International

Tuesday March 21, 2023

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday March 21, 2023

The UN just released a landmark climate-change report. Here’s the grim timeline it gives us

November 18, 2022

By 2030, scientists warn, countries such as Canada must slash carbon emissions by almost half to prevent that fifth-grader from living out her old age in a world with increased floods, fires, crop failures, forced migration and infectious disease outbreaks, and to zero by 2050.

That was the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Synthesis Report.

Climate change may have once felt like something you had to squint deep into the future to see. Monday’s report shows that the choices we make now will profoundly alter the planet today’s children live in.

“Let’s hope we make the right choices, because the ones we make now and in the next few years will reverberate around the world for hundreds, even thousands of years,” Hoesung Lee, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Monday.

Alongside new, near-term targets, the report also reaffirmed the goal of net zero emissions by 2050, a goal enshrined in the Paris Agreement. But on Monday, UN Secretary General António Guterres suggested wealthy countries such as Canada need to reach net zero even sooner — by 2040.

September 20, 2022

“This can be done,” Guterres said. “Some have already set a target as early as 2035.

“In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once,” Guterres said at a news conference for the report’s release.

Federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault affirmed the conclusions of the IPCC report Monday afternoon, but did not say Canada would move to a net-zero 2040 target.

“This is a new request from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obviously one that we will study very carefully in Canada,” Guilbeault said. “It’s one thing to simply say, well, you know, we want to reach this goal, but we have to give ourselves the means to get there. We do that now in Canada for 2050.”

August 13, 2021

While Guterres referenced a science fiction movie in his remarks, the solutions to this crisis are both well understood, already in use and, in some cases, almost embarrassingly simple. Protecting intact forests, wetlands and other natural ecosystems would have massive payoffs. Solar and wind power are already contributing energy to power grids, even in fossil-fuel-friendly places such as Texas. Bike-riding made the list.

The report is the world’s most comprehensive assessment of the current state of climate change. The last synthesis report came out in 2014, and acted as both a major impetus and the scientific underpinning for the historic Paris Agreement, when nearly all the world’s governments agreed to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. That goal is necessary to keep the world within 1.5 degrees of warming, a critical guardrail that, if overshot, will lead to increasingly destructive planetary outcomes, some irreversible.

The synthesis report released Monday concludes years of work by hundreds of scientists around the globe, and will set the stage for a different kind of momentous meeting later this year: a conference at which nations will assess their Paris commitment progress so far.

The actions pledged by nations so far are insufficient to keep the world within that guardrail, and would result in 2.8 degrees of warming by the end of the century, the UN’s initial assessment found. The world will gather again in Dubai starting in November to conclude that global “stocktake.” (The Toronto Star) 

From sketch to finish, see the current way Graeme completes an editorial cartoon using an iPencil, the Procreate app, and a couple of cheats on an iPad Pro …

 

Saturday March 4, 2023

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday March 4, 2023

Interest rates have skyrocketed. So why hasn’t the rate on your savings account budged?

As anyone with a mortgage can attest, the cost to borrow money has gotten a lot more expensive this year. Banks were swift to pass on the rate hikes the Bank of Canada implemented as part of its aggressive campaign to tame inflation.

May 2, 2020

Variable rate home loans routinely top five per cent right now, more than twice what they were a year ago.

But the same can’t be said of savings accounts, which are not paying out much more today than they were a year ago, when the Bank of Canada’s lending rate was 0.25 per cent — its lowest level on record.

Canada’s five biggest banks offer a basic savings account with a rate paying between 0.01 and 0.035 per cent at the moment. So, if you are saving $1,000 for a year, you could earn a grand total of 10 to 35 cents in interest.

Even their so-called high-interest savings accounts that come with minimum balances and other stipulations all pay less than two per cent on an annualized basis.

CBC News reached out to Royal Bank, TD Bank, CIBC, Scotiabank and the Bank of Montreal this week, asking for an explanation as to why savings account rates seem to be slow to rise while lending rates do not, and all the responses were versions of a similar theme: that their rates are based on a variety of funding costs, and while rates on savings accounts are competitive, customers can often get higher rates with products such as GICs that lock in their money for a longer term.

