Category: Uncategorized

I am not certain what the benefit is for society to go on supporting copyright the way it has been going. Copyright, and patent law, now collectively intellectual property rights, have gone badly wrong.

The legal instruments that originally protected peoples’ right to profit from their work, as an incentive to innovation were a great idea. My career was based on copyright, allowing me to sell and license the work I did. For many years, customers normally paid for a single-use of my artwork. If they wanted to reuse my work they needed to pay again for another use. If another customer wanted to use my work, I was free to profit from my right. That way I could earn a living.

Then contracts began to include boilerplate that meant, instead of paying for the right to use my artwork, customers were buying all the rights, transferred without limitation from me to them. As a contract stipulation such a provision undermined my right to profit from my work, or for that matter to use it at all. It has been more than a decade since I retained the ownership of any of my creative work. At the same time, the companies, mainly publishers, who purchased my work, enjoy intellectual property rights on work they never created.

Had I retained the copyright, it would have expired some decades after my death. However since in seven decades there will be no record of who originally created the work and owned the copyright, or when they died, it is hard to see how the corporation’s rights will ever expire.

My work is of no great cultural value, however it is important to note that since the USA increased the limit on copyright from 50 to 70 years, it is nearing two decades since any part of contemporary culture has entered the public domain there. This is stifling to cultural innovation. And the US government is keen to export its copyright law to as many other countries as possible. This is a key provision of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

As for patent law, current interpretations of what is patentable and what is covered are responsible for all the non-imaginary problems associated with GMOs as well as the grave ills proliferating in the pharmaceutical industry.

We need to fix the broken parts of intellectual property law. It should not be possible for all copyright to end up on the ledgers of corporations. It should not be possible for patent law to make indentured servants of farmers. However if we cannot reset the rules protect innovation and motivate individuals as they were originally intended, then perhaps we would be better off scrapping what we have now and starting again.

Recently I saw a wonderful video, “Potoka Giraffe Runs at Brookfield Zoo.” The weather at their zoo had improved enough that the giraffes could be safely let out of the barn into their yard, and Potoka was galloping about with pure joy.

Yet many of the comments on the video were extremely negative, declaiming that captivity was cruel and captive animals should be set free to live in an idyllic Lion-Kingesque wilderland. I do not think that these commenters were mostly haters or trolls.

I completely understand where this ideological impulse comes from. As a child I visited the Buffalo Zoo several times. The exhibits there were mostly cement boxes with cage fronts where, for instance, tigers lay uncomfortably on display for hours. It was difficult to see how the lives of those animals could be anything but miserable.

There are probably many zoos around the world with similar conditions today. I would not like to google ‘worst zoo.’ However for decades now, developed-world zoos have been running with rather more noble and beneficial objectives than displaying sullen wildlife. Zoos serve several important functions.

Zoos are hubs for intensive research. They are the bases for many important conservation projects that breed and release threatened species repopulating ecologically depleted areas. They serve as safe harbours for individuals who for one reason or another cannot live in the wild. And perhaps most importantly they expose increasingly urbanized people to wildlife and provide populations with educational resources.

It is possible today to live your life entirely disconnected from anything outside urbanity. This impairs people’s ability to have a sensible proportionate understanding of many important issues in conservation, ecological management or environmental issues. It helps people to feel outrage when a Cooper’s Hawk preys on House Finches at their bird feeder. It helps climate-change deniers and industrialists ignore habitat loss.

Zoos have the potential to mitigate ignorance of the natural world and help people make better decisions. But they cannot do that without funding and they cannot get funding without broad public support.

When the Toronto Zoo opened, it was a model of enlightened design. But over the years it has become less so. A big part of this is a loss of funding. Funding cuts are enabled by both public apathy and a failure to understand the value and importance of Zoos.

And while wildlife stands to suffer considerable harm from such an ideology, in the long run, failure to invest in conservation organizations that do something more than role-play publicity stunts, will impoverish us all.

To explain this I am first going to discuss another undemocratic instrument, the Ontario Municipal Board. The OMB is a court that developers have access to when they want to contest municipal planning decisions and regulation. The OMB is unelected and unaccountable. Its decisions are final.

Developers use the OMB both as a threat to encourage municipal governments to act in the interests of developers and as a tool to set aside municipal decisions they are unhappy with. So while “Ontario Municipal Board” might sound like it serves municipalities in some way, what it does in fact is administratively overrule the democratic processes in Ontario municipalities.

