Happy Canada Day from the True North: Land of Back Bacon, Pickerel, the Maple Leaf, Beaver, Moose and Loon, eh

Here’s some food for thought from Ipsos Reid’s annual Canada Day survey conducted between June 12 and June 15 on behalf of Historica Canada, formerly known as the Historica-Dominion Institute, as you get ready to hoist the cold libation of your choice tomorrow to perhaps toast Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, and mark Canada’s 148th birthday.

Historica Canada is a national charitable organization that was launched in September 2009 as the Historica-Dominion Institute, through the amalgamation of two existing organizations: The Historica Foundation of Canada and the Dominion Institute. The Historica Foundation of Canada was launched in October 1999, while the Dominion Institute was formed in 1997 by a group of young professionals, concerned about the erosion of a common memory and civic identity in Canada.

While Ipsos Reid assures us their sample of 1,005 Canadians from Ipsos’ panel interviewed online was weighted to balance demographics “to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe,” I wonder? Does it really matter that much? It’s the all-too-short summer barbecue season in Canada, time to have some fun, without worrying too much about how the sample was constructed. It’s a Canada Day poll after all, not say a … provincial election seats results prediction poll!

Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in public opinion research on-and-off, sometimes between journalism gigs, since 1980, including working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I supervised telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Carter-Reagan presidential election campaign. Earlier the same year, I worked as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, a Winnipeg company, doing a 1980 Quebec Referendum survey for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. So when Ipsos Reid says the precision of their Canada Day poll is accurate to a confidence or credibility interval of plus or minus 3.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled with the margin of expected sampling, coverage, measurement and perhaps other errors, as well as a confidence or credibility interval that is wider among subsets of the population, I’m suitably impressed.

And then I go back to the barbecue. Or perhaps my mother’s black cast-iron skillet if it is breakfast time.  Ipsos Reid  says 35 per cent of Canadians named back bacon as Canada’s national food, beating out poutine, named by only 30 per cent, for the top spot this year. Salmon, whether Atlantic or Pacific, trailed at a distant third (personally, I’d have opted for Paint Lake pickerel, a regional delicacy of Northern Manitoba), named by 17 per cent, followed by beavertails at eight per cent; tourtière at six per cent and doughnuts (which is how we’ll spell it for Canada Day) at four per cent.

Other fascinating tidbits include such illuminating facts as only 12 per cent of us have had the opportunity to go out dog-sledding.

When it comes to Canadian symbols, the beaver ranks up with the maple leaf, and 64 per cent of Canadians have seen a beaver in the wild, followed by moose at 60 per cent, edging out loons at 59 per cent and a bear in the wild at 55 per cent. Meanwhile 16 per cent of Canadians say they  have never seen any of these animals,  Ipsos Reid reports. If you live in Toronto or Vancouver, well, take your dog-sledding stats for guidance. Could happen, I suppose, but back bacon is a better bet. Trust me.

Respondents were asked which musician they are proudest to call Canadian. Nearly four in 10  (38 per cent) chose Celine Dion from a list which also included Kingston’s The Tragically Hip (picked by 14 per cent), Nickelback (11 per cent), Blue Rodeo (nine per cent), Drake (six per cent), Justin Bieber (two per cent), or some other musician or group (20 per cent). Given that Neil Young, The Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, April Wine, the Stampeders, A Foot in Coldwater and Loverboy, just to name half a dozen or so others, are apparently absent from the top of the list, I’ve concluded this must be the result of the confidence or credibility interval that I mentioned earlier. Or, perhaps more likely even, the fact my tastes in Canadian music apparently haven’t quite arrived in the 21st century yet. A possibility not to be discounted, to be sure.

Five years ago, the Historica-Dominion Institute, in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs and with the support of the Aurea Foundation, conducted an online survey, “Canada and the World in 2010,” which was also conducted for it by pollster Ipsos Reid and had more than 18,000 respondents in 24 countries.

