We need a new system that does a better job reflecting those commonalities. And one less likely to leave us feeling that if we vote for our favourite, we’ll just end up helping our least favourite win.
Source: Editorial: Electoral status quo fails us all | Edmonton Journal
Surveying hazards and opportunities across our upended political landscape.
Matein Khalid http://www.khaleejtimes.com October 26, 2015
The Canadian dollar’s strength may not last.(AFP)
So justin Pierre Trudeau is the new Premier Ministre of Canada. Stephen Harper’s decade in power as the Tory grand vizier in Ottawa was ultimately doomed by the oil shock, the commodities bust, the 2015 Canadian recession and voter discontent in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and the Atlantic seaboard states. Even though Trudeau is the son of a political legend Pierre Trudeau, he has no economic or diplomatic policy making experience. Yet he will rule the first Liberal majority government in Ottawa since Jean Chretien in the late 1990s.
I can envisage higher public spending as Trudeau (and the electorate) does not share the Conservative Party’s commitment to a balanced budget or a Canadian combat role in the US led military coalition against Daesh in Iraq. This means tensions with Washington beyond the Keystone XL pipeline issue. Trudeau could even resurrect the ghost of his father’s Third Option in a world where China and Russia both challenge the US. All this reinforces my conviction, outlined in my October 12 KT column, that the Canadian dollar’s strength will not last.
So it did not surprise me that the loonie fell against 15 major currencies in Singapore trading the night Trudeau unseated Harper and entered the world stage. Once the Tories resorted to the xenophobic, anti-niqab campaign, I knew Harper had run out of ideas and political risk was going to rise in Canada even as oil prices and economic growth rates/mining capex fell. Trudeau’s C$60 billion infrastructure pledge (funded rise in deficits) and two shock Bank of Canada rate cuts, fiscal populism and higher US economic momentum means a lower loonie. So does the monetary policy divergence between the Yellen Fed and the Poloz Bank of Canada I expect will widen in 2016.
As a personal friend of former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien and father of (a UAE dirham-financed) McGill undergrad, I will not disguise my pleasure at the election result and the softness of the Canadian dollar. Yet the free-fall in the Canadian dollar began in spring 2014 under the conservatives, when I recommended a loonie short at 1.06 (or 94 cents) against the US dollar.
Justin Trudeau will only add fiscal stimulus to Governor Poloz’s ultra-dovish monetary policies which have failed to use loonie depreciation to revive the Canadian economy. The yield on the 10-year Canadian Government bond is a miniscule 1.46 per cent at a time when Canada’s federal and provincial debt burden will only rise. In any case, the oil shock and $500 billion reserve falls in China will force sovereign wealth funds to jettison their holdings of Canadian government debt, which has historically been correlated with a rise in Federal budget deficits. A strategic put option on Canadian dollar government debt makes total sense since the yield on the 10-year Uncle Canuck note could well rise to two per cent or higher by late spring. Does Justin Trudeau’s proposed fiscal stimulus threaten Canada’s AAA credit rating? No.
Canada had the stablest banking system in the Western world in 2008 while Wall Street, the City of London and even the Bahnofstrasse/Paradeplatz went ballistic on subprime debt/credit derivatives. The commodity supercycle and China’s spectacular economic growth since 2001 was a financial windfall for Canada. Yet that was then and this is now. Canada is now in near recession, the commodities bust has just begun, epic consumer debt presages a housing crash, energy loans will gut banking profits and the loonie hit 12-year lows in September. Even though Alberta oil sands boast the world’s third-largest oil reserves, they are high-cost marginal producers who are toast during a global oil glut with no swing producer in either Riyadh or West Texas/North Dakota. Paradoxically, Harper’s “energy superpower” boast now haunts the loonie, since oil and gas is 25 per cent of Canadian exports. Other than the Norwegian kroner, the Canadian dollar is the ultimate Western world petrocurrency now, the political pendulum has shifted back from Alberta to the Liberal bastions of West Montreal.
CBC News Jun 13, 2014
Canadians have the right to be anonymous on the internet, and police must obtain a warrant to uncover their identities, Canada’s top court has ruled.
