Quotulatiousness

June 26, 2012

The “Draft Andrew Coyne” movement

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

I’ve met Andrew Coyne. We had a pleasant chat about political matters a few years ago (although I was one of dozens of Toronto-area bloggers he talked with that night: I doubt he remembers me). I often agree with his writings (and even when I don’t, he’s usually quotable). But how would he fare as a candidate for the Liberal leadership? Abacus ran the numbers:

Nationally, most Canadians told us they didn’t know enough about Mr. Coyne to say whether they had a favourable or unfavourable impression of him. Sixty-four percent were not sure of their opinion while 15% said they had a favourable impression while 21% had an unfavourable impression. Unfortunately for Mr. Coyne, the percentage of respondents who had “very unfavourable” was higher than those who had a “very favourable” impression of him (9% very unfavourable vs. 3% very favourable).

Nonetheless, there are “pockets” of Coynemania out there.

  • Men are slightly more likely to have a favourable impression of him than women (men 18% favourable, women 12% – women were also much more likely to be unsure).
  • There was no significant age difference although older Canadians (no surprisingly) were more likely to be aware of Mr. Coyne.
  • Regionally, he is more popular in Manitoba and Saskatchewan (25% favourable) than in other regions of the country. He is a tough sell in Quebec where his favourable rating is a mere 8%.
  • Considering his occupation and the audience likely to read and watch him, it is no surprise that respondents with a university degree were most aware and favourable to Mr. Coyne. 24% of those with a bachelor’s degree and 29% of those with a post-graduate degree had a favourable impression of the National Post columnist.
  • He is also more likely to be viewed favourably by those who live in urban communities (urban 18% favourable, suburban 13% favourable, rural 12% favourable).
  • Mr. Coyne is also viewed more favourable by those who own stocks, bonds, or mutual funds: 20% favourable vs. 10% among those who don’t own those kinds of investments.
  • Finally, there isn’t a significant partisan difference. Those who voted Liberal in 2011 are only slightly more likely to view him positively than NDP and CPC voters but the differences are marginal. He is a post-partisan candidate!

I don’t know if he’s actually interested in a political career, but he’d at least be a different kind of candidate than the Liberals have had in decades. I’ve never voted Liberal in my life, but I could imagine voting for a Liberal if Andrew Coyne was the Liberal leader. He appears to actually believe in smaller government and free markets — which is why he’d never be able to run as a Conservative. He’s on the record as being almost libertarian in his views on individual rights (especially on Nanny State issues) — which is why he couldn’t run as a New Democrat.

It’s not clear whether there are any members of today’s Liberal Party of Canada who could cope with a classical liberal as leader. But it would create a viable third choice in federal politics: that’s worth a lot in my books.

Update: There’s a Twitter hashtag for the movement: #coyne4lpc, and Jesse Helmer points out that there’s a Facebook group, too:

Update, the second: Apparently Andrew Coyne is getting into the swing of being a big-time politician, having already fired his first campaign manager:

Sacrificing relations with your top trading partner for domestic political reasons

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

In Foreign Affairs, Derek H. Burney and Fen Osler Hampson outline the sad state of the trading relationship between Canada and the United States:

Permitting the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline should have been an easy diplomatic and economic decision for U.S. President Barack Obama. The completed project would have shipped more than 700,000 barrels a day of Albertan oil to refineries in the Gulf Coast, generated tens of thousands of jobs for U.S. workers, and met the needs of refineries in Texas that are desperately seeking oil from Canada, a more reliable supplier than Venezuela or countries in the Middle East. The project posed little risk to the landscape it traversed. But instead of acting on economic logic, the Obama administration caved to environmental activists in November 2011, postponing until 2013 the decision on whether to allow the pipeline.

