Municipalities demand elimination of white space from the Canadian flag

There's too much white space on the Canadian flag, charge municipalities and ethnic groups. They demand that the colours be changed to orange on a brown background. 

"What were they thinking in 1965 when this flag was adopted?" they ask. "Didn't they know white equals racist?"

Uh … no.  It seemed about as inoffensive and non-ideo-ethnically-divisive as a flag could be. It has a LEAF. Canada's full of LEAVES. 

Still, say those determined to be ideologically offended: "If there's a statue of that flag's designer (George Stanley) it needs to be knocked down. We will search the civic squares and parks where it may be lurking -- 'We shall fight it on the beaches, we shall fight it on the landing grounds, we shall fight it in the fields and in the streets …' "

Civil rights associations, however, advise that "caution" would be wise. Should there be a referendum? 

"No!" say anti-flaggists. "Referendums that include the whole voting public are artifacts of systemic colonialism smacking of systemic parliamentary f---g systemic democracy. We need to get past all that historical garbage."

The Society For Sane Thinking has issued a statement of disagreement. "Why adopt a background of orange and gloomy muddy brown on the flag?" they ask. "That seems to represent muddy thinking." Whereupon the rights groups charge that that just proves it.

Asked for their opinion, people in the street have varied reactions.

"Canada has a flag?" asks one.

"What a hue and cry about crying over a hue!" exclaims an exasperated senior.

"Canada Day should be a National Day of Pennant-Penance," suggests a morose skateboarder with dreadlocks.

Should George Stanley's statues be removed, if any exist, asks the journalist?

"Dunno," shrugs a teenager. "Is he the dude who made the Stanley Cup? Can't de-platform that."

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Vaccine Passports Turn the World Into a Series of Armed Camps

When the herd panics, a stampede results: a common scenario in the animal kingdom. Is it happening with COVID vaccination in Canada? It's hardly surprising that COVID has caused panic, but where will a stampede toward vaccination take us? “Safety” is the destination, but as the virus continues to mutate, safety from illness may elude us while safety from official coercion might disappear altogether.

Canada's Constitution protects Canadians' right to security of the person, which includes the right to control the substances inserted into one's bloodstream. In addition, provincial privacy laws offer some protection against having to reveal personal health information, such as whether one's been vaccinated or not. Are these legal defences strong enough to withstand intrusion on individual freedom of choice through COVID vaccination “passports”?

According to Health-Infobase, by early June 2021, 61% of Canadians had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Safety studies continue to flip-flop: is Astrazenica safe? As first dose? Second? Should second doses consist of a product different from the first? Should the time between doses be lengthened (or shortened)? Can the Pfizer vaccine be stored at warmer temperatures after all? What are the long-term effects of vaccines, how many people are experiencing the short-term effects, and how do they affect people differently with different genetic susceptibilities? It is hardly surprising if the “reasonable person”, defined in law as someone who exhibits “ordinary, reasonable and prudent” conduct and judgment, would decline to be part of a mass medical experiment. (1)

There are good reasons to get vaccinated and good reasons not to, such as pre-existing illness which precludes it. Obviously, then, it's a matter of personal choice, yet media and medical officials pressure citizens to persuade acquaintances to get vaccinated. Many people don't want non-vaccinated people anywhere near them, but when the right to be safe from infection conflicts with the right to access necessities like housing, education and groceries, a more refined policy around vaccination choice needs to be crafted.

The digitality of this passport control will be another intrusion on top of the intrusion of substances into the body. It will involve smartphones, or palm or facial recognition, which will create a pandemic of surveillance.

Facial recognition uses biometric software to map facial features and store them as a face-print. Corporations get this under our privacy defences with a promise of push-button “convenience”: Apple for instance uses it to let customers unlock their cell phones, and Amazon to facilitate easy customer payments. It has turned up in shopping malls where crowd-sourced face images could be passed on to police, in case someone non-vaccinated illegally turns up in the mall. We're not there yet, but the first Trojans are already spilling out of the horse.

