Source:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_print.html?id=1213174&sponsor=

Universities facing labour time bomb

‘Permatemp’ Profs; Eleven-week-old strike at York just the start, experts predict

By Craig Offman, National PostJanuary 24, 2009

Schools across North America may face labour battles similar to the one that prompted an 11-week-old strike at York University.

Schools across North America may face labour battles similar to the one that prompted an 11-week-old strike at York University.
Photograph by: News Peter J. Thompson, National Post, National Post

The bitter strike at Toronto’s York University might seem retrograde, an old-school battle that pits bean-counters against professors demanding a recession-time raise. But experts say this closure, now in its 11th week, might mark the beginning of a larger trend, one that could push campuses to the brink. Next month, for example, a union of part-and fulltime professors will also be gunning for better wages and benefits at Waterloo’s Wilfrid Laurier University.

Ontario isn’t alone in this predicament. Hoping to save money at every turn, administrators in Canada and the U. S. have hired droves of teachers on the cheap — “permatemp” profs — either to lecture, grade papers, or oversee student conferences. Sometimes likened to Wal-Mart workers, these PhDs, part-time lecturers, and teaching assistants often perform tasks that tenured professors do not — or will not. But in recent years, the tension around this underclass is coming to a boil.

“It will particularly do so with the rapid expansion of public employee unions, and you can see a lot more of this not just in Canada, but in the U. S. as well,” said Hank Brown, the former president of the University of Colorado system and also a former U. S. senator. “These professors are asking for a bigger piece of the pie.”

The growing strife speaks to the troubled evolution of public universities, which have been slouching toward an existential crisis since the 1980s. Like unwieldy conglomerates, they have overextended, taking on broad mandates at the expense of their core identity.

Yet they remain crucial to Canada’s economic future.

Politicians of all stripes reflexively depict them as the bedrock of the “knowledge economy,” the only way in which the country will be able to compete globally.

Unprecedented numbers of Canadians have been putting their faith (and borrowed money) into the system. According to Human Resources and Social Development Canada, participation in university education reached an all-time high in 2005-2006, rising to 24% of the population aged 18 to 24. The level of full-time enrolment increased between 2001 and 2005 by 25%.

Despite the enthusiasm to sign up, these students might wind up feeling less than sentimental about their education, which might be attributable to the growing permatemp workforce.

A much-discussed study by University of Washington professor Dan Jacoby, published three years ago in the Journal of Higher Education, concludes that higher numbers of part-time faculty lead to lower graduation rates.

“This should not be taken to mean that part-time faculty offer less quality,” he told a state senate hearing, “but it would be absurd to believe that working under the deplorable conditions they work under does not have an impact on the system.”

From the 1980s onward, various governments cut back on their funding, putting tremendous pressure on administrators to scale costs while enrolment and student-faculty ratios escalated.

Between 1998 and 2006, the number of Canadian faculty grew by 21% to 40,800 from 33,700, according to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. (There are no hard numbers available in Canada that reflect the proportion of “permatemp” professors.)

But, also between 1998 and 2006, full-time enrolment grew by 37%, and the AUCC predicts that during the next decade, the mass retirement of Boomer-generation professors will require universities to replace an additional 21,000 faculty members.

This mass hiring will be a daunting task, one which tuitions alone can no longer subsidize. “The model where research is funded by undergraduate enrolment is beginning to collapse under the stress,” said Jeff Ryback, the author of What’s Wrong with University?

In the hopes of taking the pressure off their budgets, cash-strapped administrators redistribute the labour, he said. They don’t give the work to the professor who is nominally paid to research half of the time. Instead, they pile it on the other professor who is not paid to research. “It’s an obvious way to stretch the dollar,” he said.

Research costs can represent a major portion of a faculty’s budget, experts say. While publishing is undeniably crucial, administrators complain that it can be a nebulous mandate whose massive costs are almost impossible to account for. Originally intended to give scholars a platform to express themselves without fear of political or institutional interference, the role of the research-oriented professor is increasingly endangered, a luxury few public institutions can afford any longer. It becomes even more difficult to justify with so many more students to teach, indulge and nurture.

Kelvin Ogilvie, the former president of Acadia University in Nova Scotia, said that schools should return to their core missions, whether that be research or teaching. This would alleviate redundancies among institutions, and allow professors to concentrate on their strengths, whether they be in the solitude of the field, or in the class.

Many tenured professors, he added, can be national assets, but others might abuse their situation, particularly in popular fields such as social sciences and humanities.

