Winter solstice 2022: Shortest day of the year is long on pagan rituals


Forrest Brown
CNN
Digital
Published Dec. 21, 2022 

For the past six months, the days have grown shorter and the nights have grown longer in the Northern Hemisphere. But that's about to reverse itself.

Winter solstice 2022, the shortest day of the year and the official first day of winter, is on Wednesday, December 21 (well, for a decent chunk of the world anyway). How this all works has fascinated people for thousands of years. Climate Barometer newsletter: Sign up to keep your finger on the climate pulse

First, we'll look at the science and precise timing behind the solstice. Then we'll explore some ancient traditions and celebrations around the world.

The science and timing behind a winter solstice

The winter solstice marks the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere when the sun appears at its most southerly position, directly overhead at the Tropic of Capricorn.

The situation is the reverse in the Southern Hemisphere, where only about 10% of the world's population lives. There, the December solstice marks the longest day of the year -- and the beginning of summer -- in places like Argentina, Madagascar, New Zealand and South Africa.

When exactly does it occur?

The solstice usually -- but not always -- takes place on December 21. The date that the solstice occurs can shift because the solar year (the time it takes for the sun to reappear in the same spot as seen from Earth) doesn't exactly match up to our calendar year.

If you want to be super-precise in your observations, the exact time of the 2022 winter solstice will be 21:48 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on Wednesday, according to EarthSky.org and Farmers' Almanac. That's almost six hours later than last year's time.

Below are some examples of when 21:48 UTC will be for various local times in places around the world. Because of time zone differences, the vast bulk of Asia will mark the winter solstice on Thursday, December 22.

• Tokyo: 6:48 a.m. Thursday

• Hanoi, Vietnam: 4:48 a.m. Thursday

• New Delhi: 3:18 a.m. Thursday

• Istanbul: 12:48 a.m. Thursday

• Jerusalem: 11:48 p.m. Wednesday

• Copenhagen, Denmark: 10:48 p.m. Wednesday

• Charlotte, North Carolina: 4:48 p.m. Wednesday

• Winnipeg, Manitoba: 3:48 p.m. Wednesday

• San Francisco: 1:48 p.m. Wednesday

• Honolulu: 11:48 a.m. Wednesday

To check the timing where you live, the website EarthSky has a handy conversion table for your time zone. You might also try the conversion tools at Timeanddate.com, Timezoneconverter.com or WorldTimeServer.com.

What places see and feel the effects of the winter solstice the most?

Daylight decreases dramatically the closer you are to the North Pole on December 21.

People in balmy Singapore, just 137 kilometres or 85 miles north of the equator, barely notice the difference, with just nine fewer minutes of daylight than they have during the summer solstice. It's pretty much a 12-hour day, give or take a few minutes, all year long there.

Much higher in latitude, Paris still logs in a respectable eight hours and 14 minutes of daylight to enjoy a chilly stroll along the Seine.

The difference is more stark in frigid Oslo, Norway, where the sun will rise at 9:18 a.m. and set at 3:12 p.m., resulting in less than six hours of anemic daylight. Sun lamp, anyone?

Residents of Nome, Alaska, will be even more sunlight deprived with just three hours and 54 minutes and 31 seconds of very weak daylight. But that's downright generous compared with Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. It sits inside the Arctic Circle and won't see a single ray of sunshine.

What causes the winter solstice to even happen?

Because Earth is tilted on its rotational axis, we have changing seasons. As the planet moves around the sun, each hemisphere experiences winter when it's tilted away from the sun and summer when it's tilted toward the sun.

Scientists are not entirely sure how this occurred, but they think that billions of years ago, as the solar system was taking shape, the Earth was subject to violent collisions that caused the axis to tilt.

The equinoxes, both spring and fall, occur when the sun's rays are directly over the equator. On those two days, everyone everywhere has a nearly equal length of day and night. The summer solstice is when the sun's rays are farthest north over the Tropic of Cancer, giving us our longest day and the official start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

Winter solstice traditions and celebrations

It's no surprise many cultures and religions celebrate a holiday -- whether it be Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or pagan festivals -- that coincides with the return of longer days.

Ancient peoples whose survival depended on a precise knowledge of seasonal cycles marked this first day of winter with elaborate ceremonies and celebrations. Spiritually, these celebrations symbolize the opportunity for renewal.

"Christmas takes many of its customs and probably its date on the calendar from the pagan Roman festivals of Saturnalia and Kalends," Maria Kennedy, assistant teaching professor in the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University, told CNN Travel in an email.

Saturnalia started on December 17 and Kalends started on January 1, said Kennedy, who specializes in Christmas studies.

Citing academic research, Kennedy said early founders of the Christian church condemned the practices of these holidays, but their popularity endured. Christian observance of Christmas eventually aligned around the same time in the calendar even though there's no specific date set in the Gospels for the birth of Jesus.

Here's more on some of those ancient customs:

In the Welsh language, "Alban Arthan" means for "Light of Winter," according to the Farmers' Almanac. It might be the oldest seasonal festival of humankind. Part of Druidic traditions, the winter solstice is considered a time of death and rebirth.

Newgrange, a prehistoric monument built in Ireland around 3200 BC, is associated with the Alban Arthan festival.

In Ancient Rome, Saturnalia lasted for seven days. It honoured Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture.

The people enjoyed carnival-like festivities resembling modern Mardi Gras celebrations and even delayed their war-making. Slaves were given temporary freedoms, and moral restrictions were eased. Saturnalia continued into the third and fourth centuries AD.

It's not just ancient Europeans who marked the annual occasion. The Dongzhi Winter Solstice Festival has its roots in ancient Chinese culture. The name translates roughly as "extreme of winter."

