antithesis of the stereotypical Con supporter. And they are targeting them with Bill C-11, The Copyright Modernization Act.

Now to be fair, this is much to applaud with this bill, including a reduction of the maximum damages that can be awarded for copyright infringement from $20,000 to a still draconian but much more reasonable $5,000. (That is per infringement, so if you are caught with 100 pirated movies on your laptop, you could be on the hook for a cool half mil.) And the bill clearly spells out how copyrighted material can be used by educators, students, individuals, and so on for non-commercial purposes without penalty. All good stuff.

But the problem with this bill is that it allows the use of DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology to trump the rights provided elsewhere in the act. So if you purchase a DVD you are legally entitled to copy that DVD onto as many devices as you own, say onto your iPad, your smart phone, and your computer for viewing. However, if the DVD is DRM encoded by the manufacturer and you break that code in order to make copies that you are legally entitled to have, you have just broken the law.

Another example. With the proliferation of e-readers many people are now purchasing digital books. If I crack the DRM encoding in order to be able to download the same book onto both my e-reader and that of my spouse, I will have broken the law, even though had I purchased a hard copy of that same book I could share it at will, with potentially hundreds of people. (Although I read somewhere that pocketbooks are really designed – paper weight, materials, glues, etc. – to be read something like 10 or 12 times before falling apart, thus limiting the publishers exposure and ensuring additional sales.)

Like the gun registry, it is extremely unlikely that the authorities will go after otherwise law-abiding citizens for removing the DRM from an e-book for personal use. So then one has to ask why it is even necessary to enact that capability in law. Some have posited that the reason is because that’s what the Americans wanted, and the Harper Cons toned down the penalties to try to make it more palatable to the young, urban, technologically competent Canadians who are most likely to want to share files among their many devices. Perhaps. But one thing for sure, it’s not the Con base that will protest.

Politics: the art of double-speak

Dalton “Dad” McGuinty announces a special program that will provide a tax credit of $10,000 to employers to hire immigrants who are having difficulty gain Canadian experience and/or credentials. The program is limited to new Canadian citizens who have been in the country less than five years. Regardless whether one considers this good policy or bad politics the fact that the program is not available to those here more than five years, or the thousands of native born Canadians currently out of work in this province, clearly creates a different class of unemployed – a few get provincial help; most don’t.

His opponent, Tim Hudak, gets it and calls McGuinty out on this plan, calling it an affirmative action program for foreign workers that does nothing for the other unemployed in the province.

So far, utterly predictable for an election campaign. But it’s McGuinty’s response to Hudak’s challenge that shows just how contemptible politics has become. His retort? “In my Ontario there is no us and them, there's just us.” Say what? That one sentence is completely at odds with this policy which clearly treats some Ontarians (us) different than others (them). But Premier Dad is apparently okay with that; it’s just politics after all.

Justin Bieber – two words I never thought I’d use in a post

But I will make an exception in this case simply because this is so ludicrous it screams out for comment.

The intertubes and media today are awash in news of a supposed accident involving young Mr. Bieb.

The Ottawa Citizen: Justin Bieber driving Ferrari when ‘tapped’ from behind.

CTV News: Justin Bieber, Ferrari uninjured after fender-bender

Huff Post: Justin Bieber Is OK After Crash In Studio City

LA Times: Justin Bieber crashes black Ferrari; no one hurt

So what happened? According to all reports, absolutely nothing - no damages, no injuries, no citations. But that didn’t stop the LAPD from making a statement or the media wasting tons of ink and paper and tying up bandwidth (or, for that matter, me wasting a post on a soon-to-be has been.) What next, a headline breathlessly proclaiming “Justin Bieber survives; plane lands safely at La Guardia”?

The mind boggles at what the great unwashed now consider to be newsworthy.

May contain Nuts

Up at the cottage last week we were drowning worms at a furious pace in a futile attempt to entice the exceedingly rare Doe Lake walleye to latch on to a hook and hence score a position of honour at the dinner table. By midweek we were out of worms, having gone through them at a rate of about 2 dozen worms per fish caught, so it was off to town to replenish the bait supply.

The nearest town with any kind of shopping is Novar. The shopping area comprises a liquor store, an Arctic Cat snowmobile dealership appropriately named Arnie’s Cat House, a Foodland grocery store, and precious little else. The grocery store sells worms. But these aren’t just any old dew worms plucked from the greens at the local golf course before the sun rises. No, these worms “May contain Nuts”.

Think about that for a minute. The mind boggles when trying to figure out the intent of this warning.

First of all, worms don’t have nuts, so the possibility of male worms being in the package is not the reason.

Perhaps the local population has taken to supplementing their daily diet with a side plate of deep fried worms in a crispy corn meal batter. Fish stocks are down and the tourism industry is no hell this year but is it really that bad? Besides, at $3.94 a dozen a Big Mac is a better deal.

Maybe it’s about the fish. Should we be concerned about a possibly nut-allergic fish going into anaphylactic shock before we kill it? How would a fish become sensitized to nuts in the first place?

And just where would an earthworm come into contact with nuts? Does Foodland package them on the same table they use to package snack foods and other grocery items?

