Law – Page 9 – a sibilant intake of breath

Potential roots of reconciliation

As we saw in the previous chapter, the Aboriginal peoples’ foundational agreement for sharing the country with the settlers was with the British Crown. The rights and freedoms of Aboriginal peoples recognized in that agreement are now inscribed in the Charter. Since that agreement, Canada has become a self-governing democracy. Some might say this means that Aboriginal people should adjust to this reality and give up counting on an honourable Crown as their partner in regulating the relationship with Canada. But why should they do that? They were never consulted about these huge changes in the nature of their treaty partner. They were totally excluded from any kind of participation in the discussions and negotiations that led to Confederation and the founding of the Dominion of Canada. For nearly a century after Confederation they were denied any right to participate in the institutions of the new Dominion – including, for a time, its courts. For Canadians who wish to see Canada’s relations with Aboriginal peoples based on justice and honour rather than force, the task ahead is to find a way modern-day Canada can replace the Great White Mother or Father with a treaty-making process that Aboriginal peoples can trust but that also meets the imperatives of accountable democratic government.

Russell, Peter. Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests. University of Toronto Press, 2017. p. 67

Canada’s illegitimate origins

After the War of 1812, Britain, no longer in need of Indigenous allies, began to treat the Indian nations as subjects of the Crown. The colonial administrators paid lip service to the 1763 Royal Proclamation by continuing to acquire land for settlement through treaties with their native owners. But the purpose of making treaties was not to establish a continuing relationship of mutual help and the sharing of the country, but to pave the way for British settlers by isolating groups of Indians on tiny reserves, denying them the possibility of carrying out their traditional economy or the opportunity to participate in the new economy on the off-reserve lands they were considered to have “surrendered.” The policy behind this approach became clear when the United Colony of Canada passed the Gradual Civilization Act in 1857. Indians were now to be confined to reserves until sufficiently civilized to be “emancipated” from their Indian status and assimilated into mainstream society.

Russell, Peter. Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests. University of Toronto Press, 2017. p. 8

Animal transport and the ethics of meat

In a perceptive tweet Ziya Tong argued: “In the 21st century you’ll find cameras *everywhere* except: where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes”.

I have long been of the view that if people were forced to look at where our meat, eggs, and dairy come from, few would still be willing to eat them.

That lines up with a recent episode of The Current, in which Anita Krajnc’s acquittal for giving water to pigs heading to a slaughterhouse was used to open a broader conversation about animal transport in the meat industry, including high mortality among “spent hens” used to make nuggets and chicken soup.

My vegetarianism has softened since the long period when I was pretty strict about it starting in 2005, though not for any morally-informed reason. Rather, I think it has just been a result of the way meat-eating (among so many other unsustainable and potentially unethical behaviours) is normalized in our society.

At a minimum, I will try to be more mindful again going forward. Talk of “spent hens” and the conditions of pig, cattle, and horse transport has kept me vegetarian since the broadcast.

Establishing a Responsibility to Repair

The concept of Right to Repair is meant to help consumers and tinkerers keep their vehicles, electronics, and other equipment going, despite the preferences of manufacturers that they buy something new or at least pay the original builder for any repairs.

In a more sustainable world, we can imagine a Responsibility to Repair, where any manufacturer of a product intended to be durable – from a phone or laptop to a car or house – would be expected to support repairs by providing blueprints and source code, by making spare parts available, and by designing products in the first place so that failures can be repaired (a) by individual users (b) by third-party repair centres and (c) by the company itself.

This is the opposite of the Apple philosophy of keeping everything secret, building machines that cannot be taken apart, and throwing away anything broken to replace it with something new.

In a Responsibility to Repair world, governments could keep track of all devices which consumers report as broken and impossible to fix, and then press companies to comply with regard to those items. Companies that refuse could face sactions from fines to losing the right to advertise to losing the right to make products in certain categories.

It would be the end of planned obsolescence, and the start of a much more sustainable form of consumerism. Even for companies that close down, this approach would create multiple benefits, since their design specifications and software would be openly available and their products would be designed with public repair in mind from the beginning. If one big jurisdiction like the EU were to establish laws of this kind, the benefits would be felt around the world.

Proliferation of cyberattack capabilities

This is an interesting case: Spyware’s Odd Targets: Backers of Mexico’s Soda Tax

Mercy for Manning

In the closing days of his administration, President Obama has chosen to commute the 35-year sentence of army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who will now be released in May.