Obama’s choice marked a triumph of campaign posturing over pragmatism and diplomacy, and it brought U.S.-Canadian relations to their lowest point in decades. It was hardly the first time that the administration has fumbled issues with Ottawa. Although relations have been civil, they have rarely been productive. Whether on trade, the environment, or Canada’s shared contribution in places such as Afghanistan, time and again the United States has jilted its northern neighbor. If the pattern of neglect continues, Ottawa will get less interested in cooperating with Washington. Already, Canada has reacted by turning elsewhere — namely, toward Asia — for more reliable economic partners.

[. . .]

In Afghanistan, Canada is now rapidly scaling back its substantial commitment to the military mission, thanks to the United States’ increasingly erratic, if not embarrassing, direction. Canada has spent billions on the war and lost over 150 soldiers, proportionately more than any other ally, but has received no tangible dividend for its support on bilateral or multilateral issues of concern to it. Canada also participated in NATO’s mission in Libya — where a Canadian, Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, commanded military operations. Canada has no tangible interests of any kind in Afghanistan or Libya. Its participation in those countries, proportionately larger than any other ally, was intended primarily to strengthen the partnership with the United States on the theory that solid multilateral commitments would engender more productive bilateral relations. That proved not to be the case.

Update: Matt Gurney wonders if the palpable lack of reaction by Canadians to the laundry list of “slights” might possibly indicate that Canada is finally “growing up”:

You can’t say the essay is wrong. From Keystone XL to Buy America provisions in the stimulus packages developed by Congress, the U.S. has found occasion over the last few years to irritate Canada. But notably absent has been the kind of heated Canadian rhetoric you’d hear as recently as the Paul Martin era during the softwood lumber dispute. Nor does the Canadian public seem to be demonstrating much of the reflexive anti-Americanism that has always been a strange part of our national character.

We’ve long insisted that the U.S. treat us as a separate and sovereign country, and yet react with wounded outrage when they treat us as a separate country. Go figure. But given that Burney and his co-author are right, and America has repeatedly slighted Canada … and if we can agree that Canadians don’t seem particularly freaked out about it … good Lord, could it be that Canadians are, gulp, growing up?

June 25, 2012

QotD: Working with the PQ

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:44

For some reason it is being treated as news that the Prime Minister said he would work with a Parti Quebecois government in the unfortunate circumstance of a PQ victory.

What else was he supposed to say? The PQ has held power several times since Rene Levesque’s first victory in 1976. It’s a democratic country, and provinces can elect whoever they want. Ottawa doesn’t have a choice whether it wants to work with the victor or not. Harper worked with Danny Williams — well, he tried, anyway — when the Newfoundland caudillo declared himself the supreme power of El Rocko Independanto and waged a personal war against his Canadian oppressors. Pauline Marois, the PQ leader (at least until the next revolt) can’t be half as annoying as Danny was.

Kelly McParland, “Why is it news that Stephen Harper would recognize a PQ government?”, National Post, 2012-06-25

No innovation can survive the bureaucratic process

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:44

A story that won’t surprise anyone who has ever worked in a large bureaucracy is still eye opening — even Scott Adams’ Dilbert characters have it easier to get their suggestions implemented:

It was the summer of 2010, and the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) was about to launch the Employee Innovation Program — kind of like the employee suggestion drop box by the water cooler.

Except, nothing like it at all, as TBS employee Anna Bevilacqua was about to discover.

[. . .]

The employees who answered the call for creativity had to follow several rules, including: An employee could not make a suggestion without his or her boss’ approval; and proposals that might lead to a change in TBS policy would be rejected.

Managers tracked the proposals using a spreadsheet that noted the date and exact time a proposal was received, whether an individual or team of workers made the submission and the date it was received by a committee of three TBS managers.

The program designed to cut waste was taking shape. A bloated, forbidding shape.

[. . .]

Four managers formed a “Sub-Committee for Initial Triage” to conduct a “pre-screening” of the proposals. The selection process would be guided by a flow chart with text inside parallelograms and rectangles connected by arrows.