They thought this was the apex of yin (from Chinese medicine theory). Yin represents darkness and cold and stillness, thus the longest day of winter. Dongzhi marks the return yang -- and the slow ascendance of light and warmth. Dumplings are usually eaten to celebrate in some East Asian cultures.

Many places around the world traditionally hold festivals that honour the winter solstice. A few of them include:

Montol Festival

Better known for pirates than the solstice, the town of Penzance on the southwest coast of England revived the delightful tradition of a Cornish processional -- along with dancing, mask-wearing, singing and more.

Stonehenge

The UK's most famous site for solstice celebrations is Stonehenge. On the winter solstice, visitors traditionally enter the towering, mysterious stone circle for a sunrise ceremony run by local pagan and druid groups.

The English Heritage Society says the 2022 celebration will be held on Thursday, December 22. It will be live-streamed on its YouTube channel.

Lantern Festival

In Canada, Vancouver's Winter Solstice Lantern Festival is a sparkling celebration of solstice traditions spread across the Granville Island, Strathcona and Yaletown neighbourhoods.

CNN's Katia Hetter and Autumn Spanne contributed to this article



These three images from NOAA's GOES East (GOES-16) satellite show us what Earth looks like from space near the winter solstice. The images were captured about 24 hours before the 2018 winter solstice. (NOAA)

Here’s why the winter solstice is significant in cultures across the world




By —Molly Jackson, The Conversation

Science Dec 21, 2022 

If you’ve already spend hours shoveling snow this year, you may be dismayed to realize that technically, it’s not yet winter. According to the astronomical definition, the season will officially begin in the Northern Hemisphere on Dec. 21, 2022: the shortest day of the year, known as the winter solstice.

The weeks leading up to the winter solstice can feel long as days grow shorter and temperatures drop. But it’s also traditionally been a time of renewal and celebration – little wonder that so many cultures mark major holidays just around this time.

Here are four things to know about the solstice, from what it really is to how it’s been commemorated around the world.

Journey of the sun

First things first: What is the winter solstice?

For starters, it’s not the day with the latest sunrise or the earliest sunset. Rather, it’s when “the sun appears the lowest in the Northern Hemisphere sky and is at its farthest southern point over Earth,” wrote William Teets, an astronomer at Vanderbilt University. “After that, the sun will start to creep back north again.”

In the Southern Hemisphere, meanwhile, Dec. 21, 2022 marks the summer solstice. Its winter solstice will arrive June 21, 2023, the same day the Northern Hemisphere celebrates its summer solstice.

“Believe it or not,” Teets added, “we are closest to the sun in January”: a reminder that seasons come from the Earth’s axial tilt at any given time, not from its distance from our solar system’s star.

Ancient astronomy

Many Americans picturing winter solstice celebrations may immediately think of Stonehenge, but cultures have honored the solstice much closer to home. Many Native American communities have long held solstice ceremonies, explained University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scholar Rosalyn LaPier, an Indigenous writer, ethnobotanist and environmental historian.

“For decades, scholars have studied the astronomical observations that ancient indigenous people made and sought to understand their meaning,” LaPier wrote. Some societies in North America expressed this knowledge through constructions at special sites, such as Cahokia in Illinois – temple pyramids and mounds, similar to those the Aztecs built, which align with the sun on solstice days.

“Although some winter solstice traditions have changed over time, they are still a reminder of indigenous peoples’ understanding of the intricate workings of the solar system,” she wrote, and their “ancient understanding of the interconnectedness of the world.”
Dazzling light

Rubén Mendoza, an archaeologist at California State University, Monterey Bay, made an accidental discovery years ago at a mission church. In this worship space and many others that Catholic missionaries built during the Spanish colonial period, the winter solstice “triggers an extraordinary rare and fascinating event,” he explained: “a sunbeam enters each of these churches and bathes an important religious object, altar, crucifix or saint’s statue in brilliant light.”



Winter solstice illumination of the main altar tabernacle of the Spanish Royal Presidio Chapel, Santa Barbara, Calif. Rubén G. Mendoza, CC BY-ND

These missions were built to convert Native Americans to Catholicism – people whose cultures had already, for thousands of years, celebrated the solstice sun’s seeming victory over darkness. Yet the missions incorporated those traditions in a new way, channeling the sun’s symbolism into a Christian message.

“These events offer us insights into archaeology, cosmology and Spanish colonial history,” Mendoza wrote. “As our own December holidays approach, they demonstrate the power of our instincts to guide us through the darkness toward the light.”
Victory over darkness

Our next story goes halfway around the world, describing the Persian solstice festival of Yalda. But it’s also an American story. Growing up in Minneapolis, anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi explained, she felt a bit left out as neighbors celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas. That’s when her grandmother introduced her to their family’s Yalda traditions.

Millions of people around the world celebrate Yalda, which marks the sunrise after the longest night of the year. “Ancient Persians believed that evil forces were strongest on the longest and darkest night of the year,” wrote Mahdavi, who is now provost at the University of Montana. Families stayed up throughout the night, snacking and telling stories, then celebrating “as the light spilled through the sky in the moment of dawn.”

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives. It is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for WINTER SOLSTICE 

AND DOWN UNDER IT IS SUMMER SOLSTICE

SCI FI TECH

Why fusion ignition is being hailed as a major breakthrough in fusion – a nuclear physicist explains


The target chamber at the National Ignition Facility has been the site of a number of breakthroughs in fusion physics. U.S. Department of Energy/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

THE CONVERSATION

Published: December 13, 2022

American scientists have announced what they have called a major breakthrough in a long-elusive goal of creating energy from nuclear fusion.

