The government dug a deep hole for itself with Bills C-11 and C-18 | Hacker News Reader

The government dug a deep hole for itself with Bills C-11 and C-18

theglobeandmail.com

30 pointsnayuki15 comments

I really can’t understand what the end game is here for Canada. The entire mindset of the nation is just resource extraction. Resources from the land, resources from existing dwellings and municipalities, resources from income, borrowing resources from the youth. Nobody just comes out and says “heres the problem and heres the plan”. We just get these absurd solutions to problems 99.999 of the population don’t have.

With a few exceptions, almost nothing stands on its own merit. Sure, Drake, Beiber, and Schitts Creek were good. Just make better things. Write better content. Build sustainable businesses. Look to the future. Set a vision in place. Something.

> I really can’t understand what the end game is here for Canada

This is the liberal party of Canada. They are, ironically, not very liberal on most projects of law and do like to regulate and control many things. For whatever reason they rushed through these bills.

Do you honestly think the issues OP outlines are limited to periods of liberal party rule?

I am no fan of Trudeau, but I think the issues presented are cultural. We aren’t risk takers, we’re rent seekers, and it is found at the heart of every government policy and corporate consolidation.

We’ve become a nation of snowflakes that don’t know how to push ourselves to do anything but pat ourselves on the back for not being American.

> Do you honestly think the issues OP outlines are limited to periods of liberal party rule?

Yes I do. This is a highly federalist party that has a strong history of trying to shape culture through policy and regulation.

>The entire mindset of the nation is just resource extraction.

I've heard Canada described as three mining companies standing on each other wearing an overcoat.

I don't agree that the entire mindset of the nation is just resource extraction. I would say it definitely should be, since that's the obvious thing to do when you have a crap load of resources and highly overpriced/under productive labor pool that can't compete effectively at any of the high skill international jobs for any sustainable length of time. It's more like some of the country has a mindset of doing the obvious thing to improve its wellbeing (i.e. prairies) with the rest of it eyeing ways to extract a living from those places doing the right thing without having to get their own hands dirty (i.e. keeping banking in Toronto, along with head offices for various other oligopolies, or directly through unjust tax transfers). This dichotomy is present inter provincially but also increasingly in the provinces split between city and rural.

Canada used to be a fairly good place to be for digital freedom, encryption, and lax copyright enforcement but it seems like the tides are changing for the worse.

Canada will never have the political might to bend FAANGs to their will, there just isn’t enough money and people and also very little supply chain goes through Canada.

I’m honestly quite sad as a Canadian to see our country’s government squabble over small things which really don’t matter in the big picture while we cannot house our population, we cannot keep our population healthy, and we cannot keep ourselves economically relevant outside of resource extraction and real estate.

It’s not that these are small things, but rather that these (Bill c-18) are nonsensical and harmful initiatives driven by the interests of the telecom companies. Note that they were expected to get 70% off the money from Google and Facebook.

As Coyne wrote, it was a shakedown.

This isn’t misguided priorities, it is political corruption.

Canadians are used to these shakedowns. When it is elevated to the international stage our ministers are shocked that the rest of the world doesn’t bend to their reality distortion fields and blindly acquiesce.

> Ostensibly the amount of the fee was to be left to negotiations between the platforms and the publishers. But if it was not already evident what a sham this was – the negotiations were to be backstopped by that most impartial of arbiters, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission – it became clear with the release of regulations setting a minimum fee of 4 per cent of revenues for linking. Minimum, mind you: There is a floor, but no ceiling.

> Step this way, Bill C-11 – the Online Streaming Act! Where C-18 merely imposes a tax on links with little justification and less possibility of enforcement, C-11 purports to apply Canadian broadcast regulations to the entire internet: not only in Canada, but around the world. The stated reason: to promote Canadian content. The stated target: once again, the big online platforms, this time not Facebook and Google so much as Netflix and Amazon. But Canadian content is not in need of promotion – the internet is awash with it, including on the major platforms, instantly available to anyone who can type “Canada” into a search field.

> Ah, but the government has saved the best for last. Still in the works is yet a third bill: the Online Harms Act....An early draft of the bill, for example, would not only have allowed the authorities to order the deletion of offending material, but would have allowed it to be suppressed even before it appeared. Anyone, that is, who “reasonably fears they could be a target” of “hate propaganda” would have been able to apply to a judge to prevent its publication.

And then one day for no reason at all...

Andrew Coyne is one of the few left with authority and reputation sufficient to give him some independence from his employer (the globe and Mail), so he can write stuff that goes against their financial interests (they get money from c-18).

Unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/hyNZF

Imagine these companies closing down any offices they have in Canada due to C-11 and C-18? Damn that would be funny....

Google/META "sorry we have to close our Canadian Operations and lay off all 33 employees".

On a tangent, I love that this backfired, the whole Canadian Media thing is so corrupt. All 3 Amigo's, Rogers, Bell and Telus (all telco's), during NAFTA 2.0 bought Trudeau and he awarded them "Canadian Media Designation" so they would never have to worry about USA competition ever. Now Canadians can enjoy the highest telco fees in the entire world....

A quick search indicates that google and meta have about 2000 employees each in Canada.

>A quick search indicates that google and meta have about 2000 employees each in Canada.

About 90% of each being non-Canadians who are parked there because they cannot (and probably will not ever) receive a US visa. The remainder is the odd native Canadian who has not moved to the US for family or personal reasons.

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