Canadian Copyright Collective Calls It A Day After 15 Years Of Failing To Make Payments To Rights Holders

from the taking-down-the-industry-from-the-inside dept

Organizations fronting for rights holders repeatedly claim to have the best interests of those they represent at heart, but in reality, their efforts are largely self-serving. Lobbying, lawsuits and the pursuit of nominal fees through legislation is expensive work. The theory is that the monies collected by these efforts will make its way to rights holders, but as we've seen time and time again, the collected funds are either dumped back into the vicious circle of lawsuits/lobbying or disbursed to those running these agencies. Very rarely do creators see any sort of payment from these efforts, and the few that do are usually making healthy incomes already (the top 5%).

Michael Geist details the decade-plus of failure of one of these agencies. The Educational Rights Collective Canada (ERCC) was formed in 1988 1998 for the sole purpose of collecting royalties for the educational copying of broadcast programs for the classroom. Fifteen years down the road, it's asking the Copyright Board of Canada to put it out of its misery.

The ERCC, which includes the CBC as a founding member, asks the Copyright Board to effectively put an end to its tariff as it admits that it has never distributed any money to rights holders and is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

Fifteen years of pushing for tariffs and not a single cent was passed on to the creators. During this same period, the ERCC managed to rack up nearly $1 million in debt. Its creditors are expecting to collect no more than 5% of the outstanding debt, most of which the ERCC amassed in its quest to institute copying tariffs. Canada's new copyright bill, C-11, greatly expands the royalty-free copying educational institutes can do, eliminating the ERCC's reason to exist.

The debt will now be absorbed by its creditors and the ERCC's clientele find themselves in the same financial position they were in 15 years ago. Rights holders should be taking a long, hard look at the institutions supposedly representing their interests. Many of these continue to throw good money after bad in hopes of extracting fees for nearly every use of copyrighted material. The purpose these organizations are supposed to serve -- divesting funds to rights holders -- seems to fall very low on the list of priorities.

Filed Under: canada, collections, copyright
Companies: ercc

Canadian Cop Puts On An Impromptu Clinic On How To Deal With Critics And Cameras

from the timcushinglovescops.com dept

timcushinghatescops.com brings you the following special holiday message:

When I call out law enforcement officers for brutality, excessive force, moral turpitude and a general contempt for citizens' rights, it's not because I think all cops are bad. In fact, I know the job is often thankless and unpleasant. Many officers only deal with the kind of people we all hope we'll never run into, and they do it day after day. Even when a cop does his or her job well, there's a chance he or she will be criticized for any perceived missteps. (Quite possibly by me...)

When I cover stories of police misconduct, it's not because I believe that the mindset and actions on display are present in a majority of law enforcement officers. I don't think it is. The problem is that it's still far too prevalent and will only increase as long as cops are shielded by other officers, supervisors and friends in the judicial system. Law enforcement members wield a great deal of power with very little accountability.

But not all cops are bad cops, just like all cops aren't saints. But underneath it all, they're all human beings dealing with the day-to-day rigors of a job most people would never take.

Via Photography Is Not A Crime comes this video of a Canadian cop, Mark Morelli, who makes the best of what could easily have become a bad situation -- an arrest featuring several onlookers with cameras and one very uncooperative suspect. How does he keep this from becoming something more in line with the stories I usually cover? Watch. (The first 4:30 is the arrest. What follows after that is worth sticking around for.)

There's nothing more powerful than using your position and experience to inform, and to do so patiently in the face of vocal critics. The only one who comes off as a jerk is the cameraman, who is so "disturbed" by what he's seeing that he wants to go back inside where it's warmer.

The suspect knows there's an audience and that fact undoubtedly colors her performance. (And it is a performance -- at 3:07 she adjusts her hair with her handcuffed hands, almost unleashes a smile and then returns to making a whole lot of noise.)

Morelli should be held up as an example for other officers all over his nation and ours (meaning the US in this case, but feel free to apply it to your own). Rather than view onlookers "armed" with cameras as an enemy, he treats them as a simple fact of life. The job of policing is no longer private or purely subject to opinionated eyewitness accounts.

