Last year there was a report written, “Alberta Anti-Racism Advisory Council Recommendations” and I thought it was well done. I’m not sure how well some of their recommendations are being pursued. For example. One of them is to establish an Ombudsperson office with staff to investigate all complaints about policing in Alberta in an independent, transparent and timely manner. This body will have punitive powers and ensure compliance with recommended actions.
I did a Google search for the office. If I found the right information, it says the Ombudsman cannot investigate:
Decisions made by the Federal government
Members of the Legislative Assembly
Federal or municipal police forces
Decisions made by universities or schools
Decisions made by the courts
Private businesses or private matters
Does this mean the advisory council recommendations are an exercise in futility? Is this a good question? Or does it mean something has been accomplished, but we don’t know about it? I’d like to find out.
The Mayor of Edmonton, Amarjeet Sohi, called for a strategy to address racism in Edmonton moments after being sworn in as the city’s first South Asian mayor. I’d like to know what has been accomplished. It is hard to find a recent hate crime story in the news. Just what are they doing to address this issue?
If the Ombudsman can’t investigate the police, who is?
One story that really bothers me is the one about an “Indigenous teenager in Edmonton, Alberta, who has spent nearly a year without a chunk of his skull after a local police officer allegedly kicked him in the head “football-style.” The lad was handcuffed, lying on the ground, and wasn’t offering any resistance when Const. Ben Todd attacked him. Apparently, Todd wasn’t even suspended for the incident.
What’s happening with this?
Minorities all over North America are scared of the police. In the United States, it’s even worse.
A group I belong to is challenging members to set up their “Citizening” and take an active role in making Alberta into the province it needs to be… for everyone.
I would like to take an active role in helping to reduce racism, discrimination, and work towards assisting with other social issues. But, I can’t do it myself.
If you would like to join me, I’ve set up a Google Group, where discussions on how to move forward on this issue, can be addressed, and develop action plans for various levels of engagement. If we can put together a good-sized group, perhaps we can help draw more attention to racism in Alberta, and encourage local officials to stay on track.
There’s a homepage for the group, that gives a basic overview of how it can work, with a preview of the group, so you can see how it’s setup. You can join it here.
It’s easy to ignore one voice. One-hundred or more voices isn’t so easy to dismiss. Maybe, just maybe, we can get something done.
Haugen was the primary source for a Wall Street Journal exposé on the company. She called Facebook’s algorithms dangerous, said Facebook executives were aware of the threat but put profits before people, and called on Congress to regulate the company.
Social media platforms rely heavily on people’s behavior to decide on the content that you see. In particular, they watch for content that people respond to or “engage” with by liking, commenting and sharing. Troll farms, organizations that spread provocative content, exploit this by copying high-engagement content and posting it as their own, which helps them reach a wide audience.
As a computer scientist who studies the ways large numbers of people interact using technology, I understand the logic of using the wisdom of the crowds in these algorithms. I also see substantial pitfalls in how the social media companies do so in practice.
From lions on the savanna to likes on Facebook
The concept of the wisdom of crowds assumes that using signals from others’ actions, opinions and preferences as a guide will lead to sound decisions. For example, collective predictions are normally more accurate than individual ones. Collective intelligence is used to predict financial markets, sports, elections and even disease outbreaks.
Throughout millions of years of evolution, these principles have been coded into the human brain in the form of cognitive biases that come with names like familiarity, mere exposure and bandwagon effect. If everyone starts running, you should also start running; maybe someone saw a lion coming and running could save your life. You may not know why, but it’s wiser to ask questions later.
Your brain picks up clues from the environment – including your peers – and uses simple rules to quickly translate those signals into decisions: Go with the winner, follow the majority, copy your neighbor. These rules work remarkably well in typical situations because they are based on sound assumptions. For example, they assume that people often act rationally, it is unlikely that many are wrong, the past predicts the future, and so on.
Technology allows people to access signals from much larger numbers of other people, most of whom they do not know. Artificial intelligence applications make heavy use of these popularity or “engagement” signals, from selecting search engine results to recommending music and videos, and from suggesting friends to ranking posts on news feeds.
Not everything viral deserves to be
Our research shows that virtually all web technology platforms, such as social media and news recommendation systems, have a strong popularity bias. When applications are driven by cues like engagement rather than explicit search engine queries, popularity bias can lead to harmful unintended consequences.
Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok rely heavily on AI algorithms to rank and recommend content. These algorithms take as input what you like, comment on and share – in other words, content you engage with. The goal of the algorithms is to maximize engagement by finding out what people like and ranking it at the top of their feeds.
A primer on the Facebook algorithm.
On the surface this seems reasonable. If people like credible news, expert opinions and fun videos, these algorithms should identify such high-quality content. But the wisdom of the crowds makes a key assumption here: that recommending what is popular will help high-quality content “bubble up.”
