Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney.

I haven’t been following the debate over reforms to Canada’s refugee system with any particular closeness, but it’s encouraging to see Immigration Minister Jason Kenney at least attempting to do something about the issue. Any reasonable policy for processing refugee claimants would aim to balance two opposite risks: that genuine victims might be rebuffed and sent away to face persecution or worse, and that opportunists might slip through and succeed in taking up residence in Canada. Unfortunately, Canada’s system appears to have been designed by people who lay awake worrying that we might accidentally send away a deserving claimant, but didn’t much care how many undeserving ones made it through. As a result, the balance has been upset in spades.

The problem is a long-standing one, and is perfectly well-documented. Back in 1992, the Liberal politician and former Immigration Appeal Board member David Anderson called a newly constituted version of the board “a wretched monster that’s out of control”, and commented acidly that the rule of law was being “subverted” by acceptance of false claims. He also noted that Canada’s acceptance rate for refugee claims was 64% #8211; more than triple Britain’s, and more than nine times Australia’s. Since then our acceptance rate has dropped off to some extent, but remains relatively high. Data provided by the Canadian Council for Refugees imply a rate of 54.8% in 2008.

The real scandal, however, is that a negative decision does not necessarily lead to deportation. The Fraser Institute put it rather delicately in a 2004 study:

Even failed refugee applicants have a significant possibility of securing permanent residence and citizenship through various immigration categories. At the end of the process, relative to other countries, Canada’s effort to remove failed refugee applicants appears to have been given a low priority.

The Montreal Gazette was more precise:

We have a backlog of 60,000 claimants waiting for decisions. It now takes on average 19 months for a claimant to get a first hearing. When refugee status is not granted, final resolution of a case can take five years. Some 15,000 rejected claimants are #8220;awaiting removal#8221; from Canada. Another 38,000 have simply vanished. The average case costs taxpayers about $50,000 to resolve. It#8217;s a shambles.

Canada’s traditional refugee policy could almost be described as a non-policy: just show up, make a claim, and you’ll probably be able to stay, without the government’s having much of a meaningful say in the matter. The practical consequences of this situation are mixed. Canada is not exactly being flooded by spurious refugees: the annual number of claimants has varied from about 20,000 to about 44,000 over the past decade. However, surges of claimants from specific countries represent a perennial concern, and one that the government generally deals with by imposing a visa requirement on the country in question.  After all, the thinking presumably goes, they can’t claim asylum if they can’t get to Canada in the first place. It’s an extraordinarily passive-aggressive approach – in effect, we’re so dysfunctionally incapable of saying “no” to a refugee claimant that we go to great lengths to avoid being asked in the first place. And because foreign governments are understandably annoyed when Canada decides that their citizens need visas, our bilateral relationships suffer.

Against this background, Uncle Jason’s efforts to reform the refugee processing system have been laudable. The thrust of his original plan was to take the obvious steps of speeding up decisions and improving deportation enforcement. The general idea clearly enjoyed broad political support, but one detail – a plan to deny refugees from designated “safe” countries access to a new Refugee Appeal Division if their claims were rejected – aroused the ire of the opposition parties.

A compromise has now emerged, but in my opinion the politicians who dug in their heels over the safe country list were being little short of perfidious. It’s perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that some foreign countries protect their citizens at least as well as we protect ours, and accordingly that claims of asylum originating from those countries are likely to be unfounded. In fact, I would prefer a bill that went even further and did not permit claims arising from safe countries to be heard in Canada at all. While persecution can happen anywhere, many potential victims have ample recourse to their own governments, and it’s silly for Canada to try to take up slack that barely exists. Uncle Jason should be commended on a good start, but our refugee system still has some way to go before that vital sense of balance is restored. Meanwhile, it would be nice if the opposition parties would stop behaving as if the amiable little custom of admitting refugees were some kind of sacred duty or vital national interest.

Bob Rae in Israel. Photo taken from Rae#039;s official Flickr site.

