Talk to Roger about that. He sees no good reason to rate with CFC and he's the Pres. Mathematically he's perfecly correct, we are a small isolated chess community and rating with CFC would tell us virtually nothing about how average skill for a given rating compares. A big problem with the Elo system in a country like Canada, which Elo himself understood perfectly well.
The gifting of rating points caused the controversy. Plain and simple. One can argue until the cows come home as to whether Jason's rating was "correct" and whether it might have been "more correct" if more of his games had been rated, but I don't see any way to settle such an argument.
Many people objected to 'tinkering' with the rating system - even in such a localized manner as changing one player's rating.
Logically, this would result in equal blame being affixed on any club in the world that has ever held an "unrated" events.
Of course the events you were referring to are not unrated, they are rated, just not by the CFC. Many games also rated by the CFC each year that are not rated by FIDE. Thererfore, by your logic, Canada is the cause of all the bad things that happen in FIDE.
Weren't you arguing earlier that FIDE ratings and CFC ratings are incomparable? (perhaps it was on chesstalk) If so, why should CFC and VCC ratings be comparables? You have regularly used Jason's VCC rating as evidence to support his rating update...
For all the rest of us know VCC could be 350 points inflated.
All true, of course. But I was pointing out the flaws in someone else's arguments, not making one of my own. Those flaws still remain in his argument.
To be precise, any rating system that is based on probability distributions rather than absolute scores, will result in ratings that are not truly comparable between isolated rating communities. This is just a mathematical fact.
In the case of Jason, if you compare the VCC club with CFC ratings, the mean and distributions are fairly close so the comparison is reasonably useful as one piece of evidence. We never have proof in these things, we can only use the available evidence after examining that evidence to determine that using it is, under the circumstances, reasonable.
It is clear that at the time of the decision in this case , at least for awhile based on recent results, Jason was playing at around my standard. My current published CFC rating is 2050 and I peaked at over 2100, but of course those ratings are so out of date in this case that it would be silly to use them as evidence. For one thing games today are played much more quickly and my relative ability declines as the games are played at a faster speed. I would be amazed if I could play at 2000 or above under today's tournament conditions even if I was still actually as good as I was over 20 years ago which, obviously, I am not.