Jim Prentice on Bill C-61: um, er …
p2pnet news | Politics:- I have blogged in the past about the evolving communication strategy for Industry Minister Jim Prentice and copyright reform.
Just prior to the release of the bill, I posted an “unofficial” backgrounder that noted that Prentice was hoping to shuffle the bill to the committee so that he would not have to deal with it all summer long. True to form, Prentice’s brief responses at this weekend’s Stampede Breakfast suggest that this is precisely the line that he intends to use.
Having had limited success with the “made in Canada” claims and absolute disasters when asked about specifics in the bill (note that Kempton Lam reports that Prentice’s chief of staff Jean-Sebastien Rioux says that people have been “too specific” about the bill’s shortcomings), Prentice is now hoping to simply not answer questions by claiming that there will be an opportunity to debate the bill at committee.
In this exchange with Jan Rubak, Prentice is asked >>>
Question: Canadians have a hundred questions about the Copyright reform bill. Are you going to actually answer them straight-out sometime soon?
Prentice: Well there’ll be opportunity at the Parliamentary committee to debate all of those.
In other words, Prentice does not plan to answer questions about Bill C-61.
Having previously hung up on interviewers, he now hopes to hide behind a committee despite the fact that the bill has not even been referred to committee yet. Canadians should not have to wait months for answers. It is the time for the Minister to stand up and respond to specific concerns about Bill C-61.
Michael Geist
[Geist is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He can be reached by email at mgeist[at]uottawa.ca and is on-line at www.michaelgeist.ca.]
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July 9th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Enought is enought!
We don’t need parasites like Jim Prentice!
Let take this guy tar and feather him and through him out of the governement may be even of Canada!
Message to Prentice:
Prentice! You want to represent crappy multinational corporations of gansters instead of the Canadian people?
Fine! face the consequences then!
People of Canada will retake their governement soon and you might end up in prison for accepting bribery.
Mark my worlds!