While I’ve been amusing myself with the adventures of the “Freedom Flotilla”, important things have been happening in a part of the world much more important to Canadian interests at the moment, namely Afghanistan. The five-day visit to that country by members of the parliamentary commission on the Afghan mission is probably as good a place to start as any. The chair of the committee is Conservative MP Kevin Sorenson, but committee member Bob Rae seized the media spotlight in the wake of the visit by suggesting that it might be worth continuing the military aspect of the mission after our theoretical exit date in 2011:

#8220;We have an obligation to see this thing through,#8221; Rae said. #8220;The door is open to serious discussion in Canada — and between Canada and NATO — about what the future looks like.#8221;

It was left to the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson to ask the obvious question:

Just what is this “thing” that must be seen through? A military defeat of the Taliban and its allies? A peaceful, democratic Afghanistan? A regional settlement? A demonstrably rising standard of living? A diminution of the poppy trade?

Simpson is right on target here. The vagueness of the “thing” that must be accomplished has been the problem with NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan all along. Marching off to war without any real objectives beyond (somehow) helping the Afghan people and (somehow) finding and thrashing people who might want to hurt the West was always going to be a recipe for… well, not disaster, exactly, but certainly aimlessness and eventual disillusionment.

If Rae had an answer to the question of what “thing” he was talking about, I haven’t seen it reported. To be fair, Sorenson did provide a broad answer, saying that the Afghan police and military “are going to have to increase capacity if they’re going to be able to secure their own country, and Canada may have a role in that”. Committee member and NDP defence critic Jack Harris, however, had a different and somewhat more vague answer about “humanitarian concerns and institution-building concerns”. This kind of thing won’t, or at least shouldn’t, cut it with the Canadian public. If our soldiers are going to stay, it should be a for a clear, sensible, sharply defined purpose.

Harris also said that “Canadians do not want to see the sacrifice that has been made be for naught”, which opens up a whole other can of savage Afghan worms. Harris seems to be envisioning a tipping point beyond which it will become apparent that progress (however defined) in Afghanistan is not just substantial but actually irreversible, so that we can pull our troops out in the knowledge that their sacrifices won’t have been for naught. A major problem, of course, is that of recognising the tipping point.

Other recent developments in Afghanistan have implications for the future of the mission. More than 20 NATO soldiers have already been killed this week, including Sgt Martin Goudreault of the Edmonton-based 1 Combat Engineer Regiment. The most spectacular incident was probably the downing of a helicopter on Wednesday, which killed four Americans. Just today, a suicide bomber killed at least forty male guests at a wedding in Kandahar – the women were celebrating elsewhere – and the Taliban staged an ineffectual attack on the “peace jirga” that Hamid Karzai staged in Kabul in early June. It’s hard to say whether these latest examples of insurgent activity represent a continuation of the “spring offensive” I wrote about previously, but they certainly constitute a reminder of the Taliban’s determination to fight. Continuing the Afghan mission beyond 2011 will mean continuing to take casualties.

The dominant theme of the peace jirga seems to have been the possibility of reconciliation with the Taliban:

“My dear Taliban, you are welcome in your own soil. Do not hurt this country, and don’t destroy or kill yourselves,” Mr. Karzai said. “Make peace with me and there will be no need for foreigners here.”

It is particularly significant that Berhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan president and Tajik warlord who warned Terry Glavin back in February that rapprochement with the Taliban was fraught with danger for non-Pashtuns in Afghanistan, addressed the jirga and spoke about the need for peace. If even Rabbani is now in a conciliatory mood, then perhaps an agreement with elements of the Taliban is not far off. And if this leads Karzai to insist that the “need for foreigners” has passed, even as visions of an extended mission dance in the heads of Sorenson, Rae and Harris, Canada may be on a collision course with the very people our troops are supposedly in Afghanistan to help. On balance, I hope that Harper sticks to his guns regarding the planned end of the military mission in 2011.

Today wersquo;ve turned on PuSH support for the more than 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com. Therersquo;s nothing to configure, itrsquo;s working right now behind the scenes to help others keep up to date with your posts.

For those using the WordPress.org software we are releasing a new PuSH plugin: PuSHPress. This plugin differs from the current PuSH related plugins by including a built-in hub.