The U.S. Department of Energy said on Dec. 13, 2022, that for the first time – and after several decades of trying – scientists have managed to get more energy out of the process than they had to put in.

But just how significant is the development? And how far off is the long-sought dream of fusion providing abundant, clean energy? Carolyn Kuranz, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan who has worked at the facility that just broke the fusion record, helps explain this new result.

Fusion is the same process that powers the Sun. NASA/Wikimedia Commons

What happened in the fusion chamber?

Fusion is a nuclear reaction that combines two atoms to create one or more new atoms with slightly less total mass. The difference in mass is released as energy, as described by Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2 , where energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Since the speed of light is enormous, converting just a tiny amount of mass into energy – like what happens in fusion – produces a similarly enormous amount of energy.

Researchers at the U.S. Government’s National Ignition Facility in California have demonstrated, for the first time, what is known as “fusion ignition.” Ignition is when a fusion reaction produces more energy than is being put into the reaction from an outside source and becomes self-sustaining.

The fuel is held in a tiny canister designed to keep the reaction as free from contaminants as possible. U.S. Department of Energy/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The technique used at the National Ignition Facility involved shooting 192 lasers at a 0.04 inch (1 mm) pellet of fuel made of deuterium and tritium – two versions of the element hydrogen with extra neutrons – placed in a gold canister. When the lasers hit the canister, they produce X-rays that heat and compress the fuel pellet to about 20 times the density of lead and to more than 5 million degrees Fahrenheit (3 million Celsius) – about 100 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. If you can maintain these conditions for a long enough time, the fuel will fuse and release energy.

The fuel and canister get vaporized within a few billionths of a second during the experiment. Researchers then hope their equipment survived the heat and accurately measured the energy released by the fusion reaction.
So what did they accomplish?

To assess the success of a fusion experiment, physicists look at the ratio between the energy released from the process of fusion and the amount of energy within the lasers. This ratio is called gain.

Anything above a gain of 1 means that the fusion process released more energy than the lasers delivered.

On Dec. 5, 2022, the National Ignition Facility shot a pellet of fuel with 2 million joules of laser energy – about the amount of power it takes to run a hair dryer for 15 minutes – all contained within a few billionths of a second. This triggered a fusion reaction that released 3 million joules. That is a gain of about 1.5, smashing the previous record of a gain of 0.7 achieved by the facility in August 2021.
How big a deal is this result?

Fusion energy has been the “holy grail” of energy production for nearly half a century. While a gain of 1.5 is, I believe, a truly historic scientific breakthrough, there is still a long way to go before fusion is a viable energy source.

While the laser energy of 2 million joules was less than the fusion yield of 3 million joules, it took the facility nearly 300 million joules to produce the lasers used in this experiment. This result has shown that fusion ignition is possible, but it will take a lot of work to improve the efficiency to the point where fusion can provide a net positive energy return when taking into consideration the entire end-to-end system, not just a single interaction between the lasers and the fuel.

Machinery used to create the powerful lasers, like these pre-amplifiers, currently requires a lot more energy than the lasers themselves produce.

  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CC BY-SA

What needs to be improved?

There are a number of pieces of the fusion puzzle that scientists have been steadily improving for decades to produce this result, and further work can make this process more efficient.

First, lasers were only invented in 1960. When the U.S. government completed construction of the National Ignition Facility in 2009, it was the most powerful laser facility in the world, able to deliver 1 million joules of energy to a target. The 2 million joules it produces today is 50 times more energetic than the next most powerful laser on Earth. More powerful lasers and less energy-intensive ways to produce those powerful lasers could greatly improve the overall efficiency of the system.

Fusion conditions are very challenging to sustain, and any small imperfection in the capsule or fuel can increase the energy requirement and decrease efficiency. Scientists have made a lot of progress to more efficiently transfer energy from the laser to the canister and the X-ray radiation from the canister to the fuel capsule, but currently only about 10% to 30% of the total laser energy is transferred to the canister and to the fuel.

Finally, while one part of the fuel, deuterium, is naturally abundant in sea water, tritium is much rarer. Fusion itself actually produces tritium, so researchers are hoping to develop ways of harvesting this tritium directly. In the meantime, there are other methods available to produce the needed fuel.

These and other scientific, technological and engineering hurdles will need to be overcome before fusion will produce electricity for your home. Work will also need to be done to bring the cost of a fusion power plant well down from the US$3.5 billion of the National Ignition Facility. These steps will require significant investment from both the federal government and private industry.

It’s worth noting that there is a global race around fusion, with many other labs around the world pursuing different techniques. But with the new result from the National Ignition Facility, the world has, for the first time, seen evidence that the dream of fusion is achievable.

Author

Carolyn Kuranz
Associate Professor of Nuclear Engineering, University of Michigan
Disclosure statement
Carolyn Kuranz receives funding from the National Nuclear Security Administration and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She serves on a review board for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She is a member of the Fusion Energy Science Advisory Committee.
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Why did Xi scold Trudeau? Maybe because Canada spent years helping China erode human rights

THE CONVERSATION
Published: November 18, 2022 

Chinese president Xi Jinping has given Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a well-publicized dressing-down, accusing him of leaking to the media the contents of a meeting between the two leaders about alleged Chinese interference in the 2019 federal election.

The confrontation has grabbed attention around the world and sparked debate about the ways diplomatic conversations are communicated to the public.



It’s also an object lesson in diplomatic communication as Xi was apparently trying to push Canada back towards an earlier Canadian stance that accepted closed-door discussion. Chinese leaders believe they can push Canada around, because Canadian governments have been broadcasting for decades that they don’t mind being pushed around.

