The End of Educational Freedom

The U of A’s mandate letter (I’m sorry, “letter of expectation”) is out.

See it here.

Basically, the government is trampling all over the institutional independence normally expected for a major public research university and turning it into a de-facto extension of government policy. Which, by the way, is not what universities are for.

Why do we even need a BoG or Senate if the government is just going to overrule anything they want to do and impose new direction on them? All joking aside, the U of A is not badly run (especially compared to, say, several provincial ministries of the current administration), so there’s no pressing need for external intervention.

Really, the only current problem is in finances. Oh right, that was the Provincial Government’s fault too, by slashing spending for higher education because of Alberta politicians inability to have a method of stable income and instead relying on a notoriously unstable form of income to cover a substantial part of their budget.

So let’s do a check-up. We have a government intervening to fix what they see as a problem happening at a university that they caused by not giving enough funding. So their solution is to tell them how they are suppose to handle having less funding which will result in … the same amount of inadequate funding as before.

The mandate letter is pretty heavy on this new “Campus Alberta” thing. What they want is for institutions to decrease “program duplication” across campuses. In regular everyday speech, we call that healthy competition between programs. Nope, according to your Alberta Government, having more then 1 program for philosophy or music or biology (presumably) is redundant even though there is currently interest in such programs simply by the fact that they exist.

This is simply astonishing how arrogant the government can be in saying that they know what’s best for all the post-secondary institutions in the province, even the (now nominally it seems) private ones. Oh, also they want to reduce this through transfer agreements. Don’t get me wrong on that, transfer agreements are not a bad thing to do, but this new policy seems to suggest that we turn a bunch of two-bit colleges (I’m sorry, but there’s a reason people choose the U of A as their first choice) into feeder schools for better ones like the U of A.

I remember when people use to refer to Saskatchewan as some kind of “socialist” haven, but Saskatchewan never did something like this (they did change the nursing program, which use to be 2 years at SIAST and 2 at UofS/UofR to 4 years at the UofS/UofR. Nursing/Medicine is a lot more regulated through, including how many spots there are).

Congragulations Alberta, you are officially more Socialist than Saskatchewan at its heyday. Heck, I don’t even think Quebec intervenes in its Universities like this. Not impressed Government of Alberta.

Quebec’s Construction Corruption

Well, if you’ve been paying attention to what’s happening in Quebec, then you know about the current corruption inquiry investigating kickbacks from the construction industry to cities, politicians and political parties, and the mafia (with taxpayer money no less).

I’m not going to talk about that because it pretty much speaks for itself how unethical that is. Instead, I want to look at something else that Macleans has highlighted in a recent issue on the Quebec construction industry: the relationship between unions and contractors.

It turns out that in Quebec, the decisions about where to send labour for a project is not made by employer, but by the union. That in itself is flabbergastingly stupid, and that’s not even the point I’m getting at. Like, how can a firm decide on what projects they can do on certain days when they have no control over they employees? When I worked in construction (consulting in materials testing), jobs would often come up the day before or the day of which could see me have to work long hours unexpectedly based on what could be done or permits or the weather. My boss would just tell us “you’re doing this job tomorrow” and that was that, no need to consult a union or other person to ask permission for workers to work.

Oh, but it gets worse. So, we have a union who decides where workers go. Now the union also happens to own a share of one of the contractors. So now the union has an economic interest in the success and profitability of one contractor (just one, to the exclusion of others) and controls the employees. So it is within the unions power to prioritize one project with enough workers while impeding others by sending less workers. Wow, just wow.

I don’t know what they learn about ethics in Quebec, but that’s pretty much a textbook example of a conflict of interest. It would be like Enbridge owning part of Husky and allowing Husky all the pipeline space it needs while offering less or none to Suncore and Syncrude and Shell. Or if Epcor owned a transmission line and prioritized electricity from Genesee (pre-CPC split) over that from Sundance and Keephills. There seems to be something about these cases that makes us think that its not fair. In the last case I believe it would actually be illegal (if I remember right given Alberta’s electricity rules). I seem to remember a case somewhat like the other hypothetical one described where a company was favouring a subsidiary or another company they had an economic interest in, and were told (by someone with the proper jurisdiction, like the Competition Board or the courts) to stop it (I could be wrong though).

