No large political party has shown intention of electoral reform, and no large party ever will. The Liberals betrayed electoral reform. The BC NDP has abandoned efforts for PR. The Alberta NDP isn't going to do shit.

This is purely because electoral reform doesn't benefit large parties in a given election race.

So here's just a quick idea. What if a single issue group is made, that's independent of party lines with a single affirmation:

"I am person X, and I'm a member of party Y. I will not vote in the upcoming election unless my party promises to enact MMPR within 365 days of forming government. If they betray this promise, I will not vote in any given election until electoral reform is passed".

While I don't have data, I think that people irrespective of parties, AND non leading factions within political parties would like PR. Why?

People: Most people I've encountered, hate what their party does. The only way they vote is to keep the "worse guy" out. I've observed this in the Federal liberals, Alberta and BC NDPs and even the Alberta UCP. If we frame this correctly as "people vs politicians" instead of "party A vs party B", then there could be some non partisan momentum to this.

Politicians: As a politician in the current system, either you join the two largest political parties in a race, or you never win a seat. The Alberta NDP for example, is made up of quite a few politicians who ideally should've been Liberals or Greens. Same with the UCP, who should've been everything from Liberals, progressive conservatives to straight up separatists.

Splitting up into independent parties without fear of vote splitting gives more power to these politicians as well. I can't see why a politician would be against gaining more power.

Also, the movement doesn't even have to be THAT large to be a pain in the ass for political parties. Seats are won on razor thin margins. If even a single digit percentage of the electorate identifies as the "MMPR or we won't vote at all" bloc, then political parties are forced to address these demands if they have any desire to win.

It's Shopify's Tobi Lutke.

A reminder that he's behind Build Canada and Build Toronto, and that Build Toronto's Eric Lombardi is running for the Ontario Librral Party leadership as we speak.

Windscribe has told users its logging and privacy policies will not change under Canada's Bill C-22, as the surveillance bill heads to the Senate this autumn.

To no one’s surprise, women and girls are disproportionately targeted, making image-based abuse not just a technology issue but a gendered form of violence rooted in misogyny and power. In fact, in Laura Bates’ book “The New Age of Sexism”, she cites research that says that of the 96% of deepfakes that are non-consensual sexually explicit images, 99% of those depict women. In fact, most of the apps, bots and websites that will create deepfake explicit images don’t even work on pictures of men.

Deepfakes can be used to humiliate, silence, intimidate, or punish women for speaking publicly, participating online, or simply existing in digital spaces.

In the UK, women have reported being filmed by men wearing smart glasses while being approached in public spaces, with recordings subsequently uploaded to social media attracting sexualised and other gross comments. Similar “pickup” content has emerged in the US, where men have used smart glasses to record interactions with women in airports, gyms, and other public spaces, often turning those encounters into viral online content.

Last year, an Auckland man used the Ray-Ban Smart Glasses to covertly record a sex worker without her consent while she was naked. The recording was detected only because the woman noticed him activating the device (by touching the side of the glasses). He pleaded guilty to attempting to make an intimate visual recording, but was discharged without conviction - to the dismay of the brothel owner.

This is particularly concerning because wearable devices are designed to blend into everyday life. A child may not recognise that a pair of ordinary-looking sunglasses contains a camera. They may not realise they are being recorded, and will have little ability to control what happens to that image/footage afterwards.

Consent becomes much harder to meaningfully give or refuse when recording devices are hidden inside objects that look completely ordinary.

Too often, we're told that women and girls should simply be more careful, more alert, and more aware of their surroundings, remain vigilant, and constantly assess whether they are being recorded, instead of placing responsibility on those who design, deploy, and profit from technologies with foreseeable risks of misuse. The same is true for children and young people, who should not need levels of technological awareness beyond their developmental capacity simply to protect themselves from covert recording.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10376559

A Canadian national interning at NATO’s strategic military headquarters in Belgium has been arrested on charges of spying for a foreign power and participating in a criminal organisation, Belgian authorities announced on Saturday.

The suspect, an intern of Chinese origin based at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) near Mons, was formally served with an arrest warrant on 24 July, following a multi-agency security operation.

According to the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office, the suspect was initially flagged by SHAPE’s internal security team. The case was subsequently escalated to Belgium’s General Intelligence and Security Service (SGRS) and referred to federal prosecutors for a formal criminal investigation.

On 23 July officers from the Charleroi Federal Judicial Police carried out coordinated raids at the suspect’s residence and her office within the NATO facility. Specialised units, including the Computer Crime Unit and forensic teams from Charleroi and Mons, assisted in seizing potential digital and physical evidence.

An investigating judge at the Hainaut Court of First Instance ordered her detention the following day.

...

Archived

The Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador (AFNQL) has joined leaders of Indigenous communities in Alberta in defending treaty rights from a burgeoning separatism movement in that province.

