[PHOTO] Fragile

The paper label glued to the surface of this solid concrete pillar at Pearson amused me.

[BRIEF NOTE] On robocalling having hit 200 Canadian federal electoral ridings

The Globe and Mail's Daniel Leblanc shared the news. By way of comparison, the Canadian Parliament's House of Commons seats representatives from 308 ridings.

Canada’s chief electoral officer is rejecting any attempts to play down the extent of the voter-suppression tactics in the last election, expressing his outrage for the first time in public about fraudulent robo-calls made in the name of his impartial organization.

“It’s absolutely outrageous,” Marc Mayrand told a parliamentary committee. “It’s totally unacceptable in a modern democracy.”

Elections Canada has received complaints about phone fraud in the last election in about 200 ridings in 10 provinces and one territory. Mr. Mayrand said the complaints “cut pretty much across the whole country.”

[. . .]

Mr. Mayrand walked a fine line during his testimony, refusing to get into the details of ongoing investigations that are being probed by the Commissioner of Elections, while providing an update to MPs about his handling of the ongoing controversy.

He said that overall, Elections Canada has received 800 specific complaints about misleading or harassing phone calls across Canada in relation to the last election. He pointed out that 70 of the complaints came from Guelph, which is only a fraction of almost 7,000 misleading calls made on election day in the riding.

[. . .]

While the Conservative MPs on the parliamentary committee repeatedly said they did not want to “minimize” the importance of the fraudulent calls, they continuously came back to the fact that the Elections Canada voters’ list is filled with mistakes.

“There is a widespread problem here,” said Conservative MP Scott Reid.

[. . .]

Mr. Mayrand was speaking in public for the first time on the issue of thousands of fraudulent and harassing phone calls that were made during last year’s general election. The issue jumped to the forefront of the political agenda with the recent publication of details of the investigation into the riding of Guelph, where political operatives went through a company linked to the Conservative Party to send out thousands of calls directing electors to the wrong polling station.

Elections Canada has been on the trace of the person behind the calls, who used a disposable cell phone registered under the alias of “Pierre Poutine” to set up an account with robo-caller RackNine Inc.

Elections Canada initially decided to refuse to comment on the investigation, only to go on to issue a statement stating that it had received 31,000 contacts from Canadians in relation to the 2011 general election.

The statement was wrongly understood to mean that the majority of the contacts were individual complaints, which would have been a huge increase in comparison to previous ballots. However, Elections Canada later stated that 700 specific complaints had been received.

Those numbers have now been updated to refer to 40,000 contacts, and 800 specific complaints.

[LINK] "Alleged Canadian spy leak may have caused major breach of U.S. info: report"

Facebook's Edward Lucas linked to the report about the most notable spy scandal to hit Canada in recent years.

It will be interesting to see how much press attention this case gets. So far, the allegations against Delisle haven't been widely publicized since the news broke.

The Wall Street Journal reported that sources close to the case said the leak, allegedly conducted by Sub Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle, created serious fallout between Canada and the U.S., which was downplayed by Canadian officials. The Wall Street Journal also said another source claimed the volume linked to the breach was on the same level as the data loss the U.S. experienced through WikiLeaks.

Although the nature of the suspected intelligence leak has not been of publicly revealed, sources close to the matter told the Wall Street Journal that it was electronic communications between allied militaries that was leaked to Russia. The destination of the leaked information also has not been officially confirmed.

A spokesman for Defence Minister Peter MacKay told Postmedia News Tuesday night that allied nations have no doubts regarding Canadian intelligence and defence.

"I can't speculate on hearsay," Jay Paxton said in an email to Postmedia News. "The minister has been clear that our allies remain fully confident of Canadian defence activities. That point was reiterated by the visit of Minister MacKay's American and Mexican counterparts (Tuesday)."

The Wall Street Journal reported, again citing sources familiar with the matter, that the breach centred around a specific alliance between the militaries of Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Delisle, 40, was arrested in Halifax in January and became the first person charged under the Security of Information Act, which replaced the former Official Secrets Act in 2001.

He's facing charges of breach of trust, communication of safeguarded information and attempting to communicate safeguarded information. The alleged crimes are suspected to have taken place over a five-year period beginning in 2007.

After some delay, Delisle's bail hearing is now scheduled for April 13.

If convicted, the junior naval intelligence officer faces life in prison.

Delisle was employed at HMCS Trinity, an intelligence facility at the naval dockyard in Halifax that tracks vessels entering and exiting Canadian waters via satellites, drones and underwater devices.

The base is believed to specialize in sub-sea surveillance and regularly feeds its findings to the U.S. Navy and NATO. In addition to having access to communications codes, an employee of the facility might have been able to tell a foreign power the locations of ocean sensors used in monitoring ship movements.

