[PHOTO] Rob Ford in the St. Patrick's Day Parade

[BRIEF NOTE] On Wind Turbine Syndrome's possible existence

Metro Toronto this morning included a report by an Australian researcher arguing that claims wind turbines are associated with ill health are products not of biological illness but social contagion.

Professor Simon Chapman, an associate dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, mapped out the history of health-related complaints about wind turbines in Australia and found they don’t follow logically from the development of wind farms, but instead follow the growth of anti-wind turbine activism. The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed.

He found the majority of complaints — 68 per cent — came from just five of the country’s 49 wind farms, which are also at the centre of activism. There were no complaints from all of Western Australia and many other very large wind farms.

Chapman collected health-related complaints about the country’s wind farms made to Australia’s government, directly to wind companies and in Australian media finding that 120 people complained between 1993 and 2012. That is the equivalent of one in every 272 residents living within five kilometres from a wind farm.

“I find it implausible that if wind turbines in themselves were harmful, there would be whole farms using the same equipment, mega-wattage, everything, where people weren’t saying they were affected,” he said.

Wind farms have been in operation in the country since 1993, but health complaints didn’t start in earnest until 2009, when anti-wind activists began widely publicizing health-related concerns and a controversial American doctor dubbed the phrase “Wind Turbine Syndrome”, said Chapman.

[. . .]

“I don’t doubt that when people say, ‘I’m suffering,’ that they’re suffering,” he said. “But the problems that people speak of are very common in all communities. The question becomes not whether they have those problems, but what’s causing those problems.”

He argues people have mis-attributed their common health problems to wind farms because of activists’ campaigns. Some may have even become more ill because they believe that wind farms make them sick — a phenomenon called the “nocebo effect“, he said.

For balance's seek, Metro Toronto included an interview with a local anti-wind turbine activist.

Ontario anti-wind farm activist and researcher Carmen Krogh says she’s received calls and emails from many people who are upset to hear Australian professor Simon Chapman’s claims that wind turbines don’t make people sick.

“I feel profound grief and sorrow about that,” she said. “This is upsetting already vulnerable people who are hurting.”

According to Krogh, one of the major failings of Chapman’s study is he did not base his research on the personal accounts of Wind Turbine Syndrome sufferers. When she sees people willing to abandon their homes over the issue, it is powerful proof of real suffering, she said.

Krogh, a trained pharmacist who lives in a rural area north of Ottawa, said she also experienced acute sickness from wind turbines on a vacation in Northern Ontario.

“The main thing was this feeling of general unwell. It felt like there was something wrong with my heart,” she said. “It was beating funny, and there was a vibratory sensation, a very unpleasant sensation.”

Those feelings went away shortly after she left the area, accompanied by a very severe headache, which took a few days to dissipate, she said.

It was only years later, when she heard about other people’s symptoms, that she connected the dots, she said.

Five years ago when a wind project was proposed for her area, Krogh began researching Wind Turbine Syndrome and reaching out to other people who have become ill. She said their symptoms are caused by wind turbine noise, including audible noise and inaudible infrasound. In many cases, it’s the noise and vibrations that keep people up at night, taking a serious toll on their health.

Krogh's claims seems less credible to me in that strong belief--the sort that would lead people to sell their houses--is not in itself automatically proof of anything, while her citing the feelings of people who identify themselves as sufferers is problematic. Against this, there are peer-reviewed studies claiming otherwise, while Chapman's ScienceDaily announcement of his paper is worded rather confrontationally.

[LINK] "Mulcair's Washington trip a 'betrayal of Canada,' Redford says"

This CBC article helps underline the unlikelihood of the NDP, for all of its successes elsewhere in the country, breaking into an Alberta where the party's caution about developing the oil sands for export to the United States runs against the political zeitgeist.

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair was "irresponsible" and acted in a way that was a "fundamental betrayal" of Canada's economic interests by undercutting efforts to win U.S. approval for the Keystone XL pipeline, says Alberta Premier Alison Redford.

In an interview Monday on CBC News Network’s Power & Politics, Redford accused Mulcair of spreading misinformation when he criticized Canada’s environmental record and warned of massive job losses that could result from the contentious pipeline project.

[. . .]

"I think if you’re a national leader that’s talking about Canada’s economic future, it’s important to understand that an important part of our future is an energy economy," Redford told guest host Terry Milewski.

[. . .]

"For Mr. Mulcair to travel to Washington and undermine the months of good work by premiers of every persuasion, along with the federal government, is not only wholly irresponsible, but a fundamental betrayal of Canada's long-term economic interests," she told the business and political audience.

