Dear Progressive Detective: I heard police arrested a man at the Pearson International Airport in Toronto after receiving a tip from Canada’s Suspicious Incident Reporting System, which alleged the man intended to join a Somali terrorist group. I’m concerned: what is SIRS, and how might the Government’s security efforts affect my civil liberties and right to privacy?

Mohamed Hersi was arrested in March as he was preparing to board a plane for Cairo to study Arabic. The 25-year-old security guard’s employer had submitted a Suspicious Incident Report based on web browsing it deemed “suspicious.” Charged with attempting to participate in a terrorist activity and counseling another person to do the same, Hersi’s case is still before the courts. Though out on bail, he’s hardly free—Hersi can’t apply for a passport or access the internet. He must be accompanied by a surety at all times.

The RCMP describes SIRS as an online service allowing operators of certain companies in sectors such as transit, finance, and energy to file reports on any suspicious activity they witness. The Mounties, CSIS, and other relevant agencies are notified upon a report’s submission. RCMP spokesperson Greg Cox says SIRS allows the RCMP to “develop crucial partnerships, support investigations, and maintain continuous dialogue with internal and external partners on shared national security concerns.”

But according to civil liberty and privacy experts, information sharing may be cause for worry. The government is collecting information about people who have yet to—or may never—commit a crime. Micheal Vonn, of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, calls this connecting the dots before knowing if those dots will be useful. To her, such “info grabs” are counterintuitive. “If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” she says, “these systems provide more hay, not the needle.”

Vonn fears the fate of Maher Arar, deported and tortured because of “suspicions” he associated with alleged terrorists, will be repeated. “Information sharing has ramifications for privacy,” she adds, “and the sense that we aren’t being assessed as people, but by our data shadow.”

To its credit, the RCMP is fairly transparent; SIRS is monitored by the Privacy Commissioner. But any sighs of relief may—for now—be premature. As Sukanya Pillay, of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, stresses, civil liberties and privacy must be respected. “Concerns arise when these liberties are chipped away,” she says. “That’s when a country starts to change.”

Illustration by Dave Donald.

Dear Progressive Detective: I’m an HIV-positive Canadian, and I’ve heard troubling stories about people being criminally charged for transmitting the disease. Can that happen here? What are my rights and responsibilities under Canadian law?

Under Canadian law, criminal charges can be laid if an individual does not disclose his or her HIV-positive status prior to engaging in certain activities, including sharing needles. While there are no specific laws regarding HIV transmission, charges of criminal negligence causing bodily harm, aggravated assault, and even murder have been laid. This isn’t happening only in Canada, but many say the number of HIV-related criminal cases here is rising, and has been since 2000.

Of more than 60 cases in the past decade, however, Johnson Aziga’s first-degree murder trial has easily garnered the most attention. Six years after the Ontario man’s 2003 arrest, the jury’s guilty verdict made history as the first murder conviction in a criminal case involving HIV transmission. Aziga had infected seven women with HIV; two died of AIDS-related lymphoma during the trial. Additionally, Aziga was guilty of 10 counts of aggravated assault, prompting Crown prosecutors to proceed with a dangerous-offender application. Defence lawyers are currently appealing the application, and Aziga won’t be sentenced until it’s resolved sometime this spring.

In the meantime, groups such as UNAIDS and the Ontario Working Group on Criminal Law and HIV Exposure are worried. Both are currently assessing whether criminalization, in the long run, will achieve criminal justice and prevent the transmission of HIV—or if it will undermine human rights and public health. If Canada starts using criminal law as a blanket solution to HIVrelated sex offences, it may be a slippery, and troubling, slope, say the groups. For instance, HIV-positive women have a 30 percent chance of transmitting the virus to their child during pregnancy, delivery or breastfeeding. Should they face criminal charges?What about women and girls who do not disclose their status in fear of violence or abandonment?

Because of all these factors, UNAIDS proposes that criminal law only be applied to cases of intentional transmission. They also suggest that, as an alternative to criminal law, governments further expand programs promoting education, counselling, support, and other proven forms of HIV prevention.

The diaper issue is a messy one, especially since your baby will demand 5,000 to 7,000 changes before his second birthday. Currently, 85 percent of Canadian parents use disposable diapers, making them the third-largest landfill item (after newspapers and food containers), accounting for 250,000 tonnes (1.7 billion diapers) per year of solid waste that will take centuries to decompose. One study showed that one year’s worth of disposables requires about 88 kilograms of chlorine-bleached paper fibre. By comparison, six kilograms of cotton will yield enough cloth diapers to cover your baby until she is potty-trained.

However, cotton is the most pesticide-intensive crop on Earth and requires 175 litres of water to produce one kilogram, meaning that while cloth diapers have the greener edge, they aren’t sporting the shiniest halo. Home laundering requires an additional one or two loads of hot-water-only laundry a week, so expect your energy use to increase, along with your detergent bill. If you go with cloth diapers, choose a green detergent that is phosphate-free, unscented, and biodegradable.