By way of example, Ajax has a municipal plan that was a result of a good deal of research and, well, planning. But those plans were based on the public interest and adopted by a democratic government. They do not take into account what might temporarily be the most profitable for a particular developer. So developers take the town to the OMB to have democracy overruled. And even if they do not succeed, they put the town to what might often be considered insupportable expense.

ISDS provides a much more horrifying example of this kind of court. At least the OMB operates under the Ontario government. Parliament could redefine or abolish the OMB if it found it necessary. TPP member states would never have such recourse with respect to ISDS. Litigation is expensive; punitive decisions burdensome. And no state has any recourse except to pay and pay, or make undemocratic decisions that represent extraterritorial corporate interests, not those of the public.

Liberal MP David Lametti, who obviously supports the TPP and CETA, says that ISDS is “part of the democratic process…and frankly it’s a healthy part of the process, if it forces governments to reflect on what they do and what they think they should do.”

This is a terrifying prospect. That Lametti thinks it reasonable that governments trying to act in the public interest should reflect on what punishments they might face in doing so is appalling. Moreover that Lametti does not understand democracy to be government acting exclusively in the best interest of its citizens without prejudice from private or corporate interests fills me with dread.

February 15, 2016

Justin Trudeau

House of Commons
Ottawa, ON
K1A 0A6

Dear Justin.

Of course you are pro trade. I am pro trade. We are all pro trade in exactly the same way we are pro puppy pictures and pro moms. All economic transactions are trade. To be pro trade is the same as to be pro employment or pro prosperity.

That is why 24 chapters freeing corporations from regulation are tacked onto the 6 chapters dealing with trade in the TPP. That way its proponents can call it a trade agreement despite it mostly not being one. This is important propaganda because no one is going to support a “freeing corporations from legal restrictions” agreement.

This is the principal behind calling trade deregulation ‘free trade.’ ‘Free’ is a positive term that puts a smiling face on deregulation. No one is going to support ‘unfair trade’ or ‘disastrous trade.’

But that is what trade deregulation has been for Canada. In the 2015 election Liberal campaign literature talked about how things were worse now for average Canadians than they were in the 1980s. The Free Trade agreement and NAFTA were both major contributors to this, effectively pulling the plug on Canadian manufacturing, eliminating well paying jobs and job security, and undermining our industrial economy.

TPP supporters talk a lot about opening markets for Canadian business. I wonder, as I live amongst the empty foundations of all the industries that once made Canadian products, markets for what exactly? Are you genuinely as short sighted as the CPC and think we will just sell all our natural resources to manufacturers elsewhere, just to purchase them back as shoddy products for ten times the price? Could you possibly think this can be a basis for an economy?

Or perhaps you are as deluded as the new Chancellor of Brock University in 2007 when I listened to him tell a convocation including may graduating Chinese foreign students that the future of Canada was to be the source of new ideas and technology, and that the future of countries like China was to be the labourers that made the products. The idea that we can build an economy based on research and services denies the fact that people elsewhere can develop their own technology.

I am pro trade, and pro employment, and pro prosperity. But while TPP supporters dangle the promise of these before us, the TPP itself is not intended to provide any such thing. It is almost entirely a corporate deregulation treaty intended to make multinational corporations immune to national laws. Rather than creating or supporting a ‘global economy’ it is purposed to make it easier for corporations to exploit the extreme inequity in the world’s discrete local economies for the benefit of the corporations themselves, and the obscenely wealthy tiny minority who control them almost entirely.

Please do not promote or support the passage of the TPP into law in Canada. I will be deeply ashamed if your government does so. I, like most Canadians am well fed up with being ashamed of my government. Please do not disappoint us.

People like ‘common’ sense ideas, and surely ‘speed kills.’ So ‘all cars must go slower’ seems like common sense. However if 50 is safer than 60, then surely 40 is safer than 50 and following this to its absurd conclusion, stopped is safer than 10. But I am quite certain this is not so.

First of all 60 is not very fast. If you cannot maintain ‘care and control’ on good pavement in normal conditions at 60, perhaps you should not be driving at all.

A lighted sign warns me every day that I am going too fast on Fairall St. Fairall/Station St. is a secondary road connecting two major arteries through an industrial area. It is the connection between downtown Ajax and the GO Station. That stretch of road is now signed 50, which, regardless of what Ajax decided, is clearly not democratically what almost anyone using that road agrees to. It could be worse though. There is a similar connecting road north of the 401 signed 40. No one using that road goes 40.

But Ajax is once again on about speeding and safety. This is absurd for many reasons.

The expected stopping distance for vehicles is based on tests from decades ago. Actual stopping distances for cars today can be less than half the regulatory standard.