On Power & Politics, Redford defended taking out a $30,000 advertisement in the weekend New York Times to promote the Keystone XL pipeline. The half-page ad says that while the U.S. State Department concluded the project would not have a significant impact on the environment, some believe its fate should be decided "on emotion rather than science and fact."

Insisting that opponents are spreading "misinformation" about the science and playing on emotions, Redford said the objective of the ad is to set the record straight on Canada’s environmental targets, investments in clean technology and performance in reducing emissions.

[. . .]

Asked if Alberta would consider upping the current $15-a-tonne carbon tax on large emitters to show a commitment to tackling climate change, Redford said the current plan is to prove the province is a leader in setting and achieving targets by investment in clean technologies.

"We’re not in a position where we're going to go in and try and negotiate with respect to these issues from the perspective of a particular project," she said. "We want to go in and talk about what our record has been, demonstrate the fact that we've been leaders, show what we’ve been doing — not only with having a price on carbon, but what we’re doing with that money."

[. . .]

Redford added that Canada and the U.S. have built a joint energy economy and said it would be "unfortunate" if that did not continue.

[LINK] "Charles Murray’s Gay-Marriage Surprise"

Charles Murray, the American conservative author most famous for co-authoring a book (The Bell Curve) which argued for the genetic intellectual inferiority of African-Americans, has come out in support of same-sex marriage. Jane Mayer's article at The New Yorker describes how, at CPAC, Murray made a surprising case.

As he got warmed up, Murray explained that, while driving for more than an hour that morning to the conference, he had begun talking out loud to himself, which is how he usually practices his speeches. Upon realizing that he had more than an hour’s worth of fresh thoughts, he decided to simply drop the planned ones. The question on his mind was “How can conservatives make their case after the election?,” and the answer he wanted to share was drawn from his experience with his own four children. They range in age, he said, from twenty-three to forty-three. While they share many of his views on limiting the size of government, and supporting free enterprise, he said, “Not one of them thought of voting for a Republican President” in the last election. Their disenchantment with the Republican Party was not specifically because of Mitt Romney, he added, but because, “They consider the Party to be run by anti-abortion, anti-gay, religious nuts.”

“With gay marriage,” he went on, “I think the train has left the station.”

Certainly the locomotive power of the issue seemed hard to miss on a day when the top political news was Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman’s announcement that he, too, supports gay marriage. (Richard Socarides has more on that.) While Portman’s position shifted because of his family situation—he explained publicly for the first time that his son had come out as gay—Murray said his own views had been influenced heavily by friends. “I was dead-set against gay marriage when it was first broached,” Murray said; as a fan of Edmund Burke, he regarded marriage as an ancient and indispensable cultural institution that “we shouldn’t mess with.” He used to agree with his friend Irving Kristol, the late father of neo-conservatism, that gay people wouldn’t like marriage. “ ‘Let them have it,’ ” he recounted Kristol as saying, with a chuckle. “ ‘They wont like it.’ ” Murray said that he himself used to think that “All they want is the wedding, and the party, and the honeymoon—but not this long thing we call marriage.”

But since then, Murray said, “we have acquired a number of gay and lesbian friends,” and to what he jokingly called his “dismay” as a “confident” social scientist, he learned he’d been wrong. He’d been especially influenced by the pro-gay-marriage arguments made by Jonathan Rausch, an openly gay writer for the National Journal and the Atlantic. Further, Murray said, he had discovered that the gay couples he knew with children were not just responsible parents; they were “excruciatingly responsible parents.”

By this time, the CPAC audience’s rustlings had an anxious edge. Murray’s remarks seemed to surprise many in the conference room at the National Harbor Convention Center, south of Washington, even if, when it comes to gay marriage, they shouldn’t have: he’s talked about the change in his personal views before, as David Weigel and Andrew Sullivan have noted. What was striking was how critical he argued it is for the G.O.P. to make a similar shift as a party.

He also condones abortion in certain circumstances. But, huh.

[LINK] "Wilfried Knight, bureaucracy and international homophobia"

The tragic case of a gay married couple's separate suicides is the theme of Jeremy Feist's essay at Xtra!. Marriage equality is still important, and not necessarily achieved by any means.