Late-term commutations are always controversial, and this one is sure to be at least doubly so.

Wikileaks and whistleblowers

Clinton, Trump, and the electoral college

Here’s an irony of the Trump election:

The electoral college was recommended by Alexander Hamilton, who argued in Federalist Paper 68 that: “The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications”.

Of course, if the 2016 election had been conducted based on the winner of the popular vote getting the presidency then candidates, parties, and voters would all have behaved differently. You can’t take the results of a game played with one scoring formula, then project that the results would have been the same under different rules. Among other things, under a popular vote system both Democrats and Republicans would have worked harder to turn out the vote in uncompetitive states, and voters would probably have been more willing to cast a ballot in non-swing states. It’s impossible to say whether Trump would have done better or worse than under the electoral college, making the petition to have the electors choose Hilary Clinton instead misguided, at least insofar as they rely on the popular vote outcome as justification.

The “not in an eminent degree endowed” justification may be stronger, but it’s hard to argue that the members of the electoral college (or signers of the petition) are more capable of judging the question legitimately than voters following the system which the U.S. has in place for electing a president.

Radios

Carrying around and being close to transmitting radios makes me nervous.

They may be programmed to harm their owner from the outset, or reprogrammed by private hackers or government forces.

They are the means through which ubiquitous surveillance is maintained, alongside agreements and clandestine action against fixed-line phone and internet providers. Perhaps the most important rule for understanding computer, internet, and network security today is that your government is attacking you.

So… when I walk around with radios it stresses me out. That includes the cell network, WiFi, and Bluetooth radios in the ragged old iPhone4 which I sometimes carry. It includes the capable and sophisticated antennas in my laser-etched Macbook.

To an extent, it includes the increasingly inescapable RFID tags built into passports, credit cards, and bank cards.

I distrust the state.

I think the unprecedented ability of the state to track and permanently archive our conversations, movements, and financial transactions alters how we should feel about democracy, governance, and technology.

If you are evil, or curious, or a nationalistic defender of state authority, you need to start studying software defined radio.

In contrast, I find radios which can only receive comforting and anachronistic. “Radio” still means to a lot of people, a machine to receive and interpret data sent by radio frequencies. GPS receivers and radio clocks are good examples.

Writing my first book

Nothing about my PhD so far has been easy. As long-time readers may recall, my first comprehensive exam was only passed after two attempts and a lot of effort. The strike was painful, and has made me particularly question the quality of undergraduate education that U of T provides, in terms of class and tutorial sizes, the selection of professors, and support for and integration of teaching assistants into the learning process. I am now edging toward a formal research proposal for departmental approval and ethics review.

I originally wrote a longer document which talked more about methodology and many other things, but my supervisor encouraged me to write something more concise with the essential features of the proposed research project.

The plan now is to make sure the short document is a plausible nucleus for a successful PhD, including through a presentation to a brown bag lunch at the U of T Environmental Governance Lab on October 27th; to incorporate what has been left out in the older longer proposal; and to seek departmental and ethical approval before beginning first round remote interviews.

My supervisor has intelligently cautioned me about seeking too many critiques of these documents – a factor which has complicated and delayed my efforts so far, and which may be drawn from my experience as a civil servant. I have also been warned by Peter Russell that I am starting to write my thesis in the form of the proposal. So no comments please, unless they are strictly limited and focused on the process for making this proposal viable.

Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion

This is a thoroughly intriguing development:

First Nations communities from Canada and the northern United States signed a treaty on Thursday to jointly fight proposals to build more pipelines to carry crude from Alberta’s oil sands, saying further development would damage the environment.

The treaty, signed in Montreal and Vancouver, came as the politics around pipelines have become increasingly sensitive in North America, with the U.S. Justice Department intervening last week to delay construction of a contentious pipeline in North Dakota.

The document itself calls “[t]he expansion of the Tar Sands… a truly monumental threat bearing down on all Indigenous Nations in Canada and beyond”.

The document identifies risks from pipeline spills, train derailments, and tanker accidents. On climate change, it identifies “effects that have already started to endanger our ways of life and which now threaten our very survival”. The document calls for signatories to “officially prohibit and to agree to collectively challenge and resist the use of our respective territories and coasts for the expansion of the production of Tar Sands, including for the transport of such expanded production, whether by pipeline, rail or tanker”

According to CBC News it has been signed by 50 aboriginal groups in North America, including the Standing Rock Sioux tribe which is resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline, as well as opponents of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline and Energy East.