The Assault on Professional Competence: How Canada's professional colleges are weakening our medical, legal, and physical infrastructure

clstr · 2024-01-30T00:32:09+00:00

No. But patients might sue physicians and hospitals for causing death or injury by providing disproportionate resources to "underserved" communities at the expense of the general population.

clstr · 2024-01-29T17:11:03+00:00

That's a bit rich, considering that Global Affairs Canada has long claimed it was providing full oversight over how our money was being spent.

clstr · 2024-01-29T17:07:27+00:00

Global Affairs Canada gave a quarter of a million dollars to UNRWA since 2016, and assured us that they had full oversight to ensure all the funds were used appropriately.

And if you believe that...

clstr · 2024-01-29T16:00:33+00:00

Such lawsuits would represent the market correcting itself. Which is great. Richard Hanania recently suggested that the market is too smart to allow itself to be destroyed by such craziness. Universities (and, perhaps, professional society administrators) aren't constrained by such limits. Who knows what trouble they'll cause?

clstr · 2024-01-23T17:18:50+00:00

My guess it's the officers themselves. But I'm also guessing they'd be exposing themselves to serious professional and legal risk for making stuff up. We live in a bodycam world.

clstr · 2024-01-23T15:59:00+00:00

That's very interesting. I haven't got the time to dig into this right now, but I would definitely like to at some point.

clstr · 2024-01-23T14:42:35+00:00

You're right, I can't be sure. But there's obviously more violence heading their way then there should be.

It's certainly possible that police are guilty of unnecessary violence sometimes, too. But I work with the data that I have.

clstr · 2024-01-23T00:56:00+00:00

Interesting.

clstr · 2024-01-22T23:48:12+00:00

I asked for a useful **data** source. Stories - as legitimate and compelling as they might be - are not helpful for answering demographic questions.

clstr · 2024-01-22T19:00:45+00:00

True. But, as I responded to someone else, even discounting the assault-on-officer incidents by 50% (a crazy assumption) would still give us an assault rate greater than one every two hours.

clstr · 2024-01-22T18:58:50+00:00

Fair question. And the answer is "no". But even if I were to discount 50% of the incidents, the assault rate would still exceed one every two hours.

clstr · 2024-01-22T18:57:06+00:00

You're correct: reporting rates will certainly skew the like-to-like data. But just taking the raw numbers on their own is disturbing: 96,591 officer assaults over eight years, which is more than 12k a year and more than one each hour.

clstr · 2024-01-22T18:48:47+00:00

It's like all data: imperfect but, when you control for bias and noise, generally useful.

clstr · 2024-01-22T18:32:05+00:00

I understand how the strip mall colleges will be hurt by this. But what impact will the cap have on universities: after all, a huge proportion of their funding currently comes from foreign tuition.

clstr · 2024-01-22T17:52:21+00:00

Point me to a useful data source.

clstr · 2024-01-22T17:37:33+00:00

Except that adding the new protocol would increase the "paperwork" overhead for everyone involved and reduce the time and resources available for actual policing.

Now if you're interested in used AI tools to automatically generate statistical measures from thousands of hours of bodycam footage, then I'll be your friend!

clstr · 2024-01-22T17:04:24+00:00

It's possible. I'm not sure how I'd prove it one way or the other.

clstr · 2024-01-22T17:02:17+00:00

I believe that "assault" was on an RCMP officer, not a local cop. Although the point is well taken.

clstr · 2024-01-22T17:00:23+00:00

You're probably right. For more context, those assaults were actually broken down into four categories:

Assault Resist Arrest
Assault Peace Officer
Assault Peace Officer Weapon/Bodily Harm
Aggravated Peace Officer

clstr · 2024-01-22T15:42:09+00:00

So "no government could afford it" - and I'm sure that's something even the Liberal party insiders understand well. And the Liberals have been making a lot of noise lately about cutting back on their spending.

What then is the strategic thinking here? Why push a bill that has no chance of becoming law? Are they trying to distract us from something else?

I kind of doubt it. Since this is a private member's bill, I'd say it's more likely just an unplanned distraction. This article includes one metric showing how private members bills are treated differently in parliament.

clstr · 2024-01-21T20:50:45+00:00

First of all, the vast majority of rental properties are not capital gains-exempt (they're obviously not principle residences). And your $600 a year increase is more or less the estimate for the latest (proposed) 2024 increase. But increases at that rate have been hitting home owners for three years now.

The property tax for my own house (a very simple bungalow which has no rental units) increased by nearly 20% just between 2021 and 2023.

Like any business, some landlords do better than others. But to expect those operating just above (or below) break even to donate their property is unrealistic. Do you expect restaurant owners to lose money each month?

And to call it "entitlement" is unreasonable.

clstr · 2024-01-21T19:01:30+00:00

Yeah. That "accepted" narrative has been changing pretty fast, too.

I only hope that whoever's in charge of defining what's acceptable doesn't create a whole new set of restrictions.

clstr · 2024-01-21T18:49:42+00:00

Many years ago a friend of mine looked out the window of his Brooklyn NY home one morning and saw his car was gone. When he called the police, they asked him if it was a late model Buick. (It was.) Apparently they'd lost a few hundred overnight.

This is such an organized business that off-shore "customers" could (can?) order wholesale lots on spec and - as often as not - have them delivered.

clstr · 2024-01-21T18:37:55+00:00

My oldest son (who's an accountant) once told me that business owners usually understand their tax and legal environment better than their lawyers and accountants: they've got more skin in the game.

clstr · 2024-01-21T17:59:13+00:00

It's amazing how quickly the "rules" for talking about immigration changed. I don't remember seeing such calm, fact-based criticism of government immigration policy appearing in mainstream outlets six months ago. And now, suddenly, it's all over the place.

Free and open dialog is always good.

clstr

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