If you want to see a case file as to how civil unions bear few, if not zero, of the same rights and privileges as marriage, one need only look at the tragic death of gay pornstar Wilfried Knight and his partner, Jerry. The two were together for eight years, but because they were from different countries, they couldn’t be together. Why not? Because Jerry was from the United States and Wilfried was living in London, England. Neither country has legalized gay marriage on a federal level; therefore, neither man could be sponsored for immigration status in the other’s country.

Once again, they were together for more than eight years. In the United States, marriage isn’t treated so much as sacrosanct as it is a cottage industry. You can get married to a complete stranger, you can marry someone solely for the sake of bleeding their bank account dry, and you can even dupe some poor schmuck into marrying you for the sake of a reality-TV show (only to divorce the poor bastard two months later for the sake of more episodes), but two men who love each other and who defy geography just to make it work? That is not allowed.

So the two of them went to one of the few first-world countries where gay marriage is legal: Canada. The plan was to get married and then for one of them to get a job and sponsor the other for immigration. Although Jerry successfully got a job at Lululemon, it wasn’t long before the company fired him. With the two of them backed into a corner, Jerry took his own life.

Here’s where things go from bad to worse: although Jerry and Wilfried were, in the eyes of the Canadian government, legally married, both Jerry’s will and family were based in the United States, where, in the eyes of their government, Wilfried had no legal standing in Jerry’s life. Wilfried had no legal bearing over his husband or anything in his life, and, earlier this month, he too died by suicide.

[LINK] "Common-law breakers"

Gordon Bowness' article in the monthly In Toronto magazine takes a look at a recent Supreme Court decision in the case Eric v Lola that deprived common-law couples in Québec of spousal support in the case of marital breakdown. (The irony that common-law relationships are far more common in Québec than elsewhere in Canada is lost on no one.) Bowness does a good job of pointing out the broader implications for common-law couples, and non-heterosexual couples, and other non-traditional family structures across Canada.

Most Canadians wrongly assume that common-law couples — whether gay or straight — enjoy the same rights and obligations as married couples. That misperception was brought into sharp focus with the Supreme Court ruling in a case known as Eric v Lola, which affirmed that common-law partners in Quebec have no right to spousal support or to a share in their partner's property when the relationship ends.

[. . .]

One of the reasons we have same-sex marriage federally is that as common-law couples won certain protections courts found it wrong to exclude same-sex couples from those protections. Common-law and same-sex relationships are linked, historically and legally.

"For the longest time, common-law relationships and same-sex relationships were being tested in the courts and were advancing kind of in lockstep as discriminated minorities, in fits and starts, lurching forward," [divorce lawyer Anne-France] Goldwater says. She is uniquely positioned to understand that dynamic. Not only is she a leading advocate for the rights of women and mothers in common-law relationships, she and Dubé represented Hendricks and Leboeuf in the 2002 landmark ruling that won same-sex marriage in Quebec.

[. . .]

"I'm worried on a much broader level for the Supreme Court," says Goldwater. "For lawyers interested in constitutional law, we have the feeling, and it's very subjective of course, that the Supreme Court seems to be turning away from the liberal tendencies it used to have in the late '80s and '90s, which was really pro-Charter litigation. We seem to be in a new era of unexplained timidity."

[. . .]

That means Charter challenges in family law may be out of bounds in the short to medium term. Future changes — which will need to address everything from assisted reproduction, surrogacy for gay fathers and multiple parents to the application of federal child support guidelines — will have to originate with provincial legislatures and new statutes, not the courts. How that will proceed is anyone's guess. When the Eric v Lola ruling came down, Quebec's justice minister Bertrand St-Arnaud said the government was open to changing the laws to recognize the rights of common-law spouses. But then came a backlash and the government seems to be backpedalling.

[. . .]

While the wider implications of Eric v Lola remain uncertain, the ruling immediately impacts the common-law relationships of 1.2 million people in Quebec. It also spotlights that common-law couples across the country — despite what they themselves may think — may not hold the same status as their married counterparts. And for all the media attention heaped on same-sex marriage, the vast majority of gay and lesbian couples in Canada are common-law. StatsCan's latest findings on families show that while the number of same-sex marriages tripled between 2006 and 2011, same-sex common-law couples still outnumber same-sex married couples by more than two to one.

Only in BC (as of this month), Manitoba and Saskatchewan are common-law and married couples treated virtually the same, as well as in areas under federal jurisdiction, like income tax and Old Age Security.

[DM] "More on how the Irish find jobs in Toronto"

I've a post up at Demography Matters highlighting ways in which social organizations and events like Gaelic football leagues and St. Patrick's Day parades help Irish migrants to Toronto find jobs and communities.