Whatever the legal ramifications, the union by definition has become corrupt. I have said that a model where a union controls where people go is stupid (which I say because I tend to lean towards a capitalistic point of view economically), but I do not think it would be either illegal or unconstitutional. It is conceivable that the purpose would be to protect worker interest and dignity (hours and worker conditions and stuff), and while I don’t think that such measures as union control of labour is necessary to protect that it is a plausible model. Now come the corruption. If the idea is to protect workers, then having an economic interest in a contractor takes away their ability to objectively do just that; in a word their very purpose has been corrupted. When they have an economic interest, then they are now interested in profit, not workers.

And you don’t have to be part of any party to understand that corruption is wrong.

A Leap of Faith

What exactly does it mean to take a leap of faith?

Faith is something that is outright ridiculed by certain parts of the population. They say that they will never understand what faith is, or that they could never do it. Wouldn’t it be ironic if they already did though? Faith is something that everyone does; it’s essential for human socialization and for communities to form. The problem that seems to have happened is that faith has been conflated into the realms of religion, even though that it totally untrue.

Here’s the thing. All you really need to do to understand areas of faith in your own life is take Epistemology. Let’s start with Descartes. Descartes (in his 1st Meditation) wondered if we were in fact dreaming right now. It seems like a silly and trivial question, but the more you think about it the more it becomes appairent that it’s a problem. How do you distinguish dreaming from not-dreaming (I will probably revert to using !dreaming as “not”, in the style of c++ because it’s easier)? There’s often ideas of a certain test that could be used. But, to be able to use this test you first have to know you’re awake to make sure the test works in order to know whether it will works in the dream, and so the test becomes useless because you don’t know whether you got it when your were awake or dreaming.

So, the question is how many of you got out of bed this morning? I’m assuming everyone who’s reading this did (at some point). Why did you do that though? Don’t you have to first lie down (if you are in fact lying down) and contemplate whether or not there is a point to getting up? Personally, I’ve dreamt that I’ve been lying in bed trying to make the same decision. So why do we get out of bed when we don’t even know that we’re in bed? Only by a leap of faith. We just do. There is no rational process that goes on deciding whether or not we are currently in the real world where we have to get up for work, you just get up. It turnes out that when you’ve only been up for minutes, you’re already making a leap of faith.

Since that is what we do, we should ponder the question of “is that what we ought to do?” This seems like another stupid question, but it’s really important. Should we make that leap of faith in the morning? Well, if you want to not die of hunger it’s probably a good idea. If you want to be a strict Cartesian, then you really shouldn’t be getting out of bed until you have deductively proved that you are in fact awake.

There is one thing that people might appeal to: uniformity. I woke up yesterday and got out of bed and went to work and went to bed, so it’s probably a safe bet that it’s all the same today. But that is another unjustified leap of logic. This one comes from David Hume, a Scottish philosopher. We can’t just accept uniformity. Any time we take what happened “before” and say that something similar will happen “after”, we are making an inductive (or in coloquial speak, inferential) leap of logic. Strictly speaking from a logic point of view, inductive leaps are by their very nature fallible; that is that by their very nature they can be wrong. They are not guaranteed to produce results that are true 100% of the time. When you induce uniformity in the future, you could very well be wrong about it. And yet, we do it anyways. What we do is we trust that the future experiences will be like past similar experience. We take another leap of faith, because otherwise we just wouldn’t be able to do anything.

These are just 2 things we easily take for granted in life, that we are not dreaming and that the world (including the laws of physics) are uniform. And yet, if you want to say that you are strictly rational you should reject both of these. Maybe someone will just say that they are rational. That seems unfair though, because you’re just redefining rational to avoid the issue altogether  and you don’t even possess a rational reason to do that.

So, let’s stop pretending that faith is something that only exists in religion. If you are reading this, then you are exercising your faith right this very second. If you don’t like these answers, then go and solve these problems that Descartes and Hume have brought up, and all of philosophy will thank you trying. Of course, until you do so you’ll just have to assume that you are not sleeping and that the world is uniform; you just need to have a little faith to get you going.

Consolidating Environmental Reviews

Well, there’s a fairly regulatory-intensive announcement by the federal government, and tragically news articles are peppered with terms, phrases, and nuances that frankly will go over the ordinary persons head. Most people don’t understand our environmental regulatory system and lobby groups take advantage of that by making accusations that are so lacking in facts or logic that they’d make baby seals cry.