Cameras can be a cop's best friend, even when wielded by antagonistic onlookers. Morelli seizes the opportunity afforded by this recording to explain what he's done, why he did it and all without tossing out threats or condescension. He exits the situation gracefully, having gained the respect of most of the viewers. That's how you "win" at being a cop. Communication -- communication that asserts authority without using it as a weapon. "These are the facts." "This is what I do." It's professionalism at its best.

Filed Under: cameras, canada, mark morelli, police, police brutality

Canadian Cyberbullying Bill Expands Scope, Targets Open WiFi Over Terrorism, Child Porn Fears

from the every-cyber-bill-a-Frankenstein's-monster dept

The drawn-out process in which a bill becomes a law lends itself to harmful things, like mission creep and bloating. Canada's new cyberbullying legislation, problematic in its "purest" form, is now becoming even worse as legislators have begun hanging language aimed at other issues (child porn, terrorism, cable theft [?]) on the bill's framework.

As was noted earlier, language aimed at punishing revenge porn had already been attached to the bill. But the urge to target as much as possible with a broadly written bill is too much for Canada's politicians to resist. Michael Geist notes that Bob Dechert (Secretary to the Minister of Justice) took a moment during the debate to speculate about the "dangers" of "stolen" cable.

With respect to the cable, I would like the member to consider if his cable were being tapped into by someone who was transmitting child pornography over the Internet, or if his home Wi-Fi was being tapped into by someone who was using it to cyberbully another child, he would want to know about that and he would want that to stop. The modernization of those provisions is simply to bring them up to date.

The amendments proposed on those long-standing offences of stealing cable are already in the Criminal Code in section 327. They simply update the telecommunication language to expand the conduct, to make it consistent with other offences…

However, I would like him to think about the potential for someone who is doing cyberbullying, transmitting child sexual images, or perhaps planning a terrorist act, doing it by tapping into some law-abiding citizen's cable or Wi-Fi Internet access.

The code Dechert refers to deals with theft of services. What Dechert is hoping to do is turn a targeted law into something that can be used to pursue vagaries. By throwing cyberbullying, child porn and terrorism into the mix, Dechert is hoping to limit opposition to this "update" of the language.

Geist doesn't think much of Dechert's statement.

In other words, Dechert is suggesting that accessing a neighbour's cable or wireless Internet access might somehow be linked to planning a terrorist attack, sending child pornography, or engaging in cyberbullying. I would happy to think about the potential for cable theft to play a role in terrorist plots. In fact, I think most would agree that there is no likelihood whatsoever and that the government should stop trying link provisions in their "cyberbullying bill" that have nothing to do with cyberbullying.

The odds, as Geist points out, are almost nonexistent. But very slim odds are a legislator's best friend. No one wants to be caught out by the unexpected, especially when they had a chance to head it off back when the bill was being written. So, a lot of "just in case" rhetoric is deployed, accompanied by fearful projections.

If this line of reasoning is allowed to proceed, Canadians could be looking at the possibility of legal penalties for running unsecured WiFi connections. It seems implausible, but this has been witnessed before. Back in 2010, a German court stated that those running open WiFi connections could be fined for not securing their networks (thus "enabling" illegal activity). Copyright maximalists have made the argument several times that an open WiFi connection is "negligent." When the realization sinks in that it's easier to target the listed subscriber rather than find out who exactly was performing criminal activities on an open WiFi connection, you can be sure that the solution will be routed along the path of least resistance: holding the subscriber responsible for the actions of others.

And, as Geist points out, the mission creep in this bill is astounding. What was meant to target cyberbullies has instead become a playground for legislators. A nearly non-existent threat is being used to beef up the penalties for cable theft, as though that part of the equation were the greatest deterrent to illegal activities. It's also concerning that the additional powers being granted to law enforcement outside of the cyberbullying scope were omitted from the government's official "introduction" to the bill (posted without the bill's text). This omission seems to indicate that the crowd-pleasing "cyberbullying" angle will allow legislators to copy-and-paste whole sections from a previously unsuccessful "lawful access" bill, itself defended with cries of "child pornography."