The survey found, among many other things, Canadians sometimes overestimate their own influence in world affairs:

While two in three Canadians (67 per cent) agreed in 2010 that Canada had an influence on the world stage, only 55 per cent of global respondents agreed. Those polled in Brazil and India were most likely (both 74 per cent) to agree that Canada had influence in world affairs, while only one third of Japanese and Swedes agreed, making them least likely of the 24 countries polled to believe that Canada is influential on the world stage.

For Americans, Independence Day Saturday on July 4 marks the defeat of the British Redcoats in the War of Independence in 1783, although some Southerners still mourn it as the date in 1863 when Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to Union troops in the War Between the States or Civil War.

Canada being Canada and Canadians being Canadians, we quintessentially mark July 1 with what might appear to outsiders to be a rather odd mix of reticence, pride and ambivalence. Me? I like to recall that it was on Canada Day 2007 I arrived to live in Manitoba!

Sometimes we forget just how remarkable an achievement Canada was in 1867. In the spring of 1864, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were contemplating the possibility of Maritime Union. But nothing concrete happened until the Province of Canada, springing from the legislative union of Canada East and Canada West, heard of the proposed conference and members of the combined legislature requested permission to attend the meeting of the Maritime colonies, in order to raise the larger subject of British North American union.

Delegates from away arrived by steamer in Prince Edward Island and shared the spotlight with the first circus to visit the island in more than 20 years. No kidding. How absolutely Canadian can you get?

The historic Charlottetown Conference took place from Sept. 1 to 9, 1864. My ancestral Acadian roots are on the saltwater Tantramar marshes of Amherst, Nova Scotia, in Cumberland County on the Isthmus of Chignecto at the head of the Bay of Fundy and Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America. From Amherst came four of the 36 Fathers of Confederation, more than any other city or town in Canada:  Robert Barry Dickey, Edward Barron Chandler, Jonathan McCully, and Sir Charles Tupper, a Conservative who went onto serve as Canada’s sixth prime minister briefly in 1896.  While he was born in Amherst, Chandler was best known as a New Brunswick legislator.

Tupper was also a medical doctor and founded Pugsley’s Pharmacy, dispensing chemists, at 63 Victoria Street East in downtown Amherst in 1843, the same year he became a doctor. Tupper was president of the Medical Society of Nova Scotia in 1863, and was the first president of the Canadian Medical Association from 1867 to 1870. Pugsley’s operated at the same location in the same historic Tupper Block building, as the oldest business in town and one of the oldest pharmacies in Canada, for 169 years until May 2012.

While there are differing historical opinions as to who should be considered a Father of Confederation, traditionally they have been defined as the 36 men who attended one or more of the three conferences held at Charlottetown; Québec City from Oct. 10 to 27, 1864; and London, England from Dec. 4, 1866 to Feb. 11, 1867 to discuss the union of British North America, preceding Confederation on July 1, 1867. Negotiators settled on the name “Dominion of Canada,” proposed by the head of the New Brunswick delegation, Samuel Leonard Tilley.  The word dominion was taken from the King James Bible: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth” (Psalm 72:8). Tilley, who had a background in pharmacy, became the minister of customs in Sir John A. Macdonald’s first cabinet in 1867.

As a Canadian, it also remains an uncommon privilege for me to have to sat in the public gallery in the balcony of historic Province House in Charlottetown, designed and built by local architect Isaac Smith and completed in 1847, to accommodate the legislative assembly of Prince Edward Island. To this day, the assembly has only 27 seats for the members from the ridings of Souris-Elmira through to Tignish-Palmer Road.

The July 1 holiday was established by statute in 1879, under the name Dominion Day. There is no record of organized ceremonies after the first anniversary, except for the 50th anniversary of Confederation in 1917, at which time the new Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings, under construction, was dedicated as a memorial to the Fathers of Confederation and to the valour of Canadians fighting in the First World War in Europe.

The next celebration was held in 1927 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.

Since 1958, the federal government has arranged for an annual observance of Canada’s national day on July 1.

Well done, Sir John A.