[. . .]

Bevilacqua needed to complete an “implementation framework” document. If she failed to “clearly define objectives, benefits, deliverables, exclusions, assumptions, responsibilities, estimated costs and timelines,” if her plan did not identify possible “slippage in target dates,” if it did not use a “risk log” or a “risk mapping approach,” it could die in Phase Two.

She and the other applicants were warned: “A wrong plan is worse than having no plan at all.”

[. . .]

The vetting and revising and perfecting continued. Each surviving proposal was screened by the Treasury Board’s chief information officer, deputy chief financial officer and chief financial officer.

[. . .]

The months of meetings, memos and emails confirmed her idea was a no-brainer. Her plan would be put into action.

A congratulatory note was vetted by three people before it was sent to her.

Then, the extensive trail of TBS paper — nearly 550 pages obtained by the Star through Access to Information legislation — ends in late 2010.

The employee who suggested this had already retired before the suggestion was implemented — and it was implemented outside the suggestion program anyway. The final line of the article sums it up perfectly: “Not one employee has received a cash award.”

H/T to Andrew Coyne:

https://twitter.com/acoyne/statuses/217238022482169857

If NAFTA was real free trade “it wouldn’t contain 22 chapters of rules and regulations”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Free trade is the way to go, if you want to benefit the consumer. Producers don’t benefit as much: it increases their competition and means that bad producers are more likely to go out of business. Protectionists always rely on the visible “damage” that free trade does to these bad producers and minimize or completely ignore the (larger) benefits to consumers.

Jesse Kline explains why moving toward freer trade will benefit most Canadians, and the drawbacks will be to those who are least able or least willing to face real competition:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced this week that Canada will join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks, along with he United States, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, Mexico and, we hope, Japan. Some say this will be a historic free trade deal that will extend the NAFTA zone into emerging Asian markets; others believe the United States is using the process to impose its own draconian copyright regime on its trading partners, while protecting key industries, such as auto manufacturers. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

The problem is that the agreement is being negotiated under a veil of heavy secrecy. And if rumours that the negotiated sections of the agreement already contain over 1,000 pages prove to be correct, it is certain that the TPP will not give us anything resembling real free trade. Indeed, the Canadian public has little idea about what we are getting ourselves into, or how much the government knew about what it was agreeing to. Based on a leaked chapter of the agreement, it looks as though we just signed up for an entirely new copyright regime, a mere hours after the government passed its own made-in-Canada solution.

To the government’s credit, it is simultaneously pursuing trade deals with the European Union and China. But in these times of global economic uncertainty, we need to see the benefits of trade sooner, rather than later. Free trade leads to higher standards of living, and benefits society through lower prices and increased variety of consumer goods; it forces domestic industries to be more efficient. Fortunately, there is another way to achieve these benefits: The Canadian government could open our borders to the world by unilaterally removing all our trade barriers.

June 24, 2012

Paul Wells: What is behind the easy ride for Thomas Mulcair?

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells ponders what could be preventing Stephen Harper from bringing down the hammer on Thomas Mulcair the way he did on Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, and Bob Rae:

For six years Stephen Harper’s opponents have wondered when he would stop spending millions of dollars to whale the tar out of them. Apparently the answer was that he’d stop as soon as his opponent stopped being Liberal.

[. . .]

The surprise is that Harper is not yet using his old tricks to change it.

His old tricks would consist of a heavy, sustained advertising campaign against the man who has risen highest against him. That’s what he did against Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff and then, three months ago, against Bob Rae. Now, one of these things is not like the others. In minority government parliaments where an election always loomed, Dion and Ignatieff were present dangers. But going after Rae looks like a concession to instinct—and a mistake. The money spent has been lost, the neutralized enemy is now gone, and if the Liberals manage to find somebody more impressive to lead them, Harper will wish he’d let Rae limp to the next election.

