Quotulatiousness

March 13, 2012

Yet another straw in the wind on Canada’s F-35 plans

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:56

An article by Murray Brewster, published in the Winnipeg Free Press looks at more signs that Canada may not be as tightly bound to their F-35 purchase plans:

The point man on the F-35 stealth fighter purchase says the Conservative government has not ruled out abandoning the troubled project.

“We have not, as yet, discounted the possibility, of course, of backing out of any of the program,” Julian Fantino associate defence minister, told the Commons defence committee on Tuesday.

He made the comment after a series of pointed questions from both opposition parties.

Fantino said the government is still committed to buying the radar-evading jet, but no contract has been signed.

The Conservatives still believe the high-tech jet is the best choice to replace the aging CF-18s, but the minister suggested they are taking a cautious approach.

None of the other nine allied nations involved in the program has yet withdrawn and the minister said: “We are not.”

[. . .]

In months of questioning in the House of Commons, Fantino has insisted there is no need for a backup plan in case of further delays in the project as the manufacturer works out software and design glitches.

But on Tuesday, he told the committee he was waiting for defence officials to prepare alternate scenarios to the F-35 deal, the so-called Plan B that opposition parties have demanded.

Still no reason to get excited about robopocalypse, says Kelly McParland

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:33

Oh, good. I’m not alone in finding the robocall armageddon to be a bit less than exciting:

I have a confession to make. I have not been following the robocalls “scandal” with all the fervency it calls for.

It’s possible my inability to get excited results from six years … oops, make it seven … of the Liberals leaping to their feet every 18 seconds to accuse the Conservatives of plotting to pervert Canadian values, undermine democracy and display their contempt for the laws of the country. There’s this old morality tale about a kid who cried “wolf” too many times, so when a real wolf showed up, no one believed it any more. Maybe that’s why I have a hard time believing this is the real wolf.

It could also be that I find the premise hard to accept. To wit: a top-level conspiracy of Conservative grandees to steal the election by disrupting the vote, sending voters to incorrect polls or discouraging them from turning up at all. This would indeed be a major scandal if it was true, but think about it: Would a nation-wide exercise in disruptive phone calls have any chance of going undetected? Does anyone really believe (outside the fetid confines of the Toronto Star) that the senior ranks of any sane government would take such an extreme risk going into an election it expected to win anyway?

I could see some local bozos getting it into their heads that robocalling the opposing candidate’s supporters might be a great idea, but your cynicism has to be a lot deeper than mine (which would take some doing) to believe anyone could get to be Prime Minister, or his national campaign chairman, and still be either dumb enough, irresponsible enough or reckless enough to sign on to such a plan

Update, 15 March: In the comments, Saskboy strongly disagrees with my lack of excitement over the robocall scandal, and he’s been covering the story on his blog (that’s one of several posts on the topic).

March 12, 2012

The role of narcissism in calls for military intervention in Syria

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Brendan O’Neill says that one of the driving factors for those demanding military action in Syria is narcissism:

Failed Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff recently made waves with an op-ed in the Financial Times calling for Western intervention in Syria. Revisiting some of the themes of his 1990s writings (Ignatieff made a living championing ‘humanitarian interventionism’ before he led Canada’s Liberal Party to its worst electoral defeat ever), Igantieff said the West should impose a ‘comprehensive quarantine of Syria’ in order to ‘force [Assad] from power’.

Yet the most startling thing about his piece was not its extreme short-term historical amnesia, its ignorance of the disasters unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan following Western meddling, but rather its exhibition of self-regard and self-concern, even of that most malignant form of self-love: narcissism. Ignatieff mentioned his own feelings about what is happening in Homs six times and the possible feelings of the people of Homs themselves only three times. His short op-ed mainly focused on the ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ felt by people like Igantieff — that is, Western observers possessed of a good, caring, Sarajevo-informed ‘international conscience’ — while the ‘fear’ and ‘desperation’ of the people of Homs were given far briefer treatment.

