dose

Michael Geist has a nice long bit on Canada’s take on Net Neutraity, and here he summarizes the Conservative position:

We think blocking or prioritizing content may be acceptable, we recognize it is inconsistent with the recommendations of the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel, and we don’t care because we plan to the leave the issue to the dominant telecommunications providers. This is not - as some suggest - about letting freedom reign. It is about leaving Canadian consumers and the Canadian Internet vulnerable to a two-tier Internet and providing tacit approval to those telecommunications companies that actively engage in network discrimination.

Some time ago I sent out emails asking about positions on net neutrality to the Conservatives, Liberals (federal), Bloc, NDP, Liberals (provincial), and PQ. Here are responses I got:

Conservatives:

Dear Mr. McGuire:

The Office of the Prime Minister, has forwarded your electronic correspondence of November 9, 2006, concerning net neutrality to the Honourable Maxime Bernier, Minister of Industry. I am pleased to reply on behalf of the Minister and I regret the delay in relying to you.

The Minister of Industry is responsible for the Telecommunications Act, which sets out the objectives of Canadian telecommunications policy, while the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), an independent public authority, is charged with implementing these objectives through its regulation of the telecommunications industry.

The CRTC determined that the market for retail Internet access was sufficiently competitive to forgo economic price regulation. Nonetheless, the Commission has residual authority to address some issues of discriminatory and anti-competitive behaviour with respect to such Internet services should they arise.

The issue of net neutrality is also being deliberated in other countries. Industry Canada is monitoring domestic and international developments to determine the need for future domestic policy initiatives.

I appreciate your having taken the time to bring this important matter to our attention.

Yours very truly,

Leonard St-Aubin
Director General
Telecommunications Policy Branch

Parti-Quebecois:

Monsieur McGuire,

Au nom du chef de l’opposition officielle, je confirme que nous avons bien reçu votre message. Je vous en remercie.

Je me permets de le transmettre à Monsieur Daniel Turp, porte-parole de l’opposition officielle en matière de culture et de communications, afin qu’il en prenne connaissance.

Je vous souhaite une agréable fin de journée.

Mélanie Malenfant
Conseillère politique
Cabinet du chef de l’opposition officielle
Assemblée nationale
418.643.2743
mmalenfant@assnat.qc.ca

The other parties (NDP, Liberal-fed, Bloc, Liberal-provincial) did not answer. Which tells you how high this issue is on their priority list.

(tip to patrick)

from patrick, chalk one up for the good guys.

UPDATE:
says mayor tremblay on the radio this morning: “I have learned that the opinion of citizens is important.”

glad to know such important lessons are in the process of being absorbed by our leading politicians.

Net Neutrality: A Public Discussion on the Future of the Internet in Canada

Date and Location:
Tues, February 6, 2007 , 7 pm
Admission: Free
Ottawa Public Library Auditorium
120 Metcalfe St.

Moderated by:
Pippa Lawson: Executive Director, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa

Panelists:

* Michael Geist: Professor of Law, Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce Law, University of Ottawa
* Ren Bucholz: Electronic Frontier Foundation Policy Coordinator, Americas
* Andrew Clement: Professor, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto; Principal Investigator, Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking
* Bill St-Arnaud: Senior Director, Advanced Networks for CANARIE, Inc.

We seem to have reached a tipping point in public and policy opinion on climate change, which is something of a relief, but also very scary. Up until even the last few weeks, I felt that my tiny contribution to the debate was through occasional posts here, addressing some of the science as we know it, mostly in an attempt to make known the state of science. (In a previous life, I spent a few years working more directly on climate change issues, in policy, finance, and technology development).

But now that, in Canada at least, it has become politically untenable to deny climate change - the Liberals, NDP and Bloc are all climate believers; the Conservatives have just converted, either for political expediency, or after finally coming to terms with the science. There is no going back, unless the science changes. So the question is no longer: Is it a problem? or Should we do anything? but: What (the hell) do we do now?

The Liberals, NDP and Bloc have all come out demanding that the Conservative inplement policy to make Canada “meet Kyoto’s targets.” This is inane political posturing, and on the part of the Liberals, a little hard to stomach. The Liberals presided over the entire Kyoto era, and agreed in 1998 to GHG emissions reductions to 6% below 1990 levels; and in 2002 ratified the Kyoto Protocol (meaning those reductions became “binding”). As the Conservatives keep telling us (rightly) the Liberals signed and ratified the Protocol without putting in (or even proposing) one shred of binding policy, or any kind of serious plan to meet those targets. Under their dismal environmental stewardship, Canada emissions grew to something like 30% higher than the targets they agreed to as ratified (and is, by the way, twice as bad as the US that signed, but never ratified Kyoto). Stephane Dion may have a dog named Kyoto; and he may be serious about the environment, but his party sure as hell has not demonstrated any leadership on climate change in the past, except for ratifying an international treaty that binds Canada to reductions without giving any thought to how those reductions would be met. Which has one positive impact: it highlights in glaring blod face how much work we have to do.