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Canada’s ‘other’ national spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment, used its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo for HTTP metadata monitoring and collection from ‘Free File Upload’ (FFU) file-sharing sites in a covert behaviour-based target discovery project codenamed LEVITATION

News today that Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) used its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo through its CSE Web Operations Centre (CWOC) to track 10 to 15 million user uploads and downloads daily and analyze the records in its needle-in-a-haystack effort to stumble upon extremist plots and suspects, and has been monitoring and collecting HTTP metadata for 102 known “Free File Upload” (FFU) file-sharing sites, commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files, is well … not so surprising. Canada is a  partner in the so-called “Five Eyes” electronics communications intelligence partnership, which also includes the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.

The three FFU file-sharing sites specifically named are RapidShare, SendSpace, and the defunct MegaUpload – based on a 21-slide CSE Microsoft PowerPoint tradecraft presentation in 2012 compiled by a three-member Canadian team and shared with its Five Eyes partners titled, “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis.” CSE said in the presentation three years ago they “only care about the 2,200 URLs [Uniform Resource Locators] that point to documents of interest,” citing the example of a SendSpace file titled, “How to make a gas bomb.” CSE said they were “finding about 350 interesting download events per month” back then. Levitation is the codename also for the larger Communications Security Establishment covert behaviour-based target discovery project, as well as the presentation.

The “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis” CSE presentation comes from the cache of Edward Snowden. The 31-year-old American computer specialist, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, who had lived in Kunia, Hawaii, went AWOL almost three years ago, eventually landing in Moscow, and since June 2013 has disclosed more than 200,000 classified documents to the press, a fraction of the cache of  about 1.7 million NSA intelligence files he downloaded, and the biggest theft of U.S. secrets in history, the Pentagon said in January 2014.

Branded as either a patriot or traitor, largely depending on the politics of whoever is doing the branding, Snowden faces criminal prosecution in the United States and was granted temporary asylum in August 2013 in Russia.

The “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis” story was reported collaboratively today by reporter Ryan Gallagher and co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald of First Look Media’s The Intercept, an online publication created and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar last February, and Amber Hildebrandt, Michael Pereira and Dave Seglins of CBC News. The Intercept lists its short-term mission as providing “a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.”

A series of exposés, based on Snowden’s  leaks, began being published in June 2013, revealing Internet surveillance programs such as PRISM, XKeyscore and Tempora, as well as the interception of telephone metadata from U.S. allies, including Canada, around the world. The Canadian government was alleged to have engaged in economic espionage involving Brazil’s Ministério de Minas e Energia.

Snowden’s release of National Security Agency (NSA) material was called in 2013 the most significant leak in U.S. history by American defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who knows the territory well enough, one supposes, having himself leaked the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which were published by the paper beginning in June 1971.

Only a small percentage of the documents purloined by Snowden have been published to date. Since 2013, Snowden has been what Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks were to 2010. As is the case now with Snowden, at the same time stolen classified material was published by WikiLeaks, it was also being published collaboratively across various portals and platforms in three of the world’s most prestigious daily newspapers – the New York Times in the United States, the Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany.

On July 25, 2010, Assange’s WikiLeaks, a non-profit Swedish website started in December 2006, posted an unprecedented 91,731 mostly classified documents, the so-called “War Logs,” and most with a middling “secret” clearance level – from United States military databanks relating to the war in Afghanistan – on the Internet.

The documents made it possible to compare the mainly dismal frontline reality on the battlefield with the political propaganda coming from the higher-ups.

While some – including Assange – compared the War Logs to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the War Logs and Pentagon Papers were different in kind, as Ellsberg noted himself in interviews in July 2010.

“There is a very real drama because of the size of the release and it’s an important step, but these are low-level field reports while the Pentagon Papers were a high-level analysis about the origins of the war,” Ellsberg said. “Still, it’s a very important moment because this is a war that is taking place right now and what WikiLeaks has done could change how people think about it.”

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is Canada’s national cryptologic agency with a National Defence Act mandate that includes foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) interception and analysis, including cryptanalysis or codebreaking, of communications and other electronic signals. CSE  is prohibited by law from targeting Canadians or anyone in Canada under the signals intelligence part of their mandate, but can, if requested, with proper warrants or other lawful authority held by the requesting agency, provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies in the performance of their lawful duties under what is known as CSE’s “assistance mandate.”

