We had a chat about the draconian copyright bill that was supposed to be introduced in Ottawa last week, but wasn’t; she’s completely on board with why the bill is a bad thing. It likely helped that I helped her out with a little Blackberry problem that she was having just then. The best part, however, was her Rona Ambrose imitation.

Thank you to all those who have supported our websites. Due to increasing legal concerns resulting from our public participation in the Net Neutrality debate, we have at this time decided to shut down the operation of these sites.

We have no comment for the media and will not be releasing any additional detail about the factors leading up to this decision. We are currently looking for an appropriate organization to take over these properties and who has the resources to properly operate these sites.

Sincerely,
Kevin McArthur
StormTide Digital Studios Inc.

The StormTide site, which appears to be his web design/development shop, displays the same message.

Today, the Globe and Mail ran a story showing the real numbers: when income trust shares plummeted in value, a lot of new buyers stepped in to take over these companies, and many of these new buyers don’t pay Canadian taxes since they’re foreign entities or domestic private equity. That means that tax dollars that would have been payable by those trust organizations under the new law aren’t going to the Canadian government.

A quoted source in the article states that the 11 takeovers that have occurred since the announcement last year could result in over $73 million in lost taxes. Each 5% of the trust sector that is bought up by foreign entities or domestic private equity results in an additional $165 million in lost tax revenue per year, so if only 15% of the trust sector is so acquired, there goes Flaherty’s $500 million/year that he was hoping to recoup by screwing us over with the income trust tax.

This estimate even appears to be conservative (no pun intended): the G&M article quoted another unnamed analyst who said that the current acquisitions will cost Ottawa $130 million in annual lost tax revenue, not $73 million, and that if the profile of acquiring companies stays consistent to what it has been in the six months since this debacle started, the annual tax loss will be about $4.2 billion.

So instead of earning an extra $500 million in annual tax revenue, the Conservative government has created the potential to lose over eight times that amount, while at the same time causing a huge drop in the investment portfolio of everyone owning income trust units. Call it a lose-lose situation, and vote these guys out before they completely bankrupt us with their inept financial management.

For those of you who are not familiar with net neutrality, you can check out neutrality.ca’s site or the recent piece on CityTV by Amber MacArthur:

The short explanation is that it allows us, as consumers, to choose what internet content that we want to access, without having our internet providers either censor or restrict the bandwidth of sites that they deem harmful to themselves in some way. There are a growing number of examples of internet providers — companies like Bell, Telus and Rogers, who we pay to provide us with broadband access to the internet — either cutting off access to sites or throttling back the bandwidth to make them essentially unusable; these examples range from completely blocking a pro-union site that represented workers of one of these companies when they were out on strike, to restricting bandwidth of certain types of traffic, like free IP telephony applications and peer-to-peer video services, that compete with the providers’ own for-pay services. Considering that we’re paying them for internet access of a certain bandwidth, this is clearly a violation of the spirit of the agreement that we have with them, if not the letter of the contract itself.

As a consumer, it’s clear to see why you should be in favour of net neutrality: otherwise, the internet providers will continue to decide what we watch and how we use the internet, much like their predecessors have done with television; we’ll end up paying more for less variety. But it’s also important for content producers, because more and more these days, we’re all content producers. We upload photos to Flickr. We upload videos to YouTube. We write blogs. We create content online. In many cases, this content is not mission critical or even revenue generating, but it’s important to us for some reason, and we don’t want it to be unfairly restricted in any way. As the ISPs get into the business of selling content, more of what we do as independent content creators will compete with what they do, making them more likely to either slow down access to our content or shake us down for payment to make it accessible at the speed that it should be offered.

The face of content creation is changing. It’s not just the mainstream media any more: it’s anyone who has something to say and a bit of technology. And this week, I saw three examples of non-mainstream media that are very different, but great reasons for why we need to support net neutrality, since without it, these may not exist. Even if you don’t share these tastes in TV, politics and music, picture your favourites in here.

The first is PromQueen.tv, which I read about on TechCrunch. It’s an 80-episode high-school serial drama, with each episode only 1-1/2 minutes long, aimed clearly at the MySpace generation. True, this is a kissing cousin to mainstream media, since it’s the product of a company started by ex-Disney chief Michael Eisner, but the entire thing was done with a budget of $100k, and has some fairly unobtrusive ads at the beginning and end of each episode to help pay the bills. If Eisner can do this for $100k, then others can too, and people will watch if the story quality and production values are sufficiently high. Unless, of course, your ISP is also a cable company, and decides that they don’t want you watching PromQueen.tv since it might impact how much money that you spend on their cable services.

