rwmtest

I disagree with Canada's adoption of US-style primaries where political tourists decide who will be treated as the leader/dictator of Canadian political parties. Party leaders in the Canadian House of Commons should be decided by and accountable to caucus members, and never the other way around (caucus members asked to be accountable to party "leaders") if we wish to have a healthy representative democracy. That said, there are possible outcomes of the CPC primary today that are interesting to different degrees. Election not decided by "runners", front or otherwise. The media likes to report on all elections as "races", where the fastest "runner" is the one that will win. There was constant talk about who was and was not a "front runner" during this primary. The fact is most elections don't work that way, and the media tends to not even correctly identify who is being elected.  For instance, in Canada individual voters do not d...

On May 15th the Canadian INDU parliamentary committee published my brief to their study on the Canadian Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.  They published a PDF version .  This is a slightly edited (turn footnotes into links) version. Introduction I am submitting this brief as a private citizen with over 30 years experience in the Information and Communications Technology field. With population growth, aided by climate change, virus and other pathogen outbreaks are expected to be more common. With globalisation and increased global travel, pathogen outbreaks more easily become pandemics. While pandemics need to be understood as a fact of life, our response to pandemics and the various costs of those responses are policy choices. There are emergency preparedness plans with considerable resources, including preparedness drills, for other types of threats such as war, terrorism or school schootings. This has not yet been the case for pathogen outbreaks or pandemics. It seems our...

During the September 11 2001 attacks, 2,977 people died in the United States.  As of the morning of August 12 there have been 162,104 reported deaths from COVID-19 within the United States. Rounding the recent numbers it is similar to there being a S11 level of event every 4 days within the United States. Globally there have been 736,766 reported deaths thus far. These are reported deaths for COVID-19, and I expect we won't know the larger complete total until some time after the crisis is over. After September 11, 2001 the west said that "the world changed", and many policies were put in place to try to prevent similar future events. While COVID-19 is a much larger crisis, and a global rather than country-specific crisis, we are not yet treating it with an appropriate level of urgency or requirement for future planning. Several jurisdictions are wanting to send children back to school as if everything is normal.  In Ontario a few pennies per child are being spent for so...

On Page 8 of the July 27, 2020 issue of The Hill Times, a letter I submitted was published. Re: “Forty-nine days of racism in the news,” (The Hill Times, July 13, by Rose LeMay). Racism isn’t merely a matter of an individual person having a conscious dislike of another individual or a group. To quote Dr. Robin Diangelo, racism is “a default system that institutionalizes an unequal distribution of resources and power between white people and people of colour. This system is historic, taken for granted, deeply embedded, and it works to the benefit of whites.” While most people will focus on the present, I would like to suggest we fix a historical injustice. Under Canada’s British Westminster parliamentary system, we never adopted an equivalent of their House of Lords, or their Upper House. The House of Lords developed from the “Great Council” that advised the king. When Europeans came to Turtle Island there were already people here with their own traditions and governance. When a new go...