Filed Under: bob dechert, canada, child porn, cyberbullying, mission creep, open wifi, politics, terrorism

Canadian Government Rolls Out National Cyberbullying Legislation And, No Surprise, It's Problematic

from the when-all-you-have-is-legislators... dept

The legislative attempts to curb cyberbullying continue to amass. We've already seen Nova Scotia's regrettable offering -- a law that includes ex parte "hearings" attended by only the accuser and a judge, and the addition of criminal and civil liability which extends to the parents of the accused. We've seen other similar efforts here in the US, most of which have been rushed through the process while emotions are still high. The end result is a set of bad laws that criminalizes protected speech and removes objectivity from the process.

Canada is now in the process of pushing through a national cyberbullying law, one that adds "revenge porn" to the mix.

The Honourable Peter MacKay, P.C., Q.C., M.P. for Central Nova, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, today introduced legislation to address criminal behaviour associated with cyberbullying. This legislation demonstrates the Government's firm commitment to ensuring that Canadians are better protected against online exploitation.

"Our Government is committed to ensuring that our children are safe from online predators and from online exploitation. We have an obligation to help put an end to harmful online harassment and exploitation. Cyberbullying goes far beyond schoolyard bullying and, in some cases, can cross the line into criminal activity," said Minister Mackay. "With the click of a computer mouse, a person can be victimized before the entire world. As we have seen far too often, such conduct can destroy lives. It clearly demands a stronger criminal justice response, and we intend to provide one."

This legislative attempt was prompted by two high-profile suicides of bullied teens -- Rataeh Parsons and Amanda Todd -- both of whom also had explicit photos of them distributed online.

The bill itself (the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act) hasn't been posted online yet, but many of the changes the legislation hopes to make have been detailed at the Canadian Department of Justice site. In addition, the report [embedded below] leading to this legislation is also available, which contains several recommendations for altering existing laws and crafting new ones.

Here are some of the key changes the legislation hopes to implement if passed.

• Create a new offence to prohibit the non-consensual distribution of intimate images – punishable by a maximum penalty of five years' imprisonment on indictment or six months' imprisonment on summary conviction;
• Direct the sentencing judge to consider whether or not a person convicted of the new offence should be subject to a prohibition order that would restrict his or her use of the Internet for a specified period;
• Authorize a judge to order the removal of an intimate image from websites if the person depicted did not consent to having the image posted;
• Allow a judge to order restitution following a conviction to enable the victim to recoup expenses involved in having the images removed from the Internet or social media;
• Empower the court to seize and order the forfeiture of property related to the offence, such as computers and mobile devices;
• Specify that a justice may issue a recognizance order (peace bond) where there are reasonable grounds to believe an individual will commit the new offence; and
• Ensure that the spouse of an accused person is eligible to testify against the accused in court.

Canada isn't exactly the US when it comes to protected speech, so it will be interesting to see how this attempt at curbing "revenge porn" plays out. Beyond that, there are a couple of troubling additions to existing law that could result in lots of unintended consequences.

There's plenty of potential for abuse in allowing courts to order an image to be removed. One needs to look no further than Europe to see how problematic this can be. Images that aren't "revenge porn" but are embarrassing can be taken down with a court order, meaning that people will be able to bury unflattering photos. The fact that this is wrapped in with a cyberbullying law means this likely won't be strictly limited to photos. "Offensive" text may also fall under the same law.

More troubling is the fact that the law seeks to allow courts to go into the asset forfeiture business. There are hundreds of examples here in the US that show just how perverted that incentive is. The War on Drugs has seen citizens lose houses, vehicles and cash to law enforcement for things as minor as finding a personal supply of marijuana. Even worse, people pulled over carrying amounts of cash that officers find "suspicious" often find their money seized under the presumption that only drug dealers carry lots of cash. No legislative body should be in any hurry to unleash this sort of easily-exploited "deterrent" on its own citizens.