Anyways, luckily I have knowledge of the environmental regulatory system and can break down some of the terms and phrases to make them more understandable (with the help of my notes from ENV E 302 on Environmental Impact Assessments, from the last year it was taught as a joint ENVE-MINE class. Credit to Dr. Zaher Hashisho for the notes.). For reference, here’s an article from Postmedia News (listed on the Montreal Gazette).

The first thing that people need to understand is that not all projects need a Federal environmental assessment (FEA), and that is due to the Constitutional separation of powers. For the FEA, the PEAT model is followed:

Project
Exclusion List
Authority
Trigger

Project is “an undertaking related to a physical work” according to my notes, and including construction, operation, decommissioning, modification, or something is listed on the Schedule to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEA Act). Exclusion List refers to the Exclusion List Regulation, a regulation under the CEA Act. Anything listed under the ELR is not a project and therefore does not need an FEA.

Authority means it has to involve a federal Minister of the Crown, an agency or body of the federal government, a department or departmental corporation (schedules A&B of the FAA). Finally is the trigger. A trigger means the federal government is giving money (eg- tax break on that project), the company needs a permit (Fisheries, Navigable Waters, ect), the project is taking place on Federal Crown Land, or the federal government is the proponent of the project (this does not mean promoting, proponent has a very specific meaning referring to the organization, usually a corporation, who is financially backing the project and who will directly benefit).

Ok, now to the article. First thing, the federal government will allow a provincial assessment to substitute for a FEA if it meets the CEA Act. Most people probably don’t know that right now Federal-Provincial joint assessment are currently possible and are already done. This just takes the next logical step by saying that if a provincial assessment meets the CEA Act there doesn’t need to be a duplicate, nor should there be. Doing an identical assessment should give an identical result, so there’s no point (except to unnecessarily delay a proceeding).

Secondly, provincial regulations will be equivalent to the Fisheries Act. People know that I am not a fan of DFO, but legally this is not on good ground. Fisheries are a Federal head of power under the Constitution, and the Federal government cannot unilaterally transfer that to the provinces (they’d have to amend the Constitution as was done with the Natural Resources Transfer Act back when Westminster had to amend our Constitution). However, the ability to give the NEB and the CNSC the ability to grant approvals under the Fisheries Act is legitimate as the government can just designate them Fisheries Officers under the Fisheries Act.

The other big one is consolidating reviews. This will be contentious, but the reason is because nobody listens to reason anymore: we don’t need 40 different departments with 40 different FEA review processes. FEA’s are done to ensure that we are achieving the 3-fold balance between economics, social issues (including employment poverty, issues with “boom towns”, etc), and the environment. Yes, people probably don’t actually know that an EIA is suppose to be looking at all 3 of those, not just the environment. And this is an upgrade from the cost-benefit analysis that was done before that (which looked mostly at economics, as it’s hard to put costs and benefits in dollar amounts on social issues and the environment).

The reason we don’t need 40 is that there is no need. Once we have done a FEA, there doesn’t need to be another one. we live in a society that seems to think that we have the right to do “it” (replace it with whatever you feel like) as many times as we like until we get the result we like. That’s not how real life works or should work. The legal system has a court of last resort (the Supreme Court) so that there’s a resolution that can’t be appealed so that it’s resolved.

The people who are interested in the multiple processes don’t seem to be so interested in making sure of the 3-fold balance as dragging out processes to make them impossible for proponents to proceed. That’s not the point of the FEA process. The point is to make sure that any significant impacts are mitigated to reasonable and acceptable levels. Now for something people probably already know: FEA’s are almost never rejected. It’s bad press for a company. The other reason is that all the major issues are commonly worked out between the company and the regulators before the formal process even starts. When you’re doing a formal FEA, you already know the major impacts and you’ve already mitigated to regulatory standards or best practice.

Unfortunately, mob mentality can take over, as in the case of the Keystone XL Pipeline (that aquifer in Nebraska? There’s already pipelines going through it, including the older Keystone Pipeline).

So, those are some of the facts that people could probably use in understanding the issue. But of course, facts aren’t as fun and accusing the other side of being environmental pariah’s/extreme tree huggers, so as usual they’ll get buried.

