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Canada Election Result Bad News For DMCA Opponents
An anonymous reader writes "For those with a stake in the opposition of Jim Prentice's C-61, the Canadian DMCA, this previous week's election results will be displeasing. The Conservative Party, which promised to reintroduce the DMCA if elected, gained 19 seats this election, mostly at the expense of the flagging liberal party, a mere 12 short of a majority government. The increase in Conservative representation, as well as the relatively low profile of this issue amidst other, more pressing concerns, increases the likelihood that the son of C-61 will come to fruition. On a positive note, the number of MPs supporting Geist's copyright pledge has increased to 34. Given the Conservative Party's historic disregard of public opinion, however, the efforts of the copyright-pledge MPs will have to rally the full opposition across three major parties in order to defeat the bill. A mere 12 MPs now stand between the Canadian public and the MAFIAA's hungry maw."
Very few outside of geeks care about the DMCA.
The real problem here is the system. Let's take a look at the ratios between the percentage of seats each party got in the election, and their percentage of the national popular vote:
Conservative
Seats: 143/308
Popular Vote: 37.63%
Ratio: 2.03 (More than twice the seats they would have obtained under a 100% proportional system.)
Liberal
Seats: 76/308
Popular Vote: 26.24%
Ratio: 0.94
BLOC Quebecois
Seats: 50/308
Popular Vote: 9.97%
Ratio: 1.63 (Interesting thing here; because voters in Quebec will vote the BLOC in much more often, they're skewed way above other parties even though they're practically running only in Quebec.)
NDP
Seats: 37/308
Popular Vote: 18.20%
Ratio: 0.66 (Screwed once again.)
Independent
Seats: 2/308
Popular Vote: 0.65
Ratio: 0.999 (Oddly proportional.)
Green
Seats: 0/308
Popular Vote: 6.80%
Ratio: 0.0 (Yeah. 6.8% of the vote, 0% of the representation. Good stuff.)
(Source: CBC.ca Election Results)
We could have even fixed this (at least in the Ontario Legislature) if we'd voted in MMP a year ago, rather than stayed with the skewed first past the post system. Unfortunately, I don't think enough people were educated about what the new system would mean and saw it as some sort of radical change, and so voted to stay with the current system.
Note: I think my math is accurate here but feel free to correct me.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
" Given the Conservative Party's historic disregard of public opinion"
And give Slashdot's historic disregard of non-bias, I think we're tied.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Canadian citizens have much higher expectations of privacy than U.S. citizens do. Our privacy laws reflect this. However, if a U.S. style DMCA law were to be enacted it would lead to CRIA, etc. throwing a lot of their muscle around trying to get ISP's to divulge information that most Canadians would not approve of being shared. The conservatives would be scandalized by this, and I think they know it.
Prentice, in some circles, is regarded to be an unusually savvy politician. However, he was given the job of keeping both Canadian citizens *and* american media conglomerates happy. He was screwed, and he knew it. He drafted a law to avoid another chorus of "Blame Canada" from the U.S., but his party never tried to ram it through the HoC like they would with a bill they actually care about. In fact, the timing of when it was tabled seems to suggest that they wanted it to be cut off by the election rather than being passed.
Now, obviously, the Conservatives didn't want this bill making them look like a bunch of Bush sycophants right when Harper was trying to distance himself from that sort of accusation. (The liberals accuse Harper of being a Bush groupie on a weekly basis. It's like clockwork.)
So... What happens now? The conservatives might plan to ram unpopular legislation through ASAP and hope it's forgotten by the next election. However, I think they realize that the embarrassment C-61 (or it's successor) is going to cause will be an ongoing thing. By passing C-61, they grant power to CRIA to embarrass them with U.S.-style frivolous lawsuits at will. If CRIA were so inclined, they could deliberately wait for the next election and then turn courtroom cowboy.
Are the conservatives dumb enough to hand a foreign interest the power to embarrass their party whenever they feel like it? I tend to doubt it. It's more likely that C-61 will be amended, diddled, massaged, and ultimately only talked about just enough to keep the "Blame Canada" shouts to a manageable level. Either that, or severely castrated into a law approaching sensibility, if such a thing is possible.