This ratio of 2:1 between Ignatieff’s feelings of guilt and Syrians’ feelings of desperation not only suggests that modern Western interventionists are two times more obsessed with themselves than they are with the victims of foreign conflicts they claim to care so much about — it also reveals that what is really motoring the demands for Western intervention in Syria are the emotional needs of Western observers rather than the practical needs of Syrians. This kind of narcissism is now widespread among those who desperately want the ‘international community’ to intervene in Syria. These people are so amazingly vain that they see the bombing of Syria as a kind of balm for their guilt-ridden consciences, a physical act that might help to make their own emotional turmoil that bit more bearable. Their rallying cry should be: ‘Bomb Syria so that I can sleep at night.’

QotD: Corporate income tax rates

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:05

If you assume that there’s no behavioural response, then each percentage point added to the federal CIT will generate roughly $2b in new revenues. So you’d conclude that the January 1, 2012 reduction in the CIT rate from 16.5% to 15% would reduce revenues by about $3b, and increasing the federal rate from 16.5% back to (say) 24% would increase CIT revenues by some $15b — almost one per cent of GDP.

This is the the sort of answer ‘static analysis’ gives. In a world in which multinationals file 57,000-page tax returns, one can only marvel at the faith in human nature among those who would make policy based on the belief that the only behavioural change on the part of corporations to an increase in CIT rates will be to put larger numbers on the cheques they send to the Receiver-General.

Stephen Gordon, “How much new revenue will be generated by an increase in federal corporate taxes?”, Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, 2012-03-11

March 10, 2012

Canadian Conservatives: “You are not that party”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:27

Andrew Coyne’s presentation to the Manning Centre conference in Ottawa:

What I believe in are a set of principles having to do with the freedom of the individual, the usefulness but not infallibility of markets, and the legitimate but limited role of the state. There are, in brief, a few things we need government to do, based on well-established criteria on which there is a high degree of expert consensus. The task is simply to get government to stick to those things, rather than waste scarce resources on things that could be done as well or better by other means: that is, government should only do what only government can do.

As I say, these ideas are not novel, or controversial. Indeed, you would find support for them, to a greater or lesser degree, across the political spectrum.

Nevertheless, there was a party, once, that believed in these things, to a somewhat greater extent than the other parties. That party called itself conservative, whether with a small or a large C, so I suppose you could call the things it believed conservatism. But you are no longer that party.

For example, that party favoured balanced budgets. But you are not that party. In fact, you boast of how your decision to add $150-billion to the national debt saved the economy.

That party favoured cutting or at least controlling spending, after the massive spree of the Liberals’ last years. But you are not that party. In fact, you boast of how you have increased spending by 7% per year — $37-billion in one year!

That party favoured a simpler, flatter tax system, that left people free to decide how to spend, save or invest their money for themselves. But you are not that party. In fact, you boast of the many gimmicks and gew-gaws with which you have festooned the tax code.

That party favoured abolishing corporate welfare. But you are not that party. In fact you boast of the handouts you make, often accompanied by ministers or indeed MPs bearing outsized novelty cheques. In some cases, you even put the Conservative logo on them.

The story of the last decade is how the rock-ribbed small-c conservatives of the old Reform Party were tamed, neutered, and blinkered into becoming a blue-painted Liberal Party. It worked, in the sense of getting their hands on the levers of power, but their souls were tainted, corrupted, and eventually disposed of in the process.

March 7, 2012

Veterans Affairs to face disproportionally big cuts in federal budget

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

That’s what Sean Bruyea thinks. Here’s his piece in the Globe & Mail:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper calls enlisting in the military the “highest form of public service.” Why then is Veterans Affairs, the department which cares for the Canadian Forces when its members are injured, facing the largest proportional cuts of any other public-service department?

The budget axe has been looming over all federal departments. The current “strategic and operational review” is a euphemism for reigning in a federal public service that is out of control. In the last 10 years, the core public service has grown by 34 per cent (versus 12 per cent at Veterans Affairs) and total government program expenses have swelled by 84 per cent (versus 67 per cent at Veterans Affairs).

Perhaps most galling for Canadians who have passed through two recessions in two decades and have seen no real growth in their earnings, public service salaries have increased by 22 per cent over and above inflation.

Few could credibly argue against the need for Ottawa to be managed better.

