Canada Encouraged US To Place It On Piracy List

An anonymous reader writes "Copyright, U.S. lobbying, and the stunning backroom Canadian response gets front page news treatment today in Canada as the Toronto Star covers new revelations on copyright by Michael Geist (who offers a longer post with links to the cables) from the U.S. cables released by WikiLeaks. The cables reveal that former Industry Minister Maxime Bernier raised the possibility of leaking the copyright bill to U.S. officials before it was to be tabled in the House of Commons, former Industry Minister Tony Clement's director of policy Zoe Addington encouraged the U.S. to pressure Canada by elevating it on a piracy watch list, Privy Council Office official Ailish Johnson disclosed the content of ministerial mandate letters, and former RCMP national coordinator for intellectual property crime Andris Zarins advised the U.S. that the government was working on a separate intellectual property enforcement bill."

Comments

This isn't about Canadian politics

[rbrander]

This would have happened whether a "Conservative, right-wing" government was in or the Liberals. To understand, you need to read a 2008 story from the same watchdog, Michael Geist (to whom all Canada should be deeply indebted for tracking these issues for years):

http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/443867

The key phrase in the story is "Canadian officials arrived ready to talk about a series of economic concerns but were quickly rebuffed by their U.S. counterparts, who indicated that progress on other issues would depend upon action on the copyright file."

Americans are sometimes surprised to learn (Condi Rice was one, which was disappointing from a foreign-affairs scholar) that Canada is the US' largest trading partner, more bilateral trade than with your #2 (China) and your #4 (UK) combined, nearly as much as China+Japan (#3). So imagine how large a trading partner the US is for Canada - 80% of the total, last time I checked, that is, 4X as much trade as with all other partners combined.

When the US really wants to lean on Canada at trade discussions, their only difficulty is choosing which levers to pull: making trouble over standard inspections of meat and grains? Lumber? Re-investigating whether Canada subsidizes iron ore, holding up imports while doing so?

So you can find some profoundly anti-Canadian stances being taken by Canadian trade officials - until you see the larger picture and find they were arranging to charge all Canadians an extra $100/year for media content ($3 billion from 30 million people) to smooth the path for $6B in exports - of the $76B total, they only have to pick less than 10% to threaten.