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Which individuals should count in a welfare-consequentialist analysis of public policy? Some answers to this question are parochial, and others are more inclusive. The most inclusive possible answer is ‘everybody to count for one.’ In other words, all individuals who are capable of having welfare – including foreigners, the unborn, and non-human animals – should be weighed equally. This article argues that ‘who should count’ is a question that requires a two-level answer. On the first level, a specification of welfare-consequentialism serves as an ethical ideal, a claim about the attributes that the ideal policy would have. ‘Everybody to count for one’ might succeed on this level. However, on the second level is the welfare-consequentialist analysis procedure used by human analysts to give advice on real policy questions. For epistemic reasons, the analysis procedure should be more parochial than ‘everybody to count for one.’

Governments have implemented different interventions and response models to combat the spread of COVID-19. The necessary intensity and frequency of control measures require us to project the number of infected cases. Three short-term forecasting models were proposed to predict the total number of infected cases in Canada for a number of days ahead. The proposed models were evaluated on how their performance degrades with increased forecast horizon, and improves with increased historical data by which to estimate them. For the data analyzed, our results show that 7 to 10 weeks of historical data points are enough to produce good fits for a two-weeks predictive model of infected case numbers with a NRMSE of 1% to 2%. The preferred model is an important quick-deployment tool to support data-informed short-term pandemic related decision-making at all levels of governance.

Editors' Note: Inaugural Issue

This paper brings forward Justice Pal's dissenting opinion at the Tokyo Tribunal to add to Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) literature on international criminal law and the rules of evidence and procedure. It is part of a TWAIL effort to scrutinize the everyday practices of international prosecutions through procedural and evidentiary rules. By locating and situating Justice Pal's reasoning within the broader academic literature on dissents in international criminal law, it is possible to illustrate how and why Justice Pal's views were obscured as a relevant dissent. From this vantage point, this paper pursues Justice Pal's legacy as it relates to the rules of evidence and procedure in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. It traces the evolution of the judicial power to draft and amend these rules, and examines the impact of these decisions on the everyday functions of the tribunals and how truth is determined.

Relative to non-Indigenous youth, Indigenous youth have been under-represented when studying pathways to mental wellness. Yet, a broad range of adversity is acknowledged, from intergenerational and ongoing trauma arising from colonial policies. This scoping review explores resilience definitions, measures, key stressors, and what Indigenous youth identify as pathways to their wellness, based on quantitative and qualitative peer-reviewed literature in Canada and the Continental United States. Eight databases (EBSCO, PsycINFO, Science Direct, Social Science Citation Index, Web of Science, PsycARTICLES, and EMBASE) and hand searches of 7 relevant journals were conducted to ensure literature coverage. Two independent reviewers screened each article, with one Indigenous screener per article. The final scoping review analysis included 44 articles. In articles, no Indigenous term for resilience was found, but related concepts were identified (“walking a good path,” “good mind,” Grandfathers’ teachings on 7 values, decision-making for 7 generations into the future, etc.). Few Indigenous-specific measures of resilience exist, with studies relying on Western measures of psychological resilience. Qualitative approaches supporting youth-led resilience definitions yielded important insights. Youth stressors included the following: substance use, family instability, and loss of cultural identity. Youth resilience strategies included the following: having a future orientation, cultural pride, learning from the natural world, and interacting with community members (e.g., relationship with Elders, being in community and on the land). Indigenous traditional knowledge and cultural continuity serve as prominent pathways to Indigenous youth resilience. More research is needed to yield a holistic, youth-centered measure of resilience that includes traditional practices.

This article examines the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and violence in Sri Lanka through the combined lenses of international economic law (IEL) and transitional justice. We argue that colonialism instantiates vicious cycles in the histories of violence of ethno-racial capitalism through the creation of states with debts that can never be repaid. This system of ‘indebted impunity’ persists even under ‘new’ Southern sovereigns. We illustrate how IEL and transitional justice are co-constitutive in maintaining international law’s racial hierarchies, while pursuing the construction of racial hierarchies that precipitate ethno-racial capitalist formations, and violence, in Sri Lanka. We first attend to the emergence of international law with racial capitalism as a story of sustained violence, where offshoots like IEL and transitional justice remain tied to the foundational violence in ways that cannot be reformed away. The final section examines the colonial transformation of Sri Lanka, focusing on the British Empire’s role in configuring ethno-racial communities, to consider how IEL and transitional justice work together to maintain this cycle. We observe that indebted impunity persists as a structural condition even when the ‘white’ colonial masters have formally departed, and ‘brown’ differentially racialized compatriots become the ones in charge.

In Canada, Indigenous populations have an increased prevalence of psychiatric disorders and distress. Mental health mobile applications can provide effective, easy-to-access, and low-cost support. Examining grey literature and academic sources, this review found three mobile apps that support mental health for Indigenous communities in Canada. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Abstract The ‘question of labour’ and its exploitation in the Third World has not been given ample consideration by contemporary international legal scholars in their historical examinations of the making of the international order. This article revisits the history of the interwar institutions of the League of Nations, particularly the International Labour Organization (ILO), to argue that international law reformulated imperialism through its re-articulation of labour relations, beginning with its quest to suppress slavery and ultimately regulate forced labour in Africa. International institutions contributed to the valorization of ‘free wage labour’ in Africa and the Third World through its international ‘native labour’ policies, the development of international labour standards, and especially the passing of the 1930 Forced Labour Convention. The article argues that international institutions safeguarded the processes of capitalist racial/colonial accumulation and labour exploitation by ideologically dis-embedding the violence of slavery and forced labour from ‘free wage labour’, veiling the structural unity and totality of the international legal order with racial capitalism. Drawing on the ‘Black radical/internationalist tradition’, I propose an expansive critique of the international order as a form of ‘enslavement’ to the structures of capitalism, so as to adequately expose international law’s structural embeddedness with labour exploitation, white supremacy, and racial capitalism.

Richard Moon, Howard Kislowicz, Asha Kaushal, 2022 CanLIIDocs 1392