March 6, 2012

This is why I haven’t been covering the robocallpocalypse

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Margaret Wente in the Globe & Mail brings a sense of proportion to the robo-call “crisis” in Canadian politics:

What’s happened to my country? I went away for a couple of weeks and all hell broke loose. I came back to find that someone named Poutine stole the last election. At first I thought this was a typo, that they meant Putin. But no. It turns out that Russia is a shining beacon of democracy compared to Canada. Apparently, our country has been hijacked by “the most comprehensive electoral fraud in our nation’s history” (Pat Martin, NDP critic). Voter suppression — lying, cheating and general chicanery — has driven us into “uncharted waters” (Bob Rae, Liberal Leader).

I certainly don’t wish to make light of voter fraud. But this fraud seems to have been engineered by the Keystone Kops. Not a single voter claims to have been prevented from voting. No ballot boxes appear to have been stuffed. Nobody was fraudulently elected. There weren’t even any hanging chads. Elections Canada says 31,000 Canadians have complained, but the vast majority of these complaints (“somebody called me at 10 p.m.”) seem trivial.

The dirty trickster at the heart of this evil scheme turns out to be someone with the nom de plume of Pierre Poutine (real identity unknown). Mr. Poutine and his henchmen were not personally directed by Stephen Harper but are widely thought to have been channelling him. In Guelph, Ont., they engineered a bunch of robo-calls that directed people to show up at non-existent voting stations. This tactic was evidently intended to discourage people who didn’t support the Conservatives from voting. It was so effective that the Liberal candidate won by a margin of 11 per cent.

March 3, 2012

To Americans, Canada is a “dull but slavishly friendly neighbour, sort of like a great St. Bernard”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Conrad Black takes up the cudgel to berate Max Boot for his dismissive description of Canada:

The estimable American military writer Max Boot, a guerrilla-war expert associated with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, wrote in Commentary magazine last month that Canada is a country that most Americans consider a “dull but slavishly friendly neighbour, sort of like a great St. Bernard.”

That’s true. The world knows Canada as a comparatively blameless country that has not been the author of atrocities on the scale even of other democracies such as the British at Amritsar, the French under the German occupation or in Algeria, or the outrages routinely committed in the United States against African-Americans even after what Abraham Lincoln called “the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil” (slavery).

[. . .]

And yet Max Boot’s few words (contained in a review of Eliot A. Cohen’s new book, Conquered into Liberty: Two Centuries of Battles Along the Great Warpath that Made the American Way of War) are quite offensive. Because a nationality is apparently similar to a large region of his own countrymen should not be a subject of disparagement. And an unsurpassed record as a loyal ally should not be the butt of pejorative acerbities. The insult is magnified by coming from Boot, who is a very courteous man, not at all the bumptious opinionated “Ugly American” of the news talk shows and elsewhere with which the world is painfully familiar; and by being a gratuitous throwaway in a review of a book about frontier skirmishing on the Canadian-American border from the 17th to 19th centuries.

[. . .]

The book Max Boot was reviewing (by journeyman strategist Elliot Cohen) extols the military talents of the peoples on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, especially on the route of Lake Champlain and Fort Ticonderoga (or Carillon), south of Montreal. No invasion in either direction was ever successful. The French in Canada were defeated only when the British went up the St. Lawrence, and neither post-French Canada nor America, colonies or republic, has ever been successfully invaded by each other or anyone else. Despite the recourse to tail-wagging, canine domesticity as a simile, both Cohen and Boot affirm that Canadians, French and English, and their overseas kin, have defended this slavishly friendly country with implacable determination and success.

Rex Murphy: Conservatives going through rough period in parliament

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Writing in the National Post, Rex Murphy considers much of the federal government’s current set of problems are either self-inflicted or made worse by their “browbeating style and defensive righteousness”:

I agree with the point Andrew Coyne made in these pages earlier, that the Conservatives (I’m paraphrasing) have situated themselves to fit these types of accusations. Their browbeating style and defensive righteousness to almost every challenge, or serious question, is a hallmark. That attitude offers them little shield when, as on occasion they must be, they are ill-done by. They play tough and hard and close to the boards, and when a story that fits that broad category, like robocalls, is pushed upon them, it seems to fit. In other words, their brittle style has a cost.

