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Technology Issues Ignored in Canadian Elections
Jem Berkes writes "Today's Toronto Star has a good article on Canadian political parties' positions on important technology issues such as Copyright reform/WIPO, spam, and privacy. With the elections only a week away, it's surprising that these important issues have attracted little or no debate. The current Heritage Committee, for instance, has recommended that Canada ratify WIPO, and few citizens (let alone politicians) are even aware of this issue."
The Green Party has some F/OSS-favoring policies, and a do-not-spam policy: http://www.greenparty.ca/index.php?module=article& view=12&page_num=27
I was a bit surprised by what I read about the positions of the Liberals, Conservatives and especially the NDP. I would have hoped for a more civil-libertarian position from them.
Issues mentioned in the article that affect Cdns include copyright reform, a national ID card, anti-spam legislation, use of open source software by government, etc.
Canadians pay a levy on recordable media (incl blank CD's) which supposedly is collected to compensate artists for copying (as mentioned often on /. it's legal here! with some conditions) of their work. I know no-one who believes the artists will get the money.
re: the Canadian Heritage committee copyright report... MP Sarmite "Sam" Bulte is the 2-term Liberal candidate in MY riding & is campaigning hard for re-election. I had somehow forgotten that she chaired the Canadian Heritage committee; the report (referred to in article) has much in it that affects people in the tech / web sector. In particular, if I see her shaking hands outside the High Park TTC station again, I'll bring up some issues with her!
Many groups are unhappy with the report's recommendations, including educators.
The report is available as PDF.
USians and other non-Cdns may find similarities & differences with your own countries' policies illuminating.
je ne suis pas un fou
Because the conservatives aren't a big business party in Canada.
The Liberals have all the business friends, they make billions of dollars of 'loans' to large companies to keep them around. Guess who makes donations to the Liberal party.
The Conservatives want to lower corporate taxes, but their plan is to only lower the taxes by the amount the handouts are reduced by.
So yes the companies will get $1 billion in tax cuts, but that will be made possible by not giving $1 billion in handouts to other companies.
With the minority government shaping up, there won't be a dictator at all.
You may also want to use the NDP topic area on the Digital Copyright Canada forum to work together with other people from that party.
Digital Copyright Canada forum
Be careful in what you are interpreting Sarmite to have said. She is not a technology law or technology aware person. She is not someone who would recognize that legal protection for DRM (TPM/RMI combination) is in fact a considerable regulation of technology.
She also seems unaware of the fact that proposals to tax educational use of the Internet are an exemption of copyright where the intentions of the copyright holders are ignored and instead a royalty-collective society receives what amounts to "a tax on the new to protect the old".
Ask her why after those 700 submissions, 650 which were generated by the Canada-DMCA-Opponents community (now http://digital-copyright.ca ), why none of us were invited to speak before the committee? I was invited by Industry committee to speak on a different bill, I believe partly because Heritage committee was ignoring our community after many submissions and many offers to speak with individual members.
I live and work in Ottawa, and have offered to do one-on-one or committee-wide sessions. The offers still stand, and hopefully the new Heritage committee will take me up on that offer.
BTW: If this is an area of policy you are interested in, please join the Digital Copyright Canada forum and help us move this policy/education forward.
Digital Copyright Canada forum