That’s one reason why China feels free to arrest Canadian citizens like Huseyin Celil, “re-educate” Uighurs and thumb its nose at the global human rights system.

Read more: A diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games could bring Huseyin Celil home

Started with Jean Chrétien

To see how we got here, we need only look to Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government of the 1990s.

Canada was among the world’s top enablers for Chinese Communist Party rights violations. In the 1990s, it helped the CCP undermine the international human rights system. We’re now living with consequences of an eroded, weakened rights system.

Beginning in 1997, Canada, along with other countries, began to hold what they called “bilateral human rights dialogues.” Under the Chrétien government, Canada opened three dialogues — with China, Cuba and Indonesia. Not coincidentally, all three were countries that were then criticized by Canadian human rights activists for their poor human rights records.

The three new “dialogues” were a government effort to demonstrate some action on rights without actually imposing any sort of sanctions.

The Chrétien Liberals opposed any sort of concrete action to pressure China on human rights, and just embraced trade. After all, they argued, trade would make everybody wealthier, and that would lead to more democracy.

How did that work out?

Judging by recent events, not so well.

Jean Chrétien and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao chat at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in October 2003 as the prime minister at the time kicked off a visit to China.

 (CP PHOTO/Paul Chiasson)

Scant results

Far from changing things, these supposed human rights dialogues became an end in their own right, showing few measurable results and freezing out meaningful participation by civil society. They became an excuse to avoid multilateral action.

The dialogue with China ended in ignominious failure.

In February 2001, Jean Chrétien and his wife Aline, followed by Ontario Premier Mike Harris, arrive in Beijing for the start of the Team Canada Trade mission. (CP PHOTO/Fred Chartrand)

Canada opened a “dialogue” with China in 1997. At the same time, it stopped sponsoring an annual resolution on human rights in China at the United Nations Human Rights Committee. The Chrétien government called this u-turn “constructive engagement.”

Instead of public criticism, the defence of this tactic went, Chrétien would bring up human rights quietly and privately while he was visiting China on his travelling jamborees to promote Canada-China trade — trips that he insisted on calling “Team Canada.”
Providing an assist to China

Dialogue with China sounded good. What “dialogue” actually meant, though, was Canada helped China achieve its major goal — changing how the UN human rights system addresses rights violations.

After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the Communist government in China started calling for “dialogue” about human rights with western countries. Premier Li Peng, the “butcher of Tiananmen,” told the UN:

“China values human rights and stands ready to engage in discussion and co-operation with other countries on an equal footing on the question of human rights.”

What that meant was talking, quietly, in closed sessions, one-on-one. In open sessions, countries can advocate together with human rights groups. Behind closed doors, with only two governments present, Canada’s voice is that of a pipsqueak — and easy for the CCP to ignore.

“Bilateral human rights dialogues” replaced multilateral pressure. China could not have succeeded on its own. The system changed because governments like Canada’s helped it.

The result: China managed to alter international human rights norms at the UN, so much so that it’s no longer possible to even hold a debate on Uighur rights at the UN Human Rights Committee.

Read more: UN report on China's abuse of Uyghurs is stronger than expected but missing a vital word: genocide

Trade trumped rights

Why did Canada help China’s leaders undermine human rights at the UN? The Chrétien government wanted trade with China.

Though Stephen Harper would criticize this valuing of “the almighty dollar” ahead of human rights, his own government ended up hugging China just as closely.

As foreign affairs minister, John Baird shamelessly (and falsely) called China an “ally.” Harper signed a major trade deal with China, returning to the bipartisan status quo on the Chinese.

Stephen Harper speaks with John Baird while they stand next to Wen Jiabao, premier of the People’s Republic of China, in Beijing in February 2012. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

Governments of both parties wanted trade. And both were willing to sacrifice human rights to get it. If previous governments had not aided and abetted China’s campaign to undermine the UN human rights system, we might not be where we are today with China.

It is this closed-doors style of bilateral relationship that Xi wants to force Trudeau back into, as he publicly showed in hectoring Trudeau in Bali.

He thought he could do so, because this is the lesson that the Chrétien and Harper governments conveyed to China’s leaders: don’t take us seriously when we talk about rights.

It’s a lesson that it will take a long time to overhaul – if the Trudeau government even truly wants to.

Author

David Webster
Associate professor, Human Rights Studies, King's University College, Western University
Disclosure statement
David Webster receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
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How Canada’s new credit card surcharge will affect consumers and businesses

Visa and Mastercard both recently agreed to remove their no-surcharge rule, leaving businesses free to pass these fees along to customers. (Shutterstock)


THE CONVERSATION
Published: November 15, 2022

Canada has some of the highest interchange fees in the world. Interchange fees are the fees businesses pay each time their customers pay by credit card.

The average interchange fee in Canada is about 1.5 per cent of the transaction value, with fees typically falling between one and 2.5 per cent. The makeup of these fees can be complex, but they generally end up with the issuing bank. Credit card networks receive a much smaller proportion of the transaction.

Up until last month, credit card networks did not allow businesses to pass these fees to customers. That recently changed with the settlement of a class-action lawsuit that alleged certain banks and credit card networks conspired to set high interchange fees and prevent businesses from adding surcharges or refusing high-cost cards.

Several banks, along with Visa and Mastercard, admitted no fault but agreed to contribute to a $188 million settlement fund that will be dispersed to Canadian businesses that have accepted Visa or Mastercard since 2001.

In response to the lawsuit, Visa and Mastercard agreed to remove their no-surcharge rule, leaving businesses free to pass the interchange fee to their customers. For example, on a $50 purchase, a consumer could pay a credit card surcharge of up to $1.25.

