Battery supply: Announcements add to Canada’s credibility

HALIFAX – The number of hate crimes reported by Halifax police in 2023 jumped by 62 per cent compared to the prior year, according to Statistics Canada, a rise that city police credit to their new hate crimes unit.

Figures released by the federal agency last month show that Halifax police reported 121 hate crimes last year — more than 40 per cent of the total for the entire Atlantic region, at 300. Halifax ranked fifth in the country for its hate crime rate, moving up from the eighth spot in 2022. As well, there were 23.3 police-reported hate crimes per 100,000 people in Halifax in 2023, up from a rate of 14.4 in 2022.

Canada-wide, hate crimes reported by police have been steadily increasing since 2019, and in 2023 there were 12 hate crimes per 100,000 people, up from 9.3 the previous year. The total number of hate crimes in Canada has more than doubled from 2019 to 2024.

Racially motivated incidents were the most common police-reported hate crime, with 2,128 in 2023; crimes motivated by religion were the second most common, with a total of 1,284 reports; and crimes motivated by sexual orientation came in third, with 860 cases reported.

Warren Silver, an analyst with Statistics Canada, said the jump in hate crimes in the country may not necessarily be connected to an increase in hatred. Instead, he explained, the rise can be credited to more reporting and better awareness among both the public and police about the issue.

“When you do see a spike in numbers, sometimes it can be that police are working much more closely with communities, or they have a hate crimes unit doing community outreach so that more of those incidents are being reported officially to police.”

In an emailed statement, Halifax Regional Police spokesperson Const. Martin Cromwell said the “significant increase” in reported hate crimes since 2022 is related to the hate crimes unit, which was established in January 2022. The unit offers increased training for officers on identifying hate crimes, and “a focused effort” on collecting data pertaining to hate-related incidents, he said.

Silver, however, said the agency’s data doesn’t reflect the total number of hate crimes “because a lot of it goes unreported.”

A 2019 survey by the agency found that Canadians reported being victims of more than 223,000 hate-related criminal incidents in the 12 months preceding the study. Roughly one in five incidents was reported to the police, Silver said.

People may choose not to report, Silver said, because they feel what happened wasn’t important enough; they may not be comfortable approaching police; or they fear being re-victimized.

Timothy Bryan, a sociology professor studying policing and hate crimes at the University of Toronto, said the rise in police-reported hate crimes is a “complicated question.” The spike could be related to an increase in reporting, Bryan said, adding that it could also be tied to an increase in the number of people “who feel greater freedom to express hateful sentiments or act in a hateful way.”

Bryan said the normalization of hate began around 2017 when increased anger, scapegoating and misinformation started taking up more space online.

Hatred, he said, has become mainstream “because it has increasingly infused into our conversations about a lot of things, whether it’s immigration, diversity, job opportunities, fused into concerns about the changing Canadian society.”

Bryan also suggested the increased hate crime numbers in Halifax could be a product of the police’s hate crimes unit.

Statistics Canada defines hate crimes as criminal activity that is motivated by hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, language, sex, age, mental or physical disability or other visible parts of a person’s identity.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 2, 2024.

TORONTO – Amazon Web Services’ director of global artificial intelligence is encouraging Canada not to go it alone when it comes to regulating the technology.

Canada should settle on AI legislation that is “interoperable” with guardrails other countries will wind up using or many burgeoning companies could wind up having trouble, Nicole Foster warned Tuesday.

“A lot of our startups are wonderfully ambitious and have ambitions to be able to sell and do business around the world, but having bespoke, unique rules for Canada is going to be an extremely limiting factor,” Foster said during a talk at the Elevate tech conference in Toronto.

Canada is working on an Artificial Intelligence and Data Act that is meant to design how the country will design, develop and deploy the technology.

The legislation is still winding its way through the House of Commons and isn’t expected to come into effect until at least next year but is being watched intensely in the technology sector and beyond.