For more PuSH related reading check out the PubSubHubbub project site and Google Group. And if you really want to geek out therersquo;s always the PubSubHubbub Spec

Today WordPress.com was down for approximately 110 minutes, our worst downtime in four years. The outage affected 10.2 million blogs, including our VIPs, and appears to have deprived those blogs of about 5.5 million pageviews.

What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we havenrsquo;t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldnrsquo;t serve it.

What wersquo;re doing: We need to dig deeper and find out exactly what happened, why, and how to recover more gracefully next time and isolate problems like this so they donrsquo;t affect our other locations.

I will update this post as we find out more, and have a more concrete plan for the future.

I know this sucked for you guys as much as it did for us mdash; the entire team was on pins and needles trying to get your blogs back as soon as possible. I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.

Wersquo;ve said it before, and wersquo;ll probably say it again: attending a WordCamp is one of the most enjoyable ways to meet other WordPress users and learn new tricks that you can use on your site. There are a handful of WordCamps coming up in the next few months all over the world, including Atlanta, Boston, Toronto, Indonesia, Ireland, Greece, and Japan. For more information about these specific events, you can check out the post at WordPress.org or go to the WordCamp hub. Happiness Engineers from WordPress.com and other Automattic employees are often at WordCamps, so maybe wersquo;ll see you there!

Happy holidays from the WordPress.com Happiness Team! Wersquo;re working hard getting ready for the holidays and sheltering from the snow.

We will be closing support for one week in order to spend time with our families whilst trying not to overcook the turkey, coping with relatives, and staying sane.

Support will be unavailable from 2pm EST on December 24th to 5am EST on January 2nd.

If yoursquo;re stuck, we have some great documentation, videos, and of course the wonderful volunteers over in the forums.

We will, however, be around in the forums as usual in case of any problems or urgent questions. We will also be working on documentation and generally improving WordPress.com support over the break. Stay happy!

Before we get to the stats, I should mention that at the top of my thankful-for list this Thanksgiving was our growing group of Automatticians. These are the folks who bring you the awesome features and improvements that you see here every month.

Last month we launched geolocation for profiles and posts, introduced a new P2, opened up our new translation platform, GlotPress, and launched email subscriptions. We also announced proofreading support in the HTML editor, rolled out some improvements to rssCloud, launched a video contest, and had a Black Friday sale on our upgrades.

Now to the stats:

• 509,048 blogs were created.


• 6,380,052 posts were published.


• 483,127 new users joined.


• 7,245,509 file uploads.


• 4,728 gigabytes of new files.


• 865 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.


• 1,720,604 comments.


• 7,516,584 logins.


• 1,390,120,928 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,491,289,510 on self-hosted blogs (2,881,410,438 total across all WordPress blogs we track).


• 2,385,255 active blogs and 25,596,165 active posts, where “active” means they got a human visitor.


• 1,526,632,774 words.

More stuff:

There were more than 222 million unique visitors to WordPress.com in November, according to Quantcast.

The current top three languages on WordPress.com, excluding English, are Spanish (7.6%), Portuguese (4.6%), and Indonesian (4.5%).

We made speed improvements, UI enhancements, and added video library support to WordPress for BlackBerry.

WordCamp New York had a whopping 700+ attendees. Other WordCamps in November: WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp Victoria, and WordCamp Bangkok.

Upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp Peru and WordCamp Orlando.

Right now you can get 20% off on all upgrades purchased on the Upgrades page on your blog. This is our Black Friday sale and must end in 20 hours time!

You can get VideoPress for only $47.98, register a domain and map it for $11.98. Custom CSS costs $11.98 right now.

20% off everything, only for the next 20 hours. Check out the list of available upgrades to see whatrsquo;s on offer then visit your Dashboard and click ldquo;Upgradesrdquo;.

Earlier this week, we launched a WordPress.com Video Contest all about giving thanks. No matter where on Earth you are, we invited you to submit a 30-second video all about the things that bring you joy. And itrsquo;s still on!