So, what does this mean for Canadian consumers and businesses? Now that businesses are allowed to, will they add a surcharge to cover credit card fees or will they continue to absorb the cost? What should businesses know about consumers’ reactions to surcharges? And what are the costs and benefits of credit card surcharges for consumers?

Predicting customer reactions

To help businesses predict how consumers will react to credit card surcharges, we can turn to behavioural economics, which combines elements from economics and psychology to understand how and why people behave as they do in the marketplace.

Behavioural economics has long noted that people show strong diminishing reactions to both losses and gains. This means, for example, that the pain of a $10 loss is much greater than a tenth of the pain of a $100 loss. A surcharge will almost certainly enhance the “pain of paying” compared to including the fee in the overall price.

No one blames businesses for adding tax, but there is a strong possibility customers will blame businesses if they add credit card surcharges. (Shutterstock)

As a teenager working in our family furniture business in the U.K., I recall the time a customer angrily threw his credit card at my mother after she informed him of our credit card surcharge. But the psychology of losses and gains doesn’t provide the whole picture here — part of the reason the customer was so angry was because he blamed us for the surcharge.

This is a reaction that businesses should rightly fear. Blame can dramatically enhance perceptions of unfairness. No one blames businesses for adding tax, but there is a strong possibility customers will blame businesses if they add credit card surcharges.

This means consumers are unlikely to support credit card surcharges, especially if they are simply added to existing prices. In fact, the U.K. banned credit card surcharges in 2018 on the basis that surcharges were simply a “rip-off fee.”

Suggestions for businesses

Although businesses can make an educated guess about how customers will react to surcharges, it is difficult to fully predict. To play it safe, most businesses in Canada will probably refrain from adding a surcharge for credit card use for the time being.

According to a Canadian Federation of Independent Business survey, most businesses either don’t plan to add the surcharge (15 per cent), aren’t sure whether they should (40 per cent) or will simply follow what others in their industry do (26 per cent). About one in five businesses (19 per cent) said they do intend to use the surcharge.

For businesses that are contemplating using the surcharge, there are better ways to implement it than simply tacking it on to existing prices. One approach involves reframing the situation for consumers by offering a discount for cash or debit, instead of adding a surcharge for credit cards.

For the same reason a separate credit card surcharge enhances the “pain of paying,” adding a discount — typically perceived as a small, separate gain — will have an outsized positive impact on customers’ reactions.

Businesses could offer customers discounts for paying with cash or debit, instead of adding a surcharge for credit cards. (Shutterstock)

Although prices could be adjusted so this process ends up being objectively identical to an added credit card surcharge, a cash discount is also much less likely than a surcharge to be considered unfair by credit card users.

A second option is for businesses to reduce their prices before adding the surcharge, making sure customers are aware of the reduction. As long as customers perceive that a business has made efforts to lower prices first, a credit card surcharge is more likely to be seen as a charge imposed on the business, rather than an attempt by the business to boost profits.

Fees improve decision-making

If implemented appropriately, surcharges also have the potential to improve consumer decision-making by allowing consumers to make better decisions about their credit card use.

Credit cards provide benefits for consumers at a cost. In exchange for convenience, credit, rewards, and other perks, customers pay annual fees, interest, and — embedded in prices — interchange fees.

Currently, interchange fees, which are substantial, are hidden from consumers, meaning consumers cannot fully account for the costs of their decision. Not only that, cash and debit card-paying customers cannot avoid interchange fees when businesses are forced to include them in prices despite receiving none of the benefits.

Credit card surcharges, then, would allow consumers to avoid the cost if they don’t perceive the benefits to be sufficient. In other words, surcharges or cash discounts could actually help consumers make better decisions by allowing them to appropriately account for the costs of credit card use.

Author

Laurence Ashworth
Professor, Marketing, Queen's University, Ontario

Smart buildings: What happens to our free will when tech makes choices for us?

A so-called smart building. What will become of our free will when choices are made for us by technology embedded in the building? (Shutterstock)


THE CONVERSATION
Published: December 20, 2022 

Smart buildings, which are central to the concept of smart cities, are a new generation of buildings in which technological devices, such as sensors, are embedded in the structure of the buildings themselves. Smart buildings promise to personalize the experiences of their occupants by using real-time feedback mechanisms and forward-looking management of interactions between humans and the built environment.

This personalization includes continuous monitoring of the activities of occupants and the use of sophisticated profiling models. While these issues spark concerns about privacy, this is a matter of not seeing the forest for the trees. The questions raised by the massive arrival of digital technologies in our living spaces go far beyond this.

As a professor of real estate at ESG-UQAM, I specialize in innovations applied to the real estate sector. My research focuses on smart commercial buildings, for which I am developing a conceptual framework and innovative tools to enable in-depth analysis in the context of smart cities.

Read more: Get ready for the invasion of smart building technologies following COVID-19

“Choices” proposed, or imposed

Thanks to ubiquitous computing, interactions between building occupants and nested technology are quiet and invisible. As a result, the occupants’ attention is never drawn to the massive presence of computers operating permanently in the background.

Personalization allows us, for example, to have the ideal temperature and brightness in our workspace at all times. This would be idyllic if this personalization did not come at a cost to the occupants, namely their freedom of action and, more fundamentally, their free will.

As technology increasingly mediates our experiences in the built environment, choices will be offered to us, or even imposed on us, based on the profile the building’s technology device models have created of us in function of the goals, mercantile or otherwise, of those who control them (such as technology companies).