Its new $1.2 billion dollar headquarters at 1929 Ogilvie Rd., completed last July, was dubbed “Camelot” in official Department of National Defence documents and is the most expensive federal building ever constructed in Canada, located next door to the only slightly better known Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which also has its headquarters in Gloucester in east-end Ottawa.

The centrepiece of the new CSE complex on Ogilvie Road is equivalent to a 90-storey skyscraper turned on its side.

The old CSE headquarters was the five-storey Sir Leonard Tilley Building at 719 Heron Rd., near Carleton University, well known to the intelligence community as “The Farm,” and  located at the corner of Riverside Drive and Heron Road, within the boundaries of the federal government’s Confederation Heights campus, in Ottawa. The Sir Leonard Tilley Building was built in 1961 and custom designed for use by intelligence services. The building’s exterior elevations conceal specialized features linked to intelligence gathering such as the design of “slippers” beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems.

The Communications Security Establishment’s predecessor was the Communications Branch of the National Research Council of Canada (CBNRC), which began work in September 1946. The CBNRC was formed at the end of the Second World War by combining the two wartime cryptologic offices; the civilian Examination Unit (XU) and the military Joint Discrimination Unit (JDU), made up by 1945 of what had been the disparate SIGINT collection units of the Navy, Army and Air Force. The Examination Unit  was Canada’s first civilian office that was solely dedicated to the encryption and decryption of communications signals traffic content. Until then, signals intelligence (SIGINT) was entirely within the purview of the military.

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Newly-elected SDML board of trustees uphold previous board’s decision not to allow 11-year-old home schooled Colin Winship into Grade 6 band program

Colin Winship will not be making music on his trombone or on the piano with the School District of Mystery Lake band program, at least in the immediate future. The board has again turned down the request of the 11-year-old home schooled pupil and his parents, Jason and Caroline Winship, to allow him to enrol on a part-time basis in the Grade 6 band program.

The Winships have pleaded their case three times in delegations to the board, making presentations over a period of less than six months, first to the old SDML board of trustees last May 27 and June 24, and again to the new board Nov. 12, including a presentation by Colin himself, but to no avail. He told trustees Nov. 12 he’s wanted to play music since he was five years old and last August took part in the City of Thompson summer music camp. “When I came home I told my dad, brothers and sister, I couldn’t wait to join the band,” he told the board. “The very next day my mom told me home schoolers were no longer allowed, and I was quite disappointed that I would never get in.” Colin also took drum lessons privately last summer from noted local percussionist Becky Pritchard, daughter of Paul and Faith Pritchard. “It is still my dream to someday be in the school band, and I pray about it every night. I would work really hard, and behave the very best I can,” he told the board last month.

The board’s answer. however, remains “no.” The new board discussed the request and referred it to its two superintendents for “administrative policy and procedure development,” the new chair of the board, Leslie Tucker, wrote in a Dec. 11 letter to the Winships. The board held its final scheduled meeting of the year two days earlier on Dec. 9.

The majority of the SDML trustees – four of  seven – are newly elected, winning their seats less than two months ago in the Oct. 22 election. The vote on the old board not to allow Colin Winship into the band program was twice unanimous. Joining Tucker, manager of Northern Region Training and Employment Services here for Jobs and the Economy Manitoba, and Janet Brady, a senior instructor at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Social Work in the Northern Bachelor of Social Work program here. who was first elected in a byelection Nov. 17, 2011, as the third returning incumbent on this board from the old one is Guido Oliveira, who works at Vale, and is now the longest-serving member of the board, having been first elected in October 2006. He is serving as vice-chair again this year, a role he has filled on several previous occasions.

Vince Nowlin, who also works at Vale, was defeated in his re-election bid in October after a single term on the board. Rob Pellizzaro, a local lawyer, who was first elected in 1998, and was by far the longest serving trustee on the board, serving as chair again last year, did not seek re-election in October. As well, 75-year-old trustee Sya Gregovski, stepped down after a single term in October, as did Alexander Ashton, a former SDML board chair, and civil technology instructor at University College of the North (UCN), who is the younger brother of two-term Churchill NDP MP Niki Ashton and the son of Thompson NDP MLA and minister of infrastructure and transportation Steve Ashton and Hari Dimitrakopoulou-Ashton, an economist and university lecturer in economics, management, and women’s studies, who is also a former SDML school board trustee, likewise did not see re-election after a single term as trustee. Alexander Ashton is living abroad in Europe this year.

