'People are going to be offended': Ontario companies brace for new era of employee-monitoring rules

More businesses are using monitoring tools to track productivity in a remote-work world


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The Logic
Kelsey Rolfe
Publishing date: Oct 06, 2022 

Employees of medium-sized Ontario companies will soon learn if their employer is monitoring them. 

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Andrea Panagopoulos’s employer knows the length of every customer call she handles and can listen back to any of them. The company knows if she pauses before accepting another call. It knows how much time she takes for her allotted daily breaks.

Panagopoulous, a remote employee for Air Canada’s customer-support call centre in Toronto and who has worked for the airline for 28 years, said she understands why the company uses monitoring and measuring technology—but it still has her on edge.

“It’s a little nerve-wracking. … (I check my stats) every day … I need to know in my head that I’m doing well and I won’t lose my work-from-home (privileges),” she told The Logic in an interview. “They’re definitely using them to make sure you’re utilizing your time like you’re supposed to. And I get it.

“If you’re sitting there for half your shifts doing nothing, there has to be a way to monitor that.”

Employees of medium-sized Ontario companies will soon learn if their employer is monitoring them in similar ways. As of Oct. 11, employers with 25 or more workers will need to have a written policy on electronic monitoring that outlines how and why staff are monitored, what the information will be used for and to disclose that policy to employees. The rule was enshrined in the provincial Employment Standards Act in April when the government passed the Working for Workers Act.

Employee-monitoring tools, long common in jobs such as delivery drivers and call-centre employees, began seeping into other levels of work during the pandemic as employers sought to track the productivity of remote staff. Privacy and employment experts in the province told The Logic they expect unintended fallout from these new rules, and that employers themselves are bracing for impact.

If you’re sitting there for half your shifts doing nothing, there has to be a way to monitor that

ANDREA PANAGOPOULOS, AIR CANADA CALL-CENTRE WORKER

“Imagine (your employer) says, ‘This whole time you’ve been working from home, we’ve been surreptitiously taking screenshots of you in the background of your house … because we had a right to do that. We’ve been listening in to all your calls, just to make sure you’re not doing anything wrong,’” said Lauren Reid, president and principal consultant at The Privacy Pro. “People are going to be offended, rightfully so … that they haven’t been trusted and this has been happening without their knowledge.”




Reid said she wouldn’t be surprised to see a wave of investigations and complaints following the introduction of disclosure requirements.

Andrew Caldwell, an HR advisory manager at Peninsula Canada who has been helping Ontario employers prepare for the new rules, said there’s “nervousness” about how employees will react.

While Ontario is the first province to enact a disclosure requirement on electronic monitoring, the rules don’t grant workers new privacy rights.

Most Ontario employees don’t have any such protections. The current Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act only applies to federally regulated employees. The Digital Charter Implementation Act, which is making its way through Parliament, would replace part of PIPEDA with the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, which has the same limitations, and the province doesn’t have any private-sector privacy legislation.

However, Lisa Stam, an employment lawyer and the founder and managing partner of Spring Law, said case law in the arbitration space has baked privacy-law principles into collective agreements, giving unionized employees in the province better protections.

To date, just British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec have their own private-sector privacy laws. But Reid said the legislation in both Western provinces employ an outdated consent-based approach to privacy. This framework, which requires employers to seek employees’ consent to collect their data — ranging from the personal information they need to issue biweekly payments or the ability to read their work emails on a company device — doesn’t recognize the “power imbalance” between the parties that makes consent more like coercion, Reid said.

The framework in Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which deems employers must have a “legitimate interest” for gathering and processing any personal data on employees, is more protective of employees by recognizing them as a vulnerable group, Reid said.

She said the federal draft legislation, while imperfect, gets closer to this approach. Quebec’s legislation, passed last September, will require employers to have a specific purpose for the data they collect from employees. While it will continue to allow employers to use surveillance technologies, by Sept. 22, 2023, it will require them to have a serious and legitimate purpose for their use, as well as to disclose any monitoring to employees and allow them to opt out. Both B.C. and Alberta are currently reviewing their laws.

Last September, Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner Patricia Kosseim responded to a provincial government white paper on the issue, urging the province to develop privacy laws for employees. Kosseim specifically cited employee-monitoring tools as a concern, and proposed moving toward requiring employers to justify what they collect. Despite holding consultations on privacy reform in 2020, Ontario hasn’t moved to develop new legislation for the private sector.

During the pandemic, the use of employee-surveillance technologies increased significantly in Canada, according to a September 2021 report from the Cybersecure Policy Exchange and Toronto Metropolitan University. Companies are offering a range of surveillance tools, from Indiana-based, Netsoft Holdings LLC’s Hubstaff’s time-tracking of employee’s work tasks to Florida-based Teramind Inc.’s real-time streaming of desktop activity, or a feature from Sneek, where employees can choose between being on video or having their webcam take their photos at regular intervals.

Joe Masoodi, a co-author of the report and a senior policy analyst at TMU’s Leadership Lab, said monitoring tools aren’t inherently bad and can be used for professional development.

Liam Martin, the Montreal-based co-founder of Time Doctor, a B2B time-tracking software company, said such tools can help companies meet compliance requirements for workers handling sensitive data. They can also be a “third-party source of truth” between employees and managers in disputes over productivity, Martin said.

Everyone at Martin’s fully remote company — including himself and other executives — uses Time Doctor at work. The firm also employs a policy of “radical transparency,” where everyone has access to their colleagues’ and managers’ data. He said the company doesn’t care when or from where employees work, just that they’re accountable to their work.

Martin said technologies such as Time Doctor enable a remote-work future, of which he said he’s a major proponent, and empower employees “to be a lot more autonomous.”

But Masoodi said he’s concerned some of these tools fail to capture intangible elements of work like person-to-person interactions that require empathy and compassion. They can also have “serious consequences” for employees, such as being held back from a promotion or facing disciplinary measures for not meeting company metrics.