“It’s my experience as a career academic that tenured professors in that area have a higher sense of their own importance,” said Mr. Ogilvie, who is affiliated with the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies in Halifax. “Too often they easily find things to be beneath their esteemed evolutionary status.”

Jim Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, said the real problem, however, is that universities are not filling the jobs of retiring Baby Boomers.

“They’re using the money to create part-time positions. It’s the same strategy used by Wal-mart and the Hudson’s Bay Company,” he said.

In a city like Toronto, this might mean cobbling together a course load at different schools that might earn them $40,000 a year. Part-timers or contract employees work twice the hours of their full-time counterparts, and because they are not full time, they have a more difficult time raising money for research projects, which would help lift them out of their grind.

“Five years later, an opening for a full-time tenure track job comes up, and the dean says, where are your articles? You’re five years out of your PhD and you should have eight publications. It becomes a bit of job ghetto.”

Precarious as this existence is, critics say that these professors took risks spending all their time and money becoming academics, which can be a fiercely competitive market, especially during a downturn. Rather than holding universities hostage, institutions to which they have little loyalty, they should take a hint and pursue another profession.

Arguably, this is what one noted lecturer did. He ditched his part-time job at the venerable University of Chicago Law School to pursue other interests. And look what happened to him.

He became President of the United States.

coffman@nationalpost.com
© Copyright (c) National Post

Source: The Star
http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/576928

Jan 25, 2009 04:30 AM
Daniel Dale
STAFF REPORTER

Poor George Khouri. It’s hard enough to unseat an anonymous Member of Parliament. Much harder to unseat a petroleum psychic.

“Constantly. Over and over again,” complained Khouri, the Conservative candidate in Pickering-Scarborough East, his irritation undiminished three months after the 2008 election. “Six, seven, 10, 20 times a day. … “

Dan McTeague’s name on CFRB 1010. Dan McTeague’s name on CP24. Dan McTeague’s name on 680 News – every half an hour, every weeknight, between 5 p.m. and midnight.

How was he supposed to beat Dan McTeague?

“It’s all people talk about when you go to the door,” Khouri said. “`Oh, you’re running against the Gas Man.’ It’s unfair.”

For the Gas Man, a 15-year Liberal MP who has never been a minister, knowledge may not be power. At the very least, however, it is name recognition.

For Dan McTeague is a member of Parliament who doubles as a human coupon. For Dan McTeague knows how to calculate gas prices the day before the oil companies change them – and, unlike your everyday neighbourhood clairvoyant, he shares his valuable knowledge for free. On the “Tomorrow’s Gas Prices, Today” section of his website, launched in April 2008, he posts, before 5 p.m., the next day’s prices in nine Canadian cities. To the tenth of a penny, he is almost always correct.

“Because he’s spent the time and done the homework,” said Petro-Canada spokesperson Jon Hamilton, “he’s figured out some things.”

His accuracy has earned the MP acclaim across the country. His website now receives more than 30,000 hits per day. He has received hundreds of emails, he said, from people thanking him for saving them money at the pumps.

But in providing information giddily consumed by gas price conspiracy theorists, McTeague, 46, has himself become the subject of conspiracy theories. Surely, Khouri and others say, McTeague has an arrangement with the oil companies to receive prices in advance. Wrote one member of TorontoGasPrices.com: “McTague (sic) has some explaining to do. How does he know exactly what the changes are?”

It feels somehow inappropriate to ask for his magic formula. But McTeague, the Liberals’ gregarious, outspoken and occasionally controversial Treasury Board, consumer affairs and consular affairs critic, is nothing if not candid.

This, he said, is how he makes the predictions. He pays more than $300 per month out of his own pocket – “and I’ve got five kids” – for a subscription to the Oil Price Information Service, a website that provides a daily list of oil companies’ wholesale “rack” prices. Rack prices, based in part on the prices of gasoline futures and crude oil on New York markets, are posted on the companies’ websites in the wee hours of each morning; McTeague’s subscription simply gives him advance access.

There is a direct relationship between rack prices and retail prices. To predict prices at Toronto pumps, McTeague takes the Esso rack price – here, he said, Esso is the firm whose prices the others follow – and adds the Ontario gasoline tax (14.7 cents), the federal gasoline tax (10 cents), and the 7-cent-per-litre margin he says all major gas retailers currently allow themselves in the city. (When one company increases its margin, he said, the others quickly follow.) Then he tacks on the 5 per cent GST. Presto. Tomorrow’s gas price, today.

“Frankly, anyone could do it,” he said in a telephone interview. “The information is publicly available.”

