From the exam-marking trenches to the ivory tower executive suites, Premier Danielle Smith has injected nervousness throughout Alberta’s post-secondary sector.
It initially seemed her Bill 18, the Provincial Priorities Act, was intended to make her government play checkstop or gatekeeper whenever the federal government and mayors made deals without provincial involvement.
Then it became apparent that Smith’s government would apply the same scrutiny to the higher-learning sector, and the premier’s remarks made it clear she had federal research grants and notions of ideological “balance” in her targets.
“When the government of Alberta states that it wants to align research funding with provincial priorities, it risks colouring research coming from Alberta post-secondary institutions as propaganda,” wrote Gordon Swaters, a University of Alberta mathematics professor and academic staff association president.
“Students are caught in the UCP’s forever war with Ottawa,” stated James Steele, head of the University of Calgary Graduate Students’ Association.
Bill Flanagan chimed in on his University of Alberta president’s blog Wednesday: “I will continue to do all I can to advocate for a regulatory framework that does not impede our ability to secure federal funding and operates in a manner consistent with the university’s core commitment to academic freedom.”
An academic world, wondering jointly: what’s Smith going to do?
It doesn’t appear even she knows, not yet revealing any clear direction.
Campus improv night
Several signs, in fact, suggest that the UCP government did not initially conceive of the post-secondary realm to be a major player in this Bill 18 drama — at least, not until journalists began asking last week how those provincially controlled entities could get tangled up in the bill’s oversight.
Consider the following:
Advanced Education Minister Rajan Sawhney didn’t participate in the April 10 news conference; only Smith and Municipal Affairs Minister Ric McIver did.
The premier didn’t mention post-secondary once in announcing the program; it only came up when a reporter asked about it, and Smith mentioned a curiosity about social-science research.
When Sawhney was approached to discuss this the next day,her comments suggested no crackdownor limits on federal grants to researchers, seemingly at odds with what the premier would later say.
When Smith began speaking in more detail in interviews on April 12, she extensively referred to a Nova Scotia business professor’s criticisms of the system, which appeared in an Edmonton Journal column that very day.
If this policy approach involved more forethought, one imagines there would be a body of evidence or anecdotes beyond that morning’s newspaper. Smith did cite one political scientist’s survey that indicated far more left-identifying Canadian professors than right-wing ones — which was mentioned in that same Journal column.
This week, she tabled that article in the legislature.
A few days later, in her 38-minute debate speech on the bill she extensively quoted from that piece, but also brought in a second anecdotal point — another article.
This one came from the National Post in 2021, a McGill University chemistry professor’s protests that he was denied a science research grant because the “woke” granting agency expected him to factor diversity and equity into his assistant hiring. Unmentioned by Smith — that agency’s peer review committee gave the same scientist, Patanjali Kambhampati, a $144,565 grant last year.
For those keeping score at home, that’s two articles about out-of-province profs forming almost the entire public justification for Smith’s coming policy on universities.
Now, journalists love to imagine they have massive influence in high offices, and probably inflate their self-importance too often (or maybe this is just me). But it’s likely that most journalists, and more importantly most citizens, don’t expect or intend for articles or columns to form not just the backbone but the entire skeleton of political decision-making.
University of Alberta president Bill Flanagan pledged this week to push for a provincial approach ‘that does not impede our ability to secure federal funding and operates in a manner consistent with the university’s core commitment to academic freedom.’ (Peter Evans/CBC News)
But even if Smith cobbled together her justification from news clippings after she tabled Bill 18, there is at least a sense of where her grievances lie. And if it’s not clear what route she’ll take with this legislation, she’s signalled what the desired destination is.
She’s made it clear she believes more conservative-tilted research would bring more like-minded academics and then students. “If we did truly have balance in universities, then we would see that we would have just as many conservative commentators as we do liberal commentators,” she told the CBC’s Power and Politics.
Smith offered this week two potential paths she could pursue. One is using this provincial oversight bill to track all federal research grants to determine what share goes where — even though the granting agencies already publish everything online, as many academics have recently noted to the UCP.
“The other way is that we could also establish our own research programs to make sure that we’re providing that kind of balance,” Smith added.
The UCP government, in this notion, would create a new body to support ideologically focused research that Smith doesn’t feel gets its fair shake from the non-partisan, peer-review committees that dole out agency grants, at arm’s length from the Liberal government or the governments of various stripes that have overseen these agencies for more than a century.
Believe this to be far-fetched and heavy-handed, for a partisan government to set up their own shop to conduct public-interest research?
It’s already happened in the UCP government era — twice.