The addition of granting spouses the "eligibility" to testify against each other in court is an interesting twist, presumably aimed at combating revenge porn. At this point, Canadian law still considers married partners to be "one person," which means neither can be compelled to testify against each other. This would eliminate that "protection" (if that's indeed what it is) and doesn't seem to be limited solely to revenge porn cases. This would seem to open itself up for abuse as well and, if passed, Canadians may see police paying more and more attention to the spouses of suspects.

The legislation also seeks to modernize existing criminal code to be more applicable to current realities. This too has some problematic aspects.

• Provide for preservation of volatile computer data;
• Require judicial authority to acquire preserved computer data, and require the deletion of such data when it is no longer needed;
• Update production orders and warrants to make them more responsive and appropriate for today's advanced telecommunications environment;
• Give the police better tools to track and trace telecommunications to determine their origin or destination; and
• Streamline the process for obtaining multiple warrants and orders that are related to the execution of a wiretap authorization.

It's the last bullet point that's the most worrying. Streamlining processes like these almost always results in an escalating disregard for civil liberties and privacy protections. This is another area where governments should tread carefully, or better yet, not at all. Modernizing isn't simply "streamlining." Modernizing also means carefully considering the unintended consequences of applying "streamlined" procedures to a heavily-connected public. Modernizing laws, done the wrong way, simply grants more access to law enforcement without considering the additional privacy protections that may need to be built in.

Legislators (and courts) also need to be especially wary of how the law will be interpreted by those enforcing it. Most likely, new permissions will be bent to give law enforcement the "edge" it always seems to feel it needs. Again, we don't need to look any further than the US to see how selective "modernization" can be. If a judge said back in 1993 that it was fine for officers to open a flip phone and scroll through the address book without a warrant, law enforcement takes that to mean it can browse the contents of a modern smartphone (which is analogous to raiding someone's computer) without a warrant in 2013.

Pre-greasing the wiretap wheels is never a good idea. We have an entire intelligence network predicated on streamlined, bulk collections that arose out of generous interpretations of existing surveillance laws.

The bullet points alone indicate this legislation has a lot more bad in it than good. In the search for applicable deterrents to fight a nebulous problem, the bill's drafters have erred on the side of smothering speech under a heavy blanket of good intentions.

Filed Under: canada, cyberbullying

Without Anyone Paying Attention, Canada Is About To Change Its Laws To Support ACTA

from the sneaky,-sneaky dept

Thought ACTA was dead? While the EU Parliament may have strongly rejected it, and even with the EU Commission (who negotiated it) admitting that ACTA is dead, a variety of other countries still did sign on to the agreement. And, now, it appears that with basically no one paying any attention at all, Canada may be about to pass some laws to effectively tie itself to ACTA's ridiculous requirements. The bill was originally introduced back in March, but was never considered by the Canadian Parliament. However, in late October, it was reintroduced under a new code, C-8, and it looks like it's moving forward, despite almost no public discussion of it anywhere.

The whole point of ACTA, and this bill, are to unite two very different issues: counterfeiting and copyright infringement. The legacy copyright players have been trying to conflate these things for years. That's because they can point to the tiny, but very real, problem of counterfeit drugs or safety equipment that can cause serious damage... and then mix it with the very "large" issue of copyright infringement (where they can't show any actual damage or harm) and pretend that it's a big problem which puts tons of people at risk. Of course, none of that is true. Counterfeiting may be an issue, but it's a very small issue, and in the vast, vast majority of cases, with little to no threat of harm. But, the copyright legacy players have figured out that tying their bandwagon to the claim that "counterfeit drugs kill people" may help them to pass draconian copyright laws.