McTeague makes his predictions not for the attention, he said, but to demonstrate the uncompetitiveness of the Canadian oil industry – a problem he has long sought to remedy by amending the Competition Act to toughen restrictions on mergers and acquisitions, expand the definition of predatory pricing, and introduce new penalties for corporate conspiracy.

Unlike many consumers, McTeague does not believe the oil companies have illegally conspired to set identical gas prices. “You don’t need to have price-fixing when you, in fact, have no competition,” he said. “The big problem is concentration.”

After the takeovers of numerous Canadian refineries and the closing of others, the wholesale market became uncompetitive, he said. And at both the wholesale and retail levels, he said, the major firms have worked to price independents out of business; where they have succeeded, there is no pressure on them to keep retail prices low.

“A lot of people said, ‘Well, stop complaining about the problem and fix it.’ So in order to fix the problem, I said, you have to make it pretty clear so everyone realizes there is a problem. I’ve been able to literally calibrate it, pinpoint it, quantify it, with the predictions.”

Although Petro-Canada’s Hamilton said McTeague is wrong to claim the industry is not competitive, he said McTeague’s vocal criticism has “challenged the industry to do a much better job of explaining ourselves.

“I’ll probably take flak for this at the office,” Hamilton said. “But I kind of like the guy.”

Source: Globe & Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090122.wtrees0122/BNStory/Science/home

DAWN WALTON

Globe and Mail Update

January 22, 2009 at 4:47 PM EST

CALGARY — The death of old-growth forests in the western United States and Canada is increasing at a stunning rate, a troubling trend linked directly to global warming that could soon transform forests into carbon dioxide emitters rather than much-needed carbon sinks, a new study warns.

Scientists have found that tree mortality has more than doubled in the last few decades regardless of elevation, forest type or tree size as pines, firs, hemlocks and other species are dying faster than new trees are growing.

“In the future, forests might store less carbon than they do at present, and it also introduces the possibility that western forests could become net sources of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, further speeding up the pace of global warming,” said study co-author Dr. Phillip van Mantgem of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center in California.

When dead trees start to decompose, they release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The report, published Friday in the journal Science, examined 76 undisturbed stands in Oregon, Washington, California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and British Columbia, which were at least 200 years old. Some were more than 1,000 years old.

Researchers, who have been counting trees since 1955, found that mortality rates increased in the vast majority of areas studied. They also found that the death rate doubled in the Pacific Northwest in a period of just 17 years and doubled every 29 years in the U.S. interior.

What’s worse, the stands surveyed were considered healthy and resilient, which suggests that the trees in mountain-pine-beetle-infested regions such as British Columbia and those hit by an increase in forest-fire rates are dying at an even more dramatic clip, researchers said. Last year, a Canadian Forest Service report found that the beetle outbreak in B.C. has done so much damage that, by 2020, the forest will release more CO2 than it absorbs.

Dr. Nathan Stephenson, also of U.S. Geological Survey, described the most recent findings as “a canary in the coal mine.”

“So far, [we're seeing] an only slight thinning of forests, but if these trends continue or accelerate that thinning could become much more rapid,” the researcher added.

A persistent doubling of mortality rate from even 1 to 2 per cent a year could cause a greater than 50-per-cent reduction in average tree age in forests, and as a result, would mean smaller trees, according to researcher Mark Harmon of Oregon State University.

The data ruled out internal forest factors such as overcrowding, which increases competition within a forest, as well as external forces, such as air pollution.

Instead, the data zeroed in on temperature as the culprit.

In the western U.S., mean annual temperature has increased at a rate of 0.3 to 0.4 C a decade and as much as 0.5 C a decade at higher elevations. Canada has experienced a similar warming trend.

That means what would have been snow is coming down as rain and evaporating more quickly. The snowpack is shrinking, spring is arriving earlier and summer is getting longer, and, along with it, the drought season. At the same time, warm weather makes life more hospitable for insects and diseases that thrive on trees. Pine beetles, normally culled during winter cold snaps, have ravaged B.C.’s lodgepole forests, spilled into Alberta and are threatening to cascade east into the boreal forest.

The pine, bark and spruce bark beetles are also eating their way through western U.S. forests. Studies have shown that eastern forests are also suffering the effects of climate change.

The changes could further increase the risk of forest fires. They could also eliminate habitat for creatures that rely on big, old trees such as the northern spotted owl, a species already in trouble. They could mean the surviving forests are more vulnerable to sudden dying out, a trend already observed in B.C., Colorado and some parts of the Southwest U.S.

“This is further evidence that we’re really seeing continental-scale effects of the warming, which should make us rethink many of our resource management policies,” said study co-author Dr. Thomas Veblen of the University of Colorado.