Yuan Stevens, Policy Lead for the Cybersecure Policy Exchange at Ryerson University, tells us that “in Canada it is currently possible to collect and share facial images for identification purposes without consent, and without adequate legal procedures, including the right to challenge decisions made with this technology” (Stevens, Solomun: Facial recognition tech speeds up; privacy law lags | Ottawa Citizen). This might include decisions by government and business to exclude the non-vaccinated from resources and services; in other words to create an underclass, ostracized and having fewer rights than other Canadians enjoy.

Most of the hesitant are neither anti-vax fundamentalists nor anti-science. Rather, they find it ironic that intellectual property privacy for vaccine manufacturers is protected (they needn't reveal the ingredients in their vaccine), yet personal privacy for patients is not.

Hesitancy used to be considered rational. “Hesitant” means cautious. It means being scrupulous, a word derived from the Latin noun for pebble: “scrupulus”. Small points of hesitancy are like moral or practical pebbles on the path, grating and niggling. There are many pebbles on the road to mass inoculation, and those who notice them must, if the civil right to freedom of choice means anything, be allowed to hesitate and perhaps take a different route.

Vaccine-bullying in the workplace occurs in every country. A human resources firm in Australia, weighing the religious, personal and medical reasons for remaining non-vaccinated, warns that “mandatory vaccinations ... open up the risk of separating (non-vaccinated) employees from the rest of their colleagues, causing knock-on effects on their mental health and wellbeing”. (2)

Surveillance is itself bullying, but Canada's federal Privacy Act does not forbid it, and provincial privacy commissioners merely declared in May 2021 that forced disclosure of personal health information for vaccine certification “is an encroachment on civil liberties that should be taken only after careful consideration” -- a rather feeble response to such an egregious loss of a basic civil right.

While we longed for the return of indoor restaurants and hockey games, a darker legacy of COVID rolled out beneath our radar. The Public Health Agency of Canada working with other G7 countries will now demand digital proof of COVID vaccination which Canadians will need in order to travel. The data management platform being designed uses smartphones, opening the door to general tracking of individuals' movements within our country and across international borders. Everyone will be forced to own a smartphone -- a herding device (conveniently for the communications companies which charge higher smartphone rates in Canada than anywhere else in the world). The planet will become a series of digitally guarded camps. Entering and exiting them will be exactly like entering and exiting maximum security prisons, as managed in Canada today.

This is not the result of the pandemic. The world has always had pandemics, lock-downs, guarded borders and No Entry zones, but the turning of the whole world into a series of armed camps is a result of advances in the surveillance cyber-technology which make it possible. Anonymity will henceforth not be possible, and privacy a quaint notion from the past.

Karen Eltis, Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa (and past director of the University of Ottawa Human Rights Centre), sounds more alarmed about this than do the privacy commissioners. She warns against policy makers' attitude that ‘this is about life and death, forget about privacy’.” It’s not only about privacy, she says, “it’s about democratic governance ...” (Privacy concerns complicate vaccine passports - iPolitics)

After the recent theft of patient information from Life Labs in BC and Ontario, fifteen million patients’ electronic health records were exposed. Michael McEvoy, Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC, adds that “these kind of attacks ... are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Even if an organization does everything right, there is no guarantee that they will not fall victim to a cyberattack.”

Canadians learned how smartphones track our physical location as well as our data trail, when the controversial “smart city” deal between Toronto and Google-owned Sidewalk Labs collapsed partly due to fears about civic surveillance. Vaccination certification has the same “huge data-mining potential of an app whose use would create many otherwise unobtainable very large data sets … An amazing gold mine for data extractivism”, warns Mariana Valverde in What have we learned from the Sidewalk Labs saga? Smart city plans in Toronto | Centre for Free Expression (ryerson.ca).

