On July 7-9, 2008 Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda will host the world’s most influential countries at the lakeside resort city of Toyako on the Northern island of Hokkaido to participate in the 34th G8 summit.

The agenda is an aggressive but not unfamiliar one. Over three days, the leaders will discuss 1) economic development and aid strategies with Africa, 2) industrial innovation and technology sharing, and 3) climate change and global carbon reduction. To address these challenges, Japan has invited a set of non-G8 countries to join in on issue-specific discussions, most notably on carbon with the G8 plus the next eight largest carbon producers, dubbed the MEM-16 (Major Emitters Meeting).

Canada is in a privileged position within the G8. We were invited to the club on the insistence of the Americans who sought to balance out the over-representation of Europe. We are the smallest country (by population and GDP) in the group with perhaps the smallest influence. Despite this we have done our job well, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that on functional criteria, this is a club our older brother snuck us into.

A recurring theme once again this year will be on the G8’s ability to broker solutions with influential rising powers, specifically China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico. Although not a formal admissions process, the Heiligendamm Process (set-up in 2007) is a forum to discuss mutually-beneficial strategies towards today’s pressing issues. Is this good for Canada? Do we gain or lose influence by including more countries within the G8?

Our official position on G8 enlargement has been, well, mixed. Former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin was a chief advocate of enlargement, specifically for an addition of 12 countries to form the Leaders’ 20 (L20). He argued that only by widening the membership of the group could it effectively address modern global challenges, bringing in leaders from each major region especially African and the Middle East.

The government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been cautious to the idea of enlargement. He supported the creation of the HP and our diplomats have since effectively co-chaired the Energy Working Group with India. However, G8 enlargement has been perceived as a weakening of our position within the club – suggesting that by including China or India, we diminish in importance.

For a country which prides itself on the ability to ‘punch above its weight’, which course should we pursue? A bold, innovative but controversial solution or a safe, self-interested status quo? Can we not gain from a strong working relationship with the world’s rising powers? These are questions we must sort out towards 2010, when it is our turn to act as G8 host.

But if putting a price on carbon is supposed to expense the cost of climate change in the economy, where are the current costs of climate change being felt? Mostly by the world’s poor, suggest development organizations such as Oxfam, which has estimated that in addition to emergency aid to respond to natural disasters such as the 2007 floods in south Asia, Africa and Mexico and continued desertification in sub-Saharan Africa, at least $50 billion must be put forth into an adaptation fund by the global North. While such an adaptation fund took root during last December’s Bali conference, it has yet to receive wide support from countries like Canada.

Meanwhile, Canadian aid levels-which should be put towards poverty reduction and not climate adaptation-have dropped down to 0.28% of national income, well below the accepted UN target of 0.7% established by Lestor Pearson four decades ago.

When these factors are taken with our current federal commitment of $2.2 billion in subsidies to ethanol production, where biofuels represent the most extreme blurring of the line between transport and food energy, one must question whose interests are being considered. At a time when carbon dioxide released in St. John’s impacts a farmer’s production across the pond in Ghana and as our policies value burning food over feeding the poor, we must each ask, as Pierre Trudeau once did in the House of Commons, “Who is my neighbour?”

 

I am thrilled to have been invited to write for Canada’s World on the topic of the new reality of the communications revolution.

I thought I’d start by defining what I think a communications revolution is, and then figuring out whether we are in such a thing.

If you are reading this, you are already up to date on the concept of communications. If you are thinking of commenting, you’ve really got it down, especially in the contemporary sense. See how easy? We are natural communicators, and I look forward to learning from you!

That leaves us to figure out what exactly a revolution is.

In political terms, it describes a transformation in the power-base in a relatively brief period of time. I have recently heard it described as a new condition or reality that changes everything.

Traditional mediums of communication have been exclusively the domain of those who could afford it and knew how to use it. Freedom of the press was limited to those who could afford one. When only monks could read and write, there was a stasis in communications. When the printing press was developed to a point that it was reliable and affordable to use, recorded communiques became available to, and could be understood by a relatively larger demographic.

Was this a communications revolution? Yes, in that for the first time, there was some means of recording events or stories in a way that could be distributed in a sort of broadcast. But it was a limited revolution, at least when compared to what I now propose we are in now.

In the first 10 years of the Internet’s existence, only the monks (coders, hackers, programmers) could negotiate its capacities. Media outlets and companies broadcast their message, and as we had been conditioned to do for generations, we read, watched and read some more.

It began to gradually change when the price of data storage came down, and tools like blogs and wikis created shells that the non-monks could work within without the cryptic coding knowledge.