An April Ontario Superior Court decision involving Air Canada and the union representing its call-centre employees highlighted these potential risks. At the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, the airline determined employees’ eligibility for telework using a combination of seniority and key performance indicators (KPIs), as the number of headsets were limited.


Air Canada declined to comment to The Logic.


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Unifor Local 2002 filed a grievance against the airline for the policy, arguing that using KPIs to determine remote-work eligibility was discriminatory and violated a letter of understanding in the collective agreement, which has been in place since 1985, said Leslie Dias, Unifor’s airlines sector director.

The letter says technology like call monitoring is only meant to be used for analysis and training purposes. It includes a clause stating that employees must be told in advance if and when their recordings will be reviewed — with the goal of reducing “any stressful effect” of monitoring on employees — and the data can’t be used in a discriminatory or disciplinary way. While a provincial arbitrator found in Air Canada’s favour, the Superior Court overturned the decision and award, and referred the case back to arbitration.

“I don’t feel the company is unfair with their KPIs. They outline … what (they) expect of you,” said Panagopoulos, who began working at the call centre in 2021. “But I don’t think KPIs should hold someone back from getting their work-from-home (status). … You shouldn’t have to be a gold, stellar employee to get to work from home.”

Caldwell said he believes the Ontario rule will ultimately be a positive change, because it will prompt employers to justify why they want to surveil employees. “If it’s just an easier way to manage where you don’t have to have hard conversations, that may not work,” he said. “It doesn’t mean you can’t have (monitoring software), but what’s your business reason?”

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'Pushed to the back': First Nations women under-represented as chiefs in Canada

More than a year after Sheila North unsuccessfully ran to lead one of Manitoba's largest First Nations political organizations, the Cree leader and journalist is ready to try again.



The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs is preparing to host a byelection later this month to fill its top position after it removed Arlen Dumas as grand chief over harassment allegations, which he has denied.

Elders and chiefs urged North to run again.

"Ultimately, it's being asked of my community to do this," North said in an interview. "I feel I still have enough energy to respond to the call."

In North's home province, and across Canada, women have long been under-represented among First Nations chiefs.

If elected, North would be the first female grand chief the Manitoba assembly has seen in its nearly 35-year history

She's no stranger to the title of "first" — she was also elected the first female leader of the Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak, an advocacy group representing northern First Nations in the province, in 2015.

North, who is from Bunibonibee Cree Nation in northern Manitoba, held that position until 2018. She then launched a campaign to become the Assembly of First Nations national chief and finished as runner-up to Perry Bellegarde. Had she won, she would have been the group's first female national chief — a title now held by RoseAnne Archibald after her election win last year.

North, who was most recently a broadcaster with CBC Manitoba, said she's keenly aware she's running at a time when the reputation of the Manitoba assembly is being questioned. But she hopes to bring back a sense of unity between chiefs, staff and the grassroots.

"I can help with restoring the reputation that it had of being inclusive and protective of all people and advocating for all people, while not harming anyone," she said.

In the years since North last held a grand chief title, the number of female chiefs has gone up slightly in Manitoba, but women are still under-represented. Out of the 63 First Nations in the province, 11 are run by women.

Canada-wide, the number of women occupying these roles in the last 15 years has virtually stayed the same, said Cora Voyageur, a sociology professor at the University of Calgary and a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Alberta.

Voyageur's research focuses on tracking the number of women who are chiefs.

"There was between 15 and 18 per cent of the chiefs being women, and that's been pretty constant over the last 15 years or so," she said.

She said any female politicians who choose to do this work "have a hard road to hoe."

This was seen this past summer when the Assembly of First Nations executive council suspended Archibald while it launched an investigation into four complaints against her by staff. Archibald said she was suspended for trying to investigate corruption within the organization and called for a forensic audit. Chiefs ultimately decided to reinstate her.

Voyageur said it was heartbreaking to watch how those events unfolded.

Indigenous Services Canada said from 2012 to 2022, the number of female chiefs has gone up to 24 per cent from 18 per cent and the number of female band council members has risen to 31 per cent from 29 per cent. It says the numbers are an estimate based on what's reported by electoral officers and does not include First Nations councils that govern themselves outside the Indian Act.

Many First Nations communities are matriarchal and were historically governed by women, but some say colonization and the Indian Act disrupted these ways.

"I think that there's been the attitude or thinking that leadership is only for men … it stems from colonization and the way that all unfolded in our country. Our women were pushed to the back rather to be seen and not heard," said North.

She added male and female leaders are trying to correct this imbalance.

In the summer, the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation in northern Manitoba elected its first woman as chief.

Angela Levasseur decided to take a break from her burgeoning law career to run after community members and elders encouraged her.

In the colonial chief-and-council governance system, Levasseur is considered the first. But she says in a historical context, there have been many female leaders before her.

"We were always the leaders as women. In order for our communities to heal, and in order for Indigenous people to move forward in a good way, we need to restore the balance."

Since being elected, Levasseur has heard from other First Nations women interested in running for chief or council.

"I would strongly encourage them to go for it — to not be afraid, to have courage and to call upon the wisdom of our grandmothers and our ancestors to support them."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2022.

Brittany Hobson, The Canadian Press

Nearly half of the world's birds are on the decline, which experts say is a serious threat to ecosystems

Nicole Mortillaro - 3h ago

It might be one early morning, after a particularly long, dark and snowy winter, that you first hear it: The call of a robin. A signal of spring.

Or it might be a walk through a park or forest where you hear a particular bird call and look up, hoping to identify it.

Birds are all around us, every day, and they play a crucial role in the health of our planet.

But in the past 50 years nearly three million birds have disappeared across North America and the European Union alone, a recent report noted. And experts are worried that it could be a bigger sign about the health of our ecosystems.

While it's been known for quite some time that the planet's birds are in danger, it was highlighted again by the recent BirdLife's State of the World's Birds 2022 report, something that they call a "biodiversity crisis." It also notes that 49 per cent of the planet's birds are in decline.