We will never fully banish corona-virus, but a virulent epidemic of privacy invasion could be controlled, if we had the will. We need the legal equivalent of a privacy plexi-glass shield. Which agency though is actively protecting the public against vaccine dictatorship and policies that wipe out privacy faster than you can say “extractivism”? Provincial ombudsperson offices are wobbly. Although BC's Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry continually urges the public to get vaccinated, she also comes out clearly against the imposition of internal vaccination certification, citing its potential to create inequities which will do more harm than good. In this she is stauncher than is the provincial ombuds-office, which only recommends “guidance” for governments. Even Dr. Henry's doubts about the wisdom of certification however will be overwhelmed by the pressure of international travel certification, which will bleed into the national realm from the international one.

The Angus Reid Institute reports that as of May 17, 2021 only about 10% of Canadians definitely refuse the vaccine, although more in some provinces and more if the vaccine is Astrazeneca. Will the 10 to 24% who refuse, be denied a “passport” to access the full benefits of Canadian citizenship?

To date, 79% of Canadians support the use of vaccine passports for international travel, but 41% oppose them for accessing public places. Clearly, if 59% still don't oppose them at home, the non-vaccinated have work to do to protect themselves against loss of privileges and privacy (words, let it be noted, with a common root). Among public officials they have few allies to work with. We lack a “Private Lives Matter” movement. Even the Canadian Civil Liberties Association only goes so far as to say “serious consideration on ethical, moral, social, health, and legal grounds needs to be given before moving forward” with certification.

We know that free speech, security of the person, and privacy rights are the three pillars that hold up a democracy. We should not be stampeded by emergency thinking into consenting to give up any of them. In the wake of vaccine passport pressure, one legacy of COVID could be a resolve to strengthen our civil liberty and privacy organizations -- if it's not already too late.

1 The Reasonable Person (lawnow.org)

2 Will workplace bullying rise as a result of COVID-19 vaccines? | HRD Asia (hcamag.com)

3 Canada’s privacy commissioners issue guidance as country mulls COVID-19 vaccine passports - National | Globalnews.ca

4 FAQ: Vaccine Passports – CCLA

5 Office of the Ombudsperson | Province of British Columbia (bcombudsperson.ca)

6 FAQ: Vaccine Passports – CCLA

Happy Canada Day - let's celebrate Systemic Beavering

US News and World Report, in its “Best Countries Report” for 2021, ranks Canada number one for “quality of life, social purpose, good job market”, being corruption-free and “caring about human rights and social justice”. (The Report is based on a survey of 20,000 global citizens.) Some may question lining countries up in a popularity contest, yet comparisons do focus minds on what a country's characteristic are. For Canadians, this report gives us a moment not to be ruled by resentments and obsession with the negative.

Of course, one salient Canadian characteristic is our apology addiction. We insist on apologizing because we have a top-rated country, seemingly embarrassed at our very successes. Is our latest version of being “committed to social justice” a need to encourage minority groups to criticize and complain? Does “Pride” month in Canada take pride in self-abasement? 

Commentators have got into the irritating habit of adding “systemic” to every noun, such as the noun “racism”. The rest of the world doesn't consider Canada racist. (Maybe they've looked at our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which most Canadians seem not to have.)

That the Constitution forbids racism doesn't mean everybody actually likes everybody else. Liking and hating are emotions, and you can't legislate emotion. People feel what they feel; we can only demand that rights be equal and speech non-hurtful, which Canada attempts through robust anti-hate-speech laws. Of course, many people don't mind seeing white people spoken of hurtfully – even most of the white people. Even having built from our founding colonies the nation deemed most civilized in the world, they accept “anti-colonialism” barbs, but maybe this suggests moral advantage: you can absorb insult when you feel relatively unassailable.

We already know we have the grandest landscapes, longest coastline, biggest lakes and rivers, most fertile prairies on Earth. We have exciting wildlife, theatrical weather. We fall down though in taking care of the environment, conservation-wise, and we aren't as humane as we should be about animal welfare. But to fellow humans ... well: stop complaining, humans! Get out on Canada Day and celebrate your good fortune in living here.

Historically we've been “systemic” in the ways that count: easy-going, fair-minded, hardy and self-sufficient, a nation of strong women, hard workers, caring parents. Our ancestors dealt with hardship without demanding all manner of mental-health disability handouts. But we don't begrudge help now to the growing percentage of the population that does want it – that's part of the Canadian way, the way of tolerance.