The new deadline for submissions is midnight Pacific time (UTC-8) on December 4, giving you an extra week to show us your awesome vids.

Remember, the winner of the contest wins a Flip Mino HD video camera, plus a one-year subscription to VideoPress!

To submit your entry, just post your video to your blog with the tag ThanksgivingContest09.

As strong believers in open source technology, we were excited when Firefox started supporting the new HTML video tag this past summer. It has the potential to transform the future of online video.

While we are still working on adding full support for video tag, we are happy to announce that we have encoded all of our video inventories in Theora/Ogg format as well as the usual mp4 formats. VideoPress users are now able to access the Ogg file URL from within the Media Library, and the video can be played directly on browsers that  support HTML 5, such as Firefox 3.5 and Chrome. Watch this video in Firefox 3.5.

*You can embed HD-quality videos into your blog using VideoPress.

Sandbox 1.6.1 is now available to all WordPress.com blogs.

Alongside Sandbox 1.6.1 yoursquo;ll also find the older Sandbox versions. Wersquo;ve left them intact. If yoursquo;ve been using them, donrsquo;t worry, they havenrsquo;t changed. However, we do urge you to check out 1.6.1.

Sandbox is a skeleton theme for WordPress. Though you can use it by itself, it’s mainly intended for dressing up with a custom Custom CSS Stylesheet upgrade. Sandbox provides all the HTML markup, with a rich semantic structure, and all sorts of microformats and standards built in. You provide the stylesheet, which controls the appearance: layout, colors, fonts and so forth.

If you’re using an older version of Sandbox and are unsure whether Sandbox 1.6.1 is a good upgrade, or whether Sandbox 1.6.1 will work with your current custom stylesheet, here’s how you can try it out:

1. Visit Appearance/Themes then find Sandbox 1.6.1.


2. Click Preview.


3. If all looks good, activate the theme.

We hope you enjoy this great update to a very powerful and popular theme!

You publish a lot of quality content (trust us, we know). And so we understand that making it easily accessible to your faithful readers is very important for you as a blogger. Sure, our Categories, Tag Cloud, and Archives widgets do their parts, but wersquo;ve come up with an extra little something that you may care to use.

Enter our newest shortcode ndash; [archives].

This little guy will allow you to quickly and easily add a post index to anywhere on your blog (page, post, or text widget). Use the shortcode as is, and it will output a listing of all posts ever published on your blog. But itrsquo;s your show, so you get to decide what and how the shortcode generates your post index using a variety of options. Check out a number of examples of the shortcode being used here.

Ever want to see your weekly archives displayed in a drop-down menu? Now you can. Herersquo;s ours:

Enjoy!

You spend a lot of time creating great content and attracting an audience for your blog. What if you could use that influence to make a positive social impact? Now you can.

Wersquo;ve teamed up with SocialVibe, and now by adding the SocialVibe widget to your blog, you are able to earn donations for the charity of your choice by getting sponsored by a brand that appeals to you.

Each time someone visits your blog and engages with your brand (by rating a video, for example), you’re making a difference. That impact is immediately visible on your badge, i..e., ‘My blog has provided 63 cups of clean water for people in need.’

The money donated comes from your brand, so you and your readers never have to pay a dime.

In addition to earning donations, you’ll also get feedback from your charity about the difference they’re making thanks to you. By clicking the charity logo in the badge, you can find information about your cause and view real-time goal progress.

Setup is easy and only takes a few clicks – just go to Appearance-gt;Widgets in your dashboard, add the SocialVibe widget and pick a cause and a charity. For more details you can find documentation in our support area. If you change your mind about your sponsor or cause, you can easily make adjustments by visiting your widget dashboard.

If you are running a self-hosted WordPress blog, be sure to grab the SocialVibe plugin.

With SocialVibe, our community can pool our individual influences to create positive change in the world.

Sorry for this being the latest wrap-up ever.

May was a fun month for us. We rolled out a ton of new features: the ability to add YouTube videos and polls to comments, stats in your time zone, the VideoPress upgrade (with HD!), post by email, new stats charts, comment search, improved comment reply by email, and VideoPress.com.

