disaster

Friday November 4, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday November 4, 2022

Virus’, a summons, strike, and notwithstanding: A bad week for Doug Ford

August 3, 2022

Some of the largest pediatric hospitals across the country are being overwhelmed by an unprecedented surge in sick children, forcing them to keep families waiting for hours in emergency departments, cancel surgeries and transfer some teens to adult facilities.

An unusually early upswing in respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections is partly to blame. But other problems – including the inability of many families to find primary care providers and a shortage of over-the-counter fever and pain medication for infants and children – are adding to the crisis.

With emergency rooms seeing far more seriously ill children than normal and pediatric in-patient and intensive-care units at or near capacity, doctors say they are unsure how the health care system will cope when cold and flu season hits its peak in the next few months. (The Globe & Mail) 

June 16, 2021

Meanwhile, Ontario has now passed legislation making it illegal for 55,000 education workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees to strike and imposing a contract on them.

The workers are expected to walk off the job Friday after mediation between the Ontario government and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) failed to reach a deal. There’s no word on when the job action will end. School boards are advising parents to make alternative child-care plans into next week.

Education Minister Stephen Lecce said the government had no choice but to proceed with its legislation, which includes the notwithstanding clause that allows the legislature to override parts of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for a five-year term.

November 2, 2022

“For the sake of Ontario’s two million students, to keep classrooms open, CUPE has left us with no choice but to pass the Keeping Kids in Class Act,” he said.

“It is my hope and expectation that they will show up tomorrow for our kids,” said Lecce, saying the union would not rescind its intent to strike when the two parties went back to the bargaining table. 

Bill 28 will make strike action illegal, though the CUPE has said workers will walk off the job Friday regardless. Early childhood educators, educational assistants and custodians are among those taking part in the strike.

Premier Doug Ford, who was not present during the final vote on Bill 28, said Thursday that the union left him with “no choice” but to introduce Bill 28. He said students have already suffered through two years of pandemic disruptions, and the government will use every tool at its disposal to ensure kids stay in class full-time. (CBC News) 

October 27, 2022

Ontario government lawyers argued Tuesday there would be “irreparable harm” to the rule of law if Premier Doug Ford and a top minister were compelled to testify at a federal inquiry after citing parliamentary privilege in trying to avoid doing so.

But lawyers for the Public Order Emergency Commissioner, which is overseeing the inquiry, argued evidence of that harm was “speculative” at best.

The arguments were made in Federal Court as Ford and then-solicitor general Sylvia Jones look to quash a summons for them to appear at the inquiry examining the the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act to end the so-called Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa and Windsor, Ont., last winter.

February 16, 2022

Both Ford and Jones have argued through their lawyers that they’re immune to testifying after invoking parliamentary privilege, a centuries-old privilege enshrined in the constitution that is granted to sitting politicians.

Parliamentary privilege is what protects the separation of court, the Crown and the legislature in the proper functioning of a constitutional system, said Susan Keenan, a lawyer for the province.

Justice Simon Fothergill said both Ford and Jones have “relevant” testimony to give and that the harm to them, practically speaking, is “not all that serious, just two people testifying.”

He noted that parliamentary privilege resulting in immunity to being summoned to a criminal or civil court is a long-standing privilege. But Fothergill said this case will turn on whether he finds that privilege applies to public inquiries.

The judge said he’ll have a decision by Nov. 8, two days before Ford and Jones are schedule to testify at the inquiry. (Global News) 

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 … These sped up clips are posted to encourage others to be creative, to take advantage of the technology many of us already have and to use it to produce satire. Comfort the afflicted. Afflict the comforted.

 

 

Tuesday November 1, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday November 1, 2022

U.S. Headlines Expressing Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Sadness Increased Hugely Since 2000

About 42 percent of Americans now actively avoid news coverage, according to the Reuters Institute’s 2022 Digital News Report. That’s up from 38 percent in 2017. Nearly half of Americans who’ve turned away from the news say that they are doing so because it has a negative effect on their mood. As it happens, a new study in the journal PLoS One tracking the headlines in 47 publications popular in the United States reports that they have trended decidedly negative over the past two decades. 

Coincidence?

