1. Bill C-13, ‘Cyberbulling’ Legislation. Introduced under the thinly disguised banner of anti-cyberbulling measures, the new bill will amend key parts of the criminal code in order to extend police power—streamlining the process of obtaining warrants to intercept private communications, enabling the tracking of individuals if a crime is suspected, and expanding wiretapping from telephone data to any digital activity. In short, bullying tragedies are being exploited to push through previously struck down legislation (such as Bill-30), that will force Internet Service Providers to surrender our personal information to government agencies with absolutely no civilian oversight.

2. Bill C-56, The Combating Counterfeit Products Act. Championed as a measure to protect intellectual property, closer scrutiny reveals that the bill is but an attempt to push the extensively discredited Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)—an agreement rejected by EU member countries for its invasiveness—in through the backdoor. Attempting to cover everything from pharmaceuticals to art, the bill would legislate new invasive border measures including seizure powers without court oversight in instances where a government official ‘reasonably’ believes there may be some risk to a dangerously flexible conceptualisation of ‘public safety.’

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

It’s no secret that the province of Alberta, the government Canada, and the titans of the fossil fuel industry pride themselves on robust regulatory and oversight structures when it comes to the extraction of natural resources.

"Environmental protection is a priority for our government and Canada is a global environmental leader," said Canada’s Natural Resources Minister, Joe Oliver. "This is why Canada's oil sands are subject to some of the most stringent environmental regulations and monitoring in the world."

"The regulations that are in place are very stringent, the most stringent in North America and certainly around the world," added Alberta’s Minister of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development, Diana McQueen. "We have a lot of development in this province, but we also have very tough regulations with regards to any spills that happen."

"The system is working," continued Alberta Energy Regulator CEO Jim Ellis. "We have the resources we need now to properly regulate it. And that includes compliance, on the ground inspections, regulations… They are capably handling the workload right now."

"It was extremely frustrating. I just reached a point where I was so frustrated I said, 'I'm going to do whatever it takes to extract this information' because I just felt wronged by the whole process," said Timoney. "It just seems like it’s a process that’s designed not to release information but rather to appear to release information."

"When you've looked at thousands of these records, what we're seeing is the tip of the iceberg," added Timoney. "It was evident that there were thousands of incidents the public didn't know anything about."

"Not every incident is going to result in a compliance action," responded Alberta Environment spokesperson Jessica Potter when asked about such a low rate of enforcement. "The determination as to whether or not we move forward with an enforcement action entirely depends on what we find in that investigation."

In short, as both Timoney and the study are at pains to point out, the governments of Alberta and Canada are "absolutely not" doing enough to enforce regulations. "There is this disconnect between the statement from the government that we have these great regulations and we’re strictly enforcing them, and the reality, which is that there are thousands of violations about which they do nothing."

"I feel very strongly that the public has a right to know what’s happening," concluded Timoney. "In this situation, what we’re trying to do is say, 'Decide for yourself. Here’s the information that we gathered. If you wish to decide that environmental management in the bitumen sands region is good or bad, here's a set of information that you can look at to decide for yourself.'"

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

“A wish list of the 1%, a worldwide corporate power grab of enormous proportions,” “undemocratic and patently unfair,” “the biggest global threat to the Internet.”

These are just a few of the disconcerting phrases legal experts and digital rights advocates are employing to describe the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a highly secretive, contentious, and perpetually undemocratic multinational trade agreement currently being negotiated between 600-plus industry advisors and unelected trade representatives on behalf of 11 different national governments including Canada.   While the devious, closed-room nature of the discussions have made it difficult to determine how exactly the TPP will infringe on freedoms of speech, rights to privacy, and peoples’ abilities to innovate on the Internet, a leaked draft from February of 2011 reveals that concerned citizens have every reason to be alarmed by the many copyright enforcement provisions buried deep within this trade deal.

