Monthly Archives: July 2013

Canadians want plan for future of health care: poll

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By Crawford Kilian
Published July 24, 2013     http://thetyee.ca

A poll released today indicates Canadians want Prime Minister Stephen Harper to call a meeting of first ministers to discuss the future of health care — and many are ready to change their vote if their present party doesn’t come up with a plan for that future.

The Nanos Research poll was carried out for the Canadian Health Coalition, an advocacy group. In a news release, the Health Coalition wrote:

Eight in ten Canadians either support (51.1%) or somewhat support (29.4%) Prime Minister Stephen Harper calling a First Ministers’ Meeting to secure a plan for the future of health care in Canada. Four in ten Canadians are either likely (19.1%) or very likely (22.2%) to vote for another federal party if the one they currently support does not present a plan for the future of health care.

Asked for their opinion on the effect of expanding private for-profit healthcare in Canada, 54% of Canadians think health care would be weakened while only 28% think it would be strengthened.

The survey results are being released as the Premiers gather in Niagara-on-the-Lake this week for a Council of the Federation Meeting. It is the last meeting they will have before the expiration of the National Health Accord in 2014.

… The federal government has signalled that it will not renew the National Health Accord. In December 2011, it announced plans to cut $36 billion from federal money transfers to provinces for health care after the Accord expires. It recently cancelled funding for the Health Council of Canada, a council created out of the Accord negotiations in 2004 to track progress and quality in health care.

Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.

Foreign workers doubled as joblessness peaked: report

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Conference Board asks why Canada is still bringing in temporary foreign workers

 

Jul 23, 2013     http://www.cbc.ca

Despite an unemployment rate that spiked in 2009 and remains high, the number of temporary foreign workers in Canada has more than doubled over the last six years, according to the Conference Board of Canada.

In 2006, there were 150,000 temporary foreign workers employed in Canada. By December 2012, that number had more than doubled to 340,000.

The growth in the number of foreign workers continued throughout the 2009 recession, when the unemployment rate peaked at 8.6 per cent. In June of this year, unemployment stood at 7.1 per cent, though joblessness among young workers was stuck around 14.1 per cent.

The temporary foreign worker program has come under scrutiny in the last four months, since CBC reported that professional IT workers were being fired from their jobs at RBC so the employer could bring in temporary foreign workers.

The federal government amended the rules in late April, making it more difficult and more expensive for companies to turn to foreign workers to fill job vacancies in Canada. But the impact of those rule changes has yet to be seen, the Conference Board says.

Its report released Tuesday says that while Canadian youth were struggling to secure employment, especially that important first job after college or university, companies continued to bring in foreign workers in record numbers.

“This, justifiably, raises the question: if the unemployment rate remains relatively high and so many young and able Canadians are unable to find work, why are we still bringing in so many people under the TFW program?” the Conference Board asks.

There is no clear answer to that question, it concludes, pointing out that Alberta faced looming labour shortages in 2006. Employers in some parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan continue to have difficulty finding workers, despite the number of jobless in Canada.

A CBC report last month found the number of foreign workers in Canada had nearly tripled over the past 10 years.

The Conference Board blames a skills mismatch and the reluctance of Canadians to move long distances to find work for the inability of employers to attract Canadian workers to jobs. There also may be perception that foreign workers can be hired for less than their Canadian counterparts, the report said.

One of the key changes that Ottawa announced in April is a new fee that will be imposed on employers when they apply to the government for a labour market opinion (LMO). A positive labour market opinion must be obtained in order for employers to bring foreign workers to Canada. It takes a number of factors into consideration including what potential benefits hiring the foreign workers would have on the labour market and what efforts were made to hire Canadian workers for the positions.

The government also got rid of a rule that allowed employers to pay foreign workers up to 15 per cent less than the prevailing wage for a classification of job.

The Conference Board said it expects these changes to put “downward pressure” on the number of foreign workers in Canada — and lead to more employers seeking out domestic workers for jobs. However, it is too soon to tell if the measures will be effective in lowering the number of temporary workers in Canada while unemployment is high, the report said.

