The writ has dropped and Canadians are heading to the polls soon. Digital rights issues are going to struggle to get any attention.
It’s official: Canadian’s are going into a general election. The election is going to be a rather short one with election day set for April 28 – so a little more than a month from now.
The election itself is setting itself to be as crummy as it is important. With Mark Carney taking the helm of the governing Liberal party, Carney has made major strides in pulling the entire political to the right. This thanks in part to the fact that Carney is banging the “PIPELINES PIPELINES PIPELINES” drum while rolling back climate change policies such as carbon pricing. This despite the fact that getting Canada off of its hardcore dependence on fossil fuels would be a much better strategy to strengthen Canadian independence. After all, solar and wind are renewable resources that won’t help burn the planet to a crisp – and both and more are available in abundance if the Canadian government bothered to even try to harness that power. At any rate, Carney is basically telling the parties left leaning supporters to beat it because their more interested in the concerns of right wing Albertan’s more than anything else.
On the other side is the Conservative party headed up by Pierre Poilievre who is on a campaign to make Canada great again – this while also sheepishly trying to pretend to dislike his idol, Donald Trump while courting anti-science voices and swastika clad extremists.
Then there is the NDP who, after spending the entire term sucking up to Trudeau, is desperately trying to pretend that they are anything other than an unofficial wing of the Liberal party. It’s going to be difficult considering how much they ditched so many of their own principles along the way. As a result, Jagmeet Singh spent the last week or so digging through the trash to try and retrieve the NDP principles as if they actually mattered to him the whole time.
Then there is the Bloc headed up by Yves-François Blanchet. A party who is desperately trying to hide their separatist ambitions in a closet with the doors refusing to fully close. This while the party scrambles to find anything at all that would define them for this election.
Finally, there is the Green Party headed up by Jonathan Pedneault and Elizabeth May. It’s a party that finds itself with the all too familiar problem of being able to make enough noise so that Canadian’s will actually hear them over the noise of the rest of the election. Not helping matters is a media establishment who could care less about covering what they have to say and pretending that they don’t really exist and that images are there only because of some unwritten legal obligation.
Of course, this election has changed dramatically compared to just four months ago. Canada is faced with a fascist senile psychopath currently running the US who is hell bent on erasing Canada off the face of the Earth. The new dynamic has changed a bunch of the political dynamics. The Liberal party has gone from watching their political fortunes get flushed down the toilet over their mishandling of things to a party seemingly poised to take on the Trump invasion. The Conservative party who watched their political fortunes rise due to ignorance of what the party really stands for got their momentum wiped out after their American flag hugging leader, who spent years bashing Canada by declaring the country “broken”, had to awkwardly pivot yet again and be seen as being pro-Canadian for a change (all the while praying that no one noticed all of this anti-Canadian sentiment). This while other political parties scrambled to figure out how to distinguish themselves while pushing back against the threat south of the border.
As a result, this election stands to be as pivotal as it is seemingly destined to be a crummy one.
While Canadians are rightfully worried about the American push to annex Canada, there are a bunch of other issues they are facing. That includes the cost of living (i.e. the cost of food and other bills), the desert-like conditions of the job landscape, housing prices that are completely unaffordable, the fact that every year, the Canadian landscape catches fire due to out of control climate change every Summer, and a whole stack of other issues. As a result, many of the practical issues are going to struggle to bubble beneath the political surface of this election – issues that are important in their own right.
As a result of all of that, the oxygen for digital rights, at least as far as today is concerned, is going to get completely sucked out in favour of other issues. It’s not as though the issues aren’t important. They are. The problem is trying to ensure enough noise is made that politician’s hear the legitimate concerns.
One of the major issues is privacy reform. As we earlier noted, the last time major privacy laws were updated, the major record labels were in the process of suing Napster, Jean Chrétien and Bill Clinton were running Canada and the US respectively, and the Compact Disc (CD) was a popular format for listening music on. That is not an exaggeration. The fact that this law hasn’t been updated to reflect modern reality after all of this time is a pretty epic fail on the Canadian government’s part (and that crosses party lines).