June 12, 2019

In their study, the team of New Zealand-based media researchers used a language model trained to categorize as positive or negative the sentiments of 23 million headlines between 2000 and 2019. In addition, the model was finetuned to identify Ekman’s six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise), plus neutral, to label the headlines automatically. Using the 2019 Allsides Media Bias Chart, the publications were ideologically categorized as left, right, or center. For example, The New Yorker, the New York Times Opinion, and Mother Jones were identified as left; National Review, Fox News Opinion, and The New York Post as right; and A.P., Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal as center. (Reason was pegged as right-leaning.)

After turning their language model loose on the millions of headlines, the researchers found “an increase of sentiment negativity in headlines across written news media since the year 2000.”

June 5, 2012

Overall, the researchers find that the prevalence of headlines denoting anger since the year 2000 increased by 104 percent. The prevalence of headlines denoting fear rose 150 percent; disgust by 29 percent; and sadness by 54 percent. The joy emotional category had its up and downs, rising until 2010 and falling after that. Headlines denoting neutral emotion declined by 30 percent since the year 2000. Breaking these down by ideology, headlines from right-leaning news media have been, on average, consistently more negative than headlines from left-leaning outlets.

Why are negative headlines becoming more prevalent? “If it bleeds, it leads” is a hoary journalistic aphorism summarizing the well-known fact that dramatic, even gory, stories engage the attention of news consumers. In other words, journalists are supplying news consumers with what they want. Given the global reach of modern news media, there is always some attention-grabbing horror that occurred somewhere that can be highlighted between weather and sports on your local TV news.

November 4, 2020

Journalistic catering to people’s negativity bias ends up misleading a lot of their audiences into thinking that the state of the world is getting worse and worse. However, looking at long term trends, the opposite is the case. Yes, yes, there are wars in Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Yemen and, of course, a global pandemic during the past two years has killed around 6.5 million people so far. “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell, and become huffy and scornful when some idiotic optimist intrudes on their pleasure,” wrote economist Deidre McCloskey. “Yet pessimism has consistently been a poor guide to the modern economic world.” (Continued: Reason) 

 

Thursday October 6, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday October 6, 2022

The military can’t be the first line of defence in domestic disasters, MPs told

Whatever the crisis of the moment happens to be, the military is supposed to be the force of last resort.

March 23, 2022

Increasingly, though, that word “last” is being replaced by “first” — and sometimes “only.”

A former top national security adviser warned a parliamentary committee on Tuesday that successive federal governments have relied too much on the military to handle crises at home.

Richard Fadden’s remarks were met with some nods of agreement around the table — and a slight wince from a representative from one the provinces that has been in the uncomfortable position of having to call for military-backed relief.

Having served both Liberal and Conservative governments as the prime minister’s security adviser, deputy minister of defence and head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Fadden assured MPs on the House of Commons defence committee that his comments were not partisan.

January 12, 2022

He said domestic emergency operations — such as cleaning up after storms and fighting forest fires — distract the military from the training it needs in an increasingly unstable world — a point the Conservatives have been hammering away on since the committee launched its study.

That doesn’t mean the Armed Forces should stay away when Canadians are struck by tragedies like post-tropical storm Fiona, Fadden said.

The problem, he added, is that in recent years the federal government has acted as if the military is the only tool it can turn to in a disaster.

“It is becoming too easy for prime ministers — not in particular this one, but prime ministers generally — to simply say, ‘I’m going to send in the army,'” Fadden told the four-party committee, which is studying the military’s domestic emergency preparedness.

“And we do this without talking to the provinces, municipalities and civil society about what they could and should do.”

May 27, 2020

Fadden argued that the problem cannot be examined with a narrow focus on military response. He called on the federal government to undertake a thorough, independent review of all emergency response capacity across the country, both federal and provincial.

Last week, a senior military commander told the committee that the number of requests for assistance the Armed Forces receives from provinces has ramped up rapidly over the past decade.

Maj.-Gen. Paul Prevost testified that in 2021, there were seven such requests for a military response to provincial emergencies — floods, forest fires and other natural disasters. The period between 2017 and 2021 saw an average of four such requests per year. From 2010 to 2017, the average was two per year.

Those numbers do not include the 118 calls for assistance the military answered during the pandemic by, for example, backstopping exhausted health care staff in long-term care homes in Ontario and Quebec. 