Officials should adopt new land-use policies that discourage people from developing near wilderness areas and rethink fire-management techniques such as tree thinning, which could hasten the rate of tree death.

Dr. Jerry Franklin of the University of Washington in Seattle, who was one of the report’s researchers, said any carbon agreements among nations and industry should avoid allowing any activity that leads to carbon releases such as chopping down ancient forests that hold huge accumulations of carbon.

“If in fact you allow those to be cut down, the net consequence is one of very significant emissions to the atmosphere over the short and medium term,” he said. “There’s no way that you can make up for that, that you can recover that by either creating wood products or by growing a young stand of trees.”

Source: The Hill Times

http://www.thehilltimes.ca/html/index.php?display=story&full_path=2009/january/19/civcirc/&c=2

The Hill Times, January 19th, 2009

Visible minorities will find it harder to break into PS, says Tory Sen. Oliver
Donald Oliver says in the 18 years he’s been in the Senate he’s seen ‘very little progress’ on visible minorities.
By Cynthia Münster
Economic hard times could make the federal public service an even more difficult workplace to break into for visible minorities, says Nova Scotia Senator Don Oliver.

“We all have to tighten our belts and we all have to do what we can to live within our budgets and so it’s going to mean that people are going to be cut, that our salaries might be frozen and other things, austerity measures have to be taken in these critically difficult economic and financial times. What I would like to see is special measures taken to ensure that visible minorities don’t take the brunt of those cuts, but that’s likely what’s going to happen because that’s what always happens, traditionally in Canada, that visible minorities are the last hired and the first fired or let go. It’ll be sad if that happens because it’s going to set the public service, in terms of recruitment and representation, back another decade,” said Sen. Oliver.

Sen. Oliver has been advocating for visible minorities in the public sector for years now, giving presentations to federal departments and generally talking to people and pushing for the issue. In an interview with Civil Circles he said that in the 18 years he has been in the Senate, he has seen “very little progress” on this file.

Over the years, the disparity between the workforce availability of visible minorities in Canadian society and the numbers of them represented in the public service has increased, partly but not exclusively because the workforce availability is constantly increasing due to immigration.

The public service has been going through a wave of hirings as part of its renewal process, in order to replace retiring baby boomers who constitute a high percentage of its workforce.

The hiring isn’t likely to be slowed down as it concerns keeping up with the current numbers of employees but there is a possibility that salaries may be frozen or curtailed, as was suggested in the Nov. 26 economic and fiscal update (which wasn’t passed).

“Harsh economic times are what they are, we have to address that, but if you are still going through with the process of recruitment, and retention, and renewal in the public service that means staffing is going to continue in certain ways. If you drop one element of your staffing process, such as ensuring that you have a reflective workforce, then I think that they are missing the point,” said John Gordon the national president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada.

Last December, the Public Service Commission (PSC) released its annual report. Unlike any previous years, the 2007-2008 report included no update on the hiring situation for visible minorities. A higher percentage of visible minorities than the numbers available in the workforce applied for jobs in the public service, however, due to recent changes to the PSC’s database of applicant information, the numbers regarding the percentage of visible minorities hired into the public service haven’t been released yet.

The previous Public Service Commission report warned that the recruitment rates of visible minorities had shown a “marked drop” from 9.8 per cent in 2005-2006 to 8.7 per cent in 2006-2007. That is why the Public Service Commission is assessing the numbers, and the report also states that the figures given “may have been underestimated.”

Visible minorities self-identify as such during the application process and are defined by the Employment Equity Act as people, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.

Part of the problem is not just recruitment but also retention and promotion of employment equity groups.

“The Public Service Commission is committed to increasing the presence of visible minorities in the federal public service. We know there are challenges. We’re addressing those challenges by making concrete steps to boost visible minority representativeness in the public service,” wrote Marilyne Guèvremont, a spokesperson for the PSC, in an email to Civil Circles.

She used the example of executive level visible minority pools of pre-assessed candidates that hiring managers could draw from. The commission launched two such pools over the past years, the first one was set up in 2006 and had 41 pre-qualified candidates, the second one was set up last year and received 767 applications, wrote Ms. Guèvremont.

“By creating these pools, the PSC is helping federal organizations use upcoming executive retirements to build a public service that better reflects our increasingly diverse society,” she wrote.

Sen. Oliver sad he is not convinced, however. He said he thinks there are systemic barriers to the entry of visible minorities to the bureaucracy and “no onus to keep them: they are brought in to get the numbers up and once the number’s up they are let go, because they are not part of the team.”