Having the ability to decide either to do something or not, and to act accordingly, is a basic definition of freedom. Smart buildings challenge this freedom by interfering with our ability to act, and more fundamentally, with our ability to decide for ourselves. Is freedom of action even possible for the occupants of a building where interactions between humans and their built environment are produced using algorithms that are never neutral?
Satisfied… but not free

The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke’s famous analogy of the locked room sheds light on this question. Suppose a sleeping man is transported to a room where, upon awakening, he is engaged in activities that bring him great satisfaction, such as chatting with a long-lost friend.

Unbeknown to him, the door of the room is locked. Thus, he cannot leave the room if he wants to. He is therefore not free, even though he voluntarily remains in the room and gets extreme satisfaction from what he is doing there.

Locke’s analysis reflects the situation of smart building occupants. They benefit from the personalization of their experiences from which they derive great satisfaction. However, once they enter a space, technology controls their interactions outside of their awareness. While they may want to stay in the building to enjoy personalized experiences, they are not free. Smart buildings are a high-tech version of Locke’s locked room.

There’s nothing new about the problem. Already in the 19th century, in Notes from the Underground the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky identifies the challenges that computational logic poses to free will.

You will scream at me … that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic…?
Deciding on the role of technology in our living spaces

Indeed, what can be said about our free will when choices are made for us by technology?

An action is something we do actively, as opposed to things that happen to us in a passive way. Also, the active will to perform an action differs from the passive desire for an act to be done.

While algorithms are concerned with the predictability of human behaviour, things happen passively to the occupants of smart buildings. Their role is limited to receiving stimuli whilst the invisibility of the technology maintains their illusion that they have sole control over their actions.

These human-built environment interactions erode our will to take action, replacing it with desires shaped and calibrated by models over which we have no control. By denying the free will of their occupants, smart buildings challenge the right to action that the German philosopher Hannah Arendt defines as one of the most fundamental rights of humans, the one that differentiates us from animals.

So, should we prohibit, or at least regulate, the technology embedded in smart buildings?

The answer to this question takes us back to the very origins of Western democracy. Long before the Big Tech companies (GAFAM), the Greek Socrates (who died in 399 BC) was concerned with the nature of an ideal city. In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates explains that the difference between a city where citizens have all the luxuries and a city without luxuries, which he calls “a city fit for pigs,” is the ability of the residents of the former to choose their way of life, unlike the residents of the latter where this choice is simply not possible.

Smart cities are the digital version of the luxury cities of antiquity. However, without granting their residents the ability to make informed choices about technology, they provide satisfaction at the expense of their rights.

To avoid building an entire environment according to the philosophy of pigs, smart building occupants should retain the legally defined right to decide for themselves the role of technology in their living spaces. Only then can their freedom be respected.

Author 

Patrick Lecomte
Professor, Real Estate, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

Gridiron is a science fiction novel written by British author Philip Kerr. It is a story about a highly technical building (nicknamed The Gridiron), which becomes self-aware and tries to kill everyone inside, confusing real life with a video game.

Let’s call the Nova Scotia mass shooting what it is: White male terrorism

THE CONVERSATION

Published: April 24, 2020

While the mainstream media has been quick to situate the deadly recent events that unfolded in Nova Scotia within the context of Canadian mass murders, no one seems to be drawing attention to the most prominent link connecting Canadian mass killings: all of the accused perpetrators have been men, and most of them have been white.

White men were responsible for or currently face charges for the mass murders at the École Polytechnique in 1989, Mayerthorpe in 2005, Moncton in 2014, Calgary in 2014, Québec City in 2017, Toronto in 2018 (a van attack) and Fredericton in 2019. Those in Vernon, B.C., in 1996, Edmonton in 2014, and Toronto in 2018 (the shooting in the city’s Greektown neighbourhood) were perpetrated by racialized men.

Given this explicitly gendered pattern of perpetration, why don’t we talk about these mass murders as male terrorism?

When speaking about the mass murder during his regular COVID-19 update on April 19, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau referred to the violence in Nova Scotia as “senseless” and proclaimed that “violence of any kind has no place in Canada.”

A woman pays her respects at a roadblock in Portapique, N.S. on April 22. RCMP say at least 22 people are dead after a man went on a murder rampage in several Nova Scotia communities. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

As a survivor of multiple forms of violence with more than 20 years of researching and responding to gender-based violence in my academic and professional career, I beg to differ. Male-perpetrated violence underpins Canadian society and is by no means “senseless” — instead, it serves to reinforce patriarchy and male social domination. The mass shooting in Nova Scotia reportedly began with domestic abuse incident against a woman.

As long as we are unwilling to name, acknowledge and address male violence, the lives and well-being of people in Canada, especially women and children, are at risk.
The normalization of male violence

Regardless of specific motive, the fact that Canadian mass murders have been exclusively committed by men makes this violence explicitly gendered. This is male violence and, as such, must be linked to other forms of male violence and understood as gender-based violence.

While the term gender-based violence primarily implies violence on the basis of gender identity, gender presentation or perceived gender, it also encompasses patriarchy and violence perpetrated by men. In other words, regardless of specific motive, we need to consider these mass murders in relation to patriarchy and male social domination in Canada.

People hold photos of the victims of the mosque shooting in Québec City that left six people dead during a vigil in January 2020 marking the third anniversary of the carnage.

 THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

Patriarchy establishes what we refer to as “hegemonic masculinity” — the dominant social definition of what it means to be male, and violence is an essential part of this. In fact, violence plays a fundamental role in securing male social dominance: because patriarchal domination is predicated on unfounded claims to male supremacy, violence serves to reinforce this illegitimate claim to social supremacy by force

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Toys guns are popular toys for boys. (Markus Spiske/Unsplash)

To be a dominant socially acceptable man, then, involves the use of violence and aggression and, from birth, males are socialized into this violent hegemonic masculinity. For example, in addition to action figures of superheroes who regularly use violence to “save” the world, my six-year-old son received two toy guns for Christmas last year.