Former premier Jason Kenney gave his “energy war room” twin mandates to advocate for and research oil and gas, to do work he felt was lacking elsewhere; Smith has maintained this program.
In early April, Smith announced a new Crown corporation for research and expertise on addiction recovery — to bolster, hone and spread elsewhere the type of drug-crisis response her government has already invested heavily in.
The constitution squarely places post-secondary education into provincial jurisdiction, but the federal level has long led the way on supporting research projects.
The province topping up federal research funding could be a good thing, said Richard Sigurdson, past arts dean at the University of Calgary. Emphasis on could.
Calgary’s largest post-secondary school receives more than $200 million a year in grants from the federal government and outside jurisdictions. Bill 18 requires provincial officials to approve all such deals, and could let them veto ones they don’t see matching Alberta priorities. (CBC)
“It would only be great if the provincial government was to provide funds at an arm’s length, non-partisan fashion,” he wrote in an email while on academic administrative leave in Berlin. “There cannot be any interference with institutional autonomy or academic freedom.”
If the government takes this approach and establishes its own research body in the style of the Fraser Institute — a conservative think-tank where Smith herself used to work — expect heaps of controversy. But it could be less messy than actually using Bill 18’s gatekeeper function to interfere with federal agency grants, something that the Quebec government doesn’t do, despite long having the provincial go-between powers that Alberta now intends to mimic.
‘Firing a shot’
Alex Usher, a longtime analyst with the consultancy Higher Education Strategy Associates, doesn’t expect the Smith government to intervene with agency research grants.
But he still expects a fight that universities won’t like.
“While the UCP government may not be targeting tri-council grants specifically, they are firing a shot at the province’s universities, warning them that they will be expected to show ‘ideological balance,'” Usher wrote on his website.
“God knows what this will mean in practice, but my take would be that it will be low-level skirmishing and attempts at micro-management for the rest of the UCP’s term of office, combined with attempts to [wage] culture war [over] odd-sounding research projects in what the right likes to call ‘grievance studies.'”
The premier’s recent rhetoric doesn’t make it clear she knows what it will mean in practice, either. The Bill 18 debate seems to have become the jumping-off point, perhaps due to a combination of fluke and expansively written legislation.
Now the premier has been thinking about it, and finding articles to read. So an entire sector will be left to wait, wonder and worry.
48:33Alberta seeks power to veto deals between feds and municipalities
April 11, 2024 – Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has introduced legislation that would compel municipalities, schools or agencies looking to make deals with the federal government to first secure provincial approval. Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek tells us what this means for her city. Plus, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is visiting Canada on his first trip outside of Europe. He tells Power & Politics he doesn’t want the security of France and Europe to depend on the outcome of U.S. elections.
NEW YORK (AP) — Teen smoking hit an all-time low in the U.S. this year, part of a big drop in the youth use of tobacco overall, the government reported Thursday.
There was a 20% drop in the estimated number of middle and high school students who recently used at least one tobacco product, including cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, nicotine pouches and hookahs. The number went from 2.8 million last year to 2.25 million this year — the lowest since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s key survey began in 1999.
“Reaching a 25-year low for youth tobacco product use is an extraordinary milestone for public health,” said Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, in a statement. However, “our mission is far from complete.”
A previously reported drop in vaping largely explains the overall decline in tobacco use from 10% to about 8% of students, health officials said.
The youth e-cigarette rate fell to under 6% this year, down from 7.7% last year — the lowest at any point in the last decade. E-cigarettes are the most commonly used tobacco products among teens, followed by nicotine pouches.
Use of other products has been dropping, too.
Twenty-five years ago, nearly 30% of high school students smoked. This year, it was just 1.7%, down from the 1.9%. That one-year decline is so small it is not considered statistically significant, but marks the lowest since the survey began 25 years ago. The middle school rate also is at its lowest mark.
Recent use of hookahs also dropped, from 1.1% to 0.7%.
The results come from an annual CDC survey, which included nearly 30,000 middle and high school students at 283 schools. The response rate this year was about 33%.
Officials attribute the declines to a number of measures, ranging from price increases and public health education campaigns to age restrictions and more aggressive enforcement against retailers and manufacturers selling products to kids.
Among high school students, use of any tobacco product dropped to 10%, from nearly 13% and e-cigarette use dipped under 8%, from 10%. But there was no change reported for middle school students, who less commonly vape or smoke or use other products,
Current use of tobacco fell among girls and Hispanic students, but rose among American Indian or Alaska Native students. And current use of nicotine pouches increased among white kids.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Alabama man was arrested Thursday for his alleged role in the January hack of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission social media account that led the price of bitcoin to spike, the Justice Department said.