"In the 2018 report only 40 per cent of the bird species were found to be in decline. So in four years, we've had this huge jump in the number of birds that are at risk," said Sam Knight, a program manager at the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

"And they've shown that one in eight are actually threatened with extinction. So it's really concerning tat in such a small time period this is what's happened, and the pressures these birds are facing, and biodiversity overall."

Birds in North America

"I study birds, I love birds and I'm really concerned that I won't be able to go out for a walk and just hear birdsong in the same way," Knight said. "It's such a great mental health benefit to have these birds and species around; you don't even have to be a bird watcher, I don't think, to really appreciate what birds add to our lives."

Birds serve as pollinators, predators, seed dispersers, scavengers and, as the report noted, "ecosystem engineers." Because they are mobile, they traverse vast distances, linking different ecosystems.

And their losses are considerable.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species has found that 1,409 bird species are considered threatened; 755 are vulnerable; 423 are endangered and 231 are critically endangered.

And since the year 1500, at least 187 species of birds have gone extinct, mainly those found on islands.

Why is this happening?

Related video: A Wilder View: Why are some birds smarter than others?

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The threats to our feathered friends are numerous, ranging from agriculture, logging, invasive species and hunting, to birds flying into homes and buildings, and climate change, only to name a few. And our furry cat companions are a big one, with an estimated 100 million to 350 million birds being killed across Canada each year by outdoor felines, according to a 2013 study.

"Invasive species are another huge threat to birds, and cats are the most invasive species, or the most threatening invasive species that we have in North America," Knight said. "There's no doubt that habitat loss is the biggest threat, but it's really hard to measure what habitat loss looks like when it comes to birds because they move, but cats … that is the biggest number of deaths that we can calculate in North America."


A hatchling Piping Plover and its mother is seen on a beach. The species is considered endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.© Randy G. Lubischer/Shutterstock

But she noted that there are some solutions available to cat owners who still may want their cat to enjoy some fresh air.

"What we need to do is keep our cats on leashes and keep them tethered when they're outdoors, or in a catio or that kind of thing. So people can still have their cat, enjoy the outdoors, but not be taking out birds," she said.

When it comes to habitat loss, it's grassland birds and insectivores that are most vulnerable, in particular because of the loss of grasslands in place of agriculture, which, Knight said, is understandable since we need to feed people.

"But we also have to kind of think about this balance of how we can also keep grasslands and restore grasslands. And that has knock-on effects on not just birds but other species," she said. "And one great thing that this report highlighted and reminded us is that birds are really good indicators of what's going on with other biodiversity."



The Florida Scrub Jay, seen here, is listed as vulnerable on the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species.© Tommy Daynjer/Shutterstock

And then there's climate change, which is throwing off the timing for some migrating insectivores, as warmer weather is starting earlier in the year, which means insects come out earlier as well.

By the time the birds arrive, most of the insects' numbers have been reduced.

Need for more protections, big and small

Earlier this month, Birds Canada — an international partner of BirdLife — officially launched its Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) in an aim to protect not only birds, but other species, such as insects, frogs and turtles, who are facing numerous threats.

These areas require strict criteria to be designated a KBA. At the moment there are roughly 75 in Canada, with 900 in progress or being evaluated, said Andrew Couturier, senior director of landscape science and conservation at Birds Canada, who was not involved in the recent report.

"The [BirdLife] analysis shows that one in eight [birds] are threatened with extinction. That obviously varies geographically. Canada's birds aren't doing nearly as badly as that. But we still have a lot of a lot of work to do here," said Couturier, who was a co-author of the 2019 report on The State of Canada's Birds.

No surprise to Couturier, the 2019 report found that grassland birds in the Prairies were most at risk.

"There's hardly any native grassland left in Prairie Canada, and that's always under threat to be converted to some other use such as row cropping," he said. "But we do have good partnerships with the cattle industry, because those lands are actually providing good habitat for grassland birds and they're actually able to coexist with ranching."

Couturier said there are ways to reverse the trend of the loss of habitats and bird species. These can include individual efforts, such as putting stickers on big windows around our homes and planting bird- and pollinator-friendly gardens. On a larger scale, efforts can include office buildings turning off their lights at night to avoid migrating birds from crashing into them, the development of further KBAs across the country, and better land-use management.

And the report, which also outlines some of these steps, is something Couturier said he sees as positive.

"If you talk to people in the charitable sector, you know, there definitely is a fatigue associated with depressing news all the time, when you're working so hard to try and make a difference," he said. "And then you keep seeing things going down and you wonder what else can we do? What can we do better to reverse this problem?"

But, he notes, "There are signs of hope."

A US Study Finally Shows Just How Much Deadlier COVID Has Been for Republicans

Donald Moynihan - Yesterday -SLATE

An anti-vaccine protest in Boston in August 2020. 

Scott Eisen/Getty Images© Provided by Slate

This essay was adapted from Donald Moynihan’s newsletter, Can We Still Govern? Subscribe here.

For at least a year now, there has been strong but largely circumstantial evidence that right-wing anti-vaccine rhetoric was having deadly consequences in the United States.

Despite early wide-scale access to COVID-19 vaccines, the U.S. has outstripped its peer countries when it comes to the all-important measure of mortality known as “excess deaths.” Meanwhile, U.S. life expectancy has continued to drop dramatically due to the coronavirus even as longevity measures have begun rebounding elsewhere.

One seemingly obvious explanation for this grim piece of American exceptionalism is that Republicans, egged on by right-wing political and media elites, have been avoiding simple public health measures to protect themselves like getting vaccinated, and dying at elevated rates as a result.

This problem wasn’t exactly hard to pick up on just by paying attention to social media or reading the news. But the story appeared to be borne out by more careful data analyses, too. Some of the key clues:

• When it comes to the public’s beliefs about the pandemic, such as whether there should be more or fewer COVID restrictions, the gap between left- and right-leaning voters has been much higher in the U.S. than elsewhere.