The headlines detailing opposition outrage over robocalls is just the latest instalment of the Conservatives losing all control of what might be called their agenda. They blundered Old Age Security. On Internet surveillance, they surely blundered the “with us or the child pornographers” messaging. And now they’ve been hauled off whatever road they might want to be on by a “scandal” from an election nine months ago. Since the House opened, it’s been one mess after another.

Naturally, the opposition parties are at some advantage in all of this, but not quite as much as they might figure. No one is going to look back on the last week, or the last month, and remember big speeches on the big questions — either energy policy, the country’s fiscal health, or foreign affairs. Instead, it’s been the usual rattle of stones in a tin can that passes for Question Period.

March 2, 2012

At least one politician thinks we should keep the Victoria class submarines

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:41

In the National Post, Senator Pamela Wallin offers a counter-argument to John Ivison’s suggestion that the submarine fleet is a net drain on Canada’s military resources (linked from this post):

I’m with Vice-Admiral Maddison, who said, “For a G8 nation, a NATO country like Canada, a country that continues to lead internationally and aspires to lead even more, I would consider that [cancellation of the program] to be a critical loss of a fundamental capability and a very difficult one to regenerate at a future date.” Submarines provide Canada the ability to add to our knowledge of what’s happening at sea, a way of moving around without being noticed and, if fighting breaks out, a unique strike capability in support of Canadian or allied forces.

Most importantly, Canada has the longest coastline in the world. We need to be able patrol it and to guard our three enormous ocean approaches — quietly and unseen. As well, 90% of the world’s trade moves on ships. Canada is heavily reliant on maritime trade, especially through sensitive narrow waterways like the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca. Some of that trade is threatened by piracy, a growing concern for all trading nations, especially off Africa’s east coast where pirates now range all the way east to India. These are not the charmingly rakish pirates that Hollywood portrays — they are brutal, ruthless criminals. Canada, as a maritime nation, needs to know what’s going on in all domains, including underwater, and to be able to fight back.


HMCS Victoria near Bangor. (Image from Wikimedia).

In spite of the tone of my comments in the earlier post (generally agreeing with Ivison’s criticisms), I’m pro-RCN and very much pro-submarine as part of our navy. But what we need are submarines that can perform the duties required, and ever since we acquired the Victoria class, they’ve signally failed to do this. Anyone who’s ever watched a WWII film or newsreel knows that submarines fire torpedoes — except the Victoria class, which still do not have effective torpedo armament. We bought these submarines in 1998. HMCS Victoria has been in commission since 2000 and we’re only just getting around to test-firing a torpedo later this year? This is insane.

Of course, it’s not fair to blame the RCN for all the problems: the government of the day bought the subs on the cheap and then didn’t fully fund the necessary repairs to bring the boats back into operation in a timely fashion (but the military may not have done proper due diligence before recommending the purchase, either). Today’s government may cut funding as part of the austerity budget we’re rumoured to be facing soon. If so, we can expect fewer days when any of our submarines are in the water, operational, and fully crewed.

Privateers? In our Maritimes? It’s more likely than you think

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

Pirates and Privateers is a half hour documentary airing Sunday, March 4, 2012 at 12 Noon on CBC Land and Sea, that explores the rough-and-tumble history of piracy and privateering in the Maritimes.

March 1, 2012

A “Confederation theme park”? The jokes write themselves

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

In the National Post, Lorne Gunter has a bit of fun with the notion of what kind of attractions to put in a theme park celebrating Confederation:

“It’s easy to mock Preston Manning’s idea for a Confederation Theme Park … for starters, it’s somewhat odd to see the pro-small-government, West-wants-in Reform Party founder to be proposing a large government expenditure on a historically slanted amusement park to be located, of all places, in Ottawa.”

So said the Ottawa Citizen’s Mark Sutcliffe — two years ago!

It’s still easy to mock.

Although ultimately endorsing Mr. Manning’s idea (in his own altered form), Sutcliffe called the project “Epcot Centre on the Ottawa River,” a dig at the multinational exposition at Disney World in Orlando, Fla. (The one lasting impression I have of Epcot is that every pavilion was tedious and getting from one to the other required a lot of uncomfortable, fruitless walking. Hey, maybe that would be a good blueprint for a celebration of Confederation after all.)