May 13, 2010

Natasha Macmillan, director of everyday banking with rate comparison website Ratehub.ca, says consumers are keenly aware of that gap between what’s happening to the rates on what they owe versus what they have to save.

“As soon as the Bank of Canada raises their interest rate, we see that being translated immediately on the borrowing side,” she told CBC News in an interview. “But it does take a little bit slower for it to be translated to the high-interest saving side — not quite as quickly [and] not quite at the same rate.”

Natasha Macmillan, director of everyday banking with rate comparison website Ratehub.ca, says consumers are keenly aware of that gap between what’s happening to the rates on what they owe versus what they have to save.

“As soon as the Bank of Canada raises their interest rate, we see that being translated immediately on the borrowing side,” she told CBC News in an interview. “But it does take a little bit slower for it to be translated to the high-interest saving side — not quite as quickly [and] not quite at the same rate.” 

That’s not happening today, and there are a few reasons why… (Continued: CBC) 

 

Friday March 3, 2023

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday March 3, 2023

Bused out of Quebec, francophone asylum seekers struggle to get medical services

Over the phone, the woman’s voice is regretful but hurried — she says she’s sorry, but if the French-speaking migrant on the other end of the line cannot find someone to translate English, the doctor won’t see him for the medical exam he needs in order to claim asylum in Canada.

March 24, 2022

CBC News obtained a recording of the phone conversation the man says took place Wednesday in Niagara Falls, Ont. 

“It’s not possible to speak with the doctor if you can’t speak English,” the woman tells him in French. “You have to find someone at your hotel to help you.” 

“I don’t know anyone here,” Guirlin — whose last name CBC News has agreed to withhold because of his precarious immigration status — replies.

Guirlin and his family are among the more than 5,500 asylum seekers who have been bused by Canada’s government from Quebec’s border with the U.S. to cities in Ontario, including Windsor, Cornwall and Niagara Falls. 

They are also among a number of those — mostly francophones from Haiti or countries in Africa — for whom the transfer happened against their wishes since they could not afford to find a place to stay immediately. Their plan all along was to live in Quebec.

February 17, 2023

Guirlin, his wife, who is six months pregnant, and their four-year-old son ended up in Niagara Falls on Feb. 14. Originally from Haiti, the family had been struggling to make ends meet in Brazil, when they decided to travel north through a dozen countries to make their way to Canada. 

When they arrived on Feb. 11 via Roxham Road, the popular irregular border crossing south of Montreal, they were asked by immigration officers where they planned to live in Canada.

“I said we want to stay in Montreal because I don’t speak English and my wife doesn’t either, and she needs to have medical appointments for the pregnancy,” Guirlin said in a phone interview Thursday. 

He says they were told in the following days there was no space for them in Montreal, and that they were being sent to Ontario. They boarded a bus with roughly 40 other asylum seekers from a number of other countries last Tuesday. For now, the government has put them up in a hotel. (CBC) 

 

Thursday March 2, 2023

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday March 2, 2023

Google is stealing from Canadian newspapers and advertisers

June 26, 2019

For 15 years, we’ve all been hearing a fake story about why newspapers around the world are dying. It goes like this — the internet killed the news, with old, slothful media companies being unwilling to adapt to new technology. The closer you look, the less sense this story makes. There are plenty of new media companies, everyone from the Huffington Post to BuzzFeed, digitally native firms with deep pockets and clever managers, who can generate huge amounts of web traffic, but aren’t able to sell the advertising to monetize it. And there is still advertising, lots of it. It’s just that the money for those ads isn’t going to the newspapers on whose sites they sit.

The real story of why newspapers are suffering can be found in an action in January by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, when the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, along with eight U.S. states, filed a suit to break up Google’s advertising business. According to American enforcers, the search giant has unlawfully engaged in “monopolizing multiple digital advertising technology products,” basically the software plumbing underneath most online advertising, and thus, the revenue that newspapers rely on. Google inflated its profits, redirecting advertising revenues from newspapers to itself.