• COVID cases and deaths are higher in more Republican counties.

• Republicans are more likely to believe misinformation about vaccines.

• Republicans are substantially less likely to get vaccinated.

• Researchers have found that exposure to conservative media, particularly Fox News, made people more vaccine hesitant.

This body of evidence had some limitations, though. For instance, the fact that red counties tended to have higher death rates than blue ones might not mean that conservatives were more likely to die from COVID if lots of Democrats who happened to live in right-wing parts of the country were perishing too. Or, if more Republicans were dying, it might also be because they were different from Democrats in ways that affect COVID outcomes but were not directly driven by ideology. They might just be older, in worse health, or in a community with poorer health resources, for example.

Recently, however, a new working paper by three Yale public health and economics researchers—Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason Schwartz—is offering the most definitive and direct evidence I’ve seen yet confirming that Republicans have indeed been more likely to die because of COVID. The study, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, also confirms the scale of these deaths and points to the central role vaccine hesitancy has likely played in the tragedy.

Much prior work on this topic relied either on surveys of beliefs or evidence about vaccination rates and deaths at the county level. The new paper, in contrast, uses information from voter registration files in Florida and Ohio to connect individual-level data on the political affiliation and age of people who died during the coronavirus crisis. Using this information, it calculates and compares excess death rates of Republicans and Democrats in 2020 and 2021—meaning it looks at how many more people in each party died during the pandemic above what you would ordinarily expect based on their demographics and historical trends. Because they’re using a measure that takes the age of population into account, the researchers’ results shouldn’t be affected by the fact that Republicans tend to be a little older than Democrats.

Technically, excess deaths measure how many additional people have passed away from all causes, rather than just COVID. But public health experts like to use them to track the virus’s toll because causes of death aren’t reported uniformly everywhere, and it avoids the issue of whether coronavirus fatalities are under-recorded in some places but not others. (In studies like this one, it also spares researchers the task of tracking down how each individual died, which isn’t feasible.) It’s a standard and sound approach—unless you think something else besides the global pandemic has been causing a big spike in deaths over the past couple years.


So, what did the authors discover? “Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points, or 76 percent, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats.”

The figure below illustrates the key finding of the paper: It shows a spike in excess deaths around the time of the pandemic, and then a growing difference between Republicans and Democrats in the rate of excess deaths.



Wallace, Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Schwartz© Wallace, Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Schwartz

Crucially, the graphs also show the gap between Democrats and Republicans turned noticeable only after vaccines became widely available. In other words, absent the vaccines, the effect of partisan ideology was not very large. But once people could choose to protect themselves with a shot, Republican and Democratic outcomes diverged.

The figure below reiterates this point. Before vaccine availability, excess deaths are similar for Democrats and Republicans. After vaccines become available, the two groups separate: The excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats increases from 1.6 percentage points to 10.4 percentage points.



Wallace, Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Schwartz© Wallace, Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Schwartz

The paper does have a few limitations. First, it’s still a draft that has yet to go through peer review. However, NBER working papers tend to be high-quality, and absent some glaring data error, it’s hard to see the key findings being reversed. Second, it only uses data from two states, Florida and Ohio; in theory, it is possible that death patterns in the rest of the country are different (though it’s not immediately obvious why that would be the case).

Most crucially, the study also does not include data on whether individuals who died were vaccinated. As a result, the authors cannot quite prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that COVID was deadlier for Republicans specifically because fewer of them chose to be inoculated against it.

But, combined with what we know from other sources, the paper certainly points very, very strongly toward that conclusion. After all, why else would the death gap between Democrats and Republicans only have opened up after vaccines became available to the public? Notably, in counties with the very highest vaccination rates, the study’s authors find almost no difference in excess deaths between Republicans and Democrats. One plausible, if ever so slightly speculative, interpretation of this finding is that in places where conservatives acted more like liberals and actually got their shots, they were less likely to die.

As the authors write, their overall “results suggest that the well-documented differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republicans and Democrats have already had serious consequences for the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the United States.”

Now about the political implications of all this.

The U.S. government’s response to COVID was far from perfect and deserves to be scrutinized. But public health is a coproduction between a country’s citizens and government, which relies on ordinary people to follow official guidance. Most other developed countries did a lot better with that task than the United States.

At this point, it seems safe to say that one of the key reasons why the U.S. failed where other countries succeeded is because right-wing leaders and media sought to sabotage the effort—in particular by casting doubt on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.

After all, vaccine hesitancy was a fringe position before the pandemic, found both on the left and the right. It only became mainstreamed as a conservative view during the pandemic.

Once Joe Biden became president, Republicans amplified the claims that vaccines posed a threat to freedom and aligned themselves with anti-vaccine activists. In some cases, state lawmakers discouraged outreach efforts. And as Matt Gertz of Media Matters has documented, the right-wing campaign against vaccines is still ongoing. Fox News is still raising doubts about vaccinations because, as one insider told the Daily Beast last year, “it’s great for ratings.” The midterms haven’t forced the most prominent vaccine-skeptical politicians to change their tune, either. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson has pushed doubts about the shots despite being up for reelection in November.

Indeed, embracing vaccines has become politically risky. One of the Trump administration’s most positive achievements was in pushing for rapid vaccine development. But Donald Trump himself has struggled to take credit. When he mentioned he got a booster shot at one of his rallies, he was booed. It turns out that when you plant the seed of anti-science doubt—recall Trump giving credence to the false claim that vaccines cause autism—it is hard to reap the benefits of science.

The fact that an audience full of Republicans was ready to boo Donald Trump, of all people, for saying a kind word about vaccines brings up one hard-to-answer question. Did Republican voters turn against vaccines because their favorite politicians and talking heads told them to? Or did Republican politicians and talking heads turn against vaccines because that’s what their audience already wanted to hear?