The landmark decision from the Supreme Court Friday bars internet service providers from disclosing the names, addresses and phone numbers of their customers to law enforcement officials voluntarily in response to a simple request — something ISPs have been doing hundreds of thousands of times a year.
It also means parts of the cyberbullying and digital privacy bills that are currently before the House of Commons may be unconstitutional.
Friday’s decision concerned the case of Matthew David Spencer, of Saskatchewan, who was charged in 2007 and convicted of possession of child pornography after a police officer saw illegal files being downloaded to his IP address — a series of numbers representing the internet identity of a device such as a computer.
The police officer went to Spencer’s internet service provider (ISP), Shaw, and asked for the real identity of the customer attached to the IP address. The police officer did not have a search warrant, but was given subscriber information for Spencer’s sister, allowing police to track him down.
Spencer appealed his conviction, arguing that the search was unconstitutional and his rights were violated.
The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal ruled there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for basic internet subscriber information, prompting Spencer to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Supreme Court disagreed that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for the data obtained by police.
“In my view, in the totality of the circumstances of this case, there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in the subscriber information,” Supreme Court Justice Thomas Cromwell wrote.
“The disclosure of this information will often amount to the identification of a user with intimate or sensitive activities being carried out online, usually on the understanding that these activities would be anonymous.”
He added, “A warrantless search, such as the one that occurred in this case, is presumptively unreasonable. The Crown bears the burden of rebutting this presumption.”
Although the Supreme Court set limits on when internet providers can disclose customer information, it dismissed Spencer’s appeal.
The Supreme Court of Canada says in a decision released Friday that internet users have a right to privacy pending a search warrant. (Shutterstock )
It said police should have obtained a warrant before asking Shaw for the customer information. But it also said police acted reasonably and in good faith, so the administration of justice would be impaired if the evidence gathered by searching Spencer’s home in this particular case were thrown out of court.
The top court decision means Spencer would be subjected to a new trial, on a charge of making child pornography available to others.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association said in a statement that the Supreme Court decision clarifies “a point of long-standing disagreement between privacy advocates and law enforcement authorities” – whether Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act allows police to obtain subscriber information without a warrant. The act governs how the private sector gathers and handles personal information.
The Supreme Court’s ruling that a warrant is required “confirms CCLA’s view that PIPEDA is legislation to protect privacy, and cannot be used to undermine it,” the association said.
The CCLA launched a challenge in May to have parts of PIPEDA declared unconstitutional. It said the new Supreme Court decision may play a “significant role” in the challenge.
Michael Geist, a professor of internet law at the University of Ottawa, called the Supreme Court decision a “huge victory for internet privacy.”
The decision means that the common police practice of obtaining information about customers from internet service providers simply by asking for it must stop, he wrote in a blog post Friday.
“This means ISPs must change their practices on voluntary, warrantless disclosure,” he added.
The decision could also affect two federal government bills, rendering parts of them unconstitutional:
The government is reviewing the decision, said Bob Dechert, parliamentary secretary to Justice Minister Peter MacKay during question period Friday.
“In addition,” he said, “we’ll continue to crack down on cyberbullies and online criminals who work against and make our children and all Canadians unsafe.”
A spokesperson for Industry Minister James Moore, who introduced the digital privacy act bill in April, told CBC News that his office is also reviewing the Supreme Court decision.
Meanwhile, opposition MPs said the ruling was no surprise.
NDP House leader Peter Julian said, also during question period, that the NDP and privacy experts had warned the government all along.
“And yet Conservatives are steamrolling ahead with Bill C-13, which also allows unconstitutional spying on Canadians,” he said. “When will they finally take a balanced approach that keeps Canadians secure without infringing on constitutional rights?”
Recent reports show that law enforcement and government agencies have been routinely asking Canadian telecommunications companies for information about hundreds of thousands of their subscribers each year without a warrant.
Rogers Communications released a report last week showing that it received almost 175,000 requests for information about its customers from government and police agencies last year.
In March, the Chronicle Herald newspaper in Halifax reported the Canada Border Services Agency alone accessed telecom customer data almost 19,000 times in one year — and without a warrant more than 99 per cent of the time.
In 2011, the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association reported to Canada’s privacy commissioner its members received 1.2 million requests for customer information in one year and disclosed information about 780,000 customers.
Andrew Phillip Chernoff 