“Look at the power structure: the Clerk is white. The Deputy Clerk is white. All of the Deputy Ministers are white. Most of the ADMs are white and there is a whole pool of visible minorities black, yellow, all different shades, just at the beginning of the [executive] categories, EX1, EX2. They just can’t make it to the top because of these systemic racial barriers that keep visible minorities out of the power in the public service of Canada and it’s frustrating, it’s extremely disappointing, and there is only one thing that is going to make a change and that is the will to make a change from the top. Until that happens we are sadly going to be in a disgraceful situation in Canada, where the public service does not represent the face of Canada.”

The Privy Council Clerk’s 15th report on the public service stated that visible minorities are the only equity group (the other three are women, aboriginal people and people with disabilities) whose representation in the public service does not exceed labour market availability, according to the 2001 census.

“We need a public service that is more representative of the Canadian population. While the public service of today is much more diverse than when I joined in the 1970s, we must do better still, particularly with regard to the participation of visible minority Canadians at all levels,” wrote Kevin Lynch, the clerk.

cmunster@hilltimes.com

The Hill Times

How to download your textbook … or save money on it

Macleans
http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2008/09/16/how-to-download-your-textbooks-for-free/

How to download your textbooks for free
By Erin Millar | September 16th, 2008 | 4:35 pm
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Filed Under: Advice • News • Top Stories

New websites allow you to download — and even edit — your textbooks

Perhaps the worst post-secondary education scam of all time is the price of textbooks.

Students spend upwards of $200 for a hardcover textbook — only to find that they can’t sell it used the next year because a new edition has been issued, with extensive changes like a new cover or slightly different page numbers. Professors often pad their paycheques with textbook sales while also requiring their own students to buy the book.

Well, it seems that the online world is finally responding. A new U.S. website called Connextions uses the Creative Common license to allow students and professors to add and edit material as long as the original author is credited. Instead of organizing material in a linear manner, like textbooks that list topic after topic, the site presents content in smaller “modules” that are connected to larger courses or collections. This allows students and professors to access information according to topic.

According to its website, “Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web.” Professors can also build reading packages by selecting material from various sources and adding their own, creating a custom-made, downloadable textbook for their students — for free!

The website was launched by Richard G. Baraniuk, an engineering professor at Rice University. It has received $6 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, according to an article in the New York Times. “We are changing textbook publishing from a pipeline to an ecosystem,” Baranuik told the Times. “If I had finished my own book, I would have finished a couple years ago,” he said. “It would have taken five years. It would have spent five years in print and sold 2,000 copies.” Since posting it online there have been 2.8 million page views and has been translated into Spanish.

Other online options include CourseSmart, a collaboration between six leading textbook publishers, and the Massachusett Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare. CourseSmart is a website where students can purchase digital copies of their textbooks straight from the publishers (ensuring the latest edition) at a discount of up to 50 per cent, which can still cost a student in the $100 range. 4,325 books are available in 741 courses and 109 disciplines. Students are given the option of downloading the book or reading online and are able to print sections. The website boasts that, so far, almost 95,000 trees have been saved.

OpenCourseWare is a site where virtually all of MIT’s course material is published. Anyone can download course outlines, assignments, reading material, lecture notes, exams, and videos of lectures, all for free.

Another great source of lectures is iTunes U, where users can download lectures from hundreds of colleges and universities, including top schools like Yale and Columbia. Listeners can learn about everything from philosophy 101 to material on yesterday’s economic strife on Wall Street, from high-level mathematics courses to a discussion of Harry Potter and the Holocaust.

When looking for good old fashioned paper version of textbooks, students are wise to think beyond the university bookstore. Amazon.ca and Chapters often offer new books for prices cheaper than used copies elsewhere, although shipping costs are extra. Abebook.com offers great prices on used books, but be sure to check the shipping costs.

—————————————————————

http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2007/07/25/how-can-i-save-money-on-textbooks/

How can I save money on textbooks?
By Joey Coleman | July 25th, 2007 | 2:19 pm
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Filed Under: Advice • Coleman on Campus
Tags: advice • Coleman on Campus • finance • textbooks

Joey Coleman takes his textbook list on a hunt for the cheapest prices You can tell it’s almost September because of the back-to-school sale signs that are beginning to pop-up. And while the sales may mean cheap pencils to some people, for university students, they mean getting gouged with high textbook …
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Joey Coleman takes his textbook list on a hunt for the cheapest prices

You can tell it’s almost September because of the back-to-school sale signs that are beginning to pop-up. And while the sales may mean cheap pencils to some people, for university students, they mean getting gouged with high textbook prices.