In all likelihood, the answer is a bit of both. One way to think about this issue is to look at how liberals versus conservatives differed in public health attitudes around the world. What we find is that conservatives are indeed more skeptical about public health measures than liberals in lots of countries. But the gap between liberals and conservatives is much larger in the U.S. There is also some evidence that Republican voters were more attentive to partisan cues about the pandemic than their Democratic peers. In the end, the rhetoric of Republican elites and the appetite for it from voters probably created a terrible feedback loop.

Even if we believe that right-wing elites were merely responding to, rather than cultivating, the preferences of their audiences, this hardly absolves them of blame. People in positions of power and trust raised questions about vaccines while protecting themselves by making sure to get their shots. By lumping vaccines into their steady stream of fear-based political messaging—about the dangers of immigrants, “critical race theory,” or crime—they were the ones actually putting their own supporters at mortal risk. Just imagine the segment on Tucker Carlson if Democrats did something similar to their own voters.

The people who encouraged vaccine hesitancy probably won’t face any sort of reckoning for the role they played. But we need to be honest about the reasons why these deaths happened. Right-wing elites made a choice to engage in rhetoric and feed conspiracies. Some may have truly believed their own words. Some did it for votes and ratings. The consequences for their supporters were deadly.

South Star Battery Metal secures construction permit for graphite mine in Brazil

Cecilia Jamasmie | 

Aerial view of the Santa Cruz graphite project. (Image courtesy of South Star Battery Metal.)

Canadian junior South Star Battery Metal (TSX-V: STS) (OTCQB: STSBD) is moving ahead with Phase 1 construction of its Santa Cruz graphite mine in Brazil, after receiving the permit from the municipality of Itabela, in Southern Bahia.


The company said it had also held talks with the State of Bahia development agency, the Bahia industrial confederation and representatives from the port facilities in Salvador, Bahia, to update them on its growth plans.

“We presented additional details about Santa Cruz and our planned growth through Phase 2 (25,000 tonnes per year of concentrates) and Phase 3 (50,000 tpy of concentrates),” chief executive Richard Pearce said of the meetings.

South Star, which aims to start production at Santa Cruz by the end of 2023, said the mine will be the first major industrial facility in the municipality and one of the largest in the region as it scales operations.

It added that its Santa Cruz graphite project was the first of a series of industrial and battery metals projects that plans to bring into production.

The Vancouver-based company also noted that its next project in the pipeline is a development project in Alabama, United States, located in the middle of a developing electric vehicle, aerospace and defence hub.

Underestimated

Demand for graphite, an overlooked mineral that is a key ingredient for the electrification of vehicles, is expected to soar.

The lithium-ion battery used to power electric vehicles is made of two electrodes — an anode (negative) on one side and a cathode (positive) on the other. The resistant material, an excellent conductor of electricity and heat, is the only one that can be used in the anode, there are no substitutes.

It is also the largest component in lithium-ion batteries by weight, with each battery containing 20-30% graphite. But due to losses in the manufacturing process, it takes 30 times more graphite than lithium to make the batteries.

According to the World Bank, graphite accounts for nearly 53.8% of the mineral demand in batteries, the most of any. Lithium, despite being a staple across all batteries, accounts for only 4% of demand.

Consultancy Benchmark Mineral Intelligence (BMI) sees a roughly 20,000 tonne graphite deficit by the end of 2022, versus a similar-sized surplus in 2020.

Scientists take giant step toward developing room-temperature superconductors

Staff Writer | 

Copper oxide. (Reference image by Adam Rędzikowski, Wikimedia Commons.)

An international team of researchers has uncovered the atomic mechanism behind high-temperature superconductors, a finding that could be revolutionary for super-efficient electrical power.


In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the researchers explain that certain copper oxide materials demonstrate superconductivity at higher temperatures than conventional superconductors, however, the mechanism behind this has remained unknown since their discovery in 1987.

To investigate this, the group developed two new microscopy techniques. The first of these measured the difference in energy between the copper and oxygen atom orbitals, as a function of their location. The second method measured the amplitude of the electron-pair wave function – the strength of the superconductivity – at every oxygen atom and at every copper atom.

“By visualizing the strength of the superconductivity as a function of differences between orbital energies, for the first time ever we were able to measure precisely the relationship required to validate or invalidate one of the leading theories of high-temperature superconductivity, at the atomic scale,” lead researcher Séamus Davis said in a media statement.

As predicted by the theory, the results showed a quantitative, inverse relationship between the charge-transfer energy difference between adjacent oxygen and copper atoms and the strength of the superconductivity.

According to the research team, this discovery could prove a historic step toward developing room-temperature superconductors. Ultimately, these could have far-reaching applications ranging from maglev trains, nuclear fusion reactors, quantum computers, and high-energy particle accelerators, not to mention super-efficient energy transfer and storage.

The scientists also explain that in superconductor materials, electrical resistance is minimized because the electrons that carry the current are bound together in stable ‘Cooper pairs.’

In low-temperature superconductors, Cooper pairs are held together by thermal vibrations, but at higher temperatures, these become too unstable. These new results demonstrate that, in high-temperature superconductors, the Cooper pairs are instead held together by magnetic interactions, with the electron pairs binding together via a quantum mechanical communication through the intervening oxygen atom.

“This has been one of the Holy Grails of problems in physics research for nearly 40 years,” Davis said. “Many people believe that cheap, readily available room-temperature superconductors would be as revolutionary for the human civilization as the introduction of electricity itself.”

Making the radical case for Sinéad O'Connor: She was right all along

Meredith Blake - Yesterday 

Thirty years ago this week, Sinéad O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live,” effectively destroying her mainstream career with a single act of protest against the Catholic Church.



Then 25, the Grammy-winning Irish singer was an unlikely pop star. Known for the raw, emotive power of her voice and her equally fierce resistance to industry pressure — most famously, by shaving her head — O'Connor had risen to international fame with her transcendent cover of Prince's “Nothing Compares 2 U” and her vulnerable, tear-streaked performance in its accompanying video.