Canada’s Holy Day

It has often been asked in our increasingly secular culture if anything is holy anymore. Canada is a fairly secular country, although different from the secularism in other countries. It is not so much an outright lack of faith here as is pushed by radical groups in the United States or Europe, but simply more private. People aren’t afraid of being religious so much because of public embarrassment, but rather because we’ve been taught not to be so outright about it.

So in this odd culture of ours, do we still have any holy days left? There are only a few days left that are public celebrations of some solemnity. I would say that there are only really 3 days left that really make people stop and think with the rest largely having become days off without much thought given to the purpose of the day. Those 3 days are Canada Day, Christmas, and Remembrance Day.

Canada Day does make people think a little bit about the history of our country, but still ends up being more a day of parties. It’s not too surprising, as Canadians are not really that patriotic compared to many other countries. With Christmas, you can bring up a long list of the reasons Christmas has been largely forgotten in favour of consumerism and, in some cases, outright greed. Even so, the reason for the season is still widely known and celebrated in many places.

And then there’s today, Remembrance Day. Out of all the days of the year, this is really the only one that is so universally celebrated. Not just that though, it is also socially acceptable and even encouraged to participate and remember this day through poems such as In Flanders Field, the playing of the Last Post, and the wearing of the ubiquitous red and black poppy. Citizens are encouraged to attend ceremonies in many cities across the country.

CBC, the national broadcaster, always has live coverage of the ceremonies from the National War Memorial in Ottawa. To someone who only knows the stereotypes of Canada, they may actually think that this ceremony seems almost un-Canadian. In a country sometimes uncomfortable about patriotism we have soldiers and the Governor-General in full uniforms, and in a country uncomfortable about public religion we have chaplains invoking God and the Bible in prayer, and in a country that is sometimes not so sure about how we still relate to Britain we sing God Save the Queen.

And while you might have some disgruntled people who might complain (you always do), it is still considered a faux pas to criticize any of this. While we might not be in favour of war, the whole country by and large believes in the need to honour the soldiers who fought and died. It is one of the only things that is still considered sacred in this country. Today is the only day that is not just an ordinary day with a slightly different theme, but is truly set apart by everyone.

That is what makes Remembrance Day Canada’s Holy Day.

The Uncomfortable Side of Democracy

Today’s Edmonton Journal re-printed an op-ed from the NYT, a very uncomfortable look at the results of the revolution this past spring in Egypt. It’s not something that is brand new, but is something that has been happening for a while. The last while has seen several attacks on Coptic Christians in sectarian violence.

This brings to the front one of the more uncomfortable sides of the fall of dictators: can this new muti-national and multicultural state survive? And for those who like bonus questions: How long do you try and keep it together? The first question was looked at in this article by a professor at Catholic University of America.

The second question is one that is especially important in this day and age, and the example are numerous. They include Russia and Chechnya, Scotland and the United Kingdom (not to mention the question of Northern Ireland), the EU itself (because of the financial near-ruin of several members), and of course Belgium. The issue is also being felt quite a bit across Europe due to the influx of Muslim immigrants, who seem to be at the very least challenging (not  necessarily actively. More in the sociological sense) the status quo of fairly uniform ethnic backgrounds in many European countries.
In the case of Belgium, the informal consensus seems to be that the best case is for the Flemish half to separate from the Wallonian half (with that half possibly joining France, according to Wikipedia). Belgium is still, as of today, without a formal government from an election over a year ago due to disagreement between the 2 halves. A government is apparently coming soon.

Another recent example of this is the Sudan. The Christian South recently separated from the Muslim North. Of course, people now hope this will lead to peace in the Sudan at least. If you consider it peace when you don’t want to kill your neighbour because you decided to never work with them or even (preferably) see them again. The “success” is that two new countries are now lined up along the religious lines that divided the one original country.

The US doesn’t seem to be an example of this, but will it become this? The US is for all intensive purposes already fractured into regions, and the truth is that no one seems to be satisfied with how things are going. Christians don’t think that Judeo-Christian values are followed enough, while secularists argue that they hold too much sway. And the best case scenario seems to be that both sides stay unsatisfied, and that the status quo holds.