We tested this assumption by studying an algorithm that ranks items using a mix of quality and popularity. We found that in general, popularity bias is more likely to lower the overall quality of content. The reason is that engagement is not a reliable indicator of quality when few people have been exposed to an item. In these cases, engagement generates a noisy signal, and the algorithm is likely to amplify this initial noise. Once the popularity of a low-quality item is large enough, it will keep getting amplified.
Algorithms aren’t the only thing affected by engagement bias – it can affect people too. Evidence shows that information is transmitted via “complex contagion,” meaning the more times people are exposed to an idea online, the more likely they are to adopt and reshare it. When social media tells people an item is going viral, their cognitive biases kick in and translate into the irresistible urge to pay attention to it and share it.
Not-so-wise crowds
We recently ran an experiment using a news literacy app called Fakey. It is a game developed by our lab that simulates a news feed like those of Facebook and Twitter. Players see a mix of current articles from fake news, junk science, hyperpartisan and conspiratorial sources, as well as mainstream sources. They get points for sharing or liking news from reliable sources and for flagging low-credibility articles for fact-checking.
We found that players are more likely to like or share and less likely to flag articles from low-credibility sources when players can see that many other users have engaged with those articles. Exposure to the engagement metrics thus creates a vulnerability.
The wisdom of the crowds fails because it is built on the false assumption that the crowd is made up of diverse, independent sources. There may be several reasons this is not the case.
First, because of people’s tendency to associate with similar people, their online neighborhoods are not very diverse. The ease with which social media users can unfriend those with whom they disagree pushes people into homogeneous communities, often referred to as echo chambers.
Second, because many people’s friends are friends of one another, they influence one another. A famous experiment demonstrated that knowing what music your friends like affects your own stated preferences. Your social desire to conform distorts your independent judgment.
Third, popularity signals can be gamed. Over the years, search engines have developed sophisticated techniques to counter so-called “link farms” and other schemes to manipulate search algorithms. Social media platforms, on the other hand, are just beginning to learn about their own vulnerabilities.
A different, preventive approach would be to add friction. In other words, to slow down the process of spreading information. High-frequency behaviors such as automated liking and sharing could be inhibited by CAPTCHA tests, which require a human to respond, or fees. Not only would this decrease opportunities for manipulation, but with less information people would be able to pay more attention to what they see. It would leave less room for engagement bias to affect people’s decisions.
It would also help if social media companies adjusted their algorithms to rely less on engagement signals and more on quality signals to determine the content they serve you. Perhaps the whistleblower revelations will provide the necessary impetus.
Restaurant operators across Canada are struggling to find enough staff to run their operations. This labour crisis has been highly publicized by Canadian media as a “labour shortage.”
A recent survey by Restaurants Canada found that 80 per cent of food service operators were finding it difficult to hire kitchen staff and 67 per cent were having trouble filling serving, bar-tending and hosting positions.
Should the chronic hiring struggles of Canadian restaurants be referred to as a labour shortage, or can it be more accurately portrayed as a retention issue fuelled by a lack of decent work? Does the use of the term labour shortage take the onus off of restaurant operators for creating these shortages, and instead place it on Canadian job-seekers?
First job for many Canadians
A 2010 Canadian Restaurant and Foodservice Association report found that 22 per cent of Canadians worked in a restaurant as their first job — the highest of any industry. The study also found that 32 per cent of Canadians have at one point worked in the restaurant industry.
These statistics show that millions of Canadians have been introduced to restaurant work and the industry has enjoyed a seemingly endless supply of labour for decades. So why is it that the restaurant industry is burning through so many people?
Our research on restaurant work conditions shows that working in a restaurant is difficult, requiring the sacrifice of work-life balance due to long hours and unpredictable schedules. While restaurant work can be rewarding and fun, it can also be low-paying, stressful and physically demanding, all of which can have a negative impact on mental health.
A waiter wearing protective equipment collects the bill at a restaurant in Saint-Sauveur, Que. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz
Many restaurant workers spend at least eight hours a day on their feet with no time for breaks or meals. Workers are also required to forgo their social and family life by having to work late nights, weekends and holidays.
Many restaurant workers almost never know precisely when their shifts will end, and tend to be placed on unpredictable split shifts or “on call” shifts to save labour costs.
Toxic work environment
The restaurant industry has also been rampant with sexual harassment, abuse and toxic work environments.
A Statistics Canada study found that hospitality workers have the worst job quality out of any industry. This was largely due to low earnings, the inability to take time off, no paid sick leave, a lack of training opportunities and no supplemental medical and dental care.
This same study found that 67 per cent of hospitality workers work in jobs with work conditions that fall below decent work levels.