Meanwhile, apart from the odd bit of ineffectual Conservative sass-talking, Mulcair rises unhindered. Why? Three possibilities. Maybe Harper is lost in the face of superior opposition. Maybe his minions are preparing ads that will take Mulcair apart in 2013.

Or maybe Harper is happy to see Mulcair rise. The Liberals, who governed Canada for most of the 20th century while the Conservatives didn’t, are left squeezed from both sides but too stubborn to disappear. The left-of-Conservative vote remains split. With the Liberals dominant in the centre, Conservative parties won three elections between 1963 and 2004. With the NDP dominant on the left, Conservatives would win more. Harper doesn’t control all of Canadian politics or anywhere close, but if he left a landscape like that behind him, he could retire a happy man.

Conrad Black: Don’t blame Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

In his weekly column at the National Post, Conrad Black refutes Jose Manuel Barroso (who appeared to refer to Prime Minister Harper as a “nobody” recently) that the European crisis was made in North America:

Stephen Harper is absolutely correct to refuse to contribute to World Bank assistance to Europe. The reward for the consistently intelligent fiscal management of Canada by both governing parties for more than 20 years should not be to assist rich countries that ignored our example and the warnings of their own wiser statesmen until the wheels came off the Euro-fable in all four directions.

The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, made the point at the G20 meeting in Mexico last week — in, as he thought, a reply to Harper’s comments on Europe’s self-generated economic and fiscal problems — that the current economic crisis originated in North America. That is not entirely true. It originated in the ill-starred fiscal and social policies of most European countries, and the tinder was set alight by bad financial, social, fiscal and regulatory policy in the United States.

Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, and even Gerhard Schroeder, as well as a number of Austrian, Dutch, and Scandinavian leaders all warned that Europe could not continue to guarantee employment to all job-holders as a steadily shrinking percentage of Europeans worked and the public sector share of GDP rose, infused with the steroids of over-bountiful social democracy. Most countries of Europe today are like the little pigs who didn’t build their homes from weather-proof materials.

Furthermore, it is no rejoinder to Mr. Harper to complain about the Americans. It would be no less logical to blame the floundering of Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario on booming Texas, since both jurisdictions are in North America. In the same line of reasoning, I would like Newfoundland’s involvement in the drug wars in Mexico fully examined.

June 23, 2012

Trade deals as mutual disarmament pacts

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Food — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:27

It’s a very sad commentary that the only way the current “pro-business” federal government can even consider scrapping our supply management monopolies is because “our trading partners forced us to”:

If the government were of a mind to get rid of supply management — it swears it is not — that is perhaps the only basis on which it could: our trading partners made us do it. Certainly it would not dream of doing so otherwise. Such is the power of the supply management lobby, especially dairy, that a suffocating consensus has settled over the issue, of a kind rarely seen in a democracy. Consensus is not even the word. Every party strives to outdo the others in the fulsomeness of its support. And not just every party: every member of every party, in every province and at every level of government. It’s quite creepy.

Yet virtually every economist or policy analyst of note agrees that supply management is a disgrace. The primary effect of the quotas — the intended effect — is to drive up the price of these foods, staples of most Canadians’ diets, to two and three times the market price. The burden of these extraordinary price differentials, of course, fall most heavily on the poor, a fact that ought to trouble self-styled “progressives” but evidently doesn’t.

But it isn’t only consumers who pay. Since the quotas are tradeable, the premium over market prices gets capitalized into the value of the quota. The right to a cow’s worth of milk production, for example, runs to about $28,000, meaning a farmer looking to get into the industry faces an initial outlay, for the typical 60-cow farm, in excess of $1.5-million — just for the quota, never mind the cows, the barn and the rest.