Both roads and vehicles, here at least, are far better designed and safer than they were when speed limits were significantly higher. So the gap between what equipment and infrastructure is designed for and regulation is getting wider, speed limits less reasonable. That governments express concern that there is more speeding should not be surprising when traffic laws do not reflect what most people actually do and more importantly, what is actually safe.

Collisions between vehicles and anything else are more likely where there is more congestion. Consider reducing traffic speeds from 50 to 40. While no modern vehicle on a modern road in normal conditions is significantly safer to drive at the lower speed, traveling 20% slower increases trip time by a quarter. If every car on the road is out there 25% longer then there are 25% more cars on the road. This is certainly more dangerous.

Finally there are the two great hypocrisies of conflating traffic safety and ever-lower speed limits. One is that while municipal and provincial governments like to affect road safety policies, it is cheaper to just go on about speeding than it is to do anything useful. For instance changing speed signs is easier than requiring everyone to get drivers training. Second is that while reducing speed limits is unlikely to reduce accidents it is a large source of revenue in the form of speeding tickets. So lowering speed limits rather than being a safety measure could be viewed as increasing yield on traffic fine farming.

No male child ever took better advantage of having a type 1, 1950’s mom than I did. My mother took care of me. She cooked and cleaned and did my laundry. She did all the things her parents, puritanical Victorian Protestants born in the 1890’s, expected a good mother to do. And I lapped it up. Long after I moved away from home, my mom still looked forward to my visits when she could feed me and clean up after me. It was important to her. Taking care of me was her best way of showing that she loved me. And it was awesome, even though I did not always appreciate that awesomeness at the time. I am sure that if I could continue to take advantage of mum’s caring, I would.

Mum is going to be 97 this year. She still lives in her own home. But she is very hard-of-hearing and has very low vision. It has been years since it was a good idea for her to cook me a meal. She does a fair job of keeping her house clean, however there is a growing list of things she cannot, or perhaps, should not do. And there are plenty of things she needs done for her.

Mum really does not like this. I did not realize until her capacities began to diminish how strongly linked her self worth was to her service and independence. And I do not mean independence in the sense of self sufficiency. I refer to not asking for or getting assistance from anyone. That would be a weakness.

Growing old and infirm is particularly cruel for someone who has lived for most of a century believing that their virtue and worth are inextricably linked to hard work and servitude, especially in taking care of children and male family members.

Needing help equals ‘lazy’ equals sin.
Failing to take care of others and serve them equals ‘lazy’ equals sin.

It cannot be said that I am too intrusive in my mother’s life. I visit her every other weekend when possible and I do what I can to help her stay in her home. There is always a certain amount of anguish as, for instance, my mum feels ‘useless’ when I cook her a meal. She wants to cook for me not the other way around. This is hard on both of us, but I understand the dynamics of the situation and I do my best.

So, I get quite annoyed whenever I get criticized for the way I deal with my mums age-related shortcomings. I am not stupidly unaware of my mum’s feelings. I sympathize with her frustration at not being able to fulfill the role she was raised for. I understand that she is unable to change her idea of what it is for her to be a good woman even if that idea was made ridiculous fifty years ago. I would be selfishly fine with letting her take care of me, but she cannot. This is upsetting for her and her situation is upsetting for me. No derisive commentary from third parties who think they know better is either helpful or welcome. In fact it is very irritating.

Today I received an email from Ryan Spero representing the Liberal Party of Canada in response to a previous email I sent opposing the TPP. The response was unsatisfactory. So, here for all is my reply with his email appended.

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Hello Ryan.

I would be particularly unobservant not to have noticed that while free trade advocates talk a lot about growing Canadian businesses and creating well-paying jobs, what we have inevitably gotten from free trade is the disappearance of domestic manufacturing, the disappearance of well-paying secure jobs, and wage depression.

More disgustingly the only thing that is meant by “provide choice and lower prices to Canadian consumers” is that corporations are free to exploit inequities between discrete isolated economies, to outsource work to low wage workers, to cut their costs and increase their profits. I work in the publishing industry. I am a highly skilled professional. And yet I am severely underemployed specifically because companies are allowed to take the work I used to be well payed for and get it done for 2$/h, badly, by exploited workers in India. There can be no happy face put on this.

Moreover “a full and open public debate in Parliament” with a majority government sitting, does not in any way “ensure Canadians are consulted on this historic trade agreement.” The negotiations are closed on the TPP. You cannot rewrite it. If you pass the TPP it will be in the form badly and secretly negotiated by representatives of the 99 CPC sitting opposite.