Caroline Winship ran herself for a trustee seat in the Oct. 22 election but finished last in an 11-candidate field.

Newcomers elected as trustees Oct. 22 include Ryan Land, controversially fired as probationary principal of R.D Parker Collegiate in a 5-2 vote by the previous board on Feb. 22, 2011. Land now works as manager of corporate affairs and organizational development for Vale’s Manitoba Operations. On June 20, 2012, the Thompson Teachers’ Association No. 45-3 of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society, of which Land was a member, reached a deal with the SDML, just as a five-day arbitration hearing on grievances in connection with Land’s firing was set to begin, and after Land had offered his resignation to the SDML six days earlier on June 14, 2012, but effective almost seven months earlier on Nov. 18, 2011. The board, as a result, accepted Land’s resignation and rescinded his termination. Both Land and the SDML withdrew all claims against each other and ended all litigation between the parties.

Other trustee newcomers are Liz Lychuk, manager of child and adolescent mental health programs and mental health promotion here at the Northern Regional Health Authority (NRHA); Sandra Fitzpatrick, acting project officer for Manitoba Housing and Community Development; and Don Macdonald, fisheries manager for the Northeastern Region here in the  Fisheries Branch of the Water Stewardship Division of Manitoba Conservation and Water Stewardship.

Five years ago, Colin had been permitted into music and physical education classes through partial enrollment at École Riverside School back in 2009 when he was in Grade 1.

But the board’s position now in 2014 is that home schooled students cannot partially enrol for some classes or activities with SDML, due to the board’s space and funding concerns, because in fairness saying yes to one such request would make it necessary to say yes to them all. Pro-rated funding is available through through the province for home schooled students partially enrolled in classes such as a band program. There were eight families last academic year who home school their children in Thompson and some of their children, in addition to Colin, had taken part in school district programs in the past, though none have for the past two years.

Winship said last June she has spoken to superintendents at 38 other school districts or divisions, and that only one had a policy against allowing home schooled students to partially enrol and that was because that district didn’t have enough room for all of its own students in its programs.

The Winships presented a 15-page petition to the board June 24, including 324 names of people supporting Colin’s participation in the band program. While many of their petition supporters were from Thompson, many of the other petition signers were from places like Oxnard, California, Las Vegas, Richmond, Virginia, Indianapolis, Phenix City, Alabama, Summerville, South Carolina, Cleveland, Tennessee, Paramus, New Jersey, Panama City, Florida, Vienna, Austria, Cacém-sintra, Portugal, Gauteng, South Africa, Vyshneve, Ukraine and Ranelagh, Australia.

Neither the petition nor the second Winship delegation June 24, however, proved persuasive. “The decision we made at the May 27 meeting remains unchanged,” Brady wrote to the Winships in a one-paragraph letter of response June 26.

The Winships then took their case to then provincial NDP Minister of Education and Advanced Learning James Allum, who asked Gerald Farthing, his deputy minister, to review their concerns directly. In his reply to the Winships, Farthing said “the decision to admit the student rests with locally elected school board trustees,” but added he contacted SDML officials and they “have agreed to review their policy regarding the admittance of home schooled children into public school courses and extra-curricular activities.”

“We have yet to receive any reasons regarding this choice but perceive it to be a final decision after our presentation on Nov. 12,” Caroline Winship said Dec. 15.

“We are obviously disappointed and have begun discussing other options for our family for the time being. We hope to explore the idea again in the future.

“We sincerely appreciate all of the support we have received and the decision has not impacted Colin’s desire to learn trombone and piano.”

There is a public group on Facebook founded by Caroline Winship last June 9 called “Colin Winship Wants To Join The Band,” which has more than 500 members and is found at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ColinWinshipInBand/

The group’s motto is: For the love of music. Music for ALL.

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