NSA North: Why Canadians should be demanding answers about online spying

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By Adam Kingsmith| July 22, 2013   http://rabble.ca

 

Photo: OpenMedia.ca

 

“We are living in an age of surveillance,” concludes Professor Neil Richards, privacy law and civil liberties expert at Washington University. “There’s much more watching and much more monitoring, and I think we have a series of important choices to make as a society — about how much watching we want.”

Last month’s realisation that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) — by means of a top-secret program codenamed “PRISM,” has been trawling the audio, video, photo, email, and phone records of millions of Americans at home and abroad, serves as a stark reminder to those of us living in supposed “liberal democracies” that we’ve increasingly allowed state-surveillance mechanisms to become normalised and domesticated in a post 9/11 world.

Since the early 2000s, considerable advances in personal technology and the public’s broad tolerance of monitoring — due in part to illusory fears concerning the exacerbated threat of terrorism, have served to strengthen government capabilities and legal justifications to covertly monitor and record the digital activities and behaviours of entire populations.

Additionally, we’ve learned that private technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook — institutions that repeatedly preach customer confidentiality, have been quietly supporting programs such as PRISM all along by providing government agencies with warrantless access to massive amounts of our personal user information.

Of course, some Canadians will probably brush off these revelations.

After all, PRISM is a U.S. government program, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are American corporations, clearly this breech of privacy and constitutionality is an American problem, and we Canadians would best to just keep quiet and let them figure it out right?

Wrong. Dead wrong.

What these people fail to realize is that when it comes to the Internet, an American problem is everyone’s problem because the World Wide Web is essentially under U.S. jurisdiction.

“There is no border,” emphasises Professor Ron Deibert, head of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. “The way telecommunication traffic is routed in North America, the fact of the matter is about 90 per cent of Canadian traffic — no one really knows the exact number — is routed through the United States.”

Thus the telecommunications infrastructure of Canada is inextricably linked to the United States. This means that the vast majority of Canadian metadata — data that describes other data, is filtered through NSA-monitored Internet exchange points, and these points serve as informational intersections where “personal” user traffic is transferred between websites.

As we only have two Internet exchange points in Canada, an email sent from a Toronto server could pass through Chicago, Los Angeles, even Miami, before being routed back to Canada — along the way its content can be subsumed via filters and checkpoints monitored by American intelligence agencies which stress that while surveillance programs such as PRISM do not target U.S. nationals, the data of foreigners — i.e. Canadians, are fair game.

In short, the U.S.-centric architecture of the Web — coupled with the fact that copying and storing massive amounts of data has become relatively easy, makes it inevitable that some personal communiqués between Canadians will be subjected to American data mining.

Unfortunately, the NSA monitoring Canadian information in transit is just the tip of the surveillance iceberg up here. Raw documents brought to light through the Access to Information Act reveal that the Harper Administration has silently implemented a surveillance program of its own modeled after the scope and reach of the NSA’s PRISM.

Administered by the mysterious Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) — a highly secretive government agency that employs 2,000 people and has an annual budget of about $422 million, this “PRISM-North” intercepts domestic communications to order to cultivate metadata from phone records, Internet protocol addresses, and other data trails.

If armed with enough raw computing power to sift through gigantic pools of data, all of this metadata — essentially a record of who we know, and how well — can then be used to map our social networks, patterns of mobility, professional relationships and personal interests.

What’s more, oversight of CSEC is practically non-existent — even when compared with the NSA. “PRISM-North” is scrutinized by a lone retired judge who issues an annual review — concealed from parliamentarians, journalists and the public, a review that in all its years has never reported a single invasion of privacy by CSEC that would merit further inquiry.

Subsequently, while the extent of CSEC’s current monitoring activities are kept confidential from everyone except the Minister of Defense, the agency has not only reconfirmed it is collecting metadata, CSEC also said this data is being shared with the so-called “Five Eyes” — a clandestine group of intelligence agencies from Australia, New Zealand, U.S. and U.K.

I know what many of you are thinking. This is Canada, we have rights — doesn’t a federal agency like CSEC warrantlessly monitoring, stockpiling and sharing all of my private data not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in some really big way?

