An original SIN

This post is about my struggles with Canadian bureaucracy. At the end I shall draw some conclusions about a peculiar Canadian trait that, despite its benign intent, often leaves its victims feeling rather frustrated.

The background is that in December 2022 I moved from New Zealand to Ottawa, Canada in order to spend the last years of my life near to my children. I had worked in Ottawa for 10 years in the 1980s and my children are all Canadian citizens. In those days I had been a permanent resident of Canada (though not a citizen), a status I had had to renounce on leaving Canada in 1992.

 

Canada has a programme whereby citizens can apply to bring their parents and grandparents to live in Canada as permanent residents. It allocates places to applicants by a lottery system but at present that programme has been suspended. Instead there is a programme that allows parents and grandparents to hold a long term visitor visa (a Super Visa); it is ostensibly valid for 10 years and allows visits of up to 5 years at a time. My children and I decided that I should apply for a Super Visa and that I would make a new life in Canada with them. The application process is dauntingly long and costly but that is another story. The very abbreviated version is that I now have a Super Visa and live in Ottawa.

Once my Super Visa had been granted I had to set about integrating into my new environment and complying with its laws. As I was no longer a short-term resident I knew I would have to register with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) in order to pay my taxes. For this, the first thing I needed was a Social Insurance Number (SIN). I did not at first see this a problem as I still retained my SIN from the 1980s but I thought I should verify that my old SIN was still valid.

The first bit of bad news emerged only gradually. A visit to Service Canada (the agency that deals with SIN matters) and a long wait to be seen produced incomprehension as to why I would need a SIN at all as I did not intend to work. To my answer that I needed it to pay my Canadian taxes I received the response "OK, so where is your work permit?". I responded "But I don't intend to work". More incomprehension followed by the suggestion that maybe my existing SIN would suffice, but then the comment that my old SIN was for permanent residents only (it did not begin with a '9' you see, or maybe you don't). Then finally the advice to call the CRA to ask whether I could retain my old SIN.

That afternoon I phoned the CRA. That's not as easy as it sounds because one gets directed to a series of automatic telephone menus, each with a long (sometimes several minutes long) explanation of various further menu options. After about 40 minutes I got a human being who gave me the news that a return to Service Canada would be necessary and that I needed a new SIN. At least that seemed definite if disappointing news.

The next day I was back at Service Canada and another long wait. The outcome was not satisfactory. The agent I saw said he absolutely did not know what to do: the combination of issuing a SIN to someone who did not intend to work appeared to be an insoluble conundrum. However this agent helpfully supplied me a telephone number for a Service Canada helpline and I phoned it later that day.

After a 30 minute wait to speak to a human being I was buoyed by her initial apology about the wait. Further positive feelings were caused by her disparagement of the Service Canada office that had twice turned me away. She gave me a set of instructions  to follow for my next encounter with Service Canada and I returned home optimistically.

On no account was I to return to the original office so I looked up her recommended office. Gloom ensued as this office was about 50 kilometres away. I decided to try a different and closer Service Canada office.

On the morrow, armed with many pieces of official documentation I presented myself to this new office. Initially I caused the same consternation I was now familiar with but this time I stood my ground and explained that I knew there was a solution and all they had to do was find it.

The agent I was speaking to accepted the challenge. His first move was to phone his superior. This superior was similarly stumped and so he phoned his own superior. At last there was a breakthrough. Some relevant forms and procedures were located and I was able to make my application for a new SIN receiving the news that it would take no longer than 24 business days.

Last week I received by mail  (dated November 21) the notification of my new SIN. Unfortunately and perplexingly the notification stated that my SIN would expire on November 22.

I may be 77 years old and no longer as sharp as I once was but even I perceived that this was nonsensical so I phoned the number given on my notification for further inquiries. Again, many menus and minutes later, I spoke to a human being. She took my inquiry for a 15 minute excursion as she consulted her superior and returned with the advice that I should wait for 4 weeks: then, if no clarifying mail arrived, to phone again in January.

I can hardly wait.

***Addendum***

As there was no clarifying letter I did phone again in January. There was no very long phone wait. I was told that I should not be concerned that my new SIN had been cancelled after one day, that this was the normal procedure, and I could continue to use my cancelled SIN for tax purposes. While this was reassuring my perplexity with the whole process remained.

***End of Addendum***

At the beginning of this post I promised some summary conclusions about Canadian bureaucracy and I shall begin with two comments. The first is that the saga I have recounted is only the latest in a series of similar frustrations  and the second is that I fully accept that the public services in Canada are under-resourced and doing their best within an imperfect system. That said I think the Canadian services I have dealt with (public and private) are different to those in New Zealand in that the personnel are not empowered to act with initiative. Instead they are captive to their processes which they follow with robotic precision. That sounds bad and often it is awful but there is a reason for it. The system is designed to make it difficult for persuasive individuals to make special pleas for preferential treatment - and, of course, that is laudable.

Canada is a larger country than New Zealand and has chosen a system that does not automatically assume that its citizenry act in good faith. That is sad and, as I have discovered, it often leads to apparently absurd outcomes.

Sums of three squares

When I turned 62 my daughter Susanna informed me that 62 was the sum of three squares in two different ways: 1² + 5² + 6² and 2² + 3² + 7².

She had looked up this fact with a keyword search such as "Interesting facts about the number 62". I certainly did find that interesting but for 15 years I didn't take the matter any further. I did however know that there was a characterisation of numbers which were representable as the sum of three squares and this characterisation indicated that, while 62 was the smallest example of a number having two representations, it would not be the only such number. In writing this note I researched this question more thoroughly and discovered that very much more is known including asymptotic results on the number of such representations. This note has little information to add to the question but, at least, I hope it will be easy reading.

Recently I observed that 2, 3, 7 were (modulo 8) the negatives of 1, 5, and 6. This "explains" Susanna's fact as an example of the following observations. Given 3 squares a², b², and c² the equation

a² + b² + c² = (m-a)² + (m-b)² + (m-c)²

will be true (by elementary algebra) if

m = (2a + 2b + 2c)/3.

If a=1, b=5, c=6 (the first of Susanna's triples) we would have m=8 and then

m-a = 7, m-b = 3, m-c = 2: the second triple.

This gives immediately the existence of many pairs of triples whose sums of squares are equal. For example, with a = 3, b = 4, c = 8, we have m = 10, m-a = 7, m-b = 6, m-c = 2. Therefore 101 is the sum of 9, 16, and 64 as well as the sum of 49, 36 and 4. This trick of obtaining a second triple does not always work. There are some cases where the triple (m-a, m-b, m-c) is the same (to within a rearrangement} as (a, b, c). Such cases are easily seen to be when a, b, c are in arithmetic progresion.

A more serious barrier to the trick producing a second triple is that m might turn out not to be an integer. For example 3² + 6² + 7² = 94. Here m=32/3 and we find that

m-a = 23/3, m-b = 14/3, m-c = 11/3

whose squares do sum to 94 but they are not integers. In this case there is, nevertheless, a second solution, namely the triple (2, 3, 9) whose squares sum to 94. However I do not see a general pattern suggested by these two solutions.

Goodness as an absolute quality

If you were to ask anyone (Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, Pope Pius X, Myra Hindley, Mother Theresa - name anyone you like) whether they thought they were good people then, any false modesty aside, they would surely answer "Yes". Now ask a random person whether they agreed: no such uniformity of assent would be forthcoming. On some of the names on that list it is possible that no-one would say they were good.

What can we make of that? What if we ask about particular issues: is slavery bad, is homosexuality bad, is unfaithfulness to ones spouse bad, is eating battery-farmed chicken bad? (to name just a few moral positions) we would not find universal agreement either. It is possible that some answers might be of the kind "Well, it depends on the circumstances, the time era of the issue). Even those who give answers that are qualified in this way will likely still feel that, if the question could be made more precise, then they should be able to give a clear cut answer.

Why is this? We have got very used to the idea that these questions should have definite answers. Our society often legislates the answer, or the prevailing moral climate determines an answer. So we are loath to believe that such questions have no answer. Indeed you may very well suspect that, unless a society had an agreement on the worth of an answer to these complex questions, the society would collapse in significant way because we could all behave as we felt like at the time. You might even think that, on an issue such as homosexuality, where society had legislated an answer that you didn't agree with, you would feel duty-bound to go along with the consensus rather than disrupt your society by public disagreement.

The conclusion I want to draw from these examples is that the idea of absolute good or absolute evil is too nebulous to sustain. This conclusion is unpalatable to many of us because it contradicts the way we have been educated to behave. We want to feel that we are good people who act as we do because of some absolute imperative that tells us how to behave. We have been conditioned to think like this sometimes because our parents have had to instil into us a model of behaviour that allows to rub along with our fellow humans, or our church has had offered us divinely inspired moral guidance, or our law-makers have offered absolutist reasons for certain behaviours, or important role models in our lives have set a strong example.

Yet most, if not all, of our moral positions are unsustainable as absolute positions - we cannot agree on them and it is not always just crazy people, or hardened contrarians, who cannot agree. My conclusion is simple: "goodness" or "evil" are not concepts that exist in an absolute sense.

I must add immediately that this does not mean one can therefore act as one pleases because the concept of acting as a good individual is meaningless. More of that later.

I believe that one cannot build "good" societies by first identifying the "good" qualities that one would like the society to have because the idea of a "good" quality is too elusive as we saw in the examples above. My model of societal growth is more chaotic than that. Societies grow from very small collections of people into the complex societies that we see all around us today. This growth has some features in common with the development of species arising generation by generation by random events. Some developments will arise and quickly fade away because they have not been conducive to the survival of the society - and some developments will cause long term thriving. In other words societies are complex systems whose future is a product of fortunate accidents (and the more fortunate the accident the longer will its consequences be felt). As an example, early Greek democracies (to be accurate, very crude quasi-democracies) arose more by accident than design - yet it was a a fortunate societal accident producing a prototype organisation which has lasted a very long time. An example on the other side is the National Socialist experiment of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s - again arising by the conjunction of exceptional conditions - this was not a successful accident as it only lasted two decades. 

To repeat: "good" societies do not arise because of "good" qualities. On the contrary, it is the other way round. When a society has arisen it is legitimate to ask what about the society is good. Consider the society of the Roman republic and early imperium and ask that question. The Patricians would claim they lived in a wonderful society, economically prosperous, and intellectually vibrant; the Plebs would answer very differently. Yet both of them enjoyed an urban existence that was the envy of neighbouring tribes. I would judge that society to be relatively good - it certainly lasted for centuries. When it did collapse it left an intellectual legacy that people looked back on as "good" times. As that society developed into a mighty empire one can perhaps guess at the reasons for its longevity: perhaps it was the way that early consuls were appointed or, later, the rigorous training undergone in the legions, or the mild climate of the era. Romans themselves might say "we have a good way of appointing our consuls, or we have a very good army, or the gods have given us many good harvests". In other words, the judgement of whether Roman society was "good" is a post-hoc judgement rather than a template for why their society flourished.

I think one should look at our current societies in this way. 

Consider the example of the modern USA. The Americans promote the myth that their national society was the result of deliberate design by the founding fathers. But I think that is far too simplistic. The awful things in their society were obviously not deliberately planned. But the successful aspects of it were either lucky (great natural resources, guns which enabled them to steal their land from the native population, the entrepreneurial spirit that was enabled by the natural wealth in resources and human capital) was also not deliberately planned. What has grown up has been a mixture of successes and failures and, quite naturally, they celebrate their successes and forget their failures, while pretending that the "American dream and their manifest destiny" are designed either by god or by their national spirit.

British society is an older and longer lasting example. For nearly a millenium (since the Norman conquest) it has evolved in a way where accidents have been largely responsible for the way it has changed. Magna Carta for example was definitely not the result of planned good government. The Hundred Years war was a mish-mash of successes and reverses (successes="good", reverses="bad"). The foundation of the British Royal Society in 1660 which ushered in an era of brilliant scientists was "good" but who among its founders could have foreseen that? These and many other examples make it very implausible that an intial set of good design principles are responsible for modern British society. On the other hand we can look at contemporary British society and observe some things that work very well (examples: the National Trust organisation, the rich artistic and cultural life in the big centres, the ancient beautiful buildings (ruined or not) etc. none of which were planned to develop as they have).

Finally, I will return to a point I mentioned above. Just because there is no such thing as absolute good doesn't mean that we should behave as moral delinquents. We can look around our society, spot the things that work well, and then do our best to push the successful parts of our society. For example, those parts of our society where there are undesirable actions, such as outright crime or tax-dodging, are sections of society which do not contribute to the smooth functioning of the society: this suggests that we avoid crime and tax-dodging.

It's really not very difficult. Don't appeal to those unreliable authoritative concepts which assume that goodness is an absolute concept. Instead, think about which parts of your society are successful, those likely to grow into societal success, and do your best to  support them.