May was also the month for our largest-ever WordCamp San Francisco. Mission Bay Conference Center was a packed house, but (amazingly) everything ran on schedule, and nothing went wrong! A round of applause is due to our sponsors, speakers, and everyone who attended for helping to make WordCamp such a smooth success. Thanks for making it all possible.

For post-event coverage of WordCamp, check out the updated site for WordCamp San Francisco 2009.

And now, the stats for May:

• 387,416 blogs were created.


• 411,704 new users joined.


• 5,504,742 file uploads.


• 3,333 gigabytes of new files.


• 826 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.


• 8,625,931 comments.


• 6,914,546 logins.


• 1,243,177,638 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,207,143,849 on self-hosted blogs (2,450,321,487 total across all WordPress blogs we track).


• 2,105,723 active blogs where ldquo;activerdquo; means they got a human visitor.


• 1,728,890,160 words.

Plus:

There were 12,123 post-by-email posts since the release of that feature on May 12.

Video uploads are on the rise after the release of the VideoPress upgrade: 5,587.

WordCamps in May: WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Richmond, WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, WordCamp Columbus, WordCamp Milan, WordCamp Ed CUNY, WordCamp San Francisco.

WordCamp San Francisco had 739 pre-event registrations (a huge jump from 427 last year), and 789 actual attendees from 32 countries mdash; plus 15 speakers, six sponsors, and lots of volunteers.

WordCamps in June: WordCamp Chicago, WordCamp RDU, WordCamp Brazil, WordCamp Dallas.

Health.com has launched the Ask the Natural Living Experts forum hosted on the new TalkPress VIP service.

In 1995, Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and five other activists were hung by the government after leading a campaign to protest Shellrsquo;s activities in the Niger Delta. Itrsquo;s a widely held view that Shell colluded in the executions, providing arms to the Abacha government and helping capture the activists. Shell denies all guilt, but yesterday paid the Ogoni people $15.5 million in an out-of-court settlement. The 15.5 million represents 0.005% of Shellrsquo;s 2008 profits, and two-thirds of it will go to pay legal fees (the rest will be used to support initiatives in education, agriculture and small business development). The upside is that it represents a precedent for action in American courts against corporations that commit human rights abroad ndash; the case was due to go to court in New York, under a law from 1789 called the Alien Tort Claims Act.

Canada rejected, fully or partially, more than half of the UN Human Rights Councilrsquo;s 68 recommendations, including recommendations that we sign the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, create a national anti-poverty strategy, and intervene in cases where Canadians face the death penalty overseas. I could only find CanWest coverage of the event (i.e. the same story in half a dozen different papers) and no full text of Canadian ambassador in Geneva Marius Griniusrsquo; explanation for this rejection, or documents on the UNrsquo;s Universal Periodic Review page for Canada yet, so all I know about it is what Stephen Edwards says in the National Post ndash; basically, that there are lots of members of the HRC (i.e. Russia, Algeria, Iran) with terrible human rights records themselves, so itrsquo;s not clear that the body is legitimate. Irsquo;m going to have to agree with Alex Neve of Amnesty International that this should be about the message, not the messengers. But wersquo;ll have to wait until therersquo;s more information available to really evaluate the governmentrsquo;s position. Assuming that they provide somehellip;

For now, check out the Canadian Human Rights Commissionrsquo;s page on Canadarsquo;s great historical reputation for Advancing Human Rights Institutions

Well, it’s that time of year again. Tomorrow I’ll board a train in Beijing and head perhaps 700 km west to Linhe, Inner Mongolia. From there I’ll drive, or rather be driven, north into the Gobi desert to spend the next couple of weeks searching for dinosaurs and other fossil vertebrates as part of a field crew of thirty-odd eager scientific prospectors.

I visited the same part of the Gobi last August, so I have an idea of what to expect. The landscape is dry and rocky, with patches of sand here and there, but there are no extensive dunescapes. There are isolated houses inhabited by local pastoralists, but as far as I know the nearest actual town is a good hour’s drive from our field area. This may not seem terribly remote by Canadian standards, but in comparison to eastern China the emptiness of the Gobi is striking.

