PUBLIC MARKS from multilinko with tag canada

Canadian musicians are rising up against p2p lawsuits, statutory damages, DRM and anti-circumvention legislation. They've started a new group called the Canadian Music Creators Coalition.

A scientist with Environment Canada was ordered not to launch his global warming-themed novel Thursday at the same time the Conservative government was quietly axing a number of Kyoto programs.

Digital Rights Management, to repeat my argument, is not about stopping piracy, but about shutting down fair use. The aim of shutting down fair use is simple: the copyright owners want to nickel and dime users.

Environmentalists are pressing Prime Minister Stephen Harper to follow through on his election promise to curb subsidies to business.

Among the more fashionable of recently perceived (or contrived) apocalypses is "the end of suburbia," a notion popularized by a documentary of the same name, which argues coming oil scarcity will soon make modern suburbs uninhabitable. If only it were true! For the sake of suburbanites alone, the end of suburbia would be a blessing. But that's not happening. To the extent we understand suburbia as a single place, wherever it occurs -- an uncomfortably definitive mould, a collection of syndromes masquerading as a lifestyle -- it is all too robust. We made our bed over the past half-century, shaping increasingly homogeneous, car-dependent, overconsuming, overworked, socially exclusive suburbs, and now we must lie in it.

Canada has experienced its warmest winter since modern record-keeping began, with average temperatures 3.9 degrees above normal and all regions of the country basking in abnormal mildness, according to preliminary figures compiled by Environment Canada. The biggest departure from typical winter weather was in the area where Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories converge. Temperatures there were a staggering eight degrees warmer than normal. But other notable warm spots included the entire Prairie region, where temperatures were five to seven degrees above average, and southern British Columbia. In addition, temperatures were so warm in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence watershed that the Great Lakes were ice-free in the middle of the winter.

Mr. Jackman, chairman of events for the Aldergrove Elks, has harsh criticism for the TransLink board members who are set to impose a new tax on parking spaces on business property. The tax, expected to generate about $20-million a year and charged to non-residential properties, gives the regional transportation board leverage to borrow $200-million to fund more buses and roadways, widen bridges and undertake other transportation projects.

Canada’s mixture of un-ambitious standards, voluntary programs and lack of effective incentives, has left us lagging behind many jurisdictions. Other countries have combined significantly higher energy performance standards with targeted incentives to improve energy efficiency and control greenhouse gas emissions.

The growth in on-line tax filing has prompted some griping that the Canada Revenue Agency should make the necessary software available for free. It won't happen, folks, but not to worry. With so many competitors fighting for customers in the tax software business, prices have fallen significantly for people filing their 2005 return.

Some two dozen power plants are scheduled to be built or refurbished during the next five years in Canada, China, several European Union countries, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and South Africa. In the US and the UK, governmental preparations are under way that may lead to 15 new reactor orders by 2007.

I have it on very good authority however that Stephen Harper is spending a lot of time playing the game these days. Word is the back room on the Harper bus resembles the woodshed from A Beautiful Mind; the walls are littered with the names of potential conservative cabinet ministers. Luckily my secret mole in the Tory Campaign (Tom Flannagan) has been taking photos of the notes with his hand held palm device and forwarding me the information on a daily basis. This is what the Tory Cabinet looks like so far.

We're your one-stop source for blog posts from candidates across Canada in the 2006 election campaign.

Perhaps an anecdote is in order. There is no shortage of these about Canada: such as the one about the competition among American publishers to find the most unsaleable book title of the season, won by a volume entitled Canada: Our Friendly Neighbour to the North. Apocryphal? Maybe.

Rogers Cable, like other cable companies, has in fact been implementing something it calls "traffic shaping," a technology that gives priority to certain on-line activities (such as e-mail, browsing, voice communication) and putting the brakes on other less time-sensitive stuff, such as swapping music files.

As local politicians go door-to-door in search of votes and the national party leaders prepare for this week's debates, the election campaign has thus far centred on each party's attempt to articulate a unique vision for the future of Canada. With this in mind, Canadians should jump at this rare opportunity to turn the leaders' attention to law and technology issues.

The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age. The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream. The slow-down, which has long been predicted as a possible consequence of global warming, will give renewed urgency to intergovernmental talks in Montreal, Canada, this week on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

Ontario's government awarded C$2 billion ($1.7 billion) in contracts to build wind and hydro power projects on Monday in an effort to have 10 percent of electricity in Canada's biggest market generated by renewable sources. Ontario Energy Minister Donna Cansfield said she had granted awards for eight wind facilities and one hydroelectric development, which will supply a total of 975 megawatts, enough to power more than 250,000 homes. The awards come in response to a request for proposals for 1,000 MW, issued in April 2004.

The federal government has introduced a bill to make it easier for police and CSIS to monitor private cellphone conversations and communication on the internet. The Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act, if passed, would require internet companies to give the police confidential information on their subscribers.

The Globe and Mail reports that Canadian law professors have countered the Canadian recording industry's misinformation campaign in a new 600-page book that is being made freely available under a creative commons license. Led by Professor Michael Geist, the book provides full coverage of the possibility of Canada adopting DMCA-like copyright laws.

Ontario’s electricity smart meters could jump-start plans for a sprawling meshed IP network that will connect the entire province wirelessly, initially by Wi-Fi and, as the technology becomes more widely embraced, ultimately by Wi-Max. Lawrence Surtees, director of telecom and Internet research and a principal analyst at IDC Canada, believes every indication points to a sophisticated, nomadic wireless Ontario broadband network within five years. “There’s a huge, crowded field of interested parties out there. We’re seeing spectrums of (Wi-Max) bandwidth being snapped up by Rogers Wireless, Telus, Bell, SaskTel and Primus. In Canada we’re looking at potentially five national blocks of frequency,” said Surtees. With Intel predicting Wi-Max ubiquity by 2007-08, and mass commercial availability by the end of 2006, Ontario’s timeline for a smart meter network by 2010 is not unrealistic, says Surtees. “Clearly, Ontario Energy is looking at Wi-Max for the province’s smart meters,” he said. The Ontario Energy Board was issued a request for proposal by the Ministry of Energy to implement smart meters. When asked about the Board’s plan Ted Gruetzner, a spokesman for the Ministry, would give no details but said an announcement was due this month. In the meantime, pilot programmes have sprung up throughout the province, with FibreWired Hamilton deploying a hybrid of Wi-Fi and Wi-Max to support the Hamilton-Wentworth region.

TORONTO (CP) - The Canadian Recording Industry Association is calling on Ottawa to make sure Canada's copyright law is up to par after an Australian court ruled popular file-swapping network Kazaa was illegal. "The law that is currently on the books - that's enforced - is so antiquated that the net result has been, (that) despite all of our best efforts, Canada's become a piracy haven," association president Graham Henderson said in an interview Monday. "We have lobbied for years . . . to get those laws up to date so we're in line with everyone in the world - and I mean everyone else."