Revoke Bill C-18

-

Below is the text of a note sent to the PM's office via the Prime Minister's contact page. The note was prompted by the fact that I was/am unable to link to an important article about the abduction of a Canadian citizen by ICE in the United States -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-detained-us-immigration-jasmine-mooney --  Although I was aware of the event and others would be too, it is important to read the article to get the whole picture. As I was aware of it prior to reading the article I thought it was an aberrant case that would not apply to my family and myself. Having read the article, my opinion is entirely different. The more comprehensive description indicates to me that for the time being travel in the United States is positively unsafe. 

I wrote specifically at length about Bill C-18 here:

https://blog.bobtrower.com/2023/08/repeal-canadas-online-news-act.html

Letter to the Prime Minister

Subject: Urgent Call to Revoke Bill C-18

As a professional with decades of experience in all types of networks, I must emphasize that Bill C-18 is fundamentally flawed—both technically and morally. It exemplifies how short-sighted lobbying and incompetent legislative processes can create laws that actively harm the public.

By mandating payments for news content, the bill has led platforms like Meta to block legitimate news, forcing users to rely on unreliable sources. This fosters misinformation and endangers Canadians—especially in times of crisis.

For example, in an article now unshareable due to C-18 restrictions, a Canadian detained by U.S. immigration describes how "Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit." She further states, "This is not just my story. It is the story of thousands and thousands of people still trapped in a system that profits from their suffering."

These urgent realities must be widely known, yet C-18 prevents access to such critical journalism.

Bill C-18 is not just ineffective—it is dangerous. I urge lawmakers to revoke it before misinformation further erodes public safety and informed discourse in Canada.

----

Upon review, I decided to do this post and reference it because I deal with these issues at length in numerous posts online. 

Follow-up Letter to the Prime Minister

Subject: Follow-Up on Bill C-18 Concerns and Accessibility of Critical News Content

Dear Prime Minister,

I am writing to follow up on my previous correspondence regarding the urgent need to revoke Bill C-18. In my earlier note, I highlighted the unintended consequences of this legislation, particularly how it has led platforms like Meta to block legitimate news content, thereby fostering misinformation and endangering public safety.

To provide a more detailed analysis and to share specific examples that underscore these concerns, I have elaborated on this issue in a recent blog post: Revoke Bill C-18. This post expands upon the points raised in my initial message and includes references to critical news articles that I was unable to share on platforms like Facebook due to the restrictions imposed by Bill C-18.

https://blog.bobtrower.com/2025/03/revoke-bill-c-18.html 

I urge you to consider the insights presented in the blog post and to take swift action to revoke this legislation to ensure that Canadians have unfettered access to reliable news sources.

Sincerely,

Bob Trower

-------

Here's a link to that contact page, BTW:

https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/connect/contact

I wrote about aspects of publishing touching on Bill C-18:

"legislative efforts like Canada’s Bill C-18—intended to protect news producers—favor large incumbents while locking out small publishers entirely. Critics argue this entrenches disparities in access and control, leaving smaller players unable to compete (Parliament of Canada, 2023)."

The post is here:

https://blog.bobtrower.com/2025/01/the-end-of-era.html

I also wrote about the notion that so-called 'IP' is generally injurious to the body politic:

https://blog.bobtrower.com/2022/12/abolish-copyrights-make-world-better.html

https://blog.bobtrower.com/2025/02/who-owns-our-culture.html




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Javascript webp to png converter

-
Image
[Done with programmer's assistants: Gemini, DALL-E] OpenAI's DALL-E produces images, but as webp files which can be awkward to work with. I have code here below for a web page that you can save locally that will allow you to select and convert a webp file. Meantime, here's the working conversion routine: Convert WebP to PNG Convert Download PNG OpenