Connection Problems

In which Canada's already poor internet gets a whole lot more illegal.

The internet (you're using it right now!) could dominate political discourse in Canada over the summer thanks in large part to provisions of a Tory crime bill that would allow police to force internet service providers to hand over users' information. The Globe and Mail's Tabatha Southey amply eviscerates Bill C-51, “the deceptively progressive-sounding Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act,” which would give the Orwellian power police the ability to spy on our browsing habits. As it stands, she says police and ISPs have struck “a pretty good balance between our security and our privacy” in pursuing the websites that host illegal material, principally child pornography. Why authorities need more leeway to pursue users, and not the content-providers, is beyond Southey, and us as well.

Perhaps just as questionable is why successive governments have been so hesitant to liberalize the telecom industry, especially, the National Post's Jesse Kline writes, because we have among the worst internet service in the developed world. “Canadian Internet users pay some of the highest prices in the OECD, for slower connections than in many other places,” Kline writes. “The problem is that the Canadian ISP market is effectively a duopoly, with services being provided by the incumbent phone and cable companies in most major centres.” Despite the Tories' supposed free-market leanings, they've been remarkably laggard in following through, even though it would be nearly impossible to find someone who supports the industry's status quo who isn't an executive at Rogers or Bell.

And, in other regulatory messes emanating from Ottawa, the Vancouver Sun's Ian Mulgrew rips Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq's plan to no longer license private medical-marijuana growers. “The best growers in the country haven't a clue what Ottawa is doing,” writes Mulgrew, and neither do the mandarins at Health Canada. Doing away with the private growers would force medical marijuana patients to grow the plant themselves (at a considerable cost to their utilities bill, we might add) or purchase from the lone company licenced to sell it, the Saskatchewan-based Prairie Plant Systems. But the federal plans could all be for naught, depending on the Supreme Court's ruling on Vancouver's InSite clean-injection clinic. “If the country's high court endorses the view that provincial health powers trump the federal criminal law,” writes Mulgrew, “Ottawa will face a constitutional challenge aimed at establishing medical marijuana programs under provincial jurisdiction.” That sound you heard was a million “sick” twentysomethings buying one-way tickets to British Columbia.