So what exactly is “decent work?” It’s a concept established by the International Labour Organization and is linked to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Decent work establishes universal conditions of work that are central to the well-being of workers.
These conditions are considered to be minimum labour standards that include living wages, work hours that allow for free time and rest, safe working environments and access to health care. Decent work is considered a human right but based on the conditions of restaurant work, it appears the Canadian restaurant industry is struggling to provide it to all of its employees.
Bartenders and wait staff wait for the lunch hour rush as patrons sit on the patio of a Toronto restaurant. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
Exodus of workers from the industry
Through our research on restaurant work, and via conversations with many restaurant employees across the country, we’ve learned that many are fleeing the industry because the work is a grind. What’s more, they don’t see any future in a job that will continue to hinder their well-being.
The pandemic allowed workers time to find jobs in other industries that provide more stability and feature regular work schedules, vacation time, higher pay and benefits.
These workers often felt neglected, and that their employers did not believe they were worth investing in.
While there are certainly good restaurant employers, the industry as a whole has failed to improve working conditions because historically, there were always new people to fill roles.
That raises the question: Could the continuous reference to a labour shortage in the restaurant industry actually be creating a lack of urgency in addressing longstanding issues of work quality?
A waitress serves patrons at a restaurant in Carstairs, Alta. . THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
If restaurants want to operate at full staff in the post-pandemic future, they need to invest in their employees because, after all, it’s impossible to run a restaurant without people working in it.
The restaurant industry has always spent money, time and resources to attract customers and increase revenues. It’s long past time for restaurant operators to consider their employees internal customers, and put as much effort into providing great experiences for them as they do for their external customers.
A good place for operators to start is by providing decent and dignified work for all that provides decent wages, benefits and healthy working conditions.
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The news was shocking to many non-Indigenous Canadians, while many Indigenous Peoples either witnessed the graveyards being created, or grew up hearing about the graveyards from survivors. The missing children and the graveyards were also disclosed in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) final reports. Experts expect that many more graves will be found.
What if I told you there is another entity that no one is talking about that also played a major role in the operations of these schools? My research has documented how appeals to Canadians and English citizens helped fund residential schools in the Anglican Diocese of Calgary.
Partly I have accomplished this to date through visiting nine museums and archives across Canada to learn my people’s history through historical documents. These documents reveal some details of how three different Christian denominations (Anglican, Roman Catholic and Methodist) were involved with running colonial schools, including an Indian Residential School on the Blood Reserve.
Some of my research has examined Anglican Diocese of Calgary archival records pertaining to Anglican-run residential schools in Treaty 7 territory. I examined the 1892-1908 annual reports related to St. Paul’s Mission, Kainai Reserve; St. Peter’s Mission, Piikani Reserve; St. John’s Mission, Siksika Reserve, and St. Barnabas Mission, Tsuu T’ina Reserve. In early years, these mission schools received government sponsorship through rations of beef and flour or biscuits and milk for the pupils.
Later, the government would provide a small government grant to help with the building of the school’s infrastructure. After this, the government provided a maintenance grant for children enrolled in the schools. Despite the government’s financial help, it was still not enough to cover costs needed to operate a school. This left the denomination to make up the monetary difference.
Cover of Diocese of Calgary Report on Indian Missions, 1892. The report included a list of donors and subscribers. The General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada.
Mission reports solicited funds
My research has shown that to remedy this problem, the diocese decided to appeal to peoples’ caring natures in a very systematic way. Each year the Diocese of Calgary would publish a report on their evangelizing efforts for each mission within their diocese. The missions included the residential schools.
The preface mentions that the report was meant for all who may be interested in supporting the missionary work among Indigenous Peoples. Thus, potentially anyone, regardless of their religious background, could donate to the Diocese of Calgary.
The report encompassed the following sections: a short statement made by the bishop of the diocese, a missionary report for each mission, a financial statement, a list of subscribers and donors, pictures of the missions and a subscription card for donations.
Such a report caught not only the interest of national citizens but international citizens as well. The diocese listed the names of their donors, including the place where they were located. The majority of the donors came from Canada and England.
The reports do not detail the religious background of the individual donors, however the Methodist Church was listed as donating funds one year.
The TRC’s Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1 also shares that the Oblates, the Roman Catholic order that “established and managed the majority of church-run Canadian residential schools in Canada” had two “French missionary fundraising bodies that funded their work.” First is the l’Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi (Society for the Propagation of the Faith). Second is the l’Oeuvre de la Sainte-Enfance (Society of the Holy Childhood).
As the TRC noted: “The Protestants, like the Catholics, encouraged church members to make regular contributions to overseas missionary work … The financial support the missionaries received from outside Canada was considerable.”