June 22, 2012

The War of 1812 “remains the Jan Brady of American conflicts”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

In The Atlantic, Adam Chandler explains why the War of 1812 is an also-ran in the American war popularity contest:

Of the many holes in the American national memory, the War of 1812 may be the most gaping. The war that gave America its national anthem, birthed Uncle Sam, and anointed four future presidents as war heroes remains the Jan Brady of American conflicts for good reason: not only was it book-ended by two vastly more significant wars, but its causes weren’t sexy, its conclusions were muddy, and its most famous battle took place after peace was declared. And so 1812 remains the only American war known by its date. (Even Congress refused to establish a bicentennial commission, leaving the commemorations up to the states.)

But as history buffs, state and local governments, and (doubtlessly) some zealous reenactors begin the mark the conflict that started on this date in 1812, there is much that modern-day Americans can learn from this clumsy moment in the nation’s childhood.

[. . .]

Congress finally declared war on Britain, with impeccably bad timing: Just a few days earlier, the British foreign minister had decided to rescind the policy towards American trade that had caused all of the hullabaloo to begin with. But word did not reach America in time, and ill-equipped U.S. forces fecklessly staggered into Canada to show the British not to mess with American trade (and to possibly snag some of Canada’s sweet farm land). Aided by a confederacy of Native Americans, Canada mostly repelled the invasion and won a large number of battles.

The most ridiculous moment of all featured the United States surrendering the entire city of Detroit without firing a shot in defense. “It was the most colossal screw-up of the war,” Alan Taylor, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian explained in an interview. “And it comes at the worst possible time in the first major invasion. The Madison administration was counting on winning a quick victory in invading Upper Canada from the western end via Detroit to render the war popular. And instead, he got a catastrophic defeat.”

However, most Americans, if they remember it at all, recall the scene that inspired the writing of the national anthem or the (technically post-war) battle at New Orleans:

“All of those are events that come in the last months of the war when the British were mounting a counterattack against the United States.” Taylor explained. “They are all events that lead Americans to think they were on the defensive in the war and that the British were the aggressor. What’s lost sight of is that the United States declared the war and conducted the first two years of the war primarily as an invasion of Canada. And so Americans don’t remember the battles in Canada because they went so badly for the United States.”

June 21, 2012

Canada’s recession, in one Tweet

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Europe, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

Conservative government, but only in name

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Andrew Coyne on the palpable absurdity of the “Harper government” stonewalling the very office it insisted on setting up for oversight of government spending:

The reality is that the PBO has been given anything but the “free and timely access” that Parliament demanded. Time and time again, rather, he has been given the back of the government’s hand — stonewalled by the bureaucrats, ridiculed by the politicians, and lied to by both.

When, for example, the Department of National Defence at last consented to share the cost of the F-35 fighter jet purchase with the PBO, it provided only the most rudimentary figures, without any indication of how they were arrived at. These figures, on which the last election was fought, were later shown to understate the true costs of the jets by at least 40% and probably 60%, in violation not only of Treasury Board rules but the department’s own stated policies. For the crime of having been right, the PBO was subjected to a volley of ministerial insults, while the department pretends to this day not to have understood the office’s clearly stated requests.

More recently, the PBO (Kevin Page is his name) has been trying to get government departments to explain how they plan to achieve the $5.2-billion in largely unspecified “efficiencies” pencilled into the 2012 budget. How much of these, Page wanted to know, would be achieved by reducing costs, and how much by reducing services? How would federal employment be affected in either event? In other words, what did the budget mean by “efficiencies”? This would seem useful information for Members of Parliament considering their vote, assuming — you’ll indulge me here — MPs do indeed consider their votes.

Power corrupts, as Lord Acton reminds us, and the discipline that Stephen Harper enforced over his unruly caucus on their way to winning a minority government is now extended to the majority he enjoys today. What affronted him about Jean Chretien’s imperial ways now seems quite normal and unexceptional. Power does indeed corrupt.

June 19, 2012

EU’s Barroso spurns advice from Canadian “nobody”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

The EU is not taking Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s advice gracefully. In fact, they’re not taking it at all:

Maybe it was the 35 C heat here on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. Maybe it was the pressure of the crisis he faces back home.

