Preaching Peace, Selling Arms: The Evolution of Canadian Military Export Policy, 1946-49

Recent sales of Canadian military equipment to Saudi Arabia have highlighted a contradiction between Canadian military export policy on paper and in practice. This contradiction is rooted in a series of policy decision made between 1946 and 1949, just after the Second World War. During this period Canadian policymakers accepted that military exports were economically and strategically necessary, and become an opportunistic exporter of military equipment to the non-communist world. The military export policies adopted during these years were flexible, pragmatic, and reactive; they incentivised risk-aversion and commercial competitiveness, but not internally consistency. Consequently, the defining principle of Canadian military export policy became flexibility—of preserving the discretion of Canadian officials to evaluate exports on a case-by-case basis not the universal enforcement of export restrictions based on specific criteria. This commitment to flexibility has created contradictions which can be construed as hypocrisy, especially regarding the government’s historical commitment to human rights considerations

Review of Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace: The Rise, Demise and Revival of Arms Control by Michael Krepon

Review of Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace: The Rise, Demise and Revival of Arms Control by Michael Krepo

A Departmental Dilemma: The Genesis of Canadian Military Export Policy, 1945-1960

Recent sales of Canadian military equipment to Saudi Arabia have highlighted a contradiction between Canadian policy on paper and in practice. This dissertation seeks to explain these contradictions by exploring the evolution of Canadian conventional military export policy in the key years between 1946 and 1960. It loosely divides this 15-year span into three periods, which correspond to the genesis of Canadian military export policy (1946-1949), its expansion and formalization (1950-1955), and its first existential challenge (1956-1960). With a particular focus on the Department of External Affairs, this work explores the political considerations and bureaucratic debates which shaped government decision-making during these periods. After the Second World War, Canadian policymakers struggled to reconcile the commercial and strategic benefits of selling arms with the political risks in both the domestic and international environments. Through a series of reactive and somewhat contradictory precedents, they engineered a bureaucratic system of export controls to evaluate potential military exports, as well as a series of rudimentary restrictions to guide their implementation. By 1950, the Canadian government had accepted that military exports were economically and strategically necessary, and become an opportunistic exporter of military equipment to the non-communist world. This consensus would be challenged in 1956 due to geopolitical instability and domestic scandal but would prove too entrenched for significant modification. The military export policies adopted during these years were flexible, pragmatic, and reactive; they incentivized risk-aversion and commercial competitiveness, but not internal consistency. Policymakers emphasized a rotating series of idealistic restrictions in official reviews and public statements, yet the defining internal principle was discretionary flexibility. In other words, preserving the ability of Canadian officials to evaluate exports on a case-by-case basis, not consistently enforcing export restrictions based on specific criteria. Flexibility was important because of the key external objective: mirroring American military export policy specifically and other allied policies generally. This alignment maintained western solidarity and multilateral agreements regarding military exports, used collective action to diffuse the reputational risks of arms dealing, maintained privileged Canadian access to the American military industrial complex, and allowed Canadian military producers to compete equally in the global market. Policymakers often found themselves trapped between the idealistic multilateralism which ostensibly guided Canadian foreign policy, and the pragmatic considerations incentivizing Canadian arms sales. Obscuring this contradiction required the government to resort to a sort of categorical ambiguity in which key binaries such as military/civilian, offensive/defensive, enemy/ally, and peace/conflict were redefined as convenient. The resulting policy/praxis gap can be construed as hypocrisy and remains a foundational component of Canadian military export policy today

Gambling and the Millennial Generation: A Segmentation Study

This presentation will discuss the results of a segmentation study done in Minnesota on the gambllng habits of the Millennial Generation. While much of the work done on this generation (or others)focuses on central tendencies, this study was designed to explore the diversity in the gambling behavior, motivations, and attitudes of Minnesotans between the ages of 18 and 35. The authors will demonstrate the wide range of gambling behavior and beliefs within this generation, and discuss the importance of understanding these differences for the gambling industry, public policy, responsible gambling, and problem gambling awareness, treatment, and prevention

Disarming security : Project Ploughshares, the just war, and the new world order

This thesis argues that the advocacy practiced by Canadian disarmament NGO Project Ploughshares regarding military policy and the arms trade in the 1990s was an attempt to shift Canadian priorities from national security to common security / human security, and that shift required a drastic change in Canadian military production and export policy. It explains how arms control as a historical concept derives from the just war tradition, and how Ploughshares used that same just war tradition to argue that the contemporary arms trade is inherently unethical, violating both modern understandings of rights and security. It explains how Canadian policy regarding arms production and export is directly tied into Canadian military policy and industrial policy, and is the result of a long history of decisions attempting to open the massive American market to Canada’s defence industrial base. Finally, it explains how Ploughshares has advocated for policies of transparency and regulation as the most effective means of constraining the global proliferation of arms, and pursued these specific policy initiatives in both the national and international forum