Patriarchy normalizes this violence by ignoring, exonerating and enshrining the right of men to commit violence. Think of all the times you’ve heard someone dismiss male violence with the phrase “boys will be boys.” This phrase is a tacit acceptance of male violence and the right of men to be violent.

The phrasing is frequently echoed in court cases of young men who have committed sexual assault or murder or both. The perpetrators are portrayed as good boys who simply took things too far. Courts, for their part, are notoriously lenient on male perpetrators of violence, reinforcing the right of men to do violence.

Mass murder is white male terrorism

In addition to being an explicitly gendered crime, mass murder in Canada is also explicitly racialized. The perpetrators are overwhelming white males and we must consider how race, and particularly whiteness and white privilege, operate here.

While hegemonic masculinity and the right to use violence is open to all males, race and racism shape that tendency. To establish white male social supremacy, racist discourses portray all racialized males as inherently violent and a perceived threat, justifying white male violence.

This principle is exemplified in policing and the greater likelihood of BIPOC males to be killed by police. While violence is used to pathologize racialized males and justify social domination and violence perpetrated against them, the violence of white males is justified, excused and erased.

So why are white men more likely to commit mass murder? American masculinities scholar Michael Kimmel suggests that social justice efforts aimed at dismantling the social hierarchies that white men sit atop are creating “angry white men” with “aggrieved entitlement.”

He says: “If you feel entitled and you have not got what you expected, that is a recipe for humiliation.”

Three women hug each other after laying flowers in front of École Polytechnique at Université de Montréal three days after a mass shooting that left 14 women dead. Until the recent Nova Scotia mass shooting, it had been the worst in Canadian history. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Shaney Komulainen

As hegemonic masculinity makes crystal clear, if your existence is being threatened you have the right — indeed, in the minds of some mass killers, the responsibility — to use violence and set things right.

Addressing mass murder means taking a hard look at white masculinity and the normalization of violence. It requires that we refuse to dismiss mass murderers as mentally defective or a few “bad apples.” Instead, we must understand that the entire system of white masculinity is rotten. Because until we do, aggrieved white men will continue to commit mass murder and we will all continue to pay the price.

Author

Robyn Bourgeois
Assistant Professor, Centre for Women's and Gender Studies, Brock University

I research mass shootings, but I never believed one would happen in my own condo in Vaughan, Ont.

Police cones and tape are seen outside of a condominium building the day after a shooting in Vaughan, Ont. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Arlyn McAdorey

THE CONVERSATION
Published: December 21, 2022 

On the evening of Dec. 18, five people were killed in a mass shooting at a large condominium in the community of Vaughan, Ont., located just north of Toronto. A 73-year-old resident of the building — a man who had a long-standing dispute with the resident-based condominium governing board — opened fire on condo board members and others.

As an associate professor of disaster and emergency management, I have analyzed other Canadian mass shootings like the 2018 incident on crowded Danforth Ave. in Toronto and the 2020 shooting spree in Nova Scotia that left 22 people dead.

But this mass shooting was different for me. That’s because I live in the building.
York Regional Police respond to a mass shooting in Vaughan, Ont. on Dec. 18.

 (J. Rozdilsky), Author provided

I now face the cognitive dissonance of what it means to have both professional and personal survival perspectives of first-hand exposure to a mass shooting.

An otherwise normal Sunday evening

The night of Dec. 18 started off as an otherwise normal Sunday evening. But then I heard a fire alarm and, like many other residents of Bellaria Tower, exited the building. At the time, I had no knowledge of being in the vicinity of an active shooter.

I took the stairs down to the lobby, made my way to the garage and still thinking this was likely a false fire alarm, which usually meant waiting outside for a while, I left the complex to run some errands.

When I returned about two hours later, the level of police response on the scene — along with a large media presence — made it clear this was not a typical fire evacuation. I arrived as heavily armed tactical officers were making sure it was safe to return into the building.

We later learned the rampage ended in the hallways of the building when the shooter was killed by a police officer.

Re-entering a crime scene

In the aftermath, residents gathered outside on the other side of yellow police line tape. It was five hours before I was able to return to my home. When we were allowed to re-enter the building, well after midnight, police officers escorted the returning residents around the perimeter of crime scenes in the main lobby.

That night, I saw things that I cannot unsee. There were pools of blood on the pavement outside the lobby and more blood on the floor inside.

Six people died in a mass shooting incident in Vaughan, Ont., including the alleged shooter.

While I was not physically injured in the incident, I fall into the category of one who was present during the shooting. According to research conducted on the community-level adverse mental health impacts of mass shootings, primary exposure refers to the impacts faced by those who were injured or present and in danger of being shot.

I’m distressed that my neighbours and I are now facing the mental health consequences of a mass shooting, simply because we happened to live in a particular condominium building where this horrendous incident took place.

In the days after being exposed to a mass shooting, it is difficult to pin down my thoughts while living in the environment of a mass shooting crime scene.
Run, hide or defend

During a mass shooting, individual actions one can take in response are run, hide or defend. At the time, I reacted to a fire alarm, meaning I ran out the building. Had I known there was an active shooting in progress, my behaviour may have changed. At the very least, I would have considered what my most viable survival option may have been.

A main experiential takeaway is that during a mass shooting, appearances of the incident unfolding around me were deceiving. I did not realize that I was in an active shooter situation until I was out of it.

Conducting research immediately after a disaster presents ethical challenges that the researcher must navigate. A researcher’s goal is to learn from disaster experiences so that lessons learned in the aftermath can be used to increase public safety in the future.