Whatever it was, when I asked European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso here Monday why Canada should risk its financial good name to bail out European banks, Barroso blew a diplomatic gasket.

“We are extremely open and we are engaging our partners but we are certainly not coming here to receive lessons from nobody,” he harrumphed.

That “nobody” is apparently our PM. How dare a mere Canadian politician offer criticism of the European Union, the greatest political achievement of mankind?

In Barroso’s eyes, the fiscal crisis in Europe is not even Europe’s fault. It is the victim in all of this. For that reason, the rest of the world ought bail it out, even though, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper has noted, the so-called euro area of 27 countries is the single largest and wealthiest economic unit in the entire world.

Harper has told Barroso just that, saying that if Canada — or anyone else — is going to kick in to a US$430 billion pool administered by the International Monetary Fund, then Europe is going to have to release the chokehold it has had on the IMF.

And of course, no negotiation with the EU is complete without some hard-to-misunderstand threats from the Eurocrats:

But Barroso wasn’t finished. In the middle of his tirade, he trotted out a thinly veiled threat that a Canada-EU free-trade deal was at risk unless Harper comes to his senses and sends Canadian cash to the continent.

“We are trying to conclude an important agreement on trade with Canada. Why? Because all the other parts of the world look at Europe as a source of possible growth for them. And, in fact, they also have an interest. The sooner the situation is stabilized in Europe, the better for them,” he said.

June 18, 2012

The wins and losses in the C-11 copyright reform bill

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Michael Geist on the good and the bad aspects of bill C-11 which will probably pass third reading today in the House of Commons and be sent to the Senate for approval:

There is no sugar-coating the loss on digital locks. While other countries have been willing to stand up to U.S. pressure and adopt a more flexible approach, the government, led by Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore on the issue, was unwilling to compromise despite near-universal criticism of its approach. It appears that once Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the call for a DMCA-style approach in early May 2010, the digital lock issue was lost. The government heard that the bill will hurt IP enforcement, restrict access for the blind, disadvantage Canadian creators, and harm consumer rights. It received tens of thousands of comments from Canadians opposed to the approach and ran a full consultation in which digital locks were the leading concern. The NDP, Liberals, and Green Party proposed balanced amendments to the digital lock rules that were consistent with international requirements and would have maintained protection for companies that use them, but all were rejected. [. . .]

Since the Conservatives took power in 2006, there were effectively four bills: the Pre-Bill C-61 bill that was to have been introduced by Jim Prentice in December 2007 but was delayed following public pressure, Bill C-61 introduced in June 2008, and Bill C-32/C-11, which was introduced in June 2010 (and later reintroduced in September 2011). The contents of December 2007 bill was never released, but documents obtained under the Access to Information Act provide a good sense of what it contained (a call was even scheduled on the planned day of introduction between Prentice and U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins to assure the U.S. that digital locks were the key issue and would not be altered). This chart highlights many of the key issues and their progression over the years as the public became increasingly vocal on copyright:

Issue Pre-Bill
C-61 (2007) 		Bill C-61
(2008) 		Bill C-11
(2012)
Fair Dealing Expansion No No Yes (education, parody, satire)
Format Shifting No Limited (only photographs, book,
newspaper, periodical, or videocassette) 		Yes (technology neutral, no
limit on number of copies, includes network storage, and no reference
to contractual overrides)
Time Shifting No Limited (no network PVRs,
Internet communications) 		Yes (C-61 limitations removed)
Backup Copies No No Yes
User Generated Content Exception No No Yes
Statutory Damages Cap No Limited ($500 cap for
downloading) 		Yes (Max of $5000 for all
non-commercial infringement)
Enabler enforcement provision No No Yes
Internet Publicly Available
Materials Exception for Education 		Yes Yes Yes
Public Performance in Schools No No Yes
Technology Neutral Display
Exception in Schools 		No No Yes
Limited Distance Learning
Exception 		Yes Yes Yes
Limited Digital Inter-Library
Loans 		Yes Yes Yes
Notice-and-Notice Yes Yes Yes
Notice-and-Takedown No No No
Three Strikes//Website Blocking No No No
Internet Location Tool Provider
Safe Harbour 		Yes Yes Yes
Broadcaster Ephemeral Change No No Yes
Expanded Private Copying Levy No No No
Commissioned Photograph Change Yes Yes Yes
Alternate Format Reproduction No No Yes