Calgary Indian Missions subscription card. The General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada
Contributions from many
The reports I examined, and other research, clearly indicate more people were involved in maintaining schools than just the leaders of the designated churches and the Canadian government. Instead, the daily operations were made possible through the financial contributions of citizens across Canada and the globe. These citizens were not required to make donations, but nonetheless did.
Through my research travels, I meet fellow Canadian citizens of European descent who feel so entitled to tell me their version of my people’s history. Largely their message has been to point their finger and condemn an opposing religion or Christian church that is different from their own.
My research suggests that just as donations from beyond immediate church leadership made these institutions possible, so must widespread public accountability play a part in responding to the urgent problem of the unmarked graves and the TRC Calls to Action.
No longer can we say as Canadians that we had nothing to do with the residential schools. Nor can we deflect the responsibility of the negative outcomes that the schools have had upon generations of Indigenous Peoples.
Instead, residential schools are a societal problem not only in Canada, but around the world. We must take action to rectify the wrongs that have happened for over a century and a half. In order to reconcile, we must first acknowledge the truth of what has happened and engage in justice so that together we can heal as a society and move forward in reconciliation.
If you are an Indian Residential School survivor, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419
Environmentally dangerous dumps, landfills and pulp and paper mills are more likely to be sited in African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw communities. These communities suffer from high rates of cancer and respiratory illness. (Shutterstock) — Ingrid Waldron, McMaster University and Juliet Daniel, McMaster University
In the 1940s, the town of Shelburne, N.S., became home to a new garbage dump. Residential, industrial and medical waste from throughout eastern Shelburne County was burned at the dump over the decades, leaving nearby residents concerned about health issues.
The placement of this dump was an act of what we now refer to as environmental racism — the disproportionate siting of polluting industries and other environmentally hazardous projects in Indigenous, Black and other marginalized communities.
Questions about the high rates of cancer — and deaths — among members of Shelburne’s African Nova Scotian community, compared to their white neighbours on the other side of town or even within the South End, have long simmered. We, along with our colleagues, are embarking on a major research project to determine whether the legacy of the dump may be even more sinister than people knew at the time.
Community-based research on environmental racism
Much of the motivation for the study comes from the work of local activist Louise Delisle, who has gone door-to-door in her community to catalogue cases of cancer, both recent and historical.
Locations of African Nova Scotian communities, First Nations communities and toxic facilities in Nova Scotia. (ENRICH Project)
The data collected by the ENRICH Project over the years indicate that environmentally dangerous projects like dumps, landfills and pulp and paper mills are more likely to be sited in African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw communities, and that these communities suffer from high rates of cancer and respiratory illness.
Momentum to address environmental racism is also growing. A federal private member’s bill introduced by Nova Scotia MP Lenore Zann, the National Strategy to Redress Environmental Racism, passed second reading on March 24, 2021.
Bill C-230 returned to the federal Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development on June 21 for amendments, where it was approved a few days later. It will move to third reading in the fall of 2021, and then to the Senate, after which it may become Canada’s first legislation to address environmental racism.
Many factors influence cancer
As many factors can influence the incidence of cancer within a population, we’ll oversee a team spanning several research disciplines, with McMaster University serving as the hub and significant representation from Dalhousie University, co-ordinated by cancer biologist Paola Marignani.
‘There’s Something in the Water’ official trailer.
Our team will probe the contents of the dump to identify harmful materials such as heavy metals, volatile organic compounds and fine particulate matter, and we will examine genetic and epigenetic changes to the genomes of Shelburne residents that may explain cancer susceptibility.
The study is multidisciplinary and complex. Yet we are confident it will help clarify the complex interactions between the social determinants of health, lifestyle factors, genetics and generational impact of chronic toxin exposure. It will also shed light on what is driving high cancer rates in South End Shelburne.
Our study will not just have value for the small community of Shelburne but will provide a template for further studies on the relationship between environmental racism and chronic diseases. For example, the African Nova Scotian community in Lincolnville, N.S., Indigenous communities such as Wet’suwet’en First Nation in northern B.C., and Aamjiwnaang First Nation near Sarnia, Ont., as well as African Americans living near Cancer Alley in Louisiana, who all live close to landfills, pipelines and petrochemical facilities, could all benefit from a similar multidisciplinary approach.
This study, and others like it, will bring us one step closer to addressing the wider problem of systemic racism in Canada.
Last year there was a report written, “Alberta Anti-Racism Advisory Council Recommendations” and I thought it was well done. I’m not sure how well some of their recommendations are being pursued. For example. One of them is to establish an Ombudsperson office with staff to investigate all complaints about policing in Alberta in an independent, transparent and timely manner. This body will have punitive powers and ensure compliance with recommended actions.