Textbooks can easily add a thousand dollars or more each year to the price of getting an education. But now with the internet, students have all sorts of ways to hunt down cheaper prices than are offered by the university bookstore. And so, I went online with my textbook list to see if I could find myself a bargain.

The first step is finding the ISBN numbers for each book. This can be done easily by putting the title into Google and going to the first major bookstore page that shows up in the results. Usually, the ISBN is listed in the details section. Once you had the ISBN, you can search for your books. The best place to look for used textbooks is the book search engine bookfinder4u.com that searches over 130 different sites.

After searching for a few books, I quickly realized that there were five main sites that were worth looking at.

Abebooks.com was my favourite choice for used books because it lists both used books and international editions. The site offered the best deal for used in the case of five of my textbooks, before shipping and handling. Shipping costs vary using this site as many of the books listed are not held by Abebooks.com but are listings similar to eBay. And also like eBay, buy beware: some sellers increase their returns by charging a handling cost.

Next, I checked Chapters, mostly because of its reputation. For one of my books, Chapters offered a lower price for a new version than what I could find for a used one. However, Chapters’ prices were also at the other extreme: a book that my university sells new for $90.95 was sold by Chapters for $118.95. In the case of another book, Chapters offered a used price of $77.40 compared to the lowest price I could find online of $63.15. Considering that I would have to put my faith in the US-based seller to get the book to me in a timely fashion, I decided that I would rather pay a little extra to Chapters and put my mind at ease.

Next up, Amazon.ca, the Canadian website of one of the world’s largest online booksellers. Although Amazon.ca did not offer competitive prices on used books, they did offer the lowest price by far for new versions of six of my textbooks. The best deal was a book that my university sells for $63.95 that Amazon charged $39.03 with free shipping. Two textbooks that my university sells for $56.95 were offered by Amazon for $35.88 with free shipping.

Barnes and Noble, a giant American bookstore, offered used textbooks at an alright price. In the case of my history textbooks, they offered the lowest new prices, and in one case, the cost of membership was less than the savings that membership would offer. Their used listing was pretty good as well. Of course, I have learned using eBay to be weary of ordering over the border and the savings in these cases were not enough to entice me.

Alibris offered good prices on the used textbooks they offered; the problem was that their selection was limited. Now, I am taking a lot of advanced courses this year so you may have more luck with this site. All quotes on the site are in Canadian dollars.

The university bookstore was the easiest to find my books since they listed that all for me, and of course, have them in stock. In only one case did the university offer the lowest price on a new textbook. Even then, it was only $7 less than the next lowest competitor. They consistently were the highest or near the highest for costs of used textbooks. In short, they did not provide the value they claim to provide. Considering that they are ordering in bulk, one would think they would be able to offer a better price. They were unable to tell me if they had used books in stock, so my only option for online ordering was to cross my fingers and hope for a break.

Overall, I decided to pay a little extra and ordered about half of my textbooks new from Amazon and Chapters, taking advantage of free shipping due to the size of my orders. I picked up a few used textbooks and overall saved myself about $750 dollars. It remains to be seen how happy I am with the shipping time involved or the quality of the used textbooks I ordered. I have ordered early enough that I should have all my books in time for the start of classes. Of course, I did not factor in the cost of getting something for the mailman since he is going to have to lug all my textbooks to my door.

I could have saved even more money if I went completely with used textbooks, but the price difference in many cases was not enough to convince me to do so. I like to have my own books, with my own notes and writing (okay, and my own doodling) instead of someone else’s. Considering that Amazon and Chapters offered free shipping, in many cases this meant they were offering a lower overall price that a used book dealer. My advice, spend the time to make a chart so you can clearly see the price difference and then make your own decision based on your personal preferences. Keep an open mind, I started my shopping by planning to go with all used textbooks, I was surprised to find some many deals at Amazon and ended up buying most of my textbooks early. Most importantly, order now! There are only five weeks left till classes start again and you do not want it to be October before your books arrive in the mail.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090114.wpolice0114/BNStory/National/home

Police shouldn’t be investigating themselves: Ontario ombudsman

The Canadian Press
January 14, 2009 at 12:24 PM EST

WINNIPEG — No province should allow police to investigate themselves.

That’s according to Ontario ombudsman Andre Marin, who just completed an investigation into that province’s special investigations unit.

He suggests police show favouritism and bias when they investigate one of their own.

Mr. Marin says it doesn’t take a genius or a police officer to investigate alleged wrongdoing by police.

Manitoba is poised to become the second province to create a civilian body to investigate the police.

Mr. Marin says all provinces should follow that example or police won’t be held to account.