Gobi desert, Inner Mongolia. Note lack of crowds.

Geographic comparisons between Canada and China are actually quite apt, since the two countries are very close in geographic area. According to Wikipedia, Canada occupies 9.98 million km² whereas mainland China occupies around 9.6 million. However, travelling through China always reminds me of how densely crowded their 9.6 million km² really are. Canada’s population is nearly 34 million, amounting to 3.2 hardy Canucks per km². China has a comparable number of people just in Shanxi Province, actually one of the less populous ones. The national figure is 1.3 billion, plus change – and the “change”, remember, is on the order of Canada’s entire population.

The difference in population leads to differences in attitude. I’m used to thinking of the relatively small number of Canadians as a limitation that constrains our economic and military power, and by extension our place in the world’s affairs. However, a couple of different Chinese friends have told me how lucky Canada is to have so many resources for so few people. Perhaps the grass is always greener on the other side of the Pacific.

As in Canada, China’s people are rather unevenly distributed. The south, east and centre are densely crowded, but the population thins out considerably along the northern fringe and in the great western expanses of Tibet and Xinjiang. The Gobi is far enough northwest to seem remote from the madding crowds of Beijing, and I’m sure I’ll feel refreshed when I return to the blog around the end of June.

Corwin

Wersquo;ve got two Yahoo! related news items today.

The first is that wersquo;ve launched a Yahoo! 360 importer (listed in your admin screens under Tools rarr; Import) to make migration from 360 to WordPress.com super easy. Just upload the Yahoo! 360 export ZIP file, and wersquo;ll do the rest. Yahoo! will be shutting down their 360 service soon, so if you have any friends over there feel free to give them a little help and encouragement to head over to WordPress.com

Second is the release of our WordPress.com QuickPress Yahoo! Application. You can post posts and read and moderate your most recent comments straight from My Yahoo!. (Note to any self-hosted WordPress.org folks out there: the app currently only works on WordPress.com. Wersquo;re working on making it .com/.org universal.)

Thanks to Yahoo! for their help with their Yahoo! Application Platform, and thanks to all of you for the best blogs on the intertubes.

If you need help with either of these new toys (or anything else), please contact our support team.

Dick Cheney, vice-president of the United States for eight long years, has recently re-surfaced to mount a vigorous defense of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”. In a speech he gave in late May, he insisted that classified documents show the techniques elicited information that disrupted terrorist plots. However, Cheney’s assertions drew a swift rebuttal from a US senator called Carl Levin, who said that he had seen the same documents and that they did not “connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of abusive techniques”. So whom do we believe?

The disagreement is part of a broader debate about the effectiveness of what could reasonably be called torture. One side asserts that torture is simply not a useful interrogation tool, usually arguing that the subject is likely to end up spouting incoherent lies in order to make the pain stop. Counterarguments exist: sifting truth from lies is part of an interrogator’s job, and some prisoners might conclude that the best way to make the pain stop is to steer clear of the latter.

The classified memos Cheney and Levin are talking about probably constitute some of the firmest evidence with a bearing on this question. Torture tends to be rather poorly documented, for obvious reasons. A notorious case is that of Paul Aussaresses, a retired French general who makes Cheney look positively bleeding-hearted. Assauresses cheerfully claimed in his memoirs that he obtained all manner of useful information by torturing Algerian insurgents during the 1950s, but tangible confirmation is lacking.

This matters to Canadians because of the insurgency in Afghanistan and the remote but ever-present possibility of serious terrorist activity on Canadian soil. Sooner or later, if it hasn’t happened already, our forces will capture someone who is determined to withhold information that could save Canadian lives. Hypothetical discussion of this scenario tends to revolve around whether torture can ever be ethical, but surely it’s equally important to know whether it will actually work.

Whether or not the secret American memos are declassified any time soon, it would be well worth applying our Canadian ingenuity to the problem. We could have skilled interrogators torture volunteers, who would be provided beforehand with specific information and given financial incentives to divulge as little as possible. The results might finally inject some firm empirical evidence into a long-standing discussion characterised by too many moralistic assertions and unsubstantiated anecdotes.