Is Canada exempt from this? Well, things are pretty quiet right now. As in the US, as long as the status quo doesn’t undergo too much of a shift, things should stay quiet. That doesn’t mean that everyone will be satisfied though, and a slow, small set of changes could probably go ahead without too much protesting.

Solutions? Some (they know who they are) would inevitably bring up religion as the problem. Not to get too much in that, but Absolute Relativism simply seems to have become it’s own decentralized faith/spirituality as a thinly-veiled attempt to deflect criticism that they are being hypocrites (the fact that “there are no absolute truths” is an absolute statement is only the tip of that iceberg).

I don’t have the answer, and someone who says they do probably has one that is too idealistic to ever work. I’ve often wondered if it would simply be best for countries to split up if they can’t seem to work together, following the example of the Sudan. I would be the first to admit that any peace that comes is largely artificial, but since we as a society have decided (rightly) that war is not an ethical option it seems to me that even artificial peace would be the better choice over continued conflict. On the flip side, and large number of smaller and smaller sovereign entities doesn’t seem like a real good idea either (especially accounting for economies of scale losses). Or will each region of the world decide to do either or, with smaller peaceful countries spring up some places while other continue to have larger, possibly unstable ones.

Big questions, and no right answers. These have to be decided by ordinary men and women either on their own or after considering arguments from the political leadership. That is why we call democracy the least-worst choice. It’s the only system that seems to be most successful when everyone is at least a unhappy.

Quebec Said What?!

Well, today’s day … something of the campaign for the May election. All I know is that there’s a painful month to go before we can all stop pretending we care so much about politics and the government can go back to whatever it does when it’s not election time (I know there’s something they do, but it didn’t seem to happen much the last few years).

So, today’s big announcement is from the Conservatives. If they win, they’re pledging to underwrite (co-sign?) the loan for the Lower Churchill Hydro project in Labrador. Now, when it comes to renewable electricity, hydro is the only one reliable enough to act as a baseload plant, so hydro is always a good thing.

Well, except if you’re Quebec. See, Quebec is mad. Ok, I need to qualify that statement because it seems like Quebec is always mad about something. They’re mad because the project intends to build a power line directly to Nova Scotia and on to the US, bypassing anything possibly owned by one Hydro Quebec. The Quebec government is made that it’ll cut into their profits from exports into the States.

Why is Hydro Quebec so profitable? It probably has a bit to do with the Upper Churchill hydro project, which has a capacity of 5,428 MW and is one of the largest power plants in Canada. Hydro Quebec exclusively gets to buy the electricity. Or better put, they effectually get to steal it for a quarter cent per kWh ($0.0025/kWh) and sell it into the New England market for 15 to 19 cents per kWh. At 15 cents, they’re making 14.75 cents per kWh, which is a mind-blowing profit markup of  5,900%. That’s not highway robbery, that’s the sort of markup you would expect from the mob. But, I digress.

Gilles Duceppe is angry (although when is he not?), and (I kid you not, this is right from the CBC) said it’s “a ”slap in the face” for Quebec and said it was using federal tax dollars to unfairly advantage one region”. Yep. The guy from Quebec, who exists for the sole reason of trying to get as much money for Quebec from Ottawa as humanly possibly by threatening to separate every 10 minutes, is complaining about money going to another province. April Fool? Nope, apparently Quebec feels it’s just more privileged than the rest of us.

I think I speak for most of western Canada when I say “it’s about time someone stood up to Quebec”. Quebec receives $5.6 billion in equalization payments. Students in Quebec pay the lowest tuition, but only if you’re a Quebecer. Engineering Students in Quebec pay $2067.90 for a full year (non-Quebecers pay ~2.5x as much). I paid $3106.08 for 1 term last semester, so over a full year I pay 3 times as much as someone in Quebec.

Seriously, the whole separatist thing is getting old. If you want to go, then go. But we know they don’t actually want to, because they loose out on all the money they’d get. I think it’s high time someone calls their bluff.

Now I don’t have anything against Quebec or the people live there. Quebec (as New France) was the foundation of Canada. Canada grew out of Quebec. But after a while, the whining just gets old. Quebec is like a spoiled kid who’s learned that if he screams loudly enough his parents will just give him whatever he wants. Except Quebec is around 400 years old now. Quebec is the quintessential poster boy for why parents should discipline their children (but that’s a completely different topic).

Remember Canada, only 31 days to go.