Source: The Star
http://www.thestar.com/article/570620

Appeals court backs Star’s freedom of information request
Jan 14, 2009 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (22)
Tracey Tyler
LEGAL AFFAIRS REPORTER

Municipal government institutions must produce any electronically stored information the public has a right to see, even if it requires using their technical expertise to develop new software, the Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled.

In a 3-0 decision yesterday, the court ordered the Toronto Police Services Board to respond “immediately” to requests from Star reporter Jim Rankin for information stored in two electronic databases, documenting contacts between citizens and police.

Yesterday’s decision marks the first time the court has ruled on the scope of the public’s and the media’s right to access electronic records held by municipal government institutions through freedom of information requests, said Tony Wong, a lawyer representing the Star.

“This is an issue of substantial importance,” said Wendy Matheson, a lawyer representing the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which intervened in the case.

“In today’s society, electronic recordkeeping is commonplace.”

Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, hailed yesterday’s decision as a “landmark” ruling that says principles of openness and transparency apply to electronic as well as paper records in the government’s possession.

Rankin began seeking the information in 2003 to test a Toronto police claim that officers do not engage in racial profiling.

Police refused the request, saying it would be time-consuming and require the use of a special computer program to replace personal information, such as names, with numbers.

Darrel Smith, a lawyer representing police, argued since the information would have to be reformatted, the databases did not meet the definition of a publicly accessible “record” under the Municipal Freedom of Information and Privacy Act.

The appeal court disagreed.

Writing on behalf of the panel yesterday, Justice Michael Moldaver said “the prevalence of computers in today’s society” and their use by government institutions “as the primary means by which records are kept” must be borne in mind in determining the breadth of public access to electronically stored data.

Given those realities, the public’s right to obtain this kind of information must be interpreted liberally, said Moldaver. Justices Robert Sharpe and Robert Blair agreed.

The decision quashes an earlier ruling from the Divisional Court, which, in effect, said the public can only access electronic government records if they can be produced using the kind of software the municipal institution normally relies on.

A Divisional Court panel concluded last year that Frank DeVries, an adjudicator with Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, erred by failing to consider whether the police would have to reformat the information before releasing it.

The reasonableness of DeVries’s decision was the central issue before the Court of Appeal. Rejecting the Divisional Court’s findings, Moldaver said DeVries’s reasons indicate he was well aware police would need to develop a new “algorithm” to extract the requested information and that, under the legislation, the costs could be passed along to the Star.

Significantly, Moldaver also said the Divisional Court’s “narrow” interpretation of availability of electronic records fails to consider the important public policy objectives of “access to information” laws and allows governments a way to skirt requests for information. “On the Divisional Court’s interpretation, access would be determined based upon the coincidence of whether the software was already in use, regardless of how easy or inexpensive it would be to develop,” he said.

Speaking on behalf of the Civil Liberties Association, Matheson said the court has recognized “we are in the information age” and “from the public interest standpoint, it would be ironic and it would certainly defeat the public interest if the use of computer technology was allowed to be a barrier to access to information.”

The battle isn’t necessarily over. Police could still rely on other exemptions in the law as a basis for refusing to provide the information. They could also attempt to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Smith, the police lawyer, told the Star yesterday the next step will be up to the police services board.

———————-

Six year quest:

The Star’s freedom of information request is ongoing:

Oct. 2002: The Star publishes its “Race & Crime” series.

May 26, 2003: The Star files two freedom of information requests for updated police data.

July 21, 2003: The Toronto police service denies the requests.

Aug. 9, 2003: The Star appeals to the Information and Privacy Commissioner.

Nov. 7, 2005: The commissioner rules in favour of the Star.

Dec. 8, 2005: The service requests a stay, pending a court review.

June 21, 2007: Divisional court rules in favour of the police.

July 6, 2007: The Star and IPC successfully seek leave to appeal.

2008: The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Star and the police service make their arguments before Court of Appeal.

Jan. 13, 2009: The court of appeal overturns the divisional court ruling, restoring IPC order.

Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090107.wblatch07/BNStory/Front

HRISTIE BLATCHFORD
From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail
January 7, 2009 at 3:38 AM EST

It was early on the morning of Saturday, July 8, 2006, that I saw my first dead and injured Talibs. There was one of each.

I was travelling with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, in the Panjwai district west of Kandahar. This was Op Zahar, a significant battle group operation that involved all three companies. I was with Major Bill Fletcher, then the Officer Commanding of C Company.

The soldiers had been fighting throughout the night, practically, but now, early on another gorgeous morning, it was quiet, and they were doing a battle damage assessment.

The two Talibs were lying in a ditch by a little irrigation canal. Most of their clothes had been blown off, and for one man, most of his head too. He was dead. The other man was alive, but very seriously injured, with gunshot wounds to the chest; he had also lost a lot of blood.

A Canadian medic was on him like white on rice. The Talib was ferried to a nearby command post, hooked up to an intravenous and treated with all the marvels of modern battlefield medicine until a chopper arrived to evacuate him.

Last I checked, the man survived the trip and made it to hospital. I didn’t remember much of that morning – it was the next one, the Sunday, that has always stuck in my mind, the day Corporal Tony Boneca of Thunder Bay, was killed – until yesterday, when from Canadian Forces Base Petawawa, some of the background to the murder charge against Captain Robert Semrau was made public at a military hearing.

The 35-year-old was charged with second-degree murder earlier this month after a brief investigation by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service. Capt. Semrau was the Officer Commanding of a small group of Canadian mentors, members of the Operational Mentor Liaison Team or OMLT, who had been training an Afghan National Army company.

According to information from the prosecutor yesterday, the Canadians had been in neighbouring Helmand province, an area under British control, since the beginning of October. On the day of the incident, Oct. 19, they had been on a 26-kilometre foot patrol when they were ambushed by a group of Taliban.

They called for air support and a U.S. Apache gunship arrived, brought the attack to an end and allowed the Canadians to “move forward.”

In layman’s language, this appears to mean the battle was, if only for the moment, over.

As they went, the ANA apparently discovered two Talibs.

As with my July, 2006, experience, one was dead, the other, armed with an assault rifle, was apparently seriously wounded. His injuries were deemed “too severe for in-situ treatment.”

The prosecutor said that Capt. Semrau was the only person standing near the wounded insurgent when two shots rang out and the Talib was found dead. A witness will apparently testify that he saw the young officer firing at the insurgent.

The allegation is that Capt. Semrau fired both those shots, which resulted in the Talib’s death. His body was left behind, and never recovered.

If the question is whether there is a lawful way that a soldier can shoot an injured enemy combatant, with one exception that I will explain in a bit, the answer is a resounding no.

The Geneva Conventions; the international Law of Armed Conflict, the Canadian bible on such matters – it is called Duty With Honour: The Profession of Arms in Canada, and is the central ethical touchstone for Canadian soldiers – make it perfectly plain that once injured and hors de combat, French for “out of the fight,” a soldier is considered a prisoner of war, deserving of all protections.

Unless a soldier is still posing an imminent threat – and wounded soldiers can still fire weapons or toss grenades – there are no legal grounds for shooting an injured man.

If the question is whether this could have been a mercy killing, the answer is also an unequivocal no.

For one thing, given the state of modern battlefield medicine, most injuries are treatable, at least, that is, if the soldiers are travelling with a Western-trained medic; Afghan medics have much less training, medical and ethical, and less skill and equipment. OMLT teams usually have one Canadian medic with them at all times.

Medics are obliged to treat the most seriously injured first, regardless of whether they are friends or enemy, and they take this as gospel. This is the concept of triage, and as someone told me yesterday, triage isn’t done on a “friend or foe” basis, but according to need. As someone else said, a wounded man “is not a frigging dog. You may shoot animals to put them out of their misery, but not people.”

There is another phenomenon which, in ancient times, was called “going berserker.” In essence, it would capture the soldier made temporarily mad by combat, who goes out of his mind and falls prey to battle rage. This most often happens in the height of the fighting, with all the intense emotions and physical responses of combat, which doesn’t appear to have been the case here.

The allegations made at Petawawa yesterday just hint at the evidence to come; they aren’t evidence, in and of themselves, but rather the prosecutor’s brief sketch of the evidence he expects to call. Capt. Semrau is entitled to the presumption of innocence, but it would seem he has a rough row to hoe. If there is a lawful explanation for what happened, it is not an obvious one. The brief outline of the background to the charge raises more questions than it answers.

In only one small way does the outline suggest an explanation for the two-month delay between the date of the incident and the date it was reported to senior commanders, Dec. 27.

As the OC, and though he would have reported to a more senior officer, Capt. Semrau may have been the ranking Canadian officer on the field that day. Anyone witnessing what happened was probably an underling, a subordinate, and may have needed time to work through in his or her own mind a difficult ethical dilemma – protect a superior, or follow the dictates of conscience.

The Canadians were the mentors that day. The soldiers of the ANA, while brave in battle, are not known for their charitable behaviour toward the enemy (nor the Taliban toward them, of course). What the mentors are supposed to teach are not only the mechanics of how to plan and carry out a fight, but also how to do it with more honour, and more moral authority, than the other guy.