Sutcliffe had his own satirical ideas of what rides a Confederation Park might offer. There could be “Universal (Health Care) Studios” and the “Sovereignty Movement Roller Coaster” that soared to the same dizzying highs and plunged to the same gut-turning lows as Quebec nationalism has experienced over the past 40 years. Patrons could also “board the Avro Arrow as it sits on the runway and never takes off!”

[. . .]

Imagine the joy on tots faces when Mom and Dad tell them that instead of going to central Florida for Pirates of the Caribbean, It’s a Small World (gad, I still have that cloying song stuck in my head), Space Mountain, Splash Mountain and Typhoon Lagoon, they’ll be heading to Ottawa in February to watch an animatronic debate between robot John A. Macdonald and robot Joseph Howe over the British North America Act’s division of federal and provincial powers at the authentic recreation of Charlottetown’s Founders’ Hall at the PEI display.

Then there’ll be a ride on the Drop of Western Alienation Doom; the Endless Trip to the Sovereignty-Association Dentist (sponsored by “money and the ethnic vote”); the Constitutional Reform Merry-go-round (also dubbed the Canada Round); topped off by the Centre-of-the-Universe Centrifuge where riders strap themselves into cars resembling Canada’s regions and the entire contraption revolves around Toronto.

February 29, 2012

“Taken together, the [Canadian] music industry demands make SOPA look like some minor tinkering with the law”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:51

Michael Geist on the representatives of the Canadian music industry and their breathtaking demands for modifications to Bill C-11:

The steady procession of Canadian music industry representatives to the Bill C-11 committee continues today with the Canadian Independent Music Association (CIMA) ready to add to an already long list of industry demands to completely overhaul the bill. The music industry demands keep growing, but CIMA’s list is the most radical to date as it would create liability risk for social networking sites, search engines, blogging platforms, video sites, aggregators, and many other websites featuring third party contributions. If that were not enough, the industry is also calling for a new iPod tax, an extension in the term of copyright, a removal of protections for user generated content, parody, and satire, as well as an increase in statutory damage awards. Taken together, the music industry demands make SOPA look like some minor tinkering with the law.

Note that industry had already called for SOPA-style reforms such as website blocking and expanded liability that could extend to sites such as YouTube before the hearings began. This week has seen an industry lawyer inaccurately portray global approaches to digital lock rules and a musician association demand full statutory damages of up to $20,000 per infringement for non-commercial infringements by individuals.

Those demands are nothing compared to what CIMA has in mind, however. Topping the list is a massive expansion of the enabler provision. The music industry wants to remove a requirement that the so-called pirate sites be “designed primarily” to enable copyright infringement.

[. . .]

There is virtually no limit to prima facie liability under this provision as most sites can be said to enable some infringement, particularly if they allow for users to post or interact with the site. This includes sites like Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Youtube. All of these sites — indeed virtually any blogging platform, social network, search engine, or website that offers third party contributions — would face the risk of a prima facie claim under the music industry’s vision of the enabler provision.

Is it time to abandon the RCN’s submarine experiment?

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

John Ivison recounts the ill-fated story of the Royal Canadian Navy’s current submarines in the National Post:

The Liberal government bought four second-hand subs for $750-million from the British in 1998 and renamed them the Victoria class — HMCS Victoria, HMCS Windsor, HMCS Chicoutimi and HMCS Corner Brook.

Since then, billions more have been spent trying to “Canadianize” the subs, including thousands of dollars blown trying to stop pigeons roosting in them, such is the length of time they have been in dry-dock. At various times over the past 10 years, the whole fleet has been out of commission.

The history of Canada’s submarine fleet would be laughable, were it not so tragic. People in government at the time remember the surprise expressed by Liberal ministers that the Defence department accepted the British military’s statement of quality assurance, without doing their own due diligence. That the buyer should have been more wary quickly became apparent.

The Chicoutimi caught fire on her maiden voyage from Faslane in Scotland in October 2004, with the death of one sailor and smoke-inhalation injuries to nine others. The sub has been in dry-dock ever since and is scheduled to return to service in 2013, although some stories have suggested 2016 is more realistic and others that she may never again be operational.