Many worry the legislation could curtail innovation and push companies to flee for other countries that are more hospitable toward AI, but most agree that the technology industry cannot be left to decide on its own guardrails.

They reason the sector needs some parameters to protect people from systems perpetuating bias, spreading misinformation and causing violence or harm.

With the European Union, Canada, the U.S. and several other countries all charting their own paths toward guardrails, some in the tech community have called for collaboration.

Foster says there’s some “really promising signs” it could come to fruition based on what she’s seen from the G7 countries.

“Everybody is saying the right things. Everybody thinks interoperability is important,” she said.

“But saying it’s important and doing it are two different things.”

Canada’s industry minister François-Philippe Champagne is largely responsible for whatever approach the country takes to AI.

Last summer, he told attendees at another tech conference in Toronto, Collision, that he feels Canada is “ahead of the curve” with its approach to artificial intelligence, beating even the European Union.

“Canada is likely to be the first country in the world to have a digital charter where we’re going to have a chapter on responsible AI because we want AI to happen here,” he said.

His government has said it would ban “reckless and malicious” AI use, establish oversight by a commissioner and the industry minister and impose financial penalties.

Whatever Canada settles on, Foster said it has to be “conscious of the cost of regulation” because asking companies to undergo evaluations to ensure their software is safe can often be time-consuming and much of that work is already being done.

She feels the best regulatory model will identify high-risk AI systems and ensure there are steps in place to mitigate any harms they could cause but won’t regulate things that shouldn’t be regulated.

Among the AI systems she thinks can go without regulation are “mundane” systems like those that get baggage to travellers at an airport faster.

“I think (it’s about) being focused on the risks that we need to address and then really kind of not getting in the way of really valuable technology that’s going to make our lives better,” Foster said.

In a separate panel, Adobe’s head of global AI strategy Emily McReynolds also mentioned that there’s a role for companies to play in the conversation around regulation, too.

Adobe, she said, has committed to not mining the web for data it uses in its AI systems and instead opted to license information. She positioned the move as one that brings transparency to the company’s work but also ensure it is “really respecting creators,” who tend to use the company’s software.

She said Adobe had chosen to take a proactive approach to issues like data and told other businesses “it’s really important to understand that building AI responsibly is not something that comes after.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 2, 2024.

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FRIDAY HARBOR, Wash. – A census of endangered southern resident killer whales off the coast of British Columbia and Washington state shows the pods have lost three animals, bringing the population to 73, excluding a new calf born after the survey.

The Centre for Whale Research completed its 49th census as part of its Orca Survey program in July, finding the three pods had lost two adult males.

The population also lost a male calf, the only whale born within the census period.

The Washington-based centre says its researchers last saw one of the lost adult males in July 2023, and the animal appeared to be in “poor body condition” at the time.

It says the whale had not been seen since then, and the researchers had considered the animal to be at high risk after his mother died in 2017.

A statement from the centre on Wednesday says its research “clearly shows that survival rates are closely tied to Chinook salmon abundance,” and recovery of the endangered whales isn’t possible without an increase in their prey.

The other lost adult male was one of the oldest whales among the southern residents, born in 1991, and he appeared “somewhat thin” when he was last seen in August 2023.

The whale dubbed L85 had also lost his mother, though the centre says he had been “adopted” after her death by another member of his pod.

As for the calf that died, the centre says its short life was “strange and tumultuous.”

It says the calf called J60 was first confirmed in late December 2023, initially spotted travelling alongside a whale that had not been visibly pregnant last year.

Just one J-pod female could have given birth to the calf but they were never seen together, the centre says, and it’s unclear whether it was “a case of calf rejection, an inability of the mother to properly nurse the calf with other females attempting to help, or kidnapping.”

The pod was spotted travelling without the calf last January, leading researchers to conclude J60 likely died sometime earlier in the month.

The centre adds that it has submitted its census report to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 2, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.