Canadian Legislators Accused of Using AI To Produce 20,000 Amendments (www.cbc.ca) 62
sinij shares a report: Members of Parliament in Canada are expected to vote for up to 15 hours in a row Thursday and Friday on more than 200 Conservative amendments to the government's sustainable jobs bill. The amendments are what's left of nearly 20,000 changes the Conservatives proposed to Bill C-50 last fall at a House of Commons committee. Liberals now contend the Conservatives came up with the amendments using artificial intelligence in order to gum up the government's agenda. The Conservatives deny that accusation.
Have you ever actually read ... (Score:3, Insightful)
... anything written by a government drone? AI might be a step up.
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You mean that "copy and paste" book called "A Civil Action" is a bad example for people?
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You mean that "copy and paste" book called "A Civil Action" is a bad example for people?
I mean that having AI generate any text for you and submitting that text for any purpose without reading it over armed with a clear understanding of what might be right and wrong about the contents of that text makes you dumber than a fencepost. Furthermore, I've witnessed enough public government and private corporate bureaucracies to know that there is no perceivable difference between them when it comes to incompetence and stupidity so I don't share your unshakable blind faith in the unquestionable and s
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yawn, it's not the 90's anymore, limbaugh is dead, can we lay to rest the tiresome and lazy "hurr dur government complicated. bill hard for me read words"
The Conservatives are acting like (Score:2, Interesting)
The government isn't exactly helping, either. The minister is just brushing off the Co
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And 99% of people from both parties will be re-elected by an electorate who 99% of whom have no idea who they're really voting for.
Parties should be banned in every country. They're horrible for the proper running of government for the benefit of the citizens.
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And 99% of people from both parties will be re-elected
Nah, probably not. I think the Liberals will lose hugely in the next election in Canada. And unfortunately, the Conservatives are likely to win big, despite their childish antics and silly slogans in place of policy.
Canada is not (yet) like the United States where party affiliation is seen as a core part of one's identity. We still have a somewhat higher percentage of the population willing to change who they vote for based on policy rather than id
Re: The Conservatives are acting like (Score:3)
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Maybe so, but I find it less of a nuclear attack than labeling someone as Democrat or Republican is in the US.
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Most people I know will use the term liberal or Democrat interchangeably, same as conservative and Republican.
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That's fair but I'd still say the average typical American would associate Democrat as Liberal and Republican as Conservative. Clearly it doesn't fit a global Overton Window, because if that were the case then both parties are right-wing and generally conservative.
Saying classic liberal to most people will get you a blank stare unless they are actually into both history and politics and maybe a ribbing (teasing) for being a nerd.
Re: The Conservatives are acting like (Score:4, Funny)
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But unfortunately, we are following in the footsteps of the US.
It's not too late for you. Someone grab the yoke and pull up - you don't need to descend into the depths of governmental dysfunction that we have through rank partisanship.
Please keep your government functional - those of us below the 49th parallel may need a "safety" democracy to look to.
Re: The Conservatives are acting like (Score:2)
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That is funny af. Thank you!
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those of us below the 49th parallel may need a "safety" democracy to look to.
If the USA opts to elect its first openly authoritarian government this November, Canada will be one of its first targets and a good deal less safe as a democracy. No "Medicine Line" is going to protect us against US sanctions, or worse.
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Canada is not (yet) like the United States where party affiliation is seen as a core part of one's identity. We still have a somewhat higher percentage of the population willing to change who they vote for based on policy rather than identity.
I agree with your first sentence. I also agree with the second, with one observation to provide a little context for what's happening here. We Canadians are being driven / led into identity politics by both the Conservatives and the Liberals. More the former than the latter - I consider Poilievre to be almost the definition of identity-based politics. But the Liberals seem to be trying to play catch-up. The NDP still seem to be OK, but I don't expect to see an NDP PM within my lifetime. And sadly, the Green
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I agree with everything you wrote. Except for who I'm going to vote for... if my current (Liberal) MP runs again, I will vote for her because I like her a lot and she helped me out in the past with some dealings with the government. This overrides my dislike of Trudeau.
If she doesn't run again, then I dunno... I don't like any of the choices. I'll probably vote Liberal anyway because in my riding, the NDP has no chance whatsoever.
Re: The Conservatives are acting like (Score:2)
Re: The Conservatives are acting like (Score:4, Informative)
John Adams said this about democracy: “Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”
Re:The Conservatives are acting like (Score:4, Interesting)
Parties should be banned in every country. They're horrible for the proper running of government for the benefit of the citizens.
I've had a similar thought in the past, primarily as a result of witnessing the very partisan bickering we're discussing right now... but the problem wouldn't be solved by banning parties.
