well, it's unfortunate, but he's right. canada is a five eyes nation. collection and storage of data has been going on here for decades. the reason our parliament doesn't have any control over it is that our parliament doesn't have any control over it.

harper thought he could get a political bump from this, which is why the opposition to it was so necessary. but it was really just a question of legislating existing practices. and, this is really just a political miscalculation.

we'd have to get at some dramatic reforms that are well beyond repealing c-51 to begin to address the situation. and, i'd suggest it's not even possible to withdraw from these treaties, given the reality of the telecommunications networks.

my own opinion is that it is naive to expect to connect to the network and not be monitored.

https://openmedia.ca/blog/pressprogress-conservative-candidate-c-51-civil-liberties-folks-thats-not-country-we-live

Georgie Gagnon
Can you please explain why our parliament doesn't have any control over Bill C51 again?

deathtokoalas
that's not quite what i said.

a part of the criticism of c-51 is that there is no parliamentary oversight over csis. now, csis is not a new organization. you don't think that it's just something that never crossed parliament's mind, do you?

apparently, the australian secret service never bothered to tell the prime minister that they had signed the ukusa agreement until nearly 1980 - nearly forty years after it was signed.

there's certain aspects of our intelligence networks that operate at a joint military level in strong co-ordination and direction from our allies and are excluded from parliamentary oversight on purpose.

canada has to ratify the deal first, remember. signing it doesn't take away the house's ability to reject it, although it may make it a little harder. and, we actually have several trade deals awaiting ratification.

it would obviously be nice if they give us a chance to read it beforehand. and, i think that's what harper would like to avoid. his optimal strategy is to sign the deal the day of the election, so that the details don't get leaked and the opposition parties get stuck with it.

if the ndp votes to ratify the document, it's going to be an instant cleavage of support. but, they've been signalling that they will. tossing that on mulcair's lap from the get-go and then forcing a quick election could hurt the ndp pretty terribly.

understand this: if the ndp get a minority, one of the first things they will need to do is ratify this agreement. that's an almost existential quandary, immediately facing them as their first decision. there's almost nothing they can do that won't fracture them.

ipolitics.ca/2015/09/23/canada-negotiating-tpp-as-if-theres-no-election-new-zealand-trade-minister/

lol.

i think we're going to like this climate compact about as much as we like nafta.

https://ipolitics.ca/2015/09/23/after-keystone-thumbs-down-clinton-proposes-continental-energy-pact/

listen. it's not a philosophical discussion. it's an empirical reality. ivr has a proven, successful track record of being accurate to the definition of what accurate means, in context. i'll give the panels some breathing room because it's still novel, but their track record to this point has been very poor. you can construct whatever rhetorical house of cards you want to describe how you think things ought to be, but the measure of how things actually are does not have to agree, and must take precedence. further, there is a good explanation: randomness is important.

the riding projections are really an expression of artistic freedom, based on a lot of very weak inferences. it's one thing to collect the data. it's another to really more or less make guesses on how it's being distributed. it's the exact wrong way to work if you're trying to build a model. you want specific, local data that builds - not broad, vague data that you have to guess how to categorize.

if you compare the leadnow polls to the riding polls, the thing that often comes up is that it can't predict swings that increase the vote share of the party that finished third in 2011. it will instead consistently increase the share of the second place party; the polling is telling us that this is too simplistic. the issue is probably simply ignored altogether in the algorithm. you could conceivably improve the model by adding in more complicated logic, but it's only likely to be a marginal improvement.

i can't be sure, but it seems to want to weight the data relative to only the last election. if it were to average out the last five elections (weighted) and fit it to the result, it would do a little more to find the center of gravity in the riding. that will probably be more predictive when you have sudden reversals of the previous election or several previous elections (as i think may be the case; we may be heading towards 2004 results, except with a weaker liberal party and a stronger ndp, as well as no bloc - or with the roles of the ndp and liberals reversed, but with liberals stronger than the ndp ever were in such a scenario), but won't help with unpredictable situations, which are unpredictable, of course. i think that this is likely the right way to weight the data in ontario, at least.