Alberta’s premier, Danielle Smith, announced in May that the province would move forward with a non-binding referendum question relating to separating from Canada, even after an Alberta judge quashed a petition for a similar, albeit more direct, referendum, citing a failure to consult First Nations.

https://archive.ph/ljH4W

Several Canadian organizations and civil society leaders have pushed back against Canada-Ecuador free trade talks and warn that a deal will threaten the environment and worsen a human rights crisis in the South American country.

I'm starting this article not because of the title subject but what I consider alarming statements made by folks in the US about how the tech used here could be used for clandestine enrichment.

Best cast it's an attempt to dissuade other countries from adopting the CANDU reactor, or keep Canada buying enriched uranium from the states, and worse case it's further pretence for annexation.

"The only thing that inhibits Canada is the will to do it, the political decision to do it," said nuclear weapons expert Steve Fetter of the University of Maryland, who served as head of national security and international affairs in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

...

"All uranium-fuelled reactors produce plutonium. The issue with the CANDU is that it has online refuelling," explained Ed Lyman, director of nuclear safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. "You're refuelling continuously, which makes it harder for the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]."

...

"Of the countries that have made nuclear weapons with plutonium, many of them have used a heavy water reactor," he said.

...

Canada is also branching out into a new kind of technology that will require enriched uranium: the small modular reactor (SMR). Some of the proposed SMRs would use uranium enriched to a level as high as 20 per cent, known as high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).

...

"And so I worry about this push for advanced reactors, SMRs that use HALEU up near 20 per cent, like the ARC 100 in Canada, that the material itself is in the dangerous band. And if Canada were to pursue a whole fleet of SMRs using HALEU, and especially if they were to build their own enrichment plants to support that, that might give them a threshold capability for bombs, even if they never make highly enriched [over 20 per cent] uranium."

A Leger poll of 1,505 Canadians found 81% worry Al data centres will raise electricity bills and 79% fear environmental harm, while opinion is split on building them domestically for data sovereignty.

Archived link

Former prime minster Justin Trudeau infamously broke his promise to reform the electoral system. Trudeau’s own preference was for a type of majoritarian system called the Alternative Vote (AV) AKA Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). However, the House of Commons Special Committee on Electoral Reform established by his government went in a different direction: it ultimately recommended that the government design a system of proportional representation (PR) and vote on it through referendum.

Grossly, electoral systems are classified into majoritarian and proportional types. In addition to AV there are two other well-known majoritarian systems: FPTP and the two-round system (used in France). Trudeau rejected the recommendation to move away from a majoritarian system and has negatively characterized proportional representation in different ways. In this townhall exchange, Trudeau explains his opposition to PR. "If we were to make a change or risk a change that would augment individual voices — that would augment extremist voices and activist voices that don’t get to sit within a party that figures out what’s best for the whole future of the country, like the three existing parties do — I think we would be entering a period of instability and uncertainty."

...

Political stability, dissatisfaction with democracy, and political polarization are easiest to compare with simple data. With political stability, PR countries on average perform better. With democratic dissatisfaction, PR countries dramatically outperform majoritarian countries. On political polarization, PR countries outperform, with Ireland achieving the lowest polarization score in the whole OECD.

Further, when you examine the three comparison pairings listed above, the PR country performs better on each dimension for all three pairs. Trudeau feared that proportional systems would bring instability, polarization, and that voices which undermine what’s good for the country would be augmented, but it’s the majoritarian countries where these concerns are more severe.

...

Trudeau’s thesis was that these problematic outcomes should be happening in PR countries, not majoritarian ones. Given the observation we see, there is no basis to say that majoritarian electoral systems can minimize these concerns, there is simply no supporting evidence for this.

The idea that PR (at least the MMP and STV systems) would definitely lead to these outcomes is also not supported by the evidence. To be able claim that PR would cause extremism, or that majoritarian systems protect against, you would at least need to observe an association that suggests this possibility, but we do not observe any such association.

What we do have an association for is that MMP/STV are protective against democratic and social decay, while majoritarian countries inflame these issues, which is the opposite of what Trudeau believed. This does not mean causality, but it does make a causal relationship possible.

...

In proportional systems, coalitions tend to form, and different political parties sharing power helps alleviate the irrational decision-making of groupthink in a majority government. In addition, politicians must always be wary about losing their spot at the top because voters can easily select alternative parties without the inhibitions of vote splitting and vote wasting. In a proportional system, there is no shielding to give a false sense of security: politicians understand that if they are complacent, a disruptive political force can easily swallow them, so they must stay vigilant and proactive about emerging political issues to keep the public satisfied. In proportional systems, complacency and corruption can be easily punished by the electorate, which keeps politicians disciplined.

...