I blogged about HMCS Chicoutimi at the old blog, when it was expected that she’d be back in service in 2010.

Last year, HMCS Corner Brook had what some wag at the Department of National Defence characterized as a “fender bender”:

Some fender. The CBC reported on the extent of the damage:

The Canadian navy admitted that the submarine crashed off British Columbia in June, but it never described the extent of damage or released a photograph.

“I was gobsmacked. I had no idea that this level of damage had occurred,” said Senator Colin Kenny, the former head of the Senate defence committee. “That may explain why the navy took it out of the water at night.”

[. . .]

Some familiar with the submarine say its pressure hull, the area in which the sailors are housed, may be heavily damaged and that would mean the sub will never go to sea again.

“Canada needs a submarine fleet, and to have this boat not be available would be tragic,” Kenny said

The RCN claimed that there was no cover-up and that they have been completely above-board and “transparent” about the incident. It’s an odd definition of “transparency” that requires you to submit a formal Access to Information request to get the report — and the photos of the damage to the hull were censored from the report anyway.

Back in 2004, it was reported that our submarines were without torpedo armament, but that they would be “fully armed” by 2006. The CBC report mentioned in passing that eight years later, they’re still lacking torpedoes:

The navy said HMCS Windsor is to undergo trials “in the coming months” and is also expected to be back in operation later in 2012.

Not one submarine is capable of firing a torpedo, however the navy said Tuesday that a test firing of a torpedo from HMCS Victoria is planned for the coming weeks and the submarine is supposed to be operational this year.

Back to John Ivison:

In all this time, the fleet has hardly been crucial to our defence. According to people familiar with its role, it has spent time at sea monitoring fishing fleets and acting as “prey” for U.S. forces, who don’t have diesel-electric subs of their own and like to use ours for hunting practice.

Peter MacKay, the Defence Minister, recently lamented the decision to buy the British diesel-electric subs, which are not capable of diving below ice in the Arctic. “In an ideal world, I know nuclear subs are what’s needed under deep water, deep ice,” he mused.

That we do not live in an ideal world was quickly made apparent by Government House Leader Peter Van Loan, who all but disowned the fleet in a response to a question in the House. “There is no plan to replace the diesel-electric fleet purchased by the Liberals,” he said.

But if there is no plan to replace the fleet, is there a plan to scrap it?

[. . .]

The Navy defines “full operational capability” as having a weapons-ready sub on each coast. It has yet to put one sub to sea that meets that standard, a decade after the first one was received.

The hope is that two boats will be fully operational within two years, with a “swing boat” available to take over when one goes for refit. That may prove wildly optimistic. Submarines may be a useful addition to our battery of defences — but only if they work. And not at any cost.

These subs have proven themselves to be lemons, they are already past mid-life and the odds are against us having even three boats with operational capacity at any one time.

February 27, 2012

Goodbye and good riddance to the architect of “Canadian Content” media rules

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:28

Marni Soupcoff on the lasting legacy of former CRTC head Pierre Juneau, the mandatory “CanCon” ratio for TV and radio:

Former CBC and CRTC president Pierre Juneau died last week at the age of 89, and the requisite obituaries followed. Almost all of them congratulated Mr. Juneau on his most well-known achievement: having mandated minimum standards for Canadian content on radio and television. It is an unfortunate legacy.

The troubles with CanCon requirements are both moral and practical: It is not simply wrong to try to forcibly engineer a population’s taste in music in television. It is also impossible. People like what they like, and if what they like is Canadian, they will watch and listen to it even absent rules dictating that they must. If what they like isn’t Canadian, rules saturating the airwaves with all the Loverboy ditties in the world won’t make them tune in.

So even if you aren’t bothered by CanCon rules’ violation of freedom of expression, you should at least ask yourself how effective the regulations can possibly be — especially today. More and more people are selecting their music and television shows on their own, now, picking an episode from iTunes here, a free song download from a band’s webpage there. The idea that the nation’s culture can be shaped by mandating the nationality of prime-time content on TV networks and radio stations is as antiquated as it was flawed to start with. And we’re wasting money and time by continuing to force media outlets to comply.

And yes, my Cancon blog category is a backhand at the longstanding regulation.

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