Shockingly no.

“Canada has similar disclosure provisions as those found in the USA Patriot Act,” asserts Professor Michael Geist, technology law expert at the University of Ottawa. “For example, s. 21 of the Canadian Security Intelligence Act provides for a warrant that permits almost any type of communication interception, surveillance or disclosure of records for purpose of national security.”

Listening to our phone calls, monitoring our Internet searches, scrutinizing our emails, trawling our social media accounts, and sharing it all with intelligence agencies around the world — these things are not only possible, but as the law suggests — entirely legal. And as virtually everything is shrouded in secrecy, there’s no way to know how deep this goes.

Now that technology has caught up with the ambitions of government intelligence agencies, we are seeing a move away from targeted surveillance — where law enforcement would be granted limited powers to investigate by judicial ruling, to a sort of dragnet paradigm — where law enforcement is permitted to amass as much information as possible, sort through said information at its leisure, and then discard the irrelevant bits later, maybe.

So as cries for increased transparency and civilian oversight ring out from our neighbours to the south, it is time for Canadians to speak up against the spying taking place within our own country as well. Only by fighting surveillance and secrecy with discourse and dissent can we start to pull back the veil of suppression to recapture the agency in our democracy.

Adam Kingsmith has an M.A. in International Relations and his writing and research explores the linkages between technology, culture, and political dissent within a uniquely Canadian context. He currently splits his time between his hometown of Vancouver and Toronto.

Premiers urged to hold public hearings on Canada-EU trade deal

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The Canadian Press
Published Monday, July 22, 2013 6:37AM EDT

OTTAWA — Critics of the free trade talks with Europe are urging provinces to ensure any negotiated deal gets a full public airing before it is formally signed.

The Trade Justice Network and Quebec-based Le Reseau quebecois sur l’integration continentale has sent premiers a letter in advance of their meeting in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., next week, saying the federal review mechanism is not sufficient.

The umbrella groups, which represent unions and civil society organizations, say provinces must step in because “the current federal government has rejected virtually every amendment proposed by opposition parties to every trade agreement that has come before Parliament for review.”

The Harper government has made a successful Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with 28 European Union nations a key economic and political goal — it would constitute the only major free trade deal since NAFTA two decades ago.

Unlike trade talks of the past, however, Canadian provinces have had to be directly involved in the process since some of the biggest issues — such as liberalized government procurement and public hydro-electricity tenders — fall under provincial jurisdiction.

As well, expected extensions in pharmaceutical patent protections will likely result in higher provincial health care costs.

With so much involved, the groups say the provinces must hold public hearings, adding there is precedent for doing so.

“If there is a difference between the CETA and these other trade and investment agreements it is surely that the Canada–EU agreement will have far greater impacts on provincial sovereignty, as well as on policy flexibility at all levels, including municipally,” the letter notes.

“We therefore urge your government, and the Council of the Federation, to champion the idea of a democratic review of the CETA in between conclusion of the negotiations and a formal signing of the agreement.”

Adam Taylor, a spokesman for International Trade Minister Ed Fast, insisted Sunday that the talks with the European Union are the most transparent and collaborative trade negotiations Canada has ever conducted.

“From the beginning, provinces and territories have been active participants, and municipalities and stakeholders from across the country from a variety of sectors have been consulted regularly,” Taylor wrote in an email to The Canadian Press.

“Together, we are working hard to conclude an agreement that generates benefits in every region of the country and creates jobs, growth and long-term prosperity for Canadian exporters, workers and families,” he said.

Most analysts believe a deal could be signed in principle this fall, despite several missed deadlines.

Officials on both sides of the Atlantic contend only a few difficult issues remain to be resolved, including expanded access for Canadian beef exports and European demands that Canada allow more imports of European dairy products.

But analysts also warn momentum could be stalled if the talks are not concluded quickly, particularly as the European Union is refocusing its attention on a deal with the more lucrative market in the United States.

Ottawa has maintained a deal could boost Canada’s economy by $12 billion and create about 80,000 jobs, although critics say the benefits are exaggerated.