The capital city of my province however, finds the whole country guilty of ... something. Something “colonial”. Boycott Canada Day, demands City Council! Most Canadians won't, however. We're too much like our national animal, the beaver: carrying on regardless. It's interesting that the beaver is our symbol. In a world of nations that adopt bears, wolves and eagles, totems of predatory violence, we chose the beaver, an inventive, hard-working, home-building river-shaping creature that works in teams. The houses beavers build out of branches they harvest are architecturally elaborate, meant for family life. They even have baby-beaver play rooms. Beavers keep their offspring safe, and each generation learns from the one before. They live in colonies (sorry!) and ecologists are realizing that it's beavers that have kept our native woods alive and our water table high enough for agriculture, through their river-damming industriousness.

Yes, there's a definite fellow-feeling between Canadians and Castor canadensis. From Castor we've learned Systemic Beavering. Beavers like peace and social order, they like to live-and-let-live and get on with whatever role in the community is theirs. Probably, if another beaver gets too aggressively critical, they just swim away. A good idea, on Canada Day. Let's systemically celebrate that.

Will the legacy of COVID be mental illness, or mental health?

We're constantly being warned that the pandemic and its lock-downs might have spread a secondary virus: mental illness. A contingent of the polled public reports an experience of depression. Are they depressed at having been locked-down, or at the threat of having to come back out? The media know that keeping the viewer engaged requires the right mixture of fear and hope. We hope for “building back better” and “finding the new normal” and “the light at the end of the tunnel” (if you hope for the end of cliches, forget it). Now, we're told also to fear the emotional wreckage the pandemic is said to be leaving behind.

Might it have left emotional gains, though? Maybe these feared mental illness syndromes are examples of adaptive strength, and one person's mental illness is another person's mental health.

Hoarding: we're hoarding new-found privacy and space – some folks won't throw those away with the great “re-opening”. We'll hang on to having time to think, time to ourselves.

Agoraphobia: we might wish to continue avoiding crowds, predatory huggers, the misery of public transport (which never was hygienic). We're like groundhogs who poke their noses out at the first hint of spring and then hustle back into their burrow if they don't like the look of things. What's so bad about hibernation?

Isolation: is this another word for self-regulating self-sufficiency? Embrace your inner hermit.

Obsessive compulsive disorder: if we practise orderliness and non-forgetfulness, is that bad? Asking yourself, is my mask in my pocket? Is my extra mask in my pocket? Have I turned off the lights and stove? (Since you've been working from home the electricity bill has soared. Who wouldn't check?)

Hand-washing: remember when that was the hallmark of OCD? Now it's a legal requirement.

Missing contact with relatives: come on -- you used to dread seeing half of them.

Walking in nature, being with pets, reading many books, doing yoga and crossword puzzles ... are such new habits unhealthy? Is habit itself obsessive and inhibiting? No: humans develop habits instinctively; if we resist one, another will take its place. So choose them wisely. If someone calls that obsessive, fine: obsess away.

One day we'll look back on the pandemic with nostalgia, like people look back at World War II with its shortages and its “making do” inventiveness, and being “all in it together”. We might look back nostalgically at all-staying-apart – with its possibilities for peace and privacy. In fact, for some people the whole thing has been a holiday from the stress of what we called ordinary life.

Maybe “opening up” at the end of COVID is what will drive us mad.

Peace and space

Joining the #I-also Movement

Did #youtoo feel insulted by some man, criticized, sexually appraised? Someone failed to appreciate you or flirted with you or, failing to appreciate, didn't flirt with you? Behaved ambiguously?

 

You too felt passed over for a promotion? #metoo, echoed women up and down the land. 

The "war between the sexes" is an ancient trope. When was it not going on? (Where would literature, poetry, novels, opera be without it?) 