[. . .]

Public engagement on copyright continuously grew in strength – from the Bulte battle in 2006 to the Facebook activism in 2007 to the immediate response to the 2008 bill to the 2009 copyright consultation to the 2010 response to Bill C-32. While many dismissed the role of digital activism on copyright, the reality is that it had a huge impact on the shape of Canadian copyright. The public voice influenced not only the contents of the bill, but the debate as well with digital locks the dominant topic of House of Commons debate and media coverage until the very end. Bill C-11 remains a “flawed but fixable” bill that the government refused to fix, but that it is a significantly better bill than seemed possible a few years ago owes much to the hundreds of thousands of Canadians that spoke out on copyright.

June 17, 2012

“For the weekend, I’ll have to be a turncoat”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

For some obscure reason (hint: because they didn’t win) American re-enactors are much less fond of War of 1812 re-enactments than Canadians:

When the first big battle of the War of 1812 is re-enacted this fall, the U.S. 1st Artillery regiment will mount an ear-splitting barrage. The Yanks will point their cannons at British redcoats across the Niagara River in Canada. They will wear blue. They will curse King George.

Unlike 200 years ago, they will all be Canadians.

Many Americans aren’t that into the War of 1812 — not like Canadians, anyway — so the latter often play the former in re-enactments along the international border here.

“For the weekend, I’ll have to be a turncoat,” says John Sek, 60, an English-born Canadian who will play a U.S. Army gunnery captain in the Battle of Queenston Heights. “There isn’t the same interest in the war on your side.”

To grossly generalize: Canadians, whose forebears helped repulse several U.S. invasions in 1812, regard the war that began 200 years ago Monday as a crucible of national identity. For them, its bicentennial is a big deal.

June 16, 2012

Explosion 1812: “one of the biggest explosions that had ever been witnessed in North America”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

I may have to make some time to watch TV tomorrow:

This month’s 200th anniversary of the start of the War of 1812 will be marked with a colossal bang: the television premiere of Explosion 1812, a new documentary that argues the intentional detonation of Upper Canada’s main ammunition supply at present-day Toronto in April 1813 — described as “one of the biggest explosions that had ever been witnessed in North America” — is a greatly underappreciated moment in history that was key to thwarting the U.S. conquest of Canada.

The two-hour, Canadian-made film — to be aired by History Television on June 17, the eve of the bicentennial of the formal U.S. declaration of war on June 18, 1812 — recounts how retreating British-Canadian troops at Fort York blew up the colony’s “grand magazine” along the Lake Ontario shore as American forces closed in on Upper Canada’s capital on April 27, 1813.

[. . .]

U.S. soldiers outraged at what they considered an act of extreme treachery — even a war crime because of their comrades’ fatal proximity to the explosion — went on a vengeful rampage in the captured capital, terrorizing the civilian population and pillaging residents’ property.Ê

Those actions, in turn, prompted a similar assault on Washington, D.C., in 1814, when the U.S. capital was stormed by British and Canadian troops who set fire to the White House.

Among the U.S. casualties at York was the famed commander of the invasion force, Gen. Zebulon Pike, an early explorer of the American West whose death — his chest crushed by falling rock from the blasted armoury — would be exploited to rally patriotic sentiment in the U.S. for the duration of the war.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress