Why Scotland Should Join Canada as the 11th Province

The push for an independent Scotland is heating up again. After the 2016 referendum on Brexit which would effectively withdraw U.K. membership in the European Union passed; it left a sour taste in Scotland where almost all shires voted in favor of Remain.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is stoking talk of another Scottish referendum to become their own nation for the first time in over 300 years after the 2014 referendum failed. However, Scotland has a few options in moving forward, one being joining Canada as its 11^th province.

Canada is home to the largest Scottish population outside of Britain with 4.7 million Canadians claiming Scottish ancestry. Scotland would also have significantly more political power since they would comprise 12.6 per cent of the total Canadian population compared to only 8 per cent in Britain. It’s also increasingly becoming cheaper to travel from the British Isles to North America with several budget airlines expanding their overseas operations like Canadian airline West Jet.

“All Canadian provinces have more power, more independence, and autonomy than Scotland has right now,” Ken McGoogan, the author who first proposed a union between Canada and Scotland told CTV. “We know how to accommodate difference and we could easily accommodate the Scots.”

However, there are more tangible reasons that would be of benefit to Scots.

A petition that already has 188,000 signatures could soon be brought forward to the British Parliament that would allow for open movement of citizens between the U.K., Canada, New Zealand and Australia. All of which are members of the Commonwealth, share a common language and similar colonial history. It would also provide a post-Brexit solution for trade and labor in the U.K.

Although Scotland would leave the U.K., it would still benefit from this bill because the way in which Scottish citizens work, travel and trade in England will be virtually unchanged. Scottish citizens would also have universal health care in a system much similar to the NHS as well as all other benefits of Canada’s social safety net and its progressive constitution and Bill of Rights.

Of course, Scotland would be no ordinary province being thousands of miles away from mainland Canada. That’s why similar to Quebec, Scotland would have special designation within Canada, where they would have just as much autonomy in governing their own affairs, if not more than they currently hold within the U.K.

Opponents of the measure point to the ever-strained relationship between Anglo and French Canadians, where Quebec has sought numerous cracks at independence, the latest in 2015 where nationalists won by a slim margin. The push for an independent Quebec will never go away with talks of another referendum in 2018, and the prospects of Scotland seeking separation from Canada in the future (should they join) is likely if issues concerning equalization arise.

Canada’s greatest benefit to Scotland, however, is NAFTA. Scotland would have access to the entire U.S. market where its citizen’s buying power is significantly higher than in the E.U. But this doesn’t necessarily mean Scotland must choose between the two as they could also seek to rejoin the E.U. after independence.

Canada’s primary benefit of Scottish independence and joining Confederation is that if Scotland applies for E.U. membership afterward, it would provide a backdoor for Canada into the E.U. market.  Canada is already wary of President Donald Trump’s aggressive talk on trade with the Great White North, that’s why a plan B to alleviate dependency on the neighboring superpower is in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s best interest.

Scotland has long felt alienated by being in union with the country in which they were colonized by and yearn for the freedom to determine their own destiny. Ultimately, Canada and Scotland would find prosperity and self-determination in courting this mutually beneficial and historic partnership.

 

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CIA Funding Companies that Specialize in Social Media Spying

By: Deirdre Fulton, CommonDreams.org
April 15, 2016

Reflecting the CIA’s “increasing focus on monitoring social media,” the spy agency’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, has made investments in four social media mining and surveillance firms, The Intercept revealed Thursday.
According to a document obtained by journalist Lee Fang, In-Q-Tel is funding companies that monitor, collect, and analyze social media traffic and activities on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The investments were previously undisclosed.

For instance, Fang points to PATHAR, a social media intelligence company whose product, Dunami, is already being used by the FBI to “mine Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media to determine networks of association, centers of influence and potential signs of radicalization,” as confirmed last month by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Another firm in In-Q-Tel’s portfolio is Dataminr, which “directly licenses a stream of data from Twitter to visualize and quickly spot trends on behalf of law enforcement agencies and hedge funds, among other clients,” Fang writes.
Geofeedia, also on In-Q-Tel’s list, “promotes its research into Greenpeace activists, student demonstrations, minimum wage advocates, and other political movements,” Fang reports. “Police departments in Oakland, Chicago, Detroit, and other major municipalities have contracted with Geofeedia, as well as private firms such as the Mall of America and McDonald’s.” FBI and CIA scraping of the internet for social media users’ “digital dust” is hardly a new phenomenon.

In 2009, Wired reported that In-Q-Tel was “putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media,” as part of “a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ‘open source intelligence’—information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos, and radio reports generated every day.”
And in 2011, the Associated Press wrote about the CIA’s “Open Source Center, [where] a team known affectionately as the ‘vengeful librarians’ also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms—anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.”
However, Fang argues, “[t]he recent wave of investments in social media-related companies suggests the CIA has accelerated the drive to make collection of user-generated online data a priority. Alongside its investments in start-ups, In-Q-Tel has also developed a special technology laboratory in Silicon Valley, called Lab41, to provide tools for the intelligence community to connect the dots in large sets of data.”

Such blanket data collection and analysis is worrisome to privacy advocates like Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, who told The Intercept: “When you have private companies deciding which algorithms get you a so-called threat score, or make you a person of interest, there’s obviously room for targeting people based on viewpoints or even unlawfully targeting people based on race or religion.”

Fang reported just last week on In-Q-Tel’s investments in Skincential Sciences, a cosmetic company that has “developed a patented technology that removes a thin outer layer of the skin, revealing unique biomarkers that can be used for a variety of diagnostic tests, including DNA collection.”

This article (CIA Funding Companies that Specialize in Social Media Spying) originally appeared on CommonDreams.org and is licensed Creative Commons 3.0.

Ontario to experiment with universal basic income

By: Corey Savard

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau (photo via agoracosmopolitan.com)

Well this is not the conservative federal politics Canadians have been accustomed to under Stephen Harpers nine years of fiscal spending (that actually lead to a massive federal deficit) and strife with the Obama Administration that has left Canadians with inequality growing every month in a stagnant employment market.

The Ontario government announced it will be experimenting with a basic income guarantee (BIG) for Canadians that qualify. Details have not yet been released, however it be a monthly salary that is actually part of larger austerity measures that alter the welfare state with strategic cuts to social services that will go towards giving citizens independence to meet everyday expenses.

This is the welfare state Canadians deserve, without having to completely reform our capitalist society. It’s creating not only a new standard for a citizen but for a human being to have the right to live, one of the most conservative values, but without freedom to pursue happiness there is no life, only complacency on a broken social ladder that does no benefit to the state, the economy or progress.

Critics to basic income such as the late American president Ronald Reagan who said it makes people “lazy and dependent on government,” but the Mincome BIG pilot in Manitoba in the 1970s showed the exact opposite unfolded. A basic income did not affect employment growth and in fact, women were able to “buy” maternity leave, who are the most effected by poverty with disparity apparent in unpaid housework.

Canada ranks last amongst OECD countries in childcare, but universal childcare is unlikely with a national debt of over $600 billion. BIG empowers mothers that would no longer have to rely on their partner’s income, their savings, or family financial support to feed or pay for private childcare, but who a basic income truly benefits is those who have no access to either of the three support systems.

Ultimately the Ontario government’s BIG experiment must thoroughly research its effects on population centres from the rural to the Greater Toronto Area. Minority single mothers make up the majority of Toronto’s poorest households, yet are reliant on the multitude of low-skill employment available in the city. While those living in rural Ontario will not have to choose between staying in their hometown or moving to a city to look for a liveable income that has the potential slow white gentrification.