Which is why the Libs/NDP/Bloc calling for the Conservatives to meet Kyoto targets is dishonest and laughable, though it does put the pressure on to come up with concrete policies (which, to their credit, the Conservatives have started to do, for all the criticisms heaped on their Clean Air Act).

To put it in context, to meet our Kyoto targets we would have to do several things (based on 2003 numbers):
1. make all Canadian houses 30% more energy efficient
2. make all Canadian cars 30% more efficient (or, say, make every Canadian take a bike to work two days a week)
3. make every business (including industrial manufacturing, mining, and oil production) 30% more energy efficient (or close them down for 2 days of the week).
4. shut down all thermal power plants (about 30% of electricty production in Canada, the balance being hydro 60% and 12% nuclear) and replace with nukes, or some other renewables, equalling a 4x increase in nukes, or a 2000% increase in renewable contributions, going from roughly 500 MW of wind to 10,000 MW of wind, an investment on the order of 10 billion dollars).

We should be doing these things, but the scale of change to our society needed is truly massive. All areas of energy use must change: housing, transport, food production, manufacturing, urban planning, oil and gas production. To make that happen the empty posturing of the Liberals and NDP and Bloc is perhaps politically useful (if disingenuous), but it does nothing to solve the problem, which transcends party lines.

What IS needed is a massive investment in time and energy to come up with some concrete and serious ways that we can address the issue in a reasonable way without throwing the country on its ear. The sooner we start the better. It would have been nice to start in 1998 when we first signed Kyoto, but for whatever reason - political or practical - that hasn’t happened.

I’m no great fan of the Conservatives, but they are in theory the hard-nosed pragmatic doers, not the political dreamers we lefties are supposed to be. That’s encouraging (though I said the same thing when Bush won the presidency on a CO2-regulation platform in 2000, and look where that got us). So: do the Conservatives have the political will to do something about climate change? Or are they just shifting their rhetoric in response to polls? We’ll find out.

Also, just an asside. What can the world of the web do to help address this problem in a serious, significant way? Anyone have any ideas?

So it’s registered and up and running: http://visiblepolitics.org/

VisiblePolitics is a project to create a complete listing of Canadian federal politicians, parties and ridings, with information about policies, funding, voting records, public statements, press, among other things. VisiblePolitics is a source of information; it is NOT a source of, or forum for advocacy of any kind.

A totally open project if anyone wants to join in to help out. Doesn’t have to be wiki I guess, but I just cant see another way to get the info in so easily. I guess project discussion should happen here: About the Project. There’s a short list of things that could use some help, but I didn’t think very long or hard about it. No idea if this’ll work or not…

The one thing I REALLY want is someone who can help me install/figure out how to use this:
XFeed-RSS Aggregator

HOW YOU CAN HELP:
1. Find out who your Member of Parliament is
2. Visit the site: http://visiblepolitics.org
3. Add some info about your MP (you can copy some stuff from Wikipedia, some from the Canadian Parliament website, and ideally from the mess that is Elections Canada’s financial info site).

OR:
4. Help with layout, wikiness, project direction, and tools (RSS aggregator in the wiki!!)

I just (this minute) registered: visiblepolitics.org … the idea came up in discussions in the CivicAccess.ca mailing list ages ago, and someone should do something about it. Maybe me. Here’s the proposal (anyone want to help?):

A wiki project, with objective to list all Canadian federal politicians (this could happen anywhere, and could be municipal/provincial as well), and include the following information:

-Party
-Picture
-Riding
-Previous experience
-web site
-political experience
-main issues of interest, and their position on such issues (eg. copyright, climate change, iraq, afghanistan, healthcare)
-voting history (maybe a feed from howdtheyvote)
-funders/financial info (and relationship to policies …)
-links to news items about them (could do it automatically by scraping google news, cbc, globeandmail etc).
-links to blog posts about them (could do it automatically by scraping technorati)
-other things?

NOTE: the information should be objective and not editorial. The purpose is not to be an advocacy site, but an information site.

Most of this info is in the public domain, but available only to those who dig diligently. Eg the financial info is buried in difficult to access government docs, and definitely not all this stuff is in the same place. It should be.

Some people I think might be interested in this: Evan, Robin, Paul, Mike L, Tracey, Sylvain. Others too.

The main problem, for everyone on that list, is time. There must be more who are interested.

My experience with this kind of project, is that once it gets up and running, with an active and committed community, it’ll more or less run itself. But to get there there needs to be tons of work on creating the ground rules, policies, fundemental principals, and just encouraging input, keeping things in good order until a healthy group of contributors evolve their own culture and way of doing things. Then it autoregulates.