The consequences of first-past-the-post is that the most powerful party gets even MORE power, while less powerful parties get less than they deserve (analogy of making the rich richer and the poor poorer).
The irony is that only the most powerful party at any given time would be able to change this undemocratic reality, and shift to proportional representation. But obviously, they don't want to, because that'll reduce their power. It's the opposition which always supports changing FPTP to proportional (which will increase their power). But lo and behold, as soon as the opposition becomes the primary party, they immediately go to the start of the paragraph and realize they don't want the change anymore. Now, the former power holders want to change, but they no longer have the power.
The only party who can change the system, don't want to change it, and those that want to change it, can't. This statement will hold true regardless of which party is in power.
Beautiful irony, isn't it?
The voting system we have in Brazil isn't totally proportional, but still it raises more problems than it solves. Each party must have a minimum percentage of the vote to elect representatives. The total vote for the party is computed, a candidate for a popular party needs less votes to get elected.
A sad example of how this, very complex, voting system works is that this clown got elected and got three other representatives in his party elected when he ran as a "protest" candidate, i.e. people voted for him because they thought no one was a worthy candidate. His motto was "my name is Eneas" and his main political project was that Brazil should detonate the nuclear weapon that reportedly was developed here in the early 1980s.
Conservatives have NOT been in control of the USA for the last eight years..
Our conservatives != your conservatives.
where does the article say that *ALL* conservatives are would vote for this and *all* NDP, Bloc, Green and Liberals would vote against ?
I don't think you understand how Canadian politics works. Unlike in the USA, the Prime Minister is a member of the house and has direct control over the party stance. This, coupled with extremely strong party discipline (you vote with the party EVERY time or you get kicked out, ruining your career), means that the P.M. is far more powerful than the President (within the political system; not in terms of overall world power) because in a majority government, the P.M. can pass basically any law he wants, as long as it satisfies the constitution.
That's not the case though, since he only has a minority of seats. Unfortunately, if a law fails to pass and it's an important one (read: whatever they want, so basically all of them), then the government fails and we have an election. But the Liberals won't allow this because they are very weak and would likely lose more in another election. If they go to the polls, it'll be about the budget or the Afghan war, not a copyright bill. TL;DR:
The bill will pass because the opposition Liberals have too much to lose in the election that will be called if it fails. End of Story.
where does the article say that *ALL* conservatives are would vote for this and *all* NDP, Bloc, Green and Liberals would vote against ?
Under most parliamentary systems, MP's are far, far more likely to strictly tow their party line than in, say, the United States. This is because under such a system legislation is proposed by party leaders (when they are in power) rather than through any kind of committee system. Therefore, MP's rely on their party leaders to grant earmarks to their constituents, and thus vote more or less exactly as they are told so they will be looked upon more favorably when the time comes to distribute the pork.
The assessment of the Conservative gain is 100% wrong, and conclusions proceeding from it may also be flawed. The Conservatives were facing a grossly underfunded Liberal Party in historic disarray, and led by a man widely perceived to be utterly unfit to be Prime Minister. The time was so ripe to grab a majority that the Conservatives broke their own platform promise to stick with a scheduled election (the "It was a minority and we couldn't help it" dodge is a complete red herring). The New Democratic Party, which would be regarded in the US as raving loony communists, also picked up seats.
The Tories have now been told twice to cool their jets, and they won't be going back to the public any time soon unless they want their asses thoroughly kicked. Seven out of 10 Canadians either voted against them or didn't vote at all (a historic low turn-out, by the way).
I won't bore you with further details (except to note that of all the parties, the only one that actually got more total votes was the Green Party), but the bottom line is that this result is a repudiation of the Conservative Party's attempt to steal candy from a baby. If they choose to introduce legislation like this, which has historically been unpopular with Canadians, they'll be playing with fire. Most likely, they'll either let it slide under the guise of building inter-party amity, or they'll allow the legislation to be brought forward, but not make voting a matter of confidence.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.