A sharp critic of racism and misogyny in the music business who refused to play the national anthem before her concerts, O'Connor was already a controversial figure. But the "SNL" incident — in which O'Connor sang Bob Marley's "War" before tearing up the photo to protest, she later said, the Catholic Church's enablement of child abuse — turned her into a full-blown pariah. Two weeks later, O'Connor was booed off the stage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden and fled, crying, into the arms of Kris Kristofferson.

She has been in pop culture purgatory ever since, continuing to write and perform music for three decades but never coming close to the levels of acclaim or visibility she achieved in the early ’90s.

The ugly incident at the Dylan concert opens "Nothing Compares," a new documentary that offers a sympathetic reappraisal of O'Connor as an iconoclastic artist whose provocations were decades ahead of their time

“It made this huge mark on me as a young Irish woman to witness this hero of mine being treated the way she was,” said Kathryn Ferguson, director of “Nothing Compares,” which premiered this week on Showtime. “The seeds for this film were really planted at that moment. It was a story that stuck with me throughout my adult life. I couldn't understand why there hadn't been a cinematic feature made about her.”

Ferguson, who grew up in Belfast, recalls her father playing “The Lion and the Cobra,” O’Connor’s debut album, on repeat in the car “as we drove around really gray, Troubles-ridden Northern Ireland in the late ’80s,” she said during a recent Zoom conversation from London. “It became the soundtrack to my childhood.”

When Ferguson was a young teenager, she and her friends discovered O’Connor on their own terms and swiftly fell in love: “We just felt like we needed her."

As a graduate student many years later, Ferguson contacted O’Connor’s management team about using some of her music in her thesis film, a connection that eventually led to Ferguson directing the video for O’Connor’s song “Fourth and Vine” in 2013.

“I remembered all of this passion I'd had as a young teenager,” Ferguson said, “and I just really wanted to try and work out how to make this film.”

She spent much of the next five years “talking incessantly” about the project before it finally started to come together in early 2018. The timing was right: The #MeToo movement was surging in the U.S. and elsewhere. In Ireland, same-sex marriage had recently become legal and abortion was about to follow. “The world was on fire with women speaking out,” Ferguson said. “It felt a wee bit mad that this incredible figure wasn't being mentioned in any of this — someone who has inspired so many of the young activists that were directly changing the country.”

Using extensive archival video — including footage from a wedding at which a teenage O’Connor sang “Evergreen” — brief, stylized re-creations and interviews with O’Connor’s friends, collaborators and contemporaries, “Nothing Compares” traces O’Connor’s meteoric rise from troubled teenager to Rolling Stone cover girl, and her even more precipitous fall from grace. A theme throughout the film is the lingering effect of her traumatic childhood: O’Connor endured physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her mother and was sent to live in a church-run Magdalene home as a teenager.

Most important, “Nothing Compares” features an extensive interview with O’Connor. Her now-gravelly voice can be heard throughout the film, reflecting on aspects of her life and work, but her face appears only in archival video — a conscious filmmaking choice, Ferguson explained:

“Our observation was just how amazingly well the media has done in reducing her voice by mocking and ridiculing her. The key takeaway I wanted was that you heard her voice and it wouldn't be interrupted. Having her narrate her story on her own terms was of utmost importance.” (The other interviews are also voiceover only.)

O’Connor shares insights into some of her most notable songs and their connection to traumatic chapters in her life — particularly her painful relationship with her mother, who died in a car crash in 1985, a few years before O’Connor burst onto the music scene. She was thinking of her mother while she made the beautifully spare video for “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which primarily consisted of a close-up on O’Connor’s tear-streaked face against a black background

“Every time I sing the song I think of my mother. I never stopped crying for my mother,” O’Connor says in the film. “I think it’s funny the world fell in love with me because of crying and a tear.”

Notably, the film doesn’t include the song, which was written by Prince. A postscript explains that the musician’s estate denied use of her recording in the documentary.

Ferguson said she was never given a reason for the refusal: “At the end of the day, it's their prerogative. We just had to accept that that was the situation and do our best to creatively overcome it.” (A representative for the estate did not respond to a request for comment.)

She was, however, able to secure outtakes from the video, which, along with commentary from director John Maybury and others involved in the production, helps flesh out this vital chapter in O’Connor’s biography.

The documentary intentionally focuses on a brief but formative era in O’Connor’s life. Although it briefly considers the legacy she’s had on other female artists and activists, it does not explore her turbulent journey since 1992, which has included several marriages, a bitter custody battle, mental health struggles and, in January, the death by suicide of her teenage son.

“What went on in this era has had horrific reverberations throughout the rest of her life,” Ferguson said. “But as she says in the film, the positive thing is the commercial career that was annihilated after her actions in 1992 wasn't the career that she was seeking.”

It’s impossible to know how a Sinéad O’Connnor might be received today, given the way the culture wars of the ’90s have metastasized and taken over contemporary political discourse in the United States. But it’s clear that O’Connor was radically ahead of her time in many ways, from her refusal to conform to prescribed gender roles to her songs about police violence against Black people.

Most obviously, the church she criticized for perpetuating child abuse and the exploitation of women has now apologized for wrongdoing in Ireland and around the world. Back in 1992, many people claimed they didn't understand O'Connor's message, but as Ferguson noted, O'Connor spoke about her experiences with abuse in many interviews before "SNL" (including one with The Times.) "People just chose not to listen," she said.

Like many other women who were shunned in the ’90s and dismissed as “crazy," O’Connor is receiving an overdue cultural reconsideration — one she spearheaded by writing a memoir, “Rememberings,” published to acclaim last year. Her music is finding new fans: “Drink Before the War" was recently included in an episode of “Euphoria.” And “Nothing Compares,” which debuted at Sundance, is bringing O’Connor’s story to a generation of viewers who weren’t yet alive when she immolated her career at 30 Rock.