Suppose we elected 338 independents to Parliament, each one of them selected through a good election based not on partisanship but on reasonable platforms in an effort to actually represent the wishes of the constituents. So far so good. However, the next bit is the problem. Even if everyone gets to Parliament with the intention of working together, people are going to have different priorities. Some compromise is fine, but some priorities are going to be diametrically opposed. The natural course of things is that the MPs will gravitate towards the other MPs who share similar values, or at least are close enough that a compromise can be reached for mutual gain.
Now, instead of having clearly delineated parties, we've just pushed the problem underground. The "parties" will form and exist off the radar, unofficially recognized and unannounced to the public. You might as well call them "shadow parties". Even if you ban running in an election as a "slate" officially, unofficially people in the know will know who's with whom, but it'll be HARDER, not easier, for the electorate to know what they're voting for.
I would call the above speculation an "educated guess" based on my own personal experience in Canadian politics, so you're free to simply dismiss it as incorrect. Though I do encourage your own thought experiments as to how such a party-less Parliament would actually behave.
Re:The Conservatives are acting like (Score:4, Interesting)
What you would have is exactly what the Confederacy had. With no political parties (although they were starting to form by the time the war ended) the Administration would have to put together a coalition to work on getting each bill passed, expending political capital as needed to bring the members together. Then, once the bill was passed or defeated, the coalition would fall apart, meaning that the whole process of getting together enough votes to get a bill passed would have to be taken again and again and again. A lack of stable groups of members who shared common goals (and that's what parties are, when you come down to it) proved to be a great stumbling block for them because it slowed things down considerably when time was of the essence.
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USAian here. IMHO, the bigger problem in US politics (I don't know about Canadian) is that the first-past-the-post electoral system by its nature polarizes the country. The system encourages it by penalizing anyone who votes for a moderate. Say that A and Z are the extreme candidates, and a moderate called J enters the race. J is closer to A in ideology, so will pull more voters away from A than away from Z. This splits the A vote and practically guarantees a win for Z, even if there's a sizeable majority
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AC demonstrating clear inability to understand basic concepts. Fell immediately to tossing ad hominem around instead of making a point. Good job!
A political is a legal entity that has tremendous power to influence government and society as whole through control of the voting apparatus as well as controlling funds to people who agree to vote with the party, often against the wishes and benefit of their alleged constituents. Parties are antithetical to the very concept of a well functioning constitutional
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And 99% of people from both parties will be re-elected by an electorate who 99% of whom have no idea who they're really voting for.
Parties should be banned in every country. They're horrible for the proper running of government for the benefit of the citizens.
Wrong country. Wrong system. Wrong conclusion.
There are safe ridings in Canadian politics, but especially due to having several significant parties there can be pretty big turnover. Case in point, the 1993 federal election where the PCs went from 154 seats to 2 [wikipedia.org].
And while the PM is uncomfortably powerful, the centralization does mean that voters get to choose from among a handful of properly thought out visions, and then the winning party (if they have a majority) can follow through on that vision. This is a
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Right now we have the same number of offices as we would under a no,party system. Why would we suddenly have countless candidates? They'd still need money and support from normal people to get on the ballot at all much less get enough recognition to get elected.
As far as parties coming and going, yes that happens and has happened in the US and other places but it's pretty rare. It's so rare for the controlling party to lose power in some countries it's big news such as Mexico changing parties for the fir
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The problem is not that people can't tell who's with the D's and who's with the R's.
The problem is that NEITHER THE D'S NOR THE R'S GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THE AVERAGE CITIZEN.
They all want to maintain their stranglehold on power and take as much money as they can get away with.
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Right now we have the same number of offices as we would under a no,party system. Why would we suddenly have countless candidates? They'd still need money and support from normal people to get on the ballot at all much less get enough recognition to get elected.
The problem isn't countless candidates, the problem is countless platforms.
As an English Canadian I get 4 thought out consistent platforms I need to sort through, Liberal, Conservative, NDP, and Green. I don't really care about my individual MP so much because they generally just vote with the party.
In the US, among the Democrats you have progressives and moderates, pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, isolationists and interventionists, etc, etc.
Same with the GOP, you've got moderates, Libertarians, and MAGA, you
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wtf are you babbling about?
I said we shouldn't have parties.
Jfc...smh
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It's like they're more interested in scoring political points than actually dealing with the substance of the bill.
Welcome to politics. The coffee room is --this-way-->
When you have facts on your side, you argue the facts.
When you have people on your side, you argue the polls.
When you have neither, you bang your fist on the table and make as much noise as possible while throwing yourself on the gears of government to grind them to a halt, hoping to wait it out until you actually do have facts and / or p
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The thing is, the Conservatives do have people on their side. They have a massive lead in the polls compared to the other parties. The only reason the Liberals are still in power is they have an agreement with the NDP. So I don't know why the Conservatives are resorting to such childish and ultimately pointless stunts.