[URBAN NOTE] On Mayor Rob Ford's latest (abortive) conflict of interest

The National Post's Natalie Alcoba notes that Rob Ford has backed down somewhat. He still wants to run a slate of councillors, it seems, but he's not going to use his official phone number for it.

Mr. Ford issued a statement Tuesday evening in response to a complaint by Councillor Josh Matlow, who said using city resources for campaign purposes breaks the code of conduct.

“As many of you know, one of my greatest passions is promoting and encouraging people to become involved with local government,” the Mayor said in the statement, which made no more mention of a slate. “It was my intent to provide my direct personal line.”

Councillor Matlow, who had earlier in the day denounced turning the Mayor’s office a “perpetual campaign hotline,” said he received a call from Mr. Ford.

“He unreservedly apologized to me. I found him to be very gracious and I consider the matter closed,” said Mr. Matlow (St. Paul’s). “It’s important that while there may be differences of opinion, we need to find common cause and work for Toronto.”

The comments in question were made during the weekly Newstalk 1010 radio show the Mayor hosts with Councillor Doug Ford on Sunday. “I’m only one person,” Mr. Ford lamented, before reciting his City Hall phone number for listeners who might want to run for office. “We need to run a slate next time. We have to get rid of the other 24 councillors,” he said, referring to the group that quashed his subway plans in favour of light rail transit.

He talked about meeting “great candidates” over the past couple of weeks, including Ken Chan, who came second to Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam in Toronto Centre-Rosedale, and Jon Burnside, who lost to Councillor John Parker in Don Valley West.

The Mayor’s public appeal for interested candidates came as no surprise to some councillors, who say they have already been warned about a Ford nation campaign to unseat them in 2014. Indeed, while councillors on both sides of the spectrum talk about consensus and moving on from the transit vote, the Mayor talks about a “with us or against us” approach.

Open File's John Michael McGrath wondered before news of the apology what should be done with Rob Ford. He just doesn't seem to understand the basic concept behind "conflict of interest."

The key issue is that Ford told listeners that interested candidates could call his city-paid office line.

(Using city resources for an election campaign is a breach of the city's Code of Conduct for councillors, and according to the council expense policy is illegal under the Municipal Elections Act.)

[. . . U]nlike the last time an Integrity Commissioner matter came to council, it's not clear that Ford would risk any punishment more than needing to apologize to council over the breach of the code, and it's doubly uncertain that anyone is interested in bringing another allegation against the mayor under the Municipal Elections Act. So while this kind of thing is worth noting in passing, it does raise the question of whether the Integrity Commissioner needs to be strengthened somehow to impose something closer to a real punishment on councillors when they serially violate the Code of Conduct.

These multiple issues suggest to me that either Ford doesn't understand or doesn't accept the ideas behind the Code of Conduct.

[LINK] "Jane Jacobs & the Republican Radicals"

Jason Epstein at The New York Review of Books's blog comments on the political philosophy of New York-born and long-time Toronto resident Jane Jacobs. Epstein, it seems, would call her a conservative in the sense that Jacobs was a pragmatist uninterested in sweeping ideologies. This conservatism, he argues, is quite distinct from the ideologies of neoconservatives.

A team of filmmakers planning a documentary on Jane Jacobs asked me recently about the original reviews of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I was Jane’s lifelong editor and close friend and had just written an introduction for the 50th anniversary edition of her famous critique of city planners such as Robert Moses and their destruction of vital city neighborhoods. I told the filmmakers, whose film was planned for the anniversary, that writers like Jane are usually attacked by beneficiaries of entrenched institutions and that she was no exception. But I also said that I was pleasantly surprised by the positive response to Jane’s book from New York’s so-called Upper West Side intellectuals, most of whom had recently transferred their zeal from the Marxist left to the capitalist right; many had previously supported and hoped to strengthen the moderate social welfare state but were now fiercely opposed to it.

It was one of these New York intellectual friends, a proto neocon, who first suggested that I read Jane’s article in Fortune defending vital city neighborhoods from rapacious planners, the seedling that became Death and Life. Though I had never been a socialist and have my doubts about capitalism as a necessary evil I shared my friend’s enthusiasm for Jane’s critique. But I was puzzled when he went further by denouncing Washington’s plan at the time to fluoridate the water supply as an intrusion on one’s right to let one’s teeth rot. I wondered whether he was joking—surely he would not go so far in his flight from the left as to oppose protective chemicals in the drinking water, or would he?

[. . .]

Jane of course would have found such extremism absurd. One of her biographers accurately called her a genius of common sense. She belonged to no faction or party. Her mind was so finely made as T.S. Eliot said of Henry James, that no idea could violate it and none did. She was a skeptical empiricist from head to foot. She would have been disgusted by today’s right-wing Jacobinism which calls itself conservative.