Ferguson said that many of the screenings get rowdy and emotional. Young people come up to her “with their eyes flashing, just incensed and inspired” by O’Connor’s ordeal. “There’s audible gasps when you get to that backlash moment, because it's still very shocking to see that this young singer from Dublin is causing this much noise. [Her detractors] obviously saw her as a threat — somebody that had to be silenced.”

Ferguson doesn’t know if O’Connor herself has seen the film, but, she said, “I really hope she feels proud.”

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

 

AUSTRALIA

Fortescue to spend $6.2bn to rid iron ore ops of fossil fuels by 2030
Reuters | 

Credit: Fortescue Future Industries

Australia’s Fortescue Metals Group said on Tuesday it would spend an estimated $6.2 billion to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and achieve “real zero terrestrial emissions” across its iron ore operations by the end of the decade.


The investment includes the Perth-based miner installing an additional 2-3 gigawatts of renewable energy generation and battery storage, as well as incremental costs associated with beefing up its green mining fleets and locomotives.


Largely planned in fiscal years 2024 to 2028, the investment will enable displacement of about 700 million litres of diesel and 15 million gigajoules of gas per annum by 2030, and prevent emission of 3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, the miner said.

The world’s fourth-largest iron ore producer anticipates cumulative operational savings of $3 billion by 2030 with payback on investment by 2034, and expects to save $818 million in costs per year from 2030 onwards.

Real zero terrestrial emissions refer to direct and indirect emissions from the firm’s operations and from generation of purchased electricity, steam, among others.

Fortescue and its green-energy unit Fortescue Future Industries (FFI) are trying to rapidly develop infrastructure and technology to produce green hydrogen, as the miner transitions from a pure-play iron ore producer to a green energy firm.

The miner, led by chairman and iron ore magnate Andrew Forrest, has chalked in $600 million to $700 million in capital expense for FFI in fiscal 2023 to build a full green hydrogen supply chain by the end of the decade, potentially positioning itself as a key player in supply of the alternate fuel.

“There’s no doubt that the energy landscape has changed dramatically over the past two years and this change has accelerated since Russia invaded Ukraine,” Forrest said on Tuesday.

The miner expects “attractive economic returns” on operating cost savings after eliminating diesel, natural gas, and carbon offset purchases from its supply chain, it added.

(By Sameer Manekar; Editing by Maju Samuel)

Philippine town revokes permit for Tampakan copper-gold project

Staff Writer |

Camp at Tampakan copper-gold project on Mindanao Island, southern Philippines. 

( Image: Sagittarius Mines.)

A local government in the Philippines has cancelled Sagittarius Mines’ permit for the Tampakan copper-gold project in the country’s South Cotabato province, citing concerns about the survival of hundreds of indigenous peoples that live nearby.


Tampakan, considered the Southeast Asian country’s biggest untapped copper-gold reserve, was stalled for over a decade following a 2010 ban on mining, which was extended to open-pit operations in 2017.

Former President Rodrigo Duterte, who ended his six-year term in June, lifted the nationwide ban late last year to revitalise the mining industry.

The move paved the way for Sagittarius Mines to reopen the $5.9 billion project, in which commodities giant Glencore (LON: GLEN) used to have a controlling stake, but abandoned it amid regulatory uncertainties.

Mayor Leonard Escobillo of Tampakan told local press the permit had been revoked due the company’s “fraud, erroneous classification and misrepresentation of its business status.”

“There’s nothing personal in this case. We are just doing our job,” Escobillo told reporters.
The asset, which has estimated resources of 15 million tonnes of copper and 17.6 million ounces of gold, was one of at least 12 metallic mines expected to begin commercial operations this year.

Most of the mines awaiting permits are nickel projects, one of the metals in highest demand these days due to its use electric vehicles batteries and other devices that can help the world transition to cleaner technologies.

Tampakan was expected to have an average annual production capacity of 375,000 tonnes of copper and 360,000 ounces of gold in concentrate.

CANADA

Lackluster interest among youth a big problem for mining

Attracting more young people to mining presents significant challenges for the industry in the years ahead, say experts. 

Blair McBride 

Mining Industry Human Resources Council photo

As a career choice, mining has seen better times.


Over the last several years, the focus of young people has drifted away from mining as they contemplate their careers and enter post-secondary education.

Mining, in fact, ranked last in a list of nine career sectors in an Abacus Data poll conducted in 2021 with the Mining Industry Human Resources Council (MiHR).

“We had Abacus Data poll 3,000 youth across the country on perceptions of work in different sectors,” said Ryan Montpellier, executive director of MiHR. “Only 11% of youth polled identified that they would be likely to work in the mining industry. We struggle at a base layer trying to attract youth to careers in the sector.”

Mining is among the least popular fields for young people in Canada, according to a Mining Industry Human Resources Council and Abacus Data poll. Mining Industry Human Resources Council image


The poll also found that 70% of youth polled “definitely” or “probably would not” consider pursuing mining. Health care, high tech and arts and culture were the top three most desirable sectors on the list.

Montpellier, who calls the currently tight labour market in mining “somewhat dire,” attributes the lacklustre interest in mining among young people to several factors.

One is that most mining jobs are in rural and remote areas where there aren’t enough people to support large, industrial projects.

“We’re seeing an exodus from rural Canada into more urban locations, where the mining jobs aren’t,” he said.

Another is that young people associate mining with images that are out of touch with how the industry actually works.

“A lot of the feedback that we received from youth about careers in mining is that they just had no clue,” Montpellier said. “Mining is not in their backyard. Their perceptions of careers in mining were dated. They were based on stereotypes from TV shows. So, we need to change that. There’s a communications issue there.”

He also thinks the image of mining presented to young people is too often only from an environmental activist perspective.

“[The MiHR is] trying to link what we value in society with the minerals and metals that we need. Everything that we have, be it electric vehicles, cell phones, transportation…all of that happens with minerals and metals, and Canada is quite fortunate that we have access to a rich array of minerals and metals. Our industry is extracting them in the most environmentally sustainable and stringent jurisdiction in the world. Canada is the place to do that.”\

Increasing demand

The waning interest in mining comes at an awkward time as the industry will face increasing demand for labour and talent in the coming years.