    As the above introductory video emphasises, what we do know for certain is this — thanks largely to relentless lobbying on the part of multinational telecom giants, the TPP endeavours to turn the Internet into a highly regulated and increasingly scrutinised digital environment through the reconfiguring of international rules concerning the enforcement of intellectual property (IP) laws in a way that favours profit-focused private interests and state-focused surveillance over public and shared information.   If established — ratification is scheduled for October of this year — the TPP will effectively create what amounts to a secretive and criminalising “Internet Trap” that will challenge digital freedom as we know it in 4 particularly distressing ways.   First, the TPP will dramatically regulate the sharing of digital content on social and search platforms by prohibiting the use of temporary copies — files automatically copied by computers into their random access memory (RAM). According to experts at InternetNZ, these temporary copies are critical for the routine operation of social media platforms because they allow videos to be smoothly buffered in memory, browser cache files to be stored on servers to speed up the loading of websites, and copies of visited pages to be stored in a temporary Internet files folder on your hard drive.   Second, the TPP will eradicate privacy safeguards by requiring all Internet service providers (ISPs) to systematically filter, collect, and surrender customer information to government monitors and corporate regulators upon request — eradicating any remaining vestiges of the online anonymity that once protected digital interactions.   Third, the TPP will allow media conglomerates to circumvent national legal systems by unilaterally fining users, removing undesirable content, deleting entire websites, and terminating Internet access under the guise of vague and inauspicious “three-strikes” mechanisms which would heavily favour media firms over individual users.   Fourth, the TPP will force all signatories to harmonise their domestic policies and laws with the restrictive US-directed provisions of the agreement. This means all parties would have to abandon any efforts to learn from the mistakes of notoriously stifling US copyright laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and instead adopt even the most controversial aspects of US legislation in their entirety.   In Canada alone, the forceful adaptation of coercive US-based TPP regulations would mean a ban on unlocking private digital devices such as mobile phones, 20-year increases to posthumous patents for written and recorded works, the criminalising of all petty copyright infringement for non-profit, non-commercial and educational purposes, the disclosure of personal information without privacy safeguards, and harsher criminal penalties for instances of non-compliance on takedown orders.   In short, the TPP in Canada would make already repressive and controversial domestic copyright legislations such as Bill C-11 seem light-hearted in comparison.   What’s more, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) — one of the principle architects of the TPP’s authoritarian IP chapter, has recently released a report directly criticising Canada for its data security policies. Arguing that the government’s strategy of protecting private data from being subjected to often-invasive surveillance and retention regimes offshore puts our economy at risk of being “left behind” in today’s private-interest-first, public-interest-second system.   If only we could be so lucky.   Perhaps even more disturbing than the TPP’s relentless pressure to conform relatively lenient Canadian IP standards to exploitative and manipulative US-inspired policies — contradicting nearly every principle on which the Internet was founded — is the fact that the negotiations are being completed by unelected trade representatives in utter secrecy without any public or journalistic consultation.   And make no mistake — this closed-door approach is a dangerous new trend. Before 2006, most international IP negotiations were conducted through a multilateral process that publicised all proposals and let NGOs, intellectuals, and public interest groups weigh in. But due to high-profile defeats like Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and increased public outcry, the emphasis has shifted to clandestine bi-lateral talks in the hopes that confidentiality will deter concerned citizens from asking questions.   Ironically, all this confidentiality only serves to further highlight the fact that all parties involved know just how much public recoil they would face if the TPP’s policies — which put at risk some of the most fundamental rights that enable access to knowledge for the world’s citizens — were to be exposed before they are finalised.   Even though concerned citizens, public interest groups, academics, and NGOs alike are forbidden from taking part in a process that will drastically restrict the way Canadians — and millions of other peoples — access, share, and communicate online, the very Internet that the TPP seeks to regulate is a powerful tool to fight back with.   So email, post, call, or tweet at your MP or local media outlet voicing your discontent regarding the TPP’s Internet-muzzling vision, sign OpenMedia.ca’s “Stop the Trap” petition currently being circulated to key government leaders and corporate trade representatives on Parliament Hill, and most of all, talk openly about the TPP.   Talk about it with your family, your friends, your co-workers, and with strangers in public spaces on and off the Web. By confronting secrecy with awareness we can shift the TPP into the public square and restore accountability to Internet policies.   Image Credit: Wonderlane/Flickr

 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.