Read this article in Focus.

The City of Vancouver got a $400,000 provincial government grant to expand its closed-circuit television (CCTV) public-surveillance system—then ignored the commitments it made to protect citizens’ privacy. At least, that’s what’s suggested by two seemingly contradictory documents recently obtained by the Georgia Straight through freedom-of-information requests: the city’s CCTV privacy-impact assessment and its CCTV policy guidelines.  Read more in Georgia Straight.

I WAS READING THE CORONER’S REPORT on Kathleen Palamarek and something didn’t seem right. I’d been following her story since 2006. This was a diminutive, timid, 88-year-old nursing home resident with dementia and a heart condition, who’d been somewhat controversially diagnosed with dementia-related psychosis. She’d died of a heart attack. The coroner had found the antipsychotic olanzapine in her body.

Palamarek hadn’t been taking olanzapine willingly; she’d frequently complained about feeling woozy and “drugged up.” She couldn’t refuse the drug, though, because her doctors had declared her incapable and, when she’d protested, they’d certified her under BC’s Mental Health Act (MHA). Antipsychotics are being used increasingly in seniors’ homes as chemical restraints to pacify and control people. But Health Canada has issued the highest possible warnings to doctors that antipsychotics are “not approved for the treatment of patients with dementia-related psychosis” and that these powerful tranquillizers have been linked to a near-doubling of death rates in the elderly, mostly from heart attacks.

Yet here’s what coroner Stan Lajoie wrote about Kathleen Palamarek’s heart attack: “Death was clearly and unequivocally due to natural causes.” There was not so much as a hint anywhere in his seven-page report that her heart attack might have been linked to a drug known to dramatically increase heart attacks in the heart-weakened elderly. Why?

Click here for the rest of the article in April’s Focus magazine.

A handful of documents that is… Well, the RCMP had managed to get my request limited to a small number of requests for specific documents. And here’s what I finally got:

• A copy of a report about ALPR written by several professors and already available on the internet.
• Several letters to and from the federal Privacy Commissioner’s office, which the Privacy Commissioner’s office gave to me two months ago.
• A 2-page “terms and conditions” document for use of ALPR which RCMP staff had already given me four months ago.
• One redacted print-out of one ALPR database record, along with a statement that to get the rest of the data records from Victoria alone would cost me $8,660 in search fees.

That’s it. That’s all.

And to top it off, according to RCMP Access to Information staff, do you know how many emails about ALPR have been sent to or received by Sgt. Warren Nelson, the head of the ALPR program in BC, over the last 7 years as the program has expanded from a few cars to 42 cars? ZERO.

That’s right. Apparently, Nelson hasn’t even written those emails about ALPR to me that I seem to have copies of. Or else, RCMP ATIP staff have determined that emails to journalists are not public information…

And guess how many meetings the RCMP have had at which ALPR was discussed in the past seven years? You guessed it: ZERO. Or else, they’ve simply never taken any minutes, even once.

Finally, there is, according to the RCMP, no up-to-date operational manual for the RCMP’s ALPR system.

This is a blatant and egregious breaking of the law by the RCMP with regard to public access to information.

It boggles the mind that BC Minister of Justice Shirley Bond just signed the whole province up for another 20 years of this, without getting any oversight and accountability mechanisms built in.

“THERE’S NOTHING, in my view, to be alarmed about,” said Victoria Police Chief Jamie Graham. He was speaking at February’s Reboot Privacy and Security Conference in Victoria, to 200 privacy experts, academics, and government and corporate executives from around North America, including Alberta Privacy Commissioner Jill Clayton and BC Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.

Graham was on a panel with Christopher Parsons, a UVic PhD candidate in political science and surveillance studies. Parsons was presenting findings from research done by him, me and tech expert and civil rights advocate Kevin McArthur into Automatic Licence Plate Recognition (findings first revealed in February’s Focus, “Hidden Surveillance”).

Automatic Licence Plate Recognition (ALPR) involves equipping police cruisers with cameras and software that can read thousands of licence plates per hour and compare those plates to crime “hot lists.” The program operates as a joint effort between the RCMP, BC government and local BC police forces, ostensibly to primarily catch stolen vehicles, unlicensed drivers, and prohibited drivers.

Click here to read the rest of the article in the March issue of Focus.

Let’s get one thing straight, first: Climate change is clearly occurring, and Andrew Weaver is a better climate scientist than I am. He’s also a lot more famous. However, Weaver keeps wading with his opinions into areas of communications, media and politics where, in my estimation, he’s consistently doing a bad job. This latest media storm he’s caused is a perfect example.

Here’s the headline from Weaver’s own February 21, 2012 article on Huffington post: “My New Study: Coal is 1500 Times Worse for the Environment than Oil Sands“. I probably don’t need to tell very many people how much international airplay this has gotten. ‘Gosh, if that’s true, the oil sands suddenly seem squeaky clean!’ Guess who’s loving and promoting that message?

Just a few problems with Weaver’s “science” and “facts” here.

The report he wrote with student Neil Swart, which Swart was kind enough to forward to me in its entirety along with supplemental analyses they’d done, actually only focuses on carbon emissions, not “environment” impacts — they admit that themselves right up front in the report. “It is important to recognize that our estimates do not include greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide and do not address other potentially deleterious environmental, health and social side effects of oil-sand production.” So that means, Weaver has included that word “environment” in his Huffington blog headline merely for sensationalist effect. Okay, maybe skewing the facts in the headline and then clarifying further down is sometimes understandable for a scrappy journalist trying to draw attention to some obscure, little local issue; but when you’re one of the world’s most prominent scientists writing about one of the most important scientific issues of our time?

Second, it turns out the only reason coal is “1500 times worse” in terms of emissions is because, well, there’s somewhere approaching 1500 times as much coal on the whole planet as there is oil in Canada’s oil sands. Again, Weaver and Swart admit this right in their commentary: Yes, coal produces slightly more carbon emissions than tar sands oil, but “Coal’s significance is due to the large tonnage available,” they write. During my exchange about it with Swart yesterday, he confirmed their number came from multiplying a slightly higher per-unit emissions rate from coal times the earth’s much vaster stores of coal: “The 1500 number would be a combination of these two things, the large tonnage being the dominant factor.”

As for those slightly higher per-unit carbon emissions from coal, even that number is dubious. The way Weaver and Swart calculated it, they subtract the carbon emissions generated by the coal being burned to help extract and process tar sands bitumen into usable oil. Weaver writes in his blog that they did that because the coal “shouldn’t be double-counted.” In this context, though, following this logic, we would then also have to say that a coal-fired electrical plant generates zero carbon emissions, because we “shoudn’t double-count” the coal.

And by the way Weaver frames his whole argument, in the end, he’s explaining that tar sands oil will increase global temperatures 0.36C — an amount he would normally be crying holy catastrophe about, but in this context he seems to be suggesting is so minimal compared to what all the coal in the world could do that we scarcely need to be concerned about it or about the tar sands.

I’m sure that’s not exactly what Weaver wants the public “takeaway” to be, and he does try to talk his way out of it, but by that point the damage is done.

Whether he’s shilling for the environmentally toxic BC Liberal party, or pumping nuclear energy, or claiming tar sands oil is ‘better for the environment’, this seems to be a persistent problem for Weaver. He’s just not very politically or media-savvy, and he often even undermines his own scientific credibility when he wades into battles in these arenas.

A message to Andrew Weaver, then: The next time you have something to say in public, get a good communications advisor and political strategist to help you. Out of respect for your climate science work, I’m sure many would do it pro-bono. So please, just do it; for the good of the planet.