Or is it just some anally retentive product liability lawyer in a 3-piece suit in Toronto who wouldn’t know a fishing worm if he swallowed one (with or without a very large hook) who has dictated that every product the store sells be so labelled, no matter how stupid?

My money is on the lawyer.

CBSA - Canada’s ambassadors? Not really.

It used to be said that travelling into the US and having to deal with the US Customs authorities was an ordeal, the price of admission so to speak. And it was also said how nice it was to come back to Canada and the “pleasant” border control people who were friendly and generally much more laid back than their American counterparts.

Well, no more. As two recent stories can attest, Canada’s CBSA has taken the gloves off and is now showing bloodied bare knuckles.

In one case (link) a 66-year-old Minnesota woman heading to Canada to play bingo was arrested and held in jail for 12 days because a jar of motor oil was mistakenly identified as heroin at the border. Now, even if you give CBSA the benefit of the doubt and agree that heroin and motor oil can be easily confused, taking 12 days to sort it out is simply ludicrous. CBSA’s response? “all persons, goods and conveyances entering Canada may be subject to a more in-depth examination." And then ran and hid behind privacy legislation.

In the second case, some US fishermen on the St. Lawrence (link) were fishing just inside Canada’s territorial waters. This is a common practice that has been accepted on both sides of the border for generations, the only caveat being they don’t actually drop anchor, in which case they are obliged to phone the respective border authorities and advise of their presence in their territorial waters. CBSA agents, acting as judge and jury forced the two fishermen to pay a $1000 fine on the spot under threat of being arrested, handcuffed, and towed to shore. Conveniently, CBSA accepts Visa, MasterCard and American Express, so the boater was able to pay this extortion by credit card and head back home suitably chastised. CBSA claims this is “routine” but is unable (unwilling?) to provide any prior examples.

Whether these new bully tactics are as a result of higher level direction (tough on crime and all that) or simply a generally nastier tone being expressed by all those in a position of power (G20 comes to mind as well) remains to be seen. But what is certain is that examples of this new get tough attitude get wide press in the US border states  further discouraging our southern friends from coming to visit, and encouraging tit-for-tat treatment of Canadians by US authorities – a downward spiral that will never end well. And all at a time when the Canadian government publically insists it’s trying to encourage the free flow of commerce and people between the two countries.

If Vic Toews is serious about that I have a suggestion or two on where he can start.

Crime is on the rise in Canada – not!

Statistics Canada has just released their ‘Police-reported crime statistics in Canada, 2010’ report (link). And it supports what many have been saying for some time:

Police-reported crime reaches its lowest level since the early 1970's

The police-reported crime rate, which measures the overall volume of crime, continued to decline in 2010 (down 5%), reaching its lowest level since 1973 (Chart 1). In total, Canadian police services reported close to 2.1 million Criminal Code incidents (excluding traffic), approximately 77,000 fewer than in 2009 (Table 1a). Decreases among property crimes, namely theft under $5,000 (-23,000 incidents), mischief (-22,500 incidents), motor vehicle thefts (-15,300 incidents), and break and enters (-9,200 incidents), accounted for the majority of the decline.

Now I’m sure the Harper cons will be quick to dismiss this report (and probably push hard for the Chief Statistician to cancel the collection and reporting of this data), but the data is there for anyone who is the least bit interested in facts and not blind ideology.

The following chart clearly shows the trend and puts a lie to the Harper con that crime rates are increasing ergo we need more jails, more prisoners, more prison guards, etc., etc.

And, it must be pointed out, the absolute peak occurred after several years of the last major period of Conservative rule – the Mulroney years. Coincidence?

 

There’s something wrong here

This story in yesterday’s Ottawa Citizen is indicative of the laissez-faire attitude of those whose job it is to “serve and protect” when petty crime is involved.

The story, in short:

Girl has laptop stolen.

Girl reports theft to police. Response is we’re busy and will get to it eventually.

Girl tracks down thieves and recovers laptop with the help of a friend.

Girl reports recovery to police and provides names and addresses of thieves. Response is the investigating officer is away on vacation next week, but they (the culprits) will still be around when he gets back.

(And in an ideal world the perpetrators won’t have been using the intervening week to rob anyone else.)

I understand the pressures of inadequate staffing levels and the need to prioritize, but I believe that a quick response to these types of petty crimes can have a profound impact in cases such as this. Many (granted, not all) of these cases are crimes of opportunity committed by youthful miscreants who, if caught and appropriately punished in their first attempt at crime, will not reoffend. But, like anything, the more you do it (and get away with it) the easier it is, until stealing becomes second nature.

These crimes do not have a high profile in the community (that is until they are reported in The Citizen), but they are the crimes that will eventually affect all of us in one way or another. It’s becoming increasingly hard to find anyone who hasn’t had a bicycle stolen, or a purse, or a cell phone or laptop, so just on the basis of population affected these cases should receive a higher priority.  If the Ottawa Police Service needs to reassign staff from rounding up drunks, busting pot users, and escorting royal couples around town to the Robbery Unit (which, by the way has hours of Monday to Friday, 7:00am to 10:00pm and Saturday and Sunday 8:00am to 4:00pm as if robberies don’t occur outside those hours) then do it as the long-term societal benefit will be, in my opinion, significantly greater. And the feeling of why report it, the cops won’t do anything anyway, will have less currency.