Corwin

My co-blogger CanWorldJon has a cynical (but not that cynical) take on the new US border requirements: perhaps they’re basically just a “cash grab for government and government-friendly companies like Nexus”. I have no trouble believing that this a big part of what’s going on, but on another level America’s decision to tighten up its borders is just a straightforward if arguably unnecessary security and sovereignty measure.

The threat of terrorism may be grossly exaggerated, but there really is a long-standing problem with drug-running and people smuggling from Canada to the US, and it stands to reason that requiring passports or other relatively secure forms of ID may cut down on this activity. Similarly, the new rules may reduce the numbers of guns, drugs and illegal cigarettes that cross the border in the opposite direction. Americans still won’t need a passport to get into Canada, but they’ll need one to return, so in practice border security should improve from our perspective as well.

It’s a modest benefit, perhaps, but the costs are modest too. Some people who have never needed a passport before will have to obtain one, and crossing the border will involve a bit more hassle. There will be some effect on cross-border tourism and trade, although it’s hard to say how much. However, many Canadians who decry “thickening” of the border appear to be thinking in terms that are more psychological than practical. After all, America is a close ally and trading partner, and supposedly a friend. How can the US government, especially under Saint Obama the Transformative, be so rude as to suddenly declare that Canadians are no longer welcome to traipse across the border with only bare proof of citizenship?

Jon linked to a Buffalo newspaper that mirrored this attitude by warning that Americans should now “think of Canada as a foreign country”. Well, better late than never, but surely the time for that was 1783, when the American Revolution ended. Canada and the United States have been separate countries ever since, and showing a passport when you visit another country is de rigueur except in cases of “pooled sovereignty” (ugh) such as the European Union. Besides which, a slightly thickened border and a larger number of people with passports can only lessen Canada’s unhealthy dependence on the United States and lead to greater engagement with the rest of the world.

Corwin

I had been planning to participate in the protest in honour of the visit of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton to Toronto last Friday. I even had an old pair of shoes ready for throwing. But then a fellow blogger let it be known that he had access to discounted tickets. Well then!

After I checked out the festivities and shooting some video across the street, I hooked up with my three companions for the afternoon (all lawyers, law students and/or bloggers), and we made our way through the airport-like security and into the hall.

The logistics were a disaster, BTW. We were told there would be food inside, but there wasnrsquo;t. It was supposed to start at 3:30 and indeed we did get a brief welcome speech at that time. And thenhellip; nothing. For nearly half an hour we were left sitting, wondering if perhaps some shoe-throwing incident had thrown off the schedule.

When things finally did get started again, and after suffering through another 10 minutes of introductory blather, Bill Clinton took the stage. He told a few jokes, talked about the extensive list of activities and organizations hersquo;s been involved with since leaving the presidency, and then turned the stage over to George Walker Bush.  Who also told jokes.

You would think it would be difficult to find nice things to say about Mr. Bush given his appalling record, but leave it to the cream of the Toronto corporatocracy to find something: AIDS relief in Africa. Thatrsquo;s it.

Needless to say, the word lsquo;torturersquo; was never mentioned once.

Further details of what was said can be found on my blog and that of one of my other blogging companions, but I came away from the experience knowing two things I didnrsquo;t know before:

1) Bill Clinton has devoted his ex-presidency to helping people around the world and helping the planet itself through his Foundation and initiatives like the C40 group of cities ndash; and he actively encourages others to find some way to make a difference and be of service. Bush is devoting his retirement to working on his ranch, building his Presidential Library and Policy Centre, and generally trying to salvage his legacy from ignominy.

2) Bill Clinton is heartily sorry that he didnrsquo;t step in in Rwanda.  So much so, he nearly broke down talking about it.

Bush isnrsquo;t sorry at all.  Not for anything.

