“I wouldn’t be surprised if this bill was ghost-written. It would certainly explain why he’s unwilling to answer specific questions about it: he may truly not understand the specifics.”

If you read it you’ll find that it grants things to lobby groups like the RIAA and MPAA and their Canadian branch plant groups “rights” they’re still fighting for in the United States.

Including criminalization of copyright violation and trying to establish reverse onus in those cases. Never mind the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that reverse onus is a constitutional violation going back to Magna Carta and therefore invalid.

In short, it tries to do things which are unwise, at the very least to unconstitutional at worst.

The long and the short of it all is that Prentice doesn’t want to talk about it or want us to talk about it.

Nor, I suspect does he want it in committee either because of the coverage that will most definitely get and he can’t just hang up the phone on a committee.

The Senate won’t be overly friendly, either, and that’s a good thing.

(Mark this because I have very few good things to say of that chamber of sleepy cronies.)

Voting the Tories out won’t change much because the Grits are just as bad.

The federal NDP would have to get its collective head out of the clouds and stop mourning the loss of Stalinism. Not to mention the rampant paternalism of their upper class and upper middle class notions that it knows better than the poor and working class about what the less “fortunate” actually need.

So the only option we have as Canadian citizens is to raise utter hell and make sure this piece of crap dies on the order paper as it so richly deserves.

ttfn

John

(For readers outside of Canada Tories = Conservative Party and Grits = Liberal Party.)