The Net and Canadian elections
p2p news / p2pnet: The Net is becoming the chosen mode of communications for many people around the world. Increasingly, they’re by-passing the often biased corporate media, instead using blogs, personal pages and news sites to share information.
With the Canadian elections due on January 23, CIPPIC (Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic), organized a Questions for Canadians web site looking for party positions on copyright law reform, police surveillance powers, telecommunications policy reform, and legislative responses to spam, spyware, ID theft, and other privacy invasions.
"It may be no surprise, but the four main campaigns in the upcoming federal election have largely ignored key internet issues involving individual privacy, free speech, and consumer rights, despite the fact that these issues will no doubt be on the legislative agenda in the coming year," says CIPPIC.
"We’re disappointed", says Philippa Lawson, CIPPIC executive director and general counsel. "While we know that this election was prompted by the sponsorship scandal, and that Canadians are concerned first and foremost with issues such as health care and employment, we expected that all major parties would at least answer our questions.
:The issues we raised are all ones that Parliament will be addressing this year or next."
Smaller parties came back with thoughtful answers, says Lawson, but, "Neither the Conservatives nor the Bloc bothered to respond, while the Liberals provided only vague responses and the NDP didn’t answer the questions we posed.
"Of the parties that stand a chance of electing MPs, the Greens were the only ones to set out clear positions on most of these important issues."
If you’re Canadian, there’s still time to let your MP know what you think, and what you expect of him or her.
Russell McOrmond has organized an auto-contact site designed to make it easy for you to connect with your parliamentary representative.
Go beyond conversations on the blogs to make sure we’re heard during and between elections, he says.
Also See:
Questions for Canadians – Canadian election Net, Tech Q and A, January 10, 2006
January 20th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
After reading the CIPPIC press release about the lack of response, Jack Kapica, writing for the Globe and Mail suggests that, “We’re going to be run by Luddites, no matter who wins the election next week.”.
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/1808
We have a huge education job ahead of us for sure. I don’t know the makeup of the new government yet, but I don’t get the feeling there are 308 of the 1,634 candidates that are qualified to debate on things like digital copyright, Internet, etc.
Our only hope seems to be that there are some open minded people who won’t blindly trust the “experts” that the incumbent industry associations (our political opponents) bring forward.
If you haven’t sent a letter to your candidates yet, please do so. Whoever gets elected will likely keep that contact list handy to contact people in their riding after the election. Please be that contact point into our community that these new MPs will badly need!!!
3 steps to send a letter to your candidates
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/1739
January 21st, 2006 at 3:35 pm
Check out http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8615
“According to a new computer algorithm, Prime Minister Paul Martin, of
the Liberal Party, spins the subject matter of his speeches
dramatically more than Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, and
the New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton.”