Anthrax bio-surveillance of livestock in Arua District, Uganda, 2017-2018

Altres ajuts: acords transformatius de la UABThe authors would like to express their gratitude to the local Sub-County chiefs, district veterinary officers, community elders, and kraal leaders for being supportive during data collection. Author JG has received mobility support from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (action Erasmus+ KA107 Mobility Fellowship) and was supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya, Agency for Management of University and Research Grants co-financed with the European Social Found (grants for the recruitment of new research staff 2018 FI_B 00236). Authors RAO, ME, MA, MFN, MI, EI, MM, LP, BS, and SAA were funded by Livestock Disease Control project II.Anthrax, caused by Bacillus anthracis, is a widespread zoonotic disease with many human cases, especially in developing countries. Even with its global distribution, anthrax is a neglected disease with scarce information about its actual impact on the community level. Due to the ecological dynamics of anthrax transmission at the wildlife-livestock interface, the Sub-Saharan Africa region becomes a high-risk zone for maintaining and acquiring the disease. In this regard, some subregions of Uganda are endemic to anthrax with regular seasonal trends. However, there is scarce data about anthrax outbreaks in Uganda. Here, we confirmed the presence of B. anthracis in several livestock samples after a suspected anthrax outbreak among livestock and humans in Arua District. Additionally, we explored the potential risk factors of anthrax through a survey within the community kraals. We provide evidence that the most affected livestock species during the Arua outbreak were cattle (86%) compared to the rest of the livestock species present in the area. Moreover, the farmers' education level and the presence of people's anthrax cases were the most critical factors determining the disease's knowledge and awareness. Consequently, the lack of understanding of the ecology of anthrax may contribute to the spread of the infection between livestock and humans, and it is critical to reducing the presence and persistence of the B. anthracis spores in the environment. Finally, we discuss the increasingly recognized necessity to strengthen global capacity using a One Health approach to prevent, detect, control, and respond to public threats in Uganda

Review and assessment of latent and sensible heat flux accuracy over the global oceans

For over a decade, several research groups have been developing air-sea heat flux information over the global ocean, including latent (LHF) and sensible (SHF) heat fluxes over the global ocean. This paper aims to provide new insight into the quality and error characteristics of turbulent heat flux estimates at various spatial and temporal scales (from daily upwards). The study is performed within the European Space Agency (ESA) Ocean Heat Flux (OHF) project. One of the main objectives of the OHF project is to meet the recommendations and requirements expressed by various international programs such as the World Research Climate Program (WCRP) and Climate and Ocean Variability, Predictability, and Change (CLIVAR), recognizing the need for better characterization of existing flux errors with respect to the input bulk variables (e.g. surface wind, air and sea surface temperatures, air and surface specific humidities), and to the atmospheric and oceanic conditions (e.g. wind conditions and sea state). The analysis is based on the use of daily averaged LHF and SHF and the asso- ciated bulk variables derived from major satellite-based and atmospheric reanalysis products. Inter-comparisons of heat flux products indicate that all of them exhibit similar space and time patterns. However, they also reveal significant differences in magnitude in some specific regions such as the western ocean boundaries during the Northern Hemisphere winter season, and the high southern latitudes. The differences tend to be closely related to large differences in surface wind speed and/or specific air humidity (for LHF) and to air and sea temperature differences (for SHF). Further quality investigations are performed through comprehensive comparisons with daily-averaged LHF and SHF estimated from moorings. The resulting statistics are used to assess the error of each OHF product. Consideration of error correlation between products and observations (e.g., by their assimilation) is also given. This reveals generally high noise variance in all products and a weak signal in common with in situ observations, with some products only slightly better than others. The OHF LHF and SHF products, and their associated error characteristics, are used to compute daily OHF multiproduct-ensemble (OHF/MPE) estimates of LHF and SHF over the ice-free global ocean on a 0.25° × 0.25° grid. The accuracy of this heat multiproduct, determined from comparisons with mooring data, is greater than for any individual product. It is used as a reference for the anomaly characterization of each individual OHF product

Zombie journals: designing a technological infrastructure for a precarious graduate student journal

Open access article. Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License (CC-BY-NC) applies.Background: The Meeting of the Minds graduate student journal is edited primarily by students from our Masters programme. This means that our editorial board is subject to high annual turnover and that our technological infrastructure and workflow needed to be easy to train for, accommodate differing levels of technological skill and editorial interest, and provide archiving that did not require a continuing interest in the journal by future generations of students. Analysis: This article provides a detailed and comparative account of the "off-the-shelf" systems and software used in developing the journal with an explanation of the rationale behind our choices. Conclusion and implications: The choices we made can be adopted by other journals interested in a low-cost, "future-proof" approach to developing a publishing infrastructure.Ye

"Let's start a journal!": the multidisciplinary graduate student journal as educational opportunity

Sherpa Romeo green journal. Open access article. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) applies.The University of Lethbridge is a medium-sized, primarily undergraduate, comprehensive research university on the Canadian Prairies in Alberta. It has a small but growing graduate school, within which most students are studying at the masters level. For many years, the graduate student elected representative body, the Graduate Students Association (GSA), has sponsored an annual refereed conference, Meeting of the Minds. In 2015 the GSA decided to supplement this conference with an accompanying journal, also called Meeting of the Minds. This article discusses the lessons learned in establishing this journal and overseeing its first two years of operations (and first year of publication). The article concentrates on two sets of problems: 1) philosophical, economic, and sociological issues that arose at the conceptual level while establishing a multidisciplinary, institution-focused graduate journal; and 2) technical, bibliographic, organizational, and economic issues encountered in attempting to address these conceptual concerns and ensure the long-term viability of the research accepted and published. Although the journal was not able to solve all the problems that arose during the first two years of operation, several solutions on the organizational, technological, economic, and bibliographic levels were developed that might be used by others establishing similar scholar- or student-led journals.Ye