June 12, 2019

It’s a complex story, but at the heart of it is what looks like theft. Most of us think of Google as a search engine, and it is. But Google has many other lines of business. This particular suit involves display ads on the open web, which are what you find on the Wall Street Journal or ESPN. These ads are bought and sold in an unusual manner. If a user goes to the site of a newspaper, unbeknownst to the consumer, a highly complex financial market kicks into gear. Newspapers no longer sell most of their advertising directly but have become integrated into a giant set of global auctions. In these auctions, advertisers bid for the right to place their ad not into a specific newspaper, but in front of a specific user. Money then changes hands, from the buyer of the ad to the publisher, with a set of middlemen each taking a cut. This happens in a split second, billions of times a day. At this point, online advertising is far bigger than the stock market in terms of the number of transactions.

Well, guess who runs the software to manage this financial market? Google. And guess who takes the lion’s share of the revenue? Google.

March 21, 2018

There’s a decade-plus-long backstory to this scheme. In the mid-2000s, Google transitioned from its role as a search engine into the main intermediary of all online advertising. In 2005, Google had a lot of advertisers that were buying its search ads. It also started to let smaller websites put strips of ads up and gave them a share of the revenue. Ad industry insiders at the time realized that advertising was transitioning from a Mad Men-style set of local, regional and national markets to an automated set of marketplaces.

Google’s strategy wasn’t to remain a search engine, but to expand and control all online advertising. But the firm had a problem. It couldn’t break into the market for the space on big established publisher sites, because that market was already controlled by another near-monopolist, DoubleClick. DoubleClick had 60 per cent market share in the software used by publishers to manage how they sell ads on their site, or what’s known as an ad server. So, Google’s then-CEO, Eric Schmidt, did what every good monopolist does when in a lax policy regime: he bought his rival — DoubleClick — in 2007. (Continued: The National Post) 

 

Thursday March 2, 2023

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday March 2, 2023

Trudeau slaps down questions about public inquiry into election meddling

February 25, 2023

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pushed back at questions Friday about calling a public inquiry into claims that Beijing interfered in Canada’s recent elections, telling reporters that the probes already underway are sufficient.

Trudeau is under pressure from his political opponents to launch an inquiry after media reports citing unnamed sources said the Chinese communist regime has co-opted some Canadian politicians. A Commons committee passed a motion Thursday in an attempt to compel the government to act.

Speaking to reporters at a child care announcement in Winnipeg, an animated Trudeau said his government has been seized with the issue of foreign interference for years and put in place a system to actively monitor meddling by China and other bad actors.

When asked why he won’t call an inquiry now, Trudeau said senior public servants working on the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol (CEIPP) already have reviewed the 2019 and 2021 campaigns and concluded that, while there was some Chinese interference, those actions did not compromise the final outcomes.

During the news conference, Trudeau appeared to be annoyed by reporters repeating questions about the calls for an inquiry.

February 20, 2021

Former senior public servant Morris Rosenberg released his review of the 2021 campaign earlier this week.

He found that the Government of Canada did not detect foreign interference that threatened Canada’s ability to hold free and fair elections in 2019 and 2021. He also offered a series of recommendations meant to prevent foreign interference in the future.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said the Rosenberg report isn’t credible because Rosenberg previously held a role with the Trudeau Foundation, a non-profit named for the prime minister’s father. That foundation also received a $200,000 donation from an individual with ties to China’s government — money that was returned this week.

Trudeau said Friday the public service picked Rosenberg for the job — and his government had no role in the appointment.

T

December 5, 2017

rudeau also pointed out that the House of Commons procedure and House affairs committee is also in the midst of its own probe and the top-secret National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), which was created by the Liberal government, is reviewing all of the intelligence about the 2021 vote.

“All of these processes are going on and demonstrate the seriousness with which this government and this country needs to take the question of foreign interference,” Trudeau said.

“Canadians can have confidence in our institutions, in our democracies and our ability to defend ourselves.” (CBC)