My new right-wing friends in those early days danced the classic revolutionary two step. As they defended personal autonomy from an intrusive state they also pursued institutional power for themselves: funding from the CIA and right wing foundations, jobs from the Luce magazines, conservative think tanks, crackpot millionaires, invitations to Nixon’s White House: the well traveled revolutionary route from catacombs to Vatican, from barricades to Tuilleries and Kremlin. As for Jane, her only power base except for a brief tour at Luce’s Architectural Forum was her own writing.

Go, read and comment.

[URBAN NOTE] "Prehistoric Toronto: Glacial Lake Iroquois"

Torontoist's Daniel Sellers has a neat post examining the history of Glacial Lake Iroquois, Lake Ontario's Ice Age predecessor that--so long as the ice dam held--had a shoreline well to the north of Toronto's existing waterfront.

For 100 years, Casa Loma has sat just a short, steep ridge away from the intersection of Spadina and Davenport roads, and gazed out over downtown Toronto. But, at one time, the view looking south from what is now the castle grounds would have been all water as far as the eye could see; in the very late Pleistocene epoch, Davenport was the beach above vast Lake Iroquois.

“I think a lot of people go up and down that ridge every day and don’t even give much thought to it,” says Rob MacDonald of heritage conservation consultants Archaeological Services Inc. “But that was [a] shoreline 12,500 years ago.”

Some 8,000 years before that, a massive glacier called the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered most of Canada, and had managed to extend as far as present-day Ohio at the tail end of its slow creep south. Then it began to melt and retreat, and, eventually, huge basins in the Great Lakes region, formed by previous glaciers and further gouged out under the movement of the Laurentide, would fill with meltwater.

An early version of Lake Erie appeared. Further west, the lakes we now call Michigan and Huron made up the bulk of glacial Lake Algonquin. Lake Iroquois formed in the basin of today’s Lake Ontario; it was bounded by ice to the northeast and drained through New York state’s Mohawk River.

The glacier continued to recede.

By about 12,000 years ago, the ice over the St. Lawrence River had disappeared. Lake Iroquois, finding this new, lower outlet, drained quickly and dramatically to as much as 85 metres below present-day water levels; an ancient shoreline now found at the bottom of Lake Ontario is evidence of this.

This smaller lake would not last long, either. After millennia beneath a heavy glacier more than a kilometre thick, Toronto was going through a process called isostatic rebound.

[LINK] "Is Brazil big enough for Facebook and Orkut?"

Facebook has surpassed Orkut in Brazil, just as Facebook has surpassed other social networking sites in other countries. Local alternatives have stopped, are stopping, or will stop being viable alternatives to the global juggernaut.

(On a related note, apparently Tumblr's doing well in Brazil.)

Not long ago we were making the prediction that Facebook would become the dominant social force in Brazil. Over time Brazilians seem to have started to identify themselves with Facebook and looked at it as the best place to start their online lives over from scratch, helping lead to its widespread adoption.

At the beginning of 2012, numbers revealed that Facebook attracted 36.1 million visitors, that is an increase of 192% on the year, while Orkut received 34.4 million visitors during the same month.

“Brazil has always been a particularly social market and currently owns the fifth largest social networking population in the world. But despite the cultural affinity for social media, Facebook adoption had traditionally lagged in the market. That has all changed in the past year, during which the site has tripled in audience size as engagement has grown sevenfold to assume the leadership position in the market” comScore.

When Orkut came along in 2004, Internet use was stagnant in Brazil and the social network gave the people their first taste of social media, with a simple interface and Portuguese language option making it easier to use in comparison with MySpace - soon Orkut became a part of the social culture. But it seems that it wasn’t enough for its users... In terms of innovation, Orkut failed, while Facebook is offering new applications, games and the ability to connect with people beyond Brazil.

The shift of power between Facebook and Orkut is significant especially because Google was confident about its dominance in Brazil. The battle for dominance has become even more interesting now Google is attempting to overtake Facebook in the form of Google+ (4.3 million members).

[. . .]

At the same time, Tumblr is used by 49 million Brazilians, but Tumblr’s main audience is in the US with 249 million visitors, followed by Brazil and UK (34 million). The founder and CEO David Karp announced that this service is now serving 120 million people and 15 billion page views every month. According to thenextweb.com, the average Tumblr blog is re-blogged nine times, helping to distribute user content to wider audiences mainly via RSS, Twitter, Facebook.

Experts are convinced that while the North American market is almost saturated, markets like Brazil or India could help Facebook hit 1 billion users by August.