Then, in an exponential burst, a recent host of communications platforms made virtually any kind of media affordable and accessible for broadcasting by the masses. A flurry of terminology has erupted as books are written through crowdsourcing, Youtube videos give how-tos on creating your own YouTube, and people like you and me write stories, create art and code programs - all the while taking advantage of new-school attention grabbing techniques such as tags, links and cross-reference.

This paradigm-shift has been referred to as Web 2.0, and it reveals the best and the worst characteristics of our inquisitive and communicative beings.

I’ve banged on too long for one posting already, but I will be discussing our new reality and the myriad of issues, inventions, communities and possibilities that are riding the wave of this revolution, that we are decidedly in.

Industry Minister Jim Prentice recently introduced Bill C-61, legislation touted to balance the rights of intellectual property rights holders and consumers, a tall order in the new reality of widespread digital copying power. The bill was modified from a version delayed in December due to an initial incendiary public reception. This one appears not to be delayed, despite an even hotter reception.

C-61 specifies new consumer-centred provisions, notably permission to time-shift radio or televised broadcasts, change format and make one copy of music for private use on each of their playback devices(from a CD to an iPod), and for fair dealing.

Another notable provision is the $500 penalty for private use infringement (meaning specifically downloading). Prentice proposes this as an even-handed compromise to the sensational $20,000 fines for downloading under current legislation, but is it?

Downloading music (not movies or software) has been made tacitly legal by the creation of the blank audio media levy. Current legislation is intended to punish those who infringe for commercial gain, while the tenor of this new provision appears shift its focus by specifically applying fines to those who download for private use, a practice which had been a grey area up till now.

The bill, according to Prentice’s letter, will “clarify the roles and responsibilities of Internet Service Providers related to the copyright content flowing over their network facilities.” If you can negotiate the legalese, the bill appears to require ISPs to divulge information leading to the downloaders’ identities, remove copyrighted content or both.

The clause at the center of the commotion the anti-circumvention legislation, proposing a $20,000 fine for using or distributing software that overrides digitally locks. This is crucial because it makes it illegal to access the aforementioned consumer provisions, essentially making balance illusory. This effectively transfers legislative power from governments to corporations. It is specifically this point that has riled critics.

A valid component of updating copyright to meet technological standards is protection of content creators, and this is an issue that could be eclipsed by debate about this flaw.

To get informed further in the conversation, check out Michael Geist or Cory Doctorow’s sites. For a reasoned argument with a more sympathetic view toward the bill than much of what is out there, read Giuseppina D’Agostino’s piece for thestar.com.

Does C-61 get closer to balancing the needs of rights holders and consumers? What does it mean to you?

I had been putting off writing a post about the Liberals’ new ‘Green Shift’ / carbon tax plan until I could think of some way to discuss it in a way that wouldn’t be perceived as politically partisan. Then I realized that this shouldn’t be a partisan issue at all. We should be able to look at it, discuss it, and debate it’s merits and flaws without bringing politics into it at all.

Sadly, that isn’t what’s going on out there. Like every other issue, support or opposition to this proposal is falling out neatly along party lines. And that’s a shame, but I don’t think that should prevent us from trying to look at it objectively in this forum.

First, I would encourage everyone to actually download the document and read through it carefully. Next, I’d like to address some of the assumptions being made and misconceptions being propagated about what is and isn’t being proposed in this plan, as I understand it. Here are a few of the more common ones:

“A carbon tax will drive up the price of gasoline even further”

No. Gasoline is already subject to a 10 cent / litre tax that exceeds the top $40/tonne carbon tax being proposed. The new tax won’t be charged at the pumps, it won’t be charged to the distributors and it won’t be charged at the wellhead. The only part of the process on which it would be charged is on emissions from oil production, i.e. energy used for pumping, refining and transport. For conventional oil production these costs would not be significant compared to the huge profits being made.

In the case of the Alberta tar sands the tax would be significant, but there really isn’t any way that those added costs would be passed on at the pumps because a) most of that oil is exported and never makes it to our gas tanks, and b) the price of oil is set internationally, and the oil sands account for only a small percentage of world production. As for the fear that the added cost to producers would discourage investment in the tar sands, given how desperate world markets are for increased oil production right now I honestly can’t imagine anything that would discourage investment. Except possibly a large scale boycott of Alberta’s ‘dirty oil’.

Well, my 400 words are up. Tomorrow’s topic:

“Will the carbon tax will be used to fund Liberal social programs?”