another option for this election specifically - i'm not claiming this will be true in general, or even often - may be to look at weighting the ontario data relative to the last provincial election. you'd have to promote such a thing as speculative, of course. but i think it may be illuminating both in finding methods that are more generally applicable and in predicting the outcome of this specific election.

http://ipolitics.ca/2015/09/23/strategic-voting-group-releases-new-riding-polls-but-hard-data-remains-elusive/

unlike the united states, where there are large areas with majority populations of black people that are descended from slavery, under 2% of canadians are of african ancestry, and essentially all of them are migrants to canada after the pearsonian system was set up. while some of these people may have had slave ancestors in the caribbean or other places, there is essentially no cultural legacy of slavery in canada. there are small communities of loyalists in nova scotia and alberta; that's about it.

canada of course helped a lot of blacks escape slavery, but almost all of them chose to move back to the united states.

the fact is that the number of black canadians coming out of a history of slavery is statistically insignificant. you couldn't even micro-target it. there's more hermaphrodites.

so, why would anybody think trudeau would be responding in the context of a culture he doesn't live in, and about a minority that does not exist in the country he's running for prime minister in?

i'm a leftist. but, i'm also a logician. and, i get into a lot of arguments with activists over this stuff. it's a theory that makes sense in the context of a society built on imported slaves that neither went through reparations nor even really dismantled the economic system of slavery (they just created a prison labour system and made up crimes for black people to break, and that continues today with the war on drugs). that's what it's meant to explain: social relations between the remnants of a small white slave-holding class and a large enslaved black population.

there's nothing of the sort in the history of canada. not with blacks. not with the indigenous groups, who we've treated very poorly but not in a comparable way; you'd have to start from the very first principles of the theory to build a parallel critical race theory on aboriginal peoples in canada, and it would look almost nothing like the critical race theory as it applies to blacks in the southern united states. the historical goal of the canadian state has been to assimilate the natives. the dominant policy has been to try and convert them into free farmers, on an equal footing with the white settlers. laws were passed to destroy their culture to get them to that end point; there was much resistance. but, it's been a process of "domesticating" them into what american society considers being free (and which they have historically certainly not considered free to mean), not anything remotely resembling chattel slavery. there's consequently not an entrenched hierarchical system of control and dominance that is a remnant of a legacy in slavery, because there was never any such system in the first. there was and remains forces that wish to assimilate the natives into western culture, and treat them with equality under the law - including equal levels of taxation.

some advocates of the thinking understand this, and try and be careful when they say things. but, it seems to be taught at the undergraduate level of university nowadays and picked up by people with very poor understandings of history, that want to think of it as a global universal that you can just plug into any system, anywhere with comparable levels of resulting insight. these are the frustrating ones.

but, the argument in this circumstance is too weak to even be a simple error in generalizing the specific. leftist activists also know that crt is widely used entirely disingenuously as a trump card to attack political opponents. so, you might have an organization that wants to save the trees, and various dominant personalities vying for control over that organization. it is routine occurrence nowadays for arguments to erupt accusing one another of abusing privilege, in order to create fracture points that will lead one personality to conquer the other. any ridiculous straw man will do.

that's really what you're seeing here: even the most naive and ignorant application of critical race theory could not be so specious, if coming from an adult. an undergraduate student, maybe, but that's not where the attack is coming from.

it's simply meant to proactively smear. and, while i may agree that trudeau's answer was a little simplistic, these dishonest and shifty tactics have coalesced into a clear pattern that needs to be rejected. we can argue about what trudeau said, sure. but, we need to drop the bullshit, first.

http://ipolitics.ca/2015/09/22/trudeau-defends-comments-made-during-womens-debate/