So getting this set up should be easy enough. Making it work will take lots of interest and input.

(I keep registering domain names, using Julien’s GoDaddy discount codes for projects that pop into my head. Some are commercial sorts of things, but others are more alturistic projects… I’m going to start trying to be more vocal about what some of these project ideas are).

Listening to NYTimes Science Podcast, about the problems facing the grizzly population on some nature reserves in the US. The main problem, according to the scientist interviewed, is changing climate that is affecting bark beetles, affecting something or other which eventually affects the grizzlies (wasn’t listening closely).

So this is an interesting problem with climate change that I hadn’t really thought of previously. As long as climate change happens gradually, we can be fairly confident of nature’s ability to adapt: as the overall climate warms, species will tend to move north to relatively colder climates, to maintain roughly their climate and ecosystems. This should happen across the board, and indeed we are seeing this in the migration patterns and presence of new species in areas where they’d not before been present.

The problem is, however, that human use of land (cities, towns, roads, highways, farming) has penned in natural areas (often set aside by government decree to protect zones of nature). So they tend to be surrounded by blocks to movement.

This means that, on a large scale, as the climate warms (which, whether or not you believe it has anything to do with human activities, is not in doubt), the normal adaptive response of sepcies - moving north - may well be blocked off. So so nature reserves may end up losing significant species, who are not able to migrate anywhere else.

I’ve spent a lot of time and html talking about climate change, but after watching this movie, I have to wonder: could I have been wrong? It really makes me question all those “scientists” and their “consensus” …

Apparently the film was made by some PR firm pretending to be a regular fellow.

Reading the Globe today, about the recent Conservative attacks (including some TV ads, apparently) on Stephane Dion & the Libs.

Michael Ignatieff, Dion’s deputy leader, says: “Instead of doing their job … they spend their time attacking the previous administration.”

Funny, we don’t ever refer to government as “administration” in Canada; but that’s the term they use in the US to refer to the President and his entourage. Ignatieff spent the past 20-odd years in the US, mostly at Harvard, which probably explains his usage; “Previous government” is what most people here would say.

The parliamentary system is very different from the US approach to government, and there’s an interesting reflection in the language. What’s the difference between referring to a “government” and an “administration”? Proposal: there is a direct connection between government and governed, an understanding that the “government” has a responsibility to the people. “Administration” seems at once more beurocratic, more distant, and more powerful. The Administration administers their policies in the best interest of the country; while the Government implements policy on behalf of the population.

I am not sure. We certainly have a very different relationship with our government here: there is not the sense of sacred awe for the PM’s office that is attached to the Presidency. Part of this has to do with the power of the posts, and the countries they represent: the US is the most powerful country in the world and we are little pipsqueaks. But still, there is cultural thing as well. I have always been baffled by the sense of almost religious devotion to the concept of the President in the US (the person becomes an abstract idea, and so floats above the common citizen). In Canada, we tend to think of our Prime Minster as that guy in Ottawa who’s got the job of running the country right now, and no more. Maybe this is the effect of the Parliamentary system, where the PM is forced to answer questions from Opposition MPs in Parliament all the time, often pretty aggressive questions, often televised on the news. Not so in the US.

So to Mr. Ignatieff: please use the word Government, and not Administration. I prefer to be governed than administered to.

According to a recent Globe & Mail poll, suddenly, strangely, climate change has become the most important issue for the majority of Canadians (climate change topped the list for 26% of Canadians, followed by health & security). A curious and surprising event, perhaps an interesting result of the democratic system.

When the Liberals (as a centrist/left party, theoretically more enviromentally friendly than the right wing Conservatives) were in power, they did NOTHING on climate change. No policy, no effective strategy, no concrete action, and no results, except a 30% increase in CO2 emissions. But when the Liberals were in power, the official oposition was the Conservatives, right wing, oil-based, and hostile to policies addressing climate change (which will have a big impact on the oil industry and energy-intensive business). So agressive climate action on the part of the Libs would have resulted in strong opposition from the Conservatives. So the Libs did nothing.

Now, the Conservatives are in power, and they just got slaughtered (by the Libs, Bloc and NDP, and public opinion) for their weak stand on climate change in their recent Clean Air Bill (tho, in their defense, at least they tabled serious policies/laws with actual impacts on industry: the Libs never did). Stephane Dion is leading the charge, and in all the hooplah, climate change lands at the forefront of issues in the mind of Canadians. Harper shuffles his deck, and climate change becomes the Conservatives shiny new focus.

So, strike one up for Minority government as a good way to get things done that people actually want: those who pull the strings in power (the Conservatives) are forced to adjust their policies according to pressures from the other side of the spectrum. Which, theoretically at least, is a good way to ensure balanced government…And one hopes, a step in the direction of taking climate change seriously as a problem.