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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."
Can't have people getting used to the truth now, can we ?
I know politics can get evil at time but seriously, WTF?
That's as close to treason as I can see to the tech industry.
Media Levies? Fine, thank you for protecting us from RIAA type tatics.
But then to turn around and sell out the entire COUNTRY to further your agenda? That's plain evil and I wish someone had the gonads to actually put people in jail over this.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
For those that don't know, we currently have had pretty far right leaning neo-conservative governments (still not as far right as the US tea party, but pretty bad).
They have been caught lying to parliament and making illegal backroom deals in the past, yet because the Liberals can't seem to field a leader who isn't a blithering idiot (Dion) or perceived as weak (Ignatief) our left of centre vote gets split between Liberals, NDP and Green (which combined makes up over 50%) and the right of centre vote goes all towards the Conservatives.
It just goes to show you, that first past the post doesn't work well...
None of this is any surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, they are not above being sleazy in the same way that the ocean is not above the sky.
and they typically 'leak' information for political reasons, for power and influence, for purposes of manipulation and propaganda.
that is why government prosecutions of 'leakers' are the ultimate hypocrisy. government itself is the biggest leaker of all.
These cable leaks will effectively neuter the Conservatives for the next four years, since their entire policy is based on sucking American cock.
Are you kidding me? There are three types of us; those who know what's going on and act on that knowledge (a.k.a. politicians), those who know what's going on and don't act on that knowledge (you and I), and the vast, vast majority that don't read about any of this and wouldn't understand or care if they did.
All the politicians need to do is keep smearing each other with "they tax you too much" and "they are killing our health care/education/whatever" and "he's a pedophile". Nobody brings real issues into campaigning because the majority of constituents don't understand real issues not because they're stupid but because they don't want to.
"Oh no... he found the
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.