Supporters of massive trade agreements talk as though there has never yet been trade between the involved countries, that without effectively handing the regulation of trade over to the corporations being regulated we would never export or import anything again. And this is a nonsense. The reason interested parties advance these sweeping omnibus agreements is that all the evils of deregulation can be secreted within the impenetrable forest of legalese.

If you want to grow the Canadian economy you have to find ways of rebuilding wealth-generating industries on the desolate foundations of the factories we have torn down and abandoned all over Canada since the original PC Free Trade agreement was signed. Passing the TPP into law will not achieve this in any way.

Thanks
davemckay

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On 2015/12/17 11:34, Ryan Spero (Info Liberal) wrote:

Ryan Spero (Liberal / Assistance)

Dec 17, 11:34

Hello Friend,

Thank you for writing to the Liberal Party of Canada regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The Liberal Party of Canada strongly supports free trade, as this is how we open markets to Canadian goods and services, grow Canadian businesses, create good-paying jobs, and provide choice and lower prices to Canadian consumers.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership stands to remove trade barriers, widely expand free trade for Canada, and increase opportunities for our middle class and those working hard to join it. Liberals will take a responsible approach to thoroughly examining the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The former Conservative government failed to be transparent through the entirety of the negotiations – especially in regards to what Canada is conceding in order to be accepted into this partnership. We have an obligation to be open and honest about the negotiation process, including informing Canadians about the impact this agreement will have on different industries across our country. We must defend Canadian interests during the TPP’s ratification process – which includes defending supply management, our auto sector, and Canadian manufacturers across the country.

Under Liberal leadership, our government will hold a full and open public debate in Parliament to ensure Canadians are consulted on this historic trade agreement.

The Conservatives had a trade deficit for more than 50 months and they have tallied the largest trade deficit in Canadian history. Our government remains committed in ensuring that, with respect to international trade agreements, middle class Canadians will benefit and are informed about the implications of such agreements.

Thank you again for taking the time to share your concerns with us on this important economic initiative.

Kind regards,

I get regular emails from the Liberal party. I got one today from Bill Morneau, Minister of Finance. They are planning an event where he sits down with someone for dinner and listens to what they and their guests have to say. I could be the lucky one, but not likely. This was my response.

Hi, Bill.

You would not want to visit my house. It is a bit of a tip. I have been having a hard time affording maintenance since all the skilled publishing work I used to be well payed for has gone off to places like India to be done badly, but cheaply, by people making $2 per hour.

That is one of the reasons why Canadians need you to make a commitment to rejecting the CPC’s TPP. If you do not, things are going to get much worse. Instead of deregulating the depredations of multinationals, we need you to fix a system skewed to the economic advantage of corporations and the richest people who control them.

Raise taxes, but raise taxes on the rich a lot. One of the key strategies of the Corporatist Party of Canada government you just replaced was to starve the government to death by cutting taxes. While this conforms well to the discredited philosophy of small government and trickle-down economics, all it has really been for is to cripple Ottawa so that the current incarnation of the Reform and Alliance parties could gain more autonomy for Alberta. This has to stop, and taxes, especially on the people who have grown obscenely wealthy on tax cuts, need to increase.

You also need to increase the CIT. Read from pressprogress.ca HERE:

1. Canada’s corporate tax rate has been falling for three decades (from 42% to not much more than 20%)
2. Cutting corporate taxes did not increase business investment or create jobs
3. Cutting corporate taxes has led to cash hoarding
4. A poll released in the fall showed 85% of Canadians want to raise taxes on corporations.

I do not wish to see the 99 CPC seats opposite you chortling away as you do their dirty work for them and take the blame.

We need stronger laws governing the actions of corporations, and we need those corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. What we really do not need is to pass into law a giant omnibus treaty that fundamentally undermines the ability of your government to make these necessary changes.

Thankyou
davemckay

Mark Holland

Hill Office
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada
K1A 0A6

Dear Mark.

First of all, I am very relieved that 55.7% of voters in Ajax decided to reelect you. Congratulations.

Lots of the evil that the CPC did will be easy to fix, and some of it not so. It is simple to unmuzzle scientists and government employees. It is hard to replace destroyed libraries and the lost research they housed. One thing that will be quite difficult is dealing with the CPC’s Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

I want to be absolutely clear here. I oppose the TPP. This is a position I share, as far as I know, with everyone I know. While, in conversation, people have said that they are also concerned about the possible penalties for not passing the TPP into law, I have not heard anyone say they think its many sinister corporatist provisions will make the lives of most Canadians better.