So the new passport border requirements between Canada, Mexico and the United States come into effect tomorrow, which will require travelers to provide passport, enhanced drivers licenses (ie: pre-screened drivers) and those who pre-screening security verification from NEXUS. So is this merely a blip on the radar toward greater integration? Or part of a broader continental shift away from trade and travel liberalization? Maybe. Maybe not.

Already, Americans are being advised to, starting tomorrow, view Canada as a ldquo;foreign countryrdquo;. Of course, we were always a ldquo;foreign countryrdquo; technically. But, really, will the passport requirement offer any real security benefit, or is it just another way to cross-border commerce and travel? If we wanted to be cynical, we might even suggest this is just another quick cash grab for government and government-friendly companies like Nexus who provide cross-border verification services and ldquo;enhancedrdquo; drivers licenses for frequent border crossing.

But then, no need to be that cynical, right?

Clarity of vision is what distinguishes innovators from risk-takers. Meet Cory Doctorow, writer, digital rights activist and pioneer.

The Toronto-born science-fiction writer is the founder of the world’s most popular blog, Boing Boing, contributor to magazines ranging from Wired to Forbes , a founder of the Open Rights Group, a Fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, author of the first novel to be published under the Creative Commons license and achiever of accomplishments too numerous to mention. He has dropped out of more universities than you have attended, and yet was made a Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy and a visiting professor at University of Southern California, despite never having earned a degree.

As an artist, he has demonstrated an ability to prosper within a business model that utilizes free culture as a marketing and distribution strategy.

Digital Hippy or Visionary Businessman?

What was Doctorow thinking when he convinced his publisher to release Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for free distribution? ndash; That he was more threatened by obscurity than lost sales. He hypothesized that most of the people who would download the book would never have bought it, so no sales would be lost. Giving a digital version away would achieve large-scale distribution to a wider audience, some of whom would want to donate for a download or buy a hard copy; revenue gained. A few readers would treat the download as a replacement for purchase, equaling lost sales. So long as gains exceeded losses, he was ahead, and the gamble worked. This was no anomaly; Doctorow has made his other books available and earns a comfortable living, he claims because of this model.

Activism

Doctorow evangelizes the principles Creative Commons, and “Copyfights” to bring publishing industries in line with the way creative works are increasingly distributed in the digital era. He warns that application of copyright measures such as DRM restrict innovation, criminalize consumers, and impose laws intended for industry licensing onto private individuals.

He has spoken eloquently to audiences ranging from Google to publisherrsquo;s conventions about the inevitability of free information, and proposed a model where all Internet users would pay a small fee. ISPs would send as a flat-license to be distributed by a collection agency as royalties to artists an alternative to strict copyright enforcement.

You can hear his entertaining, illuminating and creative ideas in podcasts, videos and writings all over the web.

Just as Canadian healthcare has informed debates (or at least attack ads) in the U.S., it—along with European counterparts—is also purportedly informing South Africa’s proposed National Health Insurance, which would extend healthcare to all of South African’s citizens.

As the Treatment Action Campaign, a HIV/AIDS non-profit in the country, explains: “The objective of NHI is to address the inequities of the current healthcare system inherited from the apartheid era. The unfair distribution of resources that prioritises the lives of the rich over the lives of the poor remains today. While only 14% of South Africans are covered by private medical insurance, the private sector consumes roughly 60% of the 8.1% of GDP spent on health.”

Just as any increase in health care within the U.S. is met with accusations of “socialism,” scepticism and screaming red is also occurring in South Africa. But critics are also more concerned about the feasibility of the plan. Again, TAC states: “There are many concerns…with government’s ability to provide effective healthcare through NHI given the crisis of health systems in South Africa. The scale up of services under NHI may overburden and further weaken our crippled health system.”

Recently inaugurated president Jacob Zuma has promised that the National Executive Council of the African National Congress, the country’s ruling party, will look to outside models to help inform the construction and implementation of NHI. Canada’s system has been largely lauded within South Africa; although there are concerns about its feasibility as a model for such a different and complicated setting.

So let this post act as a brief reminder that despite the fact that the Canadian system is attacked by many of our neighbours-to-the-north, it is still considered a highly respected model in many other parts of the world.