Second are Olivia Chow‘s videos on YouTube. I’m in her riding and a supporter; in fact, she was knocking on doors in my building earlier this week and I had a chance to chat with her, although completely forgot to talk about net neutrality   The next day, I received an email newsletter from her office with a link to her latest video about the lack of regulation in the pet food industry. Clearly an amateur production, featuring (and likely filmed by) friends and relatives, it gave Chow an opportunity to state her opinions in a casual format without spending a lot of money to do it, and appear sort of cool at the same time. Given the obscene amounts of money that other political parties spend on attack ads on mainstream media, I’m happy to see that the NDP is using the low-cost grassroots approach for some of their policy statements, and not via the fake MySpace page approach that US politicians seem to favour. This video only has a couple of hundred views so far, but others, like her tour of the “green house” where she and Jack Layton live have generated over 10,000 views. That, of course, could change if your ISP is a large phone company that is a big supporter of the Conservative party and decides to choke off access to content created by other political parties.

Third is a hilarious parody video done by Alanis Morissette, using some fairly sparse sets but otherwise full (read: pricey) production support. First, watch this video of the rap song “My Humps” by the Black-Eyed Peas (even if you don’t like them, suffer through it, it’s less than 4 minutes long):

Then, watch this video of Morissette’s cover of the same song, released on April Fool’s Day (ditto on even if you don’t like her):

When you pick yourself up off the floor, probably having peed yourself laughing, notice that her video has over 3 million views as of today: it’s being discussed on blogs everywhere, mainstream entertainment sites such as CTV’s, who write “The ridiculous clip is attracting cheers from fans across the blogosphere, where pop-culture junkies are delighting in the ‘Ironic’ singer’s no-holds-barred critique of the titillating track and singer Fergie’s suggestive dance moves”, and music sites such as the Lefsetz Letter, which refers to it as “a juggernaut” in terms of the viral nature of its spread in the past six days, and points out that “we no longer live in a top-down society. The mainstream comes to the party last, after the public has delineated what’s important.” The point that Lefsetz is making is that even if content is semi-mainstream (if anyone can refer to Morissette in that way), the decision about what gets watched has moved from the hands of mainstream media who fed us a restricted number of channels of both video and audio, into the hands of the consumers via their consumption on YouTube and other internet sites. Except if your ISP wants to promote their own online music video offering and doesn’t want you watching Alanis unless you do it on their channel.

Net neutrality matters to all of us, whether we’re passive consumers or active creators of internet content. As neutrality.ca puts it, it’s your internet.

Many Canadians have written to me during the last few months in support for the NDP’s position on Afghanistan. This support is greatly appreciated. I firmly believe that we are a nation of facilitators not occupiers, we are a people committed to the ideals of building bridges not burning them and we must not allow that legacy of good work to falter.

A good opposition not only opposes, but proposes. So in that spirit, I want you to know about the NDP’s made-in-Canada plan for Afghanistan. An NDP-led federal government would:

• Give notice that Canada will withdraw from the search-and-kill combat mission in Kandahar.
• Work with NATO partners, the Afghan government, and other affected parties to find a political solution through capacity building and a comprehensive peace process.
• Focus Canada’s role in Afghanistan on humanitarian aid, reconstruction and development, with appropriate security measures.

In contrast to our plan, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has silenced Canada’s independent voice on foreign policy. Following the previous Liberal government’s path, today’s Conservatives have turned their backs on our respected, proven peace-building and peace-keeping traditions by committing Canadian troops to the aggressive search-and-kill combat mission in southern Afghanistan which is fueling the escalation of violence. From the emails and letters I receive it is clear that everyday Canadians know that:

• This Bush-style combat mission will not create the conditions for long-term security.
• The mission is ill-defined, unbalanced, and without a clear exit strategy.
• For every $1 in humanitarian aid and reconstruction, the Conservative government is spending $9 on military combat in Afghanistan.

The fact of the matter is that the discussion at hand should be about if this mission is the right role for Canada and – not – which Party supports our troops. If you have not done so already, I invite you to sign our on-line petition. Support our troops. Bring ‘em home, which can be found at: http://www.ndp.ca/page/4121.

Again, I appreciate hearing from you on this troubling matter. I would like to take this opportunity to encourage you to pass along this email.

All the best.

Sincerely,

Jack Layton, MP (Toronto-Danforth)
Leader, Canada’s New Democrats

As I pointed out a while back, a huge percentage of Canadian troop deaths in Afghanistan are being caused by American “not-so-friendly” fire, which is a bit ironic considering that we’re only in Afghanistan in order to pander to the Americans — they’re kinda busy in Iraq, so want us to fight some of their other battles. For decades, Canadians have held a peacekeeper role in conflicts abroad, a position that I fully support. Being part of a fighting force in a conflict that we should not be involved with, however, is not something that I can support.

I’ve had a soft spot for Turner ever since he helped out my sister and her husband almost 30 years ago when they were stuck in an 18% mortgage snafu: he publicly named the bank in his influential morning business column in the Toronto Sun, and the problem was magically resolved within days. Lately, he’s more likely to be publishing his thoughts on a number of issues where his opinion differs from that of the party, such as child care, same-sex marriage, and the publication ban when the bodies of soldiers are brought home from Afghanistan. (Not surprisingly, he’s in favour of children, tolerance and freedom of the press.)

Meanwhile, the Conservative party backs up their actions by saying that there were “confidentiality concerns” about his blog, which sounds a bit too much like the US cracking down on music pirates as part of “national security”: I can almost hear the jackboots marching in the streets.