The agreement is full of traps for ordinary Canadians. For example, changes to copyright will make using my iPod to play my CDs illegal. This may seem trivial. But being forced to rebuy 471 albums would cost me thousands of dollars. This appears to be a typical abuse of the trade agreement to impose changes that only pump money faster to the few percent of people who control corporations. The Liberal party ran a campaign based on the idea that inequity was an iniquity, that the richest should pay more, and that the economy should not be stacked in the favour of a tiny minority. The TPP contains many provisions intended to exacerbate inequity by allowing corporations to act in ever more exploitative ways to benefit the relatively few people who own them.

I cannot believe you do not understand this and other problems with the TPP. However I will quote Pete Dolack in his article for counterpunch shared by Government for all Canadians, not just the wealthy:

The TPP, if enacted, promises a race to the bottom: An acceleration of jobs to the countries with the lowest wages, the right of multi-national corporations to veto any law or regulation their executives do not like, the end of your right to know what is in your food, higher prices for medicines, and the subordination of Internet privacy to corporate interests. There is a reason it has been negotiated in secret, with only corporate executives and industry lobbyists consulted and allowed to see the text as it took shape.

In its thousands of pages, the TPP must contain some valuable undertakings for trade. However it has become a vehicle for covert negotiation of constraints Canadians and our government will regret for decades. It is in effect Stephen Harpers’ last omnibus bill, cloaking provisions no one should ever agree to.

I will be deeply ashamed if your government passes the TPP into law. I, like most Canadians am well fed up with being ashamed of my government. Please do not disappoint us.

Thank you for your time.

Dave McKay

“Everyone has their own way of doing things.” is sometimes a reasonable thing to say. For instance, I make peanut butter cookies differently than my mum did. She made them to suit her, and I make them to suit myself. This is cool because how I make peanut butter cookies doesn’t matter.

In my professional life, how I work matters. If I set up files in unpredictable ways to suit myself I am being unprofessional. A large portion of my career has been spent going through supplied work, searching for and correcting problems I cannot ignore because at some point I am going to have to sign off jobs I have worked on.

More often than not there is a right way and a wrong way. As Tim Minchin said you do not normally argue whether it is better to leave an, “apartment by the front door, or a window on the second floor.”

Along come political philosophers. Like people who feed pet cats vegetarian diets and can’t understand why Fluffy is dying, political ideologues can’t understand that reality does not bend to fit their ideas. They make up stuff about economics, taxes, civil society and etc. that need not represent any observable reality. Then when it all goes wrong, or the public rebels, we ‘just did not try hard enough.’ They say if we just give them five more years everything will come up daffodils.

This is of course, the most generous interpretation of the disconnection between what is promised, and what actually happens. It is hardly likely that a corporatist believes in trickle-down economics since it has never worked anywhere. The reality is that like cult leaders, time immemorial, their spiel doesn’t need to work, it just needs to subvert dissent and allow them to implement their own, often-contrary agenda, unhampered.

Conservative: holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation

Radical: advocating or based on thorough or complete political or social reform; representing or supporting an extreme section of a political party.

Canada once had a federal Conservative party. Although it was progressive, the governments it formed traditionally tended not to change things much or quickly. There is no trace of Progressive Conservatism in federal politics anymore. And when Stephen Harper talks about ‘Conservatives’ as though there is continuity between his CPC and historic PC governments, he is entirely disingenuous.

Just as any dictator cloaks their manifest self-interest in words that sound like the best interest of people, the CPC keeps telling us that their road to ruin is the road to prosperity. No matter how far they have lead us down that road they keep telling us we will arrive in Prosperityville any minute now.

There is a wrong way of doing government. Austerity, lower taxes, deregulation, privatization, secrecy, deceit, and patronage among so many other antisocial policies have not in one instance ever made the public better off. If you did not learn from the 19^th and 20^th centuries that government spending on public services, good wages, and dignified workplaces make societies better, then you need to do some revision.

The CPC is not a conservative party at all. It is the Radical Party of Canada. For a decade it has been using a shroud of nonsensical rhetoric to implement extremely destructive radical changes to Canada, all while telling us this is the way to paradise. Nothing about the places they are leading us resemble anything but a darkening wood.

Parliament works for you. If I do bad work for clients, in pursuit of my own agenda, they will not hire me again. If I make you a batch of peanut butter cookies that taste bad and make you seriously ill, you should not accept cookies from me again.

So, on Monday, for your own sake, for pity’s sake, I ask you to reject the cloak of dishonesty the CPC hides their war against Canada behind. Get out and vote for a candidate whose party does not play Canadians for fools.