Then there are the new additions to the diaper market, like gDiapers, a disposable-cloth hybrid made of flushable inserts for cloth pants. They tote the “biodegradable” label, but like anything else will only break down if exposed to air, something that doesn’t always happen in landfills. According to Samantha Leeson, co-founder of BabyReady.ca, the green disposables are often less absorbent than cloth nappies, which means more changes and more products weaseling into our sanitation system.

So the best choice really depends on your neighbourhood. Landfills overflowing? Use cloth diapers. If water quality is an issue, choose disposables. Personally, the Progressive Detective suggests cloth diapers, to minimize chemical exposure. However, you may want to pick up a few planet-friendly disposables for long car trips, or you might run into a messy situation.

Leonardo DiCaprio enjoyng an e-cigarette in March 2009. The electronic cigarettes are touted as a quitting aid.

E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that detect the user’s pull and vaporize a nicotine solution that recreates the smoking experience without carcinogens, odour, ashes, stubs, or even litter. Without the 4,000 chemicals added to a traditional burning cigarette, pure nicotine is a relatively harmless drug that’s often compared to caffeine.

Developed several years ago in China, the product didn’t sell much in Asia (a real pack of Chinese smokes costs a mere 40 cents) and was largely ignored in North America. But that all changed in March, when the luscious pout of Leonardo DiCaprio was photographed taking a drag off an e-cigarette. This was great news for Bill Marangos, president of SmokeStik International and maker of the actor’s e-smoke of choice. Before that moment, he says, “98 percent of people didn’t know about this product.”

But with this publicity, however, came some unwanted attention. Pressured by special interest groups, Health Canada—previously wary to even classify the product— cracked the whip in March with an advisory. Since they contain nicotine, SmokeStiks and all other e-cigarettes now require approval under the Food and Drugs Act, and so these products are currently off the market while they undergo Health Canada’s nearly year-long new drug review.

Without their fix, e-smokers are again jonesing for a working quit-aid. Marangos—a former three-pack-a-day smoker—claims SmokeStik’s success rate to be 10 times the measly 5 percent norm, though without any peer review studies available, it’s possible Marangos is just blowing smoke.

So e-cigarettes’ effectiveness as a quitting tool is currently debatable, says Jeff Daiter, chief medical director at Ontario Addiction Treatment Centres. But, he explains, “maybe it’s better than the patch or gum because you get the sensation.” He’s excited to incorporate a nicotine-free version of the device into his addiction research. “The deck is stacked against smokers,” he adds. “Anything we can do would be great.”

In the meantime, e-smokers will have to quit—or keep smoking—the old-fashioned way.

It’s true in some circles that taking an active interest in one’s finances is considered anathema to being truly left-leaning, that it’s a distasteful, bourgeois hobby. And if you’re making millions off investments in tobacco companies and weapons manufacturers, it probably is. But that isn’t always the case. The flipside of that argument is that taking control of one’s finances is the ultimate expression of self-determination.

Learning about personal finance should be of most interest to those who don’t have much of it—and in that category we can safely include the many people who work for low-paying NGOs, non-profits and charities. After all, do you think Belinda Stronach reads personal finance magazines? Hardly—she can pay someone to manage her money for her, whereas the rest of us need to learn to do it ourselves.

It’s easy to understand why many lefties find personal finance literature so odious, as much of it is written with the same underlying conservative philosophy—that you need to master your finances in order to pay the least amount of tax possible. Most lefties naturally, and rightfully, disagree with such a position. As supporters of a social welfare state, we realize that if we didn’t pay taxes there would be no such thing as universal health care.

My take is a little different: I think you should bone up on personal finance in order to pay the least amount of money possible to the multinational corporations that control your life. According to the latest information from Statistics Canada, the average Canadian family carries a rather astounding $12,300 in credit card and “other” debts, to say nothing of what we owe on mortgages ($82,800), student loans ($10,400), lines of credit ($13,500) and car loans ($11,200). That means big bucks in interest payments for banks and credit card companies. But why are so many of us giving them more money than we have to?

What’s your interest in keeping the big banks profitable, the same ones that shutter small-town branches they deem not profitable enough and charge increasingly higher service fees for fewer services? Or what about credit card companies that charge interest rates that are more than 15 percent higher than the Bank of Canada’s prime lending rate and insist on giving consumers more credit to spend than they can ever hope to pay off? Surely if the money you shell out in unnecessary interest payments stayed in your hands, you could find better ways to spend it than bolstering the bottom line of these multinational money-making machines.

The same thinking applies to investing. Yes, most of the literature you’ll find is couched in terms of making RRSP contributions as a way to reduce your so-called tax burden. But try to look past that. Because if you don’t learn how to invest properly, and simply pour money into an ethical fund, you may end up more philosophically compromised than if you’d just bought a regular mutual fund. The fund manager’s idea of what is ethical may be quite different from yours. If you don’t learn what to look for, you won’t know what your money supports.