Members of Parliament have found themselves facing increasing verbal and physical attacks and threats in public spaces, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other top officials.
Paradis’ unit has been tasked not just with protecting politicians, but also high-profile figures such as Irwin Cotler, who faced an assassination threat last fall believed to be linked to Iran.
In 2019, the House of Commons’ sergeant-at-arms office opened eight files on threats against MPs. That number shot up to 530 last year.
“Whether it’s here in Canada, whether it’s online, whether it’s somebody in their basement in another country, they’re coming in at a rate that we’ve never seen,” Paradis said.
“This is an unprecedented time for us.
How RCMP is responding to ‘unprecedented’ threats against MPs, officials | Read more |
Eco-arsonists, mandatory bug diets and global warming denialism are now talking points for Canadian politicians. What’s behind the explosion of climate misinformation — and how can we combat it?
Like climate change itself, conspiracy theories and misinformation are growing crises. And where they intersect with the environment, the problem seems to spread like wildfire — one that might be caused by laser beams, eco-terrorists or the Canadian government, depending who you ask.
Year after year, poll after poll has consistently shown a majority of Canadians believe in human-caused climate change. But across the country, Conservative politicians are fomenting weariness and skepticism about climate science to appeal to their bases and undermine their opponents — and it appears to be working.
For Conservative politicians, it seems rejecting climate change policies is not about the environment at all — it’s convenient shorthand for championing individual rights, while offloading the government’s responsibility for addressing carbon emissions, by framing climate change as either a natural, benign phenomenon or a leftist plot. Instead of addressing climate change — the worsening impacts of which are impossible to ignore, no matter how deep your head is buried in the sand — our politicians argue over the inescapable facts in front of them.
Climate misinformation is exploding — and Canadian politicians are spreading it | Read more |
Governments are failing to report the annual release of more than 80 megatonnes (Mt) per year of greenhouse gases from boreal forests, Environmental Defence Canada, Nature Canada, Nature Québec, and Natural Resources Defense Council conclude, in a report[pdf] released in the week leading up to the COP. That’s a significant increase over Environment and Climate Change Canada’s economy-wide estimate of 730 Mt per year.
The report says Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), the federal department that does the carbon accounting for the forestry sector, creates an artificial carbon sink by excluding the impact of major wildfires in primary forest (areas undisturbed by significant human disturbance) and annual clearcutting of 400,000 hectares. The NRCan inventory in 2019 said managed forests were a net annual carbon source of 5 Mt, but a more accurate assessment would be 85 Mt, according to Jennifer Skene, natural climate solutions policy manager with NRDC’s International Program.
Protecting forests is essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change because trees absorb one-third of human-caused carbon emissions from the atmosphere. Canada’s boreal forests hold some of the world’s last large stretches of primary forest, which plays a crucial role in achieving a sustainable future, the report notes.
Canada’s boreal forest, which holds some of the world’s last large stretches of remaining primary forest, plays a crucial role in achieving a sustainable, livable future. The Canadian boreal is both a biodiversity hotspot and the world’s most carbon-dense terrestrial ecosystem, storing twice as much carbon per hectare as tropical forests,2 making it an essential ally in the fight against climate change. As the steward of this forest, Canada has both a tremendous responsibility and an opportunity to lead on effective, ambitious natural climate solutions that protect the boreal.
Despite the boreal’s global importance, it is facing considerable threats from unsustainable industrial logging. While Canada has made leading commitments to a broad portfolio of natural climate solutions, the logging industry continues to clearcut more than 400,000 hectares of the boreal each year—about five NHL hockey rinks every minute3—much of this in irreplaceable primary forests.4 This conversion of primary forests into second-growth forests, which store less carbon, is transferring large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, driving significant climate impacts.
“Despite increased climate ambitions and net-zero commitments, governments still plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than what would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C and 45% more than consistent with limiting warming to 2°C,” according to the report.
The main findings include: (sourced from the press release)
The world’s governments plan to produce around 110% more fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C, and 45% more than consistent with 2°C. The size of the production gap has remained largely unchanged compared to our prior assessments.
Governments’ production plans and projections would lead to about 240% more coal, 57% more oil, and 71% more gas in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C.
Global gas production is projected to increase the most between 2020 and 2040 based on governments’ plans. This continued, long-term global expansion in gas production is inconsistent with the Paris Agreement’s temperature limits.
Countries have directed over USD 300 billion in new funds towards fossil fuel activities since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — more than they have towards clean energy.
In contrast, internationalpublic finance for production of fossil fuels from G20 countries and major multilateral development banks (MDBs) has significantly decreased in recent years; one-third of MDBs and G20 development finance institutions (DFIs) by asset size have adopted policies that exclude fossil fuel production activities from future finance.
Verifiable and comparable information on fossil fuel production and support — from both governments and companies — is essential to addressing the production gap.
In the report Canada shows up as the world’s fourth-biggest oil and gas producer, and global fossil fuel production in 2030 will still be more than double the amount that would match a 1.5°C climate pathway, according to the 2021 Production Gap Report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP),” writes Mitchell Beer in The Energy Mix.
IEA calls for Faster Fossil Phaseout
In yet another recent article, Beer focused on the IEA’s (International Energy Agency) call for a much “faster fossil phaseout and more renewables investment to keep 1.5°C withing reach.” Current climate pledges “cover less than 20% of the gap in emissions reductions that needs to be closed by 2030 to keep a 1.5°C path within reach,” says the IEA World Energy Outlook report.”
To shift those trends, the IEA Report calls for: (excerpt from The Energy Mix)
• A doubling of countries’ current commitments to deploy photovoltaic solar and wind, along with a “huge buildout” of grid infrastructure, greater flexibility in electricity systems, more reliance on hydropower, a rapid coal phaseout, electrification of transportation and space heat, and “use of nuclear power where acceptable”;
• A “relentless” focus on energy efficiency, making better use of materials and shifting behaviours to speed the reduction in the amount of energy the global economy uses for each unit of output it produces;
• A “big boost” to clean energy innovation, focused on technologies like hydrogen, low-carbon fuels, and carbon capture, utilization, and storage—particularly to drive emission reductions in energy-intensive industries like steel and cement, and in long-haul transport. While “all the technologies needed to achieve deep emissions cuts to 2030 are available,” the IEA says, nearly half of the reductions required by 2050 “come from technologies that today are at the demonstration or prototype stage.”
“Every data point showing the speed of change in energy can be countered by another showing the stubbornness of the status quo…for all the advances being made by renewables and electric mobility, 2021 is seeing a large rebound in coal and oil use. Largely for this reason, it is also seeing the second-largest annual increase in CO2 emissions in history.” — IEA
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.
Governments are failing to report the annual release of more than 80 megatonnes (Mt) per year of greenhouse gases from boreal forests, Environmental Defence Canada, Nature Canada, Nature Québec, and Natural Resources Defense Council conclude, in a 
The UNEP 2021 