The MiHR’s “Canadian Mining Labour Market Report”, published in 2020 said the mining industry will need about 79,680 new hires between 2020 and 2030 in its baseline employment outlook scenario, and 113,130 in an expansionary scenario.

Most of those required new hires will be needed to replace workers retiring from the industry.

The extraction and milling sub-sectors of mining are projected to experience hiring gaps in all occupational categories, with the largest shortages forecast in trades occupations (830 jobs) and all other occupations (1,630 jobs).

Responding to that report, Montpellier said that for some in-demand occupations the mining world needs to increase its share of heavy equipment operators and mechanics.

But for more mining-specific roles, he said he believes the industry needs to play a bigger role in helping the post-secondary education system attract more future miners.

One way it’s trying to do that is with its National Youth Mining Career Awareness Strategy to address perceptions about the industry and its We Need Mining, Mining Needs You campaign.

If efforts to draw more young people into the industry aren’t successful, Montpellier said talent will have to come from outside of Canada, a switch from the country’s traditional reputation as an “exporter of mining talent.”

“We’ve had people come here to work and then they go home with that expertise. But maybe there is more we can do to keep them here,” he said.
Promoting mining for youth, diverse candidates

Although three generations of his family have worked in mining, recent geology graduate Pierre-Olivier Leroux can understand why many young people aren’t gravitating towards the industry.

What many youth today learn about mining reflects outdated perspectives, said Leroux, who graduated with a degree in geology from the University of Laval in Quebec City last May.

He now works as a mineral technology professor at Thetford Mines Cegep in Thetford, Quebec.

“When we hear about mining we hear about the vast amounts of money put into the projects and there’s always bad press about the environmental part. People have images from the 1970s and they think that things work the same way now but it’s not true,” he said, pointing to industry standards requiring miners to remediate sites once operations end.

In addition to the environment, proper work-life balance is also very important for millennials, even more than high salaries, Leroux said.

That’s where he believes the industry can do more to meet the needs of future miners if the job entails going to the far north where the mines are.

“You really have to insist on how to accommodate someone who wants kids. It’s an issue.
Not all young mining professionals are the same. The (companies) should work with those potential candidates. They should ask them what would make them come here? But it’s a hard one for sure,” he said.

Montpellier also acknowledges that the industry needs to do more to attract people of colour, Indigenous people, new Canadians and especially women.

“We know it’s a challenge,” he said, noting that a 2022 report from MiHR found women made up only 16% of undergraduate mining engineering enrolments between 2016 and 2020. That puts the field in the bottom half of female representation in engineering, along with electrical, computer and mechanical; although metallurgical and geological engineering had higher enrolment rates.

Women’s representation in mining engineering programs has been among the lowest of engineering programs in Canada, the Mining Industry Human Resources Council found. Mining Industry Human Resources Council graphic

“You factor in the ageing workforce, remote mines, lack of diversity — it leads to a perfect storm of an extremely tight labour market and a historically low unemployment rate in our sector,” he said. “I think part of the solution here is changing the culture of the industry to make it more inclusive and open and attract more diverse talent. But also ensuring we’re attracting more diverse talent into the university system as well.”

While representation of women in mining engineering in recent years is relatively low, progress has made in recent decades.

Industry veteran Pat Dillon has witnessed important changes in her more than 32-year career in mining, which saw her become president of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) from 2006 to 2008 and was inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame in 2021.

She also serves as president and CEO of PDAC Mining Matters, an organization that has provided educational resources promoting mineral literacy to more than 800,000 students and teachers in Canada, in English, French and several Indigenous languages.

In a phone interview with The Northern Miner, Dillon noted that while mining disciplines have never attracted many female students, women made up as little as 4% of students around 20 years ago.

“I know when I was at school studying geology there were women in the earth sciences geological program but there were very few in mining engineering,” she noted about her time at the University of Toronto, where she earned a BSc in geology in 1974.

“I’m not going to sugar coat it. There’s a long, long way to go.”

Dillon says she’s encouraged that the increasing representation of women in mining – however modest – will spur more women to enter the field because once they start seeing “like individuals” having success “people start thinking of the industry as a career more and more.”
Scope of the problem

Educational data further bears out the declining interest in mining.

Between 2010 and 2020, enrolment at all post-secondary levels across Canada for mining engineering programs rose from a low of 1,227 students in 2010/2011 to a high of 2,049 in 2014/2015, according to data from Statistics Canada. Enrolment then dipped to 1,311 in 2019/2020. Information for years preceding 2010 was not available.

Looking at the 2014 to 2020 period, Montpellier said a “clear pattern of a decline in total enrolment” is evident in mining engineering, with enrolment falling by 42%.

Montpellier also noted that while mining engineering enrolment declined in those years, more students were registering for other engineering fields.

StatsCan data shows that total enrolment numbers in engineering sat at 91,947 in 2010 and increased each subsequent year, reaching 131,613 in 2019/2020.

Although mining hasn’t had the lowest enrolment numbers out of all engineering fields — such as relatively niche fields like agricultural or marine engineering — many thousands of fewer students are signing up for mining than conventional fields like general engineering, chemical, civil, electrical or mechanical.

Graduation numbers in mining engineering are even lower. Between 2010 to 2019, the year with the lowest number of graduates was 2010 when 246 graduated. Numbers rose steadily to a high of 498 in 2016, then fell gradually to 393 in 2019.With geological and earth sciences, enrolment rates have been significantly higher than mining engineering.

Between 2010 and 2020, enrolment climbed from 5,775 in 2010 to its decade peak of 6,696 in 2014/2015, before declining to its lowest level of 4,797 in 2019/2020. The number of students who ended up graduating in those fields has been noticeably lower. The decade opened at its lowest graduation level of 1,191, then climbed to 1,728 in 2017 before dipping to 1,386 in 2019.