Eric Council Jr., 25, of Athens, is accused of helping to break into the SEC’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter, allowing the hackers to prematurely announce the approval of long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
The price of bitcoin briefly spiked more than $1,000 after the post claimed “The SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.”
But soon after the initial post appeared, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said on his personal account that the SEC’s account was compromised. “The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products,” Gensler wrote, calling the post unauthorized without providing further explanation.
Authorities say Council carried out what’s known as a “SIM swap,” using a fake ID to impersonate someone with access to the SEC’s X account and convince a cellphone store to give him a SIM card linked to the person’s phone. Council was able to take over the person’s cellphone number and get access codes to the SEC’s X account, which he shared with others who broke into the account and sent the post, the Justice Department says.
Prosecutors say after Council returned the iPhone he used for the SIM swap, his online searches included: “What are the signs that you are under investigation by law enforcement or the FBI even if you have not been contacted by them.”
An email seeking comment was sent Thursday to an attorney for Council, who is charged in Washington’s federal court with conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.
The price of bitcoin swung from about $46,730 to just below $48,000 after the unauthorized post hit on Jan. 9 and then dropped to around $45,200 after the SEC’s denial. The SEC officially approved the first exchange-traded funds that hold bitcoin the following day.
Google, Meta and TikTok have removed social media accounts belonging to an industrial plant in Russia’s Tatarstan region aimed at recruiting young foreign women to make drones for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
Posts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were taken down following an investigation by The Associated Press published Oct. 10 that detailed working conditions in the drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is under U.S. and British sanctions.
Videos and other posts on the social media platforms promised the young women, who are largely from Africa, a free plane ticket to Russia and a salary of more than $500 a month following their recruitment via the program called “Alabuga Start.”
But instead of a work-study program in areas like hospitality and catering, some of them said they learned only arriving in the Tatarstan region that they would be toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine.
In interviews with AP, some of the women who worked in the complex complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages and areas of study, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching. AP did not identify them by name or nationality out of concern for their safety.
The tech companies also removed accounts for Alabuga Polytechnic, a vocational boarding school for Russians aged 16-18 and Central Asians aged 18-22 that bills its graduates as experts in drone production.
The accounts collectively had at least 158,344 followers while one page on TikTok had more than a million likes.
In a statement, YouTube said its parent company Google is committed to sanctions and trade compliance and “after review and consistent with our policies, we terminated channels associated with Alabuga Special Economic Zone.”
Meta said it removed accounts on Facebook and Instagram that “violate our policies.” The company said it was committed to complying with sanctions laws and said it recognized that human exploitation is a serious problem which required a multifaceted approach, including at Meta.
It said it had teams dedicated to anti-trafficking efforts and aimed to remove those seeking to abuse its platforms.
TikTok said it removed videos and accounts which violated its community guidelines, which state it does not allow content that is used for the recruitment of victims, coordination of their transport, and their exploitation using force, fraud, coercion, or deception.
The women aged 18-22 were recruited to fill an urgent labor shortage in wartime Russia. They are from places like Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as the South Asian country of Sri Lanka. The drive also is expanding to elsewhere in Asia as well as Latin America.
Accounts affiliated to Alabuga with tens of thousands of followers are still accessible on Telegram, which did not reply to a request for comment. The plant’s management also did not respond to AP.
The Alabuga Start recruiting drive used a robust social media campaign of slickly edited videos with upbeat music that show African women smiling while cleaning floors, wearing hard hats while directing cranes, and donning protective equipment to apply paint or chemicals.
Videos also showed them enjoying Tatarstan’s cultural sites or playing sports. None of the videos made it clear the women would be working in a drone manufacturing complex.
Online, Alabuga promoted visits to the industrial area by foreign dignitaries, including some from Brazil, Sri Lanka and Burkina Faso.
In a since-deleted Instagram post, a Turkish diplomat who visited the plant had compared Alabuga Polytechnic to colleges in Turkey and pronounced it “much more developed and high-tech.”
According to Russian investigative outlets Protokol and Razvorot, some pupils at Alabuga Polytechnic are as young as 15 and have complained of poor working conditions.
Videos previously on the platforms showed the vocational school students in team-building exercises such as “military-patriotic” paintball matches and recreating historic Soviet battles while wearing camouflage.
Last month, Alabuga Start said on Telegram its “audience has grown significantly!”
That could be due to its hiring of influencers, who promoted the site on TikTok and Instagram as an easy way for young women to make money after leaving school.
TikTok removed two videos promoting Alabuga after publication of the AP investigation.
Experts told AP that about 90% of the women recruited via the Alabuga Start program work in drone manufacturing.