I think that the Liberals and NDP should simply unite to form a single party on the left to counter the Conservatives. I cannot see it happening before the next election, but when (not i
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We have the same problem (probably worse) in the US where the Republicans (conservatives) aren't interested in doing anything except gumming up the works and persecuting immigrants, poor people and cutting social services (health, housing, food, education, retirement).
The New Culture War (Score:2)
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Canada is still doing better than America. In Canada, the conservatives try to gum up legislation from liberals. In America, the conservatives try to gum up legislation from conservatives also.
AI? (Score:2)
Seems like this was possible in the 2000s when it was called "writing a computer program" or more accurately a "mail merge" use of Word.
Prove it. (Score:2)
Liberals now contend the Conservatives came up with the amendments using artificial intelligence in order to gum up the government's agenda. The Conservatives deny that accusation.
If they want to deny the accusation, fine. Turn it off. Hunt down and kill any and all AI in question. Make the Conservatives to it. Then see what the response is. Kinda the nice thing about blaming The Machine. It still has a power cord to end debates with.
Denial of Service Attack is a novel use of AI (Score:4, Informative)
The summary is confusing, because it is conflating two different events that are separated by an entire year. The first event was the bill in its committee, and that is where the "20,000 amendments" figure comes from. Of those, only 200 actually made it out of committee. What is now happening a year later are the votes to consider the 200 amendments. As each vote takes tens of minutes to conduct, that is where the "15 hours of voting" figure comes from.
The bill itself is highly controversial. It requires five-year action plans, regular reporting and the inclusion of labour and Indigenous leaders in discussions, to create what the Liberal party calls "just" energy transition. Conservative critics consider this a blueprint for economic restructuring that they say will put thousands of oil and gas workers out of work.
I would love to read the rejected 19,800 amendments if I could find them anywhere. Using AI to do a DOS attack on a process is a very interesting idea, even though of course it would be done in bad faith.
Canada imports a feature of American Democracy. (Score:2, Insightful)
What I read from the summary: Canada has imported the "vote-a-rama" from the "reconciliation" bill process from the United States Senate.
Enjoy shooting down your nonsense amendments that only exist to waste time, filibuster, and produce "gotcha" votes that partisan hacks can use in their partisan communication to partisan tribal voters about how CORRUPT AND EVIL the incumbent is for voting against some totally irrelevant-to-the-legislation pet issue amendment that never had a chance to get serious considera
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What I read from the summary: Canada has imported the "vote-a-rama" from the "reconciliation" bill process from the United States Senate.
Enjoy shooting down your nonsense amendments that only exist to waste time, filibuster, and produce "gotcha" votes that partisan hacks can use in their partisan communication to partisan tribal voters about how CORRUPT AND EVIL the incumbent is for voting against some totally irrelevant-to-the-legislation pet issue amendment that never had a chance to get serious consideration because it's an unserious proposal that wouldn't survive debate.
You're welcome, Canada!
It does not speak highly of the Canadian conservatives or any other political party anywhere else in the world that they took a look at how the US Congress works these days, and particularly the playbook of the MAGA caucus, and saw a awesome way to run a country. If the US Congress is anything these days, it is a working demonstration of everything any National Assembly with a lick of sense should never do.
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Reconciliation isn't something from the "MAGA playbook", that's ridiculous. It's a standard Congressional procedure.
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I'm not sure I understand the critique. Reconciliation is already a fast-track process. Allowing open amendments seems like an entirely reasonable rule, given the fact that the process short-cuts all kinds of opportunities to change the bill. Some absolutely massive bills have been pushed through with the reconciliation process, such as ObamaCare. Naturally there are going to be a lot of amendments!
This bill in Canada would completely rewrite the government's approach to energy regulation. Sure, 20,000 amen
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The point of the critique is that otherwise reasonable processes can quickly become unreasonable when bad actors become involved in the process.
Bad actors are famously good at finding where processes do not scale, and then overwhelming those processes in order to grind things to a halt.
See:
- the filibuster (60-vote threshold for cloture motions)
- a speaker refusing to allow votes on legislation that would pass with overwhelming margins (currently, Ukraine aid and border bill)
- vote-a
They should vote yes (Score:1)
They would change their tune pretty quickly.
Oh please! (Score:3)
Have you ever heard the Liberal Party drones respond to any questions posed to them? They rid some AI-generated rubbish from a piece of paper, refusing to answer the actual question. If anyone is guilty of this kind of bullshit, it is the Liberal Party.
Now THIS is FUNNY! (Score:1)
Fake "conservatives" being assholes... (Score:1)
Business as usual for them.