February 9, 2016

“We probably in this country, right now, don’t have another tool.” Fadden said. 

“I think this is really problematic for a sophisticated, complex government like the Government of Canada today, when a disaster occurs … if a prime minister only has one tool.”

The idea of a dedicated force within the military tasked with responding to natural disasters has been floated frequently since Fiona hit the East Coast. Gen. Wayne Eyre, Canada’s top military commander, has said such a force would require more military capacity.

It’s also a bad idea, said Fadden.

“Asking the Canadian Forces, for example, to run a railway would be a mistake. Asking the Canadian Forces to become overly involved in disaster assistance, in my view, is also a mistake,” he said. (CBC) 

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 …

 

Friday September 2, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday September 2, 2022

Why are Pakistan’s floods so extreme this year?

With rivers breaking their banks, flash flooding and glacial lakes bursting, Pakistan is experiencing its worst floods this century. At least one-third of the country is under water. Scientists say several factors have contributed to the extreme event, which has displaced some 33 million people and killed more than 1,200.

November 19, 2021

Researchers say the catastrophe probably started with phenomenal heatwaves. In April and May, temperatures reached above 40 °C for prolonged periods in many places. On one sweltering day in May, the city of Jacobabad topped 51 °C. “These were not normal heatwaves — they were the worst in the world. We had the hottest place on Earth in Pakistan,” says Malik Amin Aslam, the country’s former minister for climate change, who is based in Islamabad.

Warmer air can hold more moisture. So meteorologists warned earlier this year that the extreme temperatures would probably result in “above normal” levels of rain during the country’s monsoon season, from July to September, says Zia Hashmi, a water-resources engineer at the Global Change Impact Studies Centre in Islamabad, speaking in his personal capacity.

Friday January 10, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday January 10, 2020

As Iran and US take step back from the brink, Canada grieves

The worst had passed, it seemed, and the United States and Iran no longer appeared poised at the edge of war.

April 13, 2018

“All is well!” President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday night, days after a U.S. drone strike killed Iran’s most powerful general, and Iran, after a barrage of missiles, had signaled it was stepping back from further escalation.

But 27 seconds before Trump’s tweet, commercial flight trackers had lost contact with a Ukrainian International Airlines jet that had just taken off from Tehran’s main airport. On board were 176 people, including 138 passengers on their way to Canada and at least 63 Canadian citizens and 11 Ukrainians. The plane, which never made a mayday call, slammed moments later into the ground.

Everyone on board died. They were students, newlyweds, doctors and parents. The youngest was a 1-year-old girl, Kurdia Molani, who was flying back home with her parents to the Toronto suburb of Ajax.

January 6, 2016

By late Thursday, Western leaders said that Iran had most likely shot down the jetliner with a surface-to-air missile — probably by accident. The loss of so many lives transformed the U.S.-Iran confrontation, which had seemed to conclude with limited bloodshed.

Instead, what had begun with a drone attack on Gen. Qassem Soleimani’s motorcade at the Baghdad airport had suddenly rippled outward until dozens of Iranian-Canadians, dozens of Iranian students studying in Canada, were dead.

“The community is overwhelmed with mourning and sadness,” said Payman Parseyan, a prominent Iranian-Canadian in western Canada, counting through the names of the friends he had lost. There was Pedram Mousavi and his wife Mojgan Daneshmand, both of them engineering professors, and their two daughters, Daria and Dorina Mousavi. There was Dr. Shekoufeh Choupannejad, an obstetrician-gynecologist, and her two daughters, Saba and Sara Saadat. It seemed impossible.

January 8, 2020

Some in Canada quickly blamed Trump for the disaster.

“This is insane. Sickening. Imagine having a family member on that plane,” said Rob Kent, a 42-year-old Toronto resident. “One man, and only one, is responsible for those deaths. And he will never face consequences for them.”

But Parseyan wasn’t so sure.

“It takes two to tango,” he said. “It’s not hard to see the downing as a result of the escalation between the two countries. However, Iran is responsible for its own military defense equipment. While it has the right to defend itself, as it should to protect its own people, it should also have the responsibility with that right to make sure their defensive systems aren’t targeting civilian aircraft.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has at times had a rocky relationship with Trump, was careful not to say the U.S. strike was responsible for what happened. (Associated Press)