A major issue in conducting quick-response research is access. Access allows for purposeful sampling, where a goal of the field researcher is to get proximity to a disaster site and interact with the site itself and people with specific knowledge regarding the event.

The Vaughan condominium mass shooting will rank as one of Canada’s worst mass killings. From a professional perspective, I have direct access to a horrendous disaster site.

That degree of access is something that is, in theory, beneficial for a disaster researcher. But it’s also the type of access that I personally never wanted to have.
After a mass shooting in Vaughan, Ont., people leave flowers at a makeshift memorial. (J. Rozdilsky), Author provided

Author

Jack L. Rozdilsky
Associate Professor of Disaster and Emergency Management, York University, Canada
Disclosure statement
Jack L. Rozdilsky is a Professor at York University who receives external funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research as a co-investigator on a project supported under operating grant Canadian 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Rapid Research Funding.

Most Canadians welcome immigrants, but anti-immigration sentiments persist

While most Canadians do not reveal strong anti-immigrant sentiments, they are less immigrant-friendly than we might expect. (Shutterstock)

THE CONVERSATION
Published: December 20, 2022 

Hostility towards immigrants has become a powerful component of right-wing populism in several western countries. But for the time being, Canada has not succumbed to this wave.

In Canada, attitudes towards immigration have never been a particularly divisive or salient election issue. Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada is the only federal party whose platform includes radical reform of Canada’s immigration system. Nonetheless, the party has twice failed to gain any seats in parliament.

Reinforcing the idea that multiculturalism lies at the centre of Canadian identity, a recent Focus Canada report finds that the public “has never been more supportive” of immigrants.

Our ongoing research into anti-immigration attitudes is primarily motivated by recent xenophobic attacks which expose a resurgence in anti-immigrant feelings. For instance, the 2021 London, Ont. hit-and-run, described by the prime minister as a “terrorist attack,” which killed four members of a Muslim family, shocked many Canadians. A man facing terror-related murder charges is scheduled to stand trial in September 2023.

In 2020, Canadian police reported 2,669 criminal acts motivated by hatred —the largest number recorded since 2009

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The Canadian government recently announced plans to welcome 500,000 new permanent residents a year by 2025. Research shows that despite rising hate crimes most Canadians are supportive of immigration. (Shutterstock)

Anti-immigrant sentiments exist, but no province stands out

We conducted a survey in September 2022 with Canadian polling firm Abacus Data on a sample of 1,000 respondents across Canada. We asked four questions:

1) Whether immigration hurts the economy.

2) Whether the number of immigrants should be reduced.

3) Whether immigrants increase crime.

4) Whether cultural diversity limits opportunities for Canadians. By “opportunities,” we mean in areas such as jobs, education and housing.

Previous studies revealed that some provinces were less welcoming to immigrants than others. In 2019, pollsters EKOS politics found that 40 per cent of Canadians were apprehensive about “visible minority” immigrants.

EKOS reported that 56 per cent of Albertans, 46 per cent of Ontarians and 31 per cent of British Columbians echoed this sentiment. Only residents of Atlantic Canada were more immigrant friendly. Similarly, a 2021 report by Maru Public Opinion found that only half of Canadians believed that Alberta was a welcoming place for immigrants.

However, we found no significant differences across Canadian provinces in anti-immigrant sentiments. Furthermore, our research suggests that the majority of respondents do not hold strong anti-immigrant views.

Four questions to measure anti-immigration beliefs. Left-side percentages show tolerance; middle percentages show neutral feelings; right-side percentages show strong anti-immigration feelings. (Author provided)

When asked whether “immigration hurts the economy,” 53 per cent disagreed. While Canadians do not reveal strong anti-immigrant sentiments, they are less immigrant-friendly than we expected. We found that 24 per cent of the respondents do not have an opinion on immigration, while 23 per cent agree that immigration hurts the economy.

Moreover, 34 per cent of Canadians agreed that “immigration should be reduced.” Twenty-four per cent agree that “immigrants increase crime” and 20 per cent agree that “cultural diversity limits their opportunities.”

Attitudes within the immigrant population

Our study shows that recent immigrants to Canada are more tolerant to immigration than those who immigrated in the distant past, but the differences are rather small. Other researchers have arrived at a similar conclusion when examining immigrants’ attitudes toward immigration.

Those who have acquired citizenship in their host countries tend to be more skeptical about immigration than newer non-citizen immigrants. There could be several hypotheses that explain this trend, however, more research is needed to shed light on why that might be.

Anti-immigrant attitudes stronger among convoy supporters

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described the truckers’ protest in Ottawa in early 2022 as imbued with “symbols of hatred and division” and accused protesters of “abuse and racism.” In contrast, the convoy was endorsed by prominent American right-wing figures including Donald Trump and Fox News commentators

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Supporters of the ‘freedom convoy’ tend to hold stronger anti-immigrant views. (Author provided)

We found that stronger support for the convoy movement is associated with stronger anti-immigrant feelings. This finding lends some credence to Trudeau’s sentiment that racism and xenophobia were present among the convoy protesters.

We found that moderate anti-immigrant sentiments exist in Canada, but without noticeable differences between provinces. The trucker Convoy protest supporters showcased stronger anti-immigrant attitudes than those who opposed these protests. 

This might challenge Canada’s all-encompassing tradition of diversity and tolerance.

Authors

Constantin Colonescu
Associate Professor of Economics, MacEwan University

Andrea Wagner
Assistant Professor, Political Science, MacEwan University

Disclosure statement

Constantin Colonescu receives funding from MacEwan University (Internal funding).

Dr. Andrea Wagner received funding from MacEwan University's Scholarly Activity Support Fund
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