Sure, people have a right to rights: to inclusion, non-racialism, non-binary-ism, different-ablism, mental health support, freedom of choice …

#Ialso (speaking from the subject rather the object-pronoun stance) know that freedom is practice, not theory,

that ideological thought-control only takes away rights, never preserves them

that "diversity" can only come from diversity of thought, freedom of opinion, freedom to speak without "correctness"

that mental health means mental hardiness and resilience, not permanent adolescence

that some parts of Canadian society exhibit a phenomenon of sub-adultism, dependency, of privilege-envy, a "that's no fair" whine of endless childhood

that individuals are no longer seen as choice-making agents, but as "people experiencing" things, rather than people choosing them -- as if they are experiencing addiction, poverty or homelessness because these things hunted them down

that these observations are not popular, although (and because) they are part of Canadian nation-building heritage familiar to earlier generations

Excellence, Elitism, and Olympian Ideas

 We're in an Olympics year (although apparently still uncertain about whether the games will go ahead), which is a good moment to reflect on rainbows, excellence and victory. 

The co-founder of the current Games (1913), Pierre de Coubertin, created the five-circle logo. He used six colours, an early example of the rainbow symbolism later adopted by the Pride and then "diversity" movements. He had something to say about pride and perfection in his founding Olympic principles.

One principle on which Coubertin based Olympism is instructive: referring to the gold-winning champions in sport he described them as an elite "whose origins are egalitarian". What made them the elite? They accomplished the best score, as measured. And they did so from an egalitarian base (later known as equal opportunity). We could do worse than to hang on to those notions, and stop fearing excellence as "elitist". Of course it is. "Elite" by definition means best. And if you're going to have a thing, why not choose the best of it? Sounds like a winning idea.

The circle is itself symbolic of course, and recalls the Renaissance artist Giotto's view that it is the most perfect shape in art -- and the hardest to draw. Let's be circumspect about throwing out ideas from the past. What goes around comes around, history goes in cycles and old ideas may be be judged wise again, in their next circuit around the track.

Handing Over the Future

 It's handy for those in the digital and software industries, but bad news for physical fitness: children's hands don't work like they used to. Like the rest of their bodies in our online virtual world, hands don't get much exercise. They are atrophying, which  causes the newly-identified Hand Fatigue Syndrome.

"Kids' fingers are reverting to the tree-grasping claws of our early pre-human ancestors," warn experts.

Since learning-at-home took over during the COVID pandemic, kids spend even more time online than they did in classrooms, observers note. "We're seeing a new epidemic of hand dysfunction."

Physiotherapists are worried. "I have clients who can't even hold a pen, let alone write with one."

But, "who needs handwriting?" ask educators. "Penmanship is an elitist colonialist concept."

Kids' hands might soon be able only to peck keyboards, not pick up objects. No grasping a ball, let alone throwing one. No turning a door handle, since most doors have auto-openers one need only press. Tapping on digital devices, only the index finger gets a work-out today. 

Fingertips have become insensitive, feeling only smooth plastic surfaces. The brain isn't being fed other sensory information, and brain regions to do with touch, texture and dexterity are shrinking. We are becoming less dexterous (right-handed) and increasingly sinister (left-handed) in our manipulations. 

The word "digital" comes from "digit" which means finger. Fingertips used to be the body's "eyes" on the tactile world, but they are going blind. We live in a push-button world. 

When polled, five out of ten teens reported that physically turning the pages of a book is challenging. "Where's the swipe function?" they ask.

"Finger joints no longer get a work-out, which impacts wrist joints which also have less to do in the smartphone-pecking lifestyle," warn physiotherapists. 

Software developers scoff at concerns. "None of that matters," they declare, "because soon we'll have robots performing most tasks. Artificial intelligence is the future, body-based intelligence an artifact of the dark pre-tech past." 

"Plus, the playing field will be levelled between disabled and abled when everything is done by robots anyway," point out delighted disability advocates. 

Hand-eye coordination will be a quaint notion from our ape-ancestry days, as will the notion of a 'playing field' itself; there will be only online play. No fields. No baseball-catching, no frisbee throwing, no berry-picking in meadows. "We're working on playing on screens by thought alone," enthuse new software developers. 

"It'll come, once we get the right electrodes implanted in the brain. Never mind hands, we'll hardly need bodies at all.