The fact that Canadian privacy laws are farcically outdated was punctuated in 2018 when Europe passed the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), ushering, as the European’s called it, a new era for respect for people’s privacy. What’s more, the GDPR, even with its flaws, represented a new golden standard for other countries around the world to follow. The need for such a law was made abundantly clear when a major problem appeared – the law was actually too successful. By 2020, the organizations enforcing the law received an estimated 160,000 cases. This as the organizations had to scramble to hire enough people just to keep up with the unexpectedly massive volume of complaints and incidences. As a result, the law pulled in hundreds of millions of euro’s from fines by that point in time. If there ever was a case that major privacy reforms are needed, that certainly proved the point beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Yet, despite the insanely successful law making headlines all over the world, the Canadian government basically spent their time naval gazing and slow walking privacy reform. This while every time their was a major security incident that punctuated the need for such reforms, the Canadian government repeatedly hit the snooze button on the matter before rolling back over and sleeping on this important issue. Now that the election was called, privacy reform has officially died on the orderpaper.
Over top of that is the credibility and financial crisis faced by the media sector. This thanks to the notorious Online News Act (which is now the law of the land). The law itself was passed based on the ridiculous lies including “hosting links is stealing” and “Facebook depends on Canadian news links for their survival”. After the terribel link tax law was passed, Meta, as warned, dropped Canadian news links across their Facebook and Instagram, causing an estimated yearly loss of $230 million. Faced with the extinction of the entire news sector on their watch, the Liberal party folded to Google and handed everything they asked for to them and called it a “deal”. While desperate link tax supporters pretended that the $100 million per year deal represented a win (and that price tag is technically optimistic thanks to existing deals being rolled into that amount), this still represented a massive loss to the sector that was so big, the media sector found themselves completely reliant of government bailouts to sustain them.
While the situation was a huge and predictable mess (that we repeatedly warned about through basic common sense over the years), the situation risks going even further out of control. This thanks to Poilievre and the Conservative party vowing to pull the rug out from under the media outlets by “defunding” the news organizations including the CBC. This while rescinding the Online News Act (which does need to be rescinded) and ensuring that news organizations have as little time to recover as humanly possible. The Liberal party, meanwhile, isn’t much better as they are content with just keeping this horrible law that caused these problems in place and ensuring that the only reason news organizations survive is with government bailout money. As a result, the government will continue to ensure that they have a firm grip on the newfound leash they have on news organizations.
Another problem is the still impending shoe that’s going to drop on online creators thanks to the Online Streaming Act which is also a law that has passed. Indeed, the CRTC is currently working through the process of implementing this horrendous law, so this does survive the election as well. The Act would ensure that creators would have their works downranked on platform in favour of government certified speech. Many online creators rightfully feared that it would negatively impact their access to Canadian audiences for the simple reason that they aren’t officially recognized by the Canadian government. Such a law would have profound implications to free speech rights and the ability to build a small business on content creation. The Conservatives have said in the past that they would repeal this law while the Liberals are proud to screw over Canadian creators.
All of this isn’t even getting into the issues surrounding AI, how small businesses can form in the realm of the internet, broadband access to rural and indigenous communities, the monopolistic reality of the telecommunications sector in Canada, the sky high prices for internet and cellular access, and a broad range of other issues thrown in. Many of these issues appear to be issues that the government really doesn’t give a flying fuck about, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are actually quite important.
All of these issues are extremely important and are tasks that need to be dealt with. The problem is that thanks to Canada’s very existence being under threat and so many other issues not directly related to digital rights and technology struggling to get some attention, it’s going to be very difficult to push these issues to the forefront in this election. Maybe there will be a surprising brief breakthrough somewhere along the line, but who knows?
In the mean time, I’ll do my best to follow the election. The goal is to, among other things, offer a rundown of the different party platforms looking through the lens of digital rights. I did this in 2021 and 2019, so my hope is to be able to do this for 2025 as well – even if it’s likely to be another sorry state of affairs in the end.
plus side is bills like s-210 are now officially dead
This is true… and somehow, I forgot that when I was writing the article. Yeah, Age Verification has formally died on the orderpaper as well and that should at least be counted as a win.