Bizarrely, the Canadian government appears to have bought this bogus argument, despite nearly all of the evidence suggesting it's wrong. Michael Geist made exactly this point to the Canadian Parliament, but nearly everyone else they heard from were industry folks insisting that they needed this new "anti-counterfeiting" bill. And the end result is it appears that the Canadian Parliament is about to move forward on the bill without hearing from anyone other than Geist who might represent the interests of the public at large. As Howard Knopf notes:

What this exercise it will do – and has done – is to allow lobbyists with a maximalist agenda to use this fake problem of fakes to create the potential for interference with legitimate trade in parallel imports, vastly increased criminalization of everyday “infringement”, shifting of enforcement costs from the private sector to the taxpayer, and the interference with the transshipment of generic drugs and other legitimate products. The new law will allow incredible opportunity for abusive or even simply incompetent enforcement. This can be very costly to large and SME business, not to mention consumers. This is perhaps the most sweeping legislation in Canadian IP law in 70 years, and it is being done without adequate hearings, study or the demonstration of any need. Anyone looking for counterfeit products can find them on the street in mid-town and downtown Manhattan. One doesn’t find this kind of flagrant counterfeiting in Canada. The “evidence” of a major problem with counterfeit good that can’t already be dealt with via existing laws almost entirely anecdotal or absent. Piling on of responsibility to border officials is an unnecessary and costly mistake. The DNA and fingerprints of the movie and record industries are all over this bill.

Tragically, there appears to be almost no media coverage of this at all. Basically, it looks like Canadian politicians waited until everyone was looking elsewhere, and then tried to sneak ACTA right through the Parliament. This would be a major win for the movie and recording industries in the US, but a massive loss for Canadians and Canadian innovation.

Filed Under: acta, c-8, canada, copyright, counterfeiting

Resistance Grows To Inclusion Of Corporate Sovereignty In Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA)

from the just-get-rid-of-it dept

Remember CETA, the Canada-EU trade agreement, officially known as "Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement"? You could be forgiven for losing track of where things were with the negotiations, which have been dragging on since 2009, but a kind of milestone was passed recently:

Commission President José Manuel Barroso and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper have today reached a political agreement on the key elements of a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) after months of intense negotiations between EU Trade Commissioner De Gucht and Canadian trade Minister Ed Fast. It will be the first free trade agreement between the European Union and a G8 country.

Despite that "political agreement", there still remains plenty to be done, as this CBC article explains:

Some areas of the agreement still need drafting, while others need fine-tuning, reporters learned through a briefing. But the most contentious points have been settled. The agreement text then has to be drafted, run past lawyers and translated into 24 languages for the 28 EU countries to examine. The document Harper and Barroso signed Friday is an agreement in principle and full ratification is likely two years away.

Although the CBC post claims "the most contentious points have been settled", that's not true for one of the most controversial areas: corporate sovereignty, officially known as investor-state dispute settlement -- and resistance is building. For example, the European Trade Union Confederation, which claims to represent more than 60 million workers in Europe, "strongly opposes the inclusion of ISDS in CETA." And as negotiations on the ISDS chapter begin, over 80 organizations have put together a "transatlantic statement" calling for the corporate sovereignty chapter to be withdrawn from CETA completely:

As European and Canadian trade officials meet again in Brussels today to continue negotiating an investment protection chapter in the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), transatlantic civil society groups are demanding that this chapter be removed entirely as an affront to democracy, an attack on the independent judiciary, and a threat to climate change and our shared environment.

The CETA "will include a controversial and unnecessary investment protection chapter and investor-to-state dispute settlement process (ISDS) that a growing number of countries are rejecting for good reasons," says the transatlantic statement, which is endorsed by more than 80 organizations in the European Union, Canada and Quebec. "These excessive corporate protections, built into thousands of investment treaties and free trade agreements, serve no social or economic purpose other than to undermine our democratic rights to decide public policy and public interest regulation."

The accompanying statement (pdf) provides a useful summary of why the inclusion of corporate sovereignty in so-called trade agreements is so worrying. Here are some of the main points:

CETA will permanently freeze existing rules governing investment and then strictly limit government regulation of services, investment, natural resources, environmental protection and public safety measures in the interests of corporations. All existing government policies in all these areas that have not been excluded from the agreement up front will be covered, making it difficult for countries to introduce new services or regulations in the future that affect however modestly the investment opportunities of foreign companies and investors.

In fact, changes to regulations are still possible, but the ISDS chapter means in practice that they will always be in favor of corporations, not the public. That's because the intentional asymmetry of corporate sovereignty allows companies to sue a government for unlimited sums when they don't like changes in regulations, but the public has no equivalent rights. This naturally encourages governments to listen to corporations and ignore its citizens.

There is no comfort in claims by the Commission or Canadian government that "frivolous" claims, or challenges to environmental policy, will be filtered out. Despite efforts in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to limit what kinds of government decisions might violate an investor's minimum standards of treatment or other investment chapter protections, Canada continues to face investor-state disputes attacking environmental measures that affect national and foreign investors in exactly the same way (e.g. a partial moratorium on shale gas extraction in Quebec).

The declaration has a good explanation why this happens:

Likewise, we are not satisfied by efforts to limit the meaning of "indirect expropriation" so that legitimate public welfare objectives should be immune from investor challenges. The final determination is always made by the private investment tribunals themselves, and these unaccountable tribunals have a built-in bias toward the interests of multinational corporations.

Techdirt readers may recall that it was precisely this concept of indirect "expropriation" that Eli Lilly invoked when suing Canada under NAFTA's ISDS section. As the declaration rightly notes, the lawyers who make up ISDS tribunals are inherently biased in favor of corporations because they can represent the same companies in other corporate sovereignty cases -- an extraordinary conflict of interest. Finally, the declaration points out why it is really important to remove the ISDS chapter from CETA before the final ratification:

Whatever the EU gets away with in CETA, including on investment protection, will just create a new ground floor on which multinational corporations will build even more.

The way all these agreements work is that they seek to take the results of previous treaties as a baseline, and then go beyond them -- but always in favor of big business, never to the benefit of the public. That means one of the best ways of fighting corporate sovereignty in TAFTA/TTIP is to make sure it's taken out of CETA.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: canada, ceta, corporate sovereignty, eu, investor state dispute settlement, isds, trade agreements

Canadian-Based Company Sues Canada Under NAFTA, Saying That Fracking Ban Takes Away Its Expected Profits

from the it's-not-meant-to-work-like-that dept

We've written several posts about a growing awareness of the dangers of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), which lets foreign companies sue entire countries for the alleged loss of future profits. One of the most egregious examples of ISDS concerns Canada, which is being sued by Eli Lilly & Co for $500 million after refusing to grant it a couple of pharma patents. Now The Huffington Post has details about another ISDS case involving Canada:

Free trade critics say a $250-million damage suit being pursued as a result of Quebec's moratorium on fracking is proof Canada needs to be careful in negotiating trade pacts around the world.

That's because TPP and TAFTA/TTIP, as well as Canada's bilateral treaty with Europe, CETA, all have ISDS clauses in them -- at least as far we know, given the obsessive secrecy that surrounds their negotiation. Here's the key issue in this latest case involving Canada:

Quebec has yet to decide whether fracking -- a process to inject fluid into the ground at a high pressure in order to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas inside -- can be conducted safely under the St. Lawrence.

"If a government is not even allowed to take a time out to study the impact without having to compensate a corporation, it puts a tremendous chill on a governments' ability to regulate in the public interest," said Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club's trade program in Washington, D.C.

That is, the company concerned is trying to pressure Quebec to lift its moratorium before the latter has had a chance to evaluate all the scientific evidence on fracking, and come to a reasoned decision. That seems to be a typical effect where ISDS clauses are in operation: with the threat of huge claims hanging over them, governments often choose to capitulate and give companies what they want, rather than risk losing before the secretive tribunals that are used to adjudicate such ISDS cases.

The fear is that both TPP and TAFTA/TTIP will cast a chill over policy making around the Pacific and across the Atlantic, as businesses take advantage of the punitive damages available to bully governments into scrapping existing or proposed regulations in key consumer areas like food, health, safety and the environment.

The present case is noteworthy for the following fact:

Lone Pine is a Calgary-based firm and would not have standing as a foreign entity to sue Canada under NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], but [Lone Pine company president] Granger said it can do so because it is registered in Delaware.

The justification for ISDS is that it is designed to protect companies when they make investments in a country that is not their own, and which therefore may not offer all the protections they enjoy at home -- although that's plainly absurd when trade agreements are between nations like Canada, the US and the EU. But here we see ISDS being turned into yet another way for a local company to overturn decisions it doesn't like -- a clear perversion of the original intent of such measures.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: canada, fracking, investor-state dispute resolution, investor-state dispute settlement, investor-state disputes, isds, nafta, tafta, tpp, ttip
Companies: lone pine

Canadian Scientists Call Countrywide Protests Against Government Censorship, Found Advocacy Group

from the lab-coat-fightback dept

Back in April, we noted that the Canadian government has been trying to muzzle various groups in the country, including librarians and scientists. It now seems that some scientists have had enough, as the Guardian reports:

Researchers in 16 Canadian cities have called protests on Monday against science policies introduced under the government of Stephen Harper, which include rules barring government researchers from talking about their own work with journalists and, in some cases, even fellow researchers.

Nor are these just a one-off, since they build on earlier protests:

The rallies, on university campuses and central locations in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver as well as other cities, will be the second set of protests in a year by government scientists against the Harper government's science policies.

Like last year, protesters have been asked to wear white lab coats on Monday.

There's also a new group called Scientists for the Right to Know:

In 2012, a Working Group of Science for Peace started to look into the muzzling of science and scientists in Canada. Muzzling is a broad process that may be carried out by governments, industry, universities, and others. However, we quickly realized that the current federal government is actually waging a war on basic science. While other Canadian governments have engaged in muzzling as well, we have never witnessed the type of systematic attack on basic science that is happening right now in Canada.

We therefore decided to focus at present on the muzzling of science on the part of the federal government. We also decided that we needed to find a means to engage the public at large. The focus of our work shifted, then, from researching the issue to advocating for unmuzzled science. It became clear that the work the group was envisaging would exceed the mandate of Science for Peace - education. We decided to form a new organization frankly devoted to advocacy.

It's not clear how much impact this new group will make, but it is indicative that at least some people are beginning to move beyond simply wearing white coats at protests to organizing a more active resistance. The big question is how much support it will receive from government scientists around Canada.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: canada, free speech, science

Canada Forcing Wounded Vets To Sign Agreement Not To Criticize The Military On Social Media

from the free-speech? dept

Rob Hyndman alerts us to yet another attack on free speech up in Canada. The Canadian Armed Forces are apparently forcing wounded veterans to sign a form promising not to criticize the military on social media. In fact, they're told they should "discourage others in uniform." They're also told not to discuss "your views on any military subject." Not surprisingly, many of those receiving these forms are not too pleased about it. The military claims that it's just been designed to "educate" veterans. The statement to the Ottawa Citizen is quite incredible:

In an email to the Citizen, the JPSU denied that the creation of the policy and document was designed to stifle criticism of politicians and senior military staff. It was created “in an effort to educate our members and personnel on what constitutes the appropriate and inappropriate use of social media and the possible ramifications for a CAF member,” the email added.

But, many others quoted in the same article note that it goes way beyond an education effort, and is clearly much more of an attempt to stifle free speech and criticism of the military.

Ottawa lawyer and former military officer Michel Drapeau said the form is an obvious attempt to intimidate those who were injured and prevent them from speaking out about ill treatment.

“It’s not illegal but it’s obviously a threat,” said Drapeau, who has represented injured soldiers as they try to get benefits from the federal government. “The criticism about the leadership’s failure to take care of the wounded is obviously hitting home.”

There is, of course, a fine line -- especially with military personnel -- about what they can and should communicate with the rest of the world. But this really does seem like a way to try to silence wounded vets who might have very legitimate criticisms as to how they've been treated.

Filed Under: canada, free speech, gag order, social media, veterans