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The least democratic aspects of Canada's Constitution may provide the best defence of our election process – CBC.ca

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This column is an opinion by Eric M. Adams, vice dean and professor of law at the University of Alberta, Faculty of Law, where he teaches and researches Canadian constitutional law. For more information about CBC’s Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

Democracies are not made on election day. As recent events in the United States remind us, it is what happens just after elections that can cause democracies to face their greatest challenge. The capacity to change power peacefully and uneventfully is the triumph of democratic government, and a value we lose at our peril.

It was only ever a faint hope that President Donald Trump would accept losing the U.S. election with muted resignation, let alone the dignity that has defined the transfer of presidential power.

Fuelled by narcissism, indecency, and indifference to fundamental democratic norms, President Trump’s dangerous accusations of a stolen election, fraudulent mail-in votes, and corrupt state electoral institutions were part of a calculated strategy long in the making to inflame his base of ardent supporters. “This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen,” President Trump claimed about mail-in voting during the presidential debate at the end of September, a baseless theme Trump returned to frequently throughout the election campaign.

As election results began to turn in Biden’s favour, the president simply switched on the spooky lights of a house of horrors he had already built. The predictable results of fear, suspicion, mistrust, and conspiracy now playing out on American streets and the more crowded digital highways of social media only further corrode the public trust essential to the democratic process. Once spilled, the poison of mistrust is difficult to put back in the bottle.

The Trump campaign has launched a lawsuit challenging election results in Michigan, while the White House continues to keep president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team in limbo. 1:50

The sobering experience of watching these events unfold from Canada provides a moment to appreciate the elements of the Canadian Constitution that govern the transfer of power.

Like the United States, Canada has a constitutionally protected right to vote. “The right of every citizen to vote lies at the heart of Canadian democracy,” as the Supreme Court of Canada recently stated.

But that right is only as meaningful as the processes that surround it.

One hundred years ago, Parliament had the foresight to create what would become Elections Canada. This was done in order to remove Canada’s federal electoral process from the possibility of partisan government control, and to establish an independent body of experts to register voters and administer professional elections. That independence matters today more than ever.

But even the fairest of elections can be undermined if political leaders attack their legitimacy.

In the United States, this is especially so when the attacks issue directly from the Office of the President.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters Tuesday he expects ‘there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration’ and repeated the president’s message to count every ‘legal’ vote, despite no evidence voter fraud occurred during the presidential election. 1:33

Such a nightmare in Canada – a prime minister claiming victory without foundation, or attacking an electoral process with wild conspiracies – seems improbable, but many would have thought similarly about the United States not very long ago.

As it turns out, the least democratic aspects of Canada’s Constitution may provide the best defence against such possibilities.

While Article II of the American Constitution places the full weight of both symbolic and actual executive power directly in the hands of an elected president, section 9 of Canada’s Constitution Act 1867 stipulates that the “Executive Government and Authority of and over Canada is hereby declared to continue to be vested in the Queen.”

Not exactly an inspiring theory of democratic rule. Or so it may seem.

Unlike the United States, the Canadian Constitution divides symbolic from actual executive authority.

Unlike the United States, the Canadian Constitution divides symbolic from actual executive authority.

Canadian elections do not change the symbolic executive, because that position is perpetually occupied by the Crown. In electing a Parliament, Canadian elections do determine by democratic means who may advise the Crown and govern in its name. The holder of that power is the leader of the political party commanding a majority of support in the House of Commons.

As the Crown’s representative, the Governor General supervises that process by doing very little, because Canada’s political leaders understand and are constrained by the constitutional rules that govern them.

A rogue prime minister may tweet invective and lies, pronounce false victories or refuse to cede power. However, they would do so in a constitutional system that holds them accountable to Parliament and, in extreme situations, to a Governor General with the discretion to refuse to comply with the unconstitutional advice of a prime minister gone truly bad.

Donald Trump and most of his team still refuse to admit that the Republican president lost last Tuesday’s U.S. election, resisting the usual transitional protocols. Joe Biden calls it embarrassing, as he prepares to move into the White House in January. 2:03

America will withstand this latest erosion of its democratic foundations, but whether it emerges from Trumpism strengthened or weakened by the experience remains to be seen.

As various court challenges sputter in the weeks to come, there is hope that the words Justice Robert Jackson of the United States Supreme Court wrote nearly 70 years ago remain as true today: “With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, [people] have discovered no technique for long preserving government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations. Such institutions may be destined to pass away. But it is the duty of the Court to be last, not first, to give them up.”

As for Canada, an independent electoral process and parliamentary system of accountability that divides symbolic and actual executive authority has served our constitutional democracy well. Protecting those structures, and the constitutional law that gives them life, from the forces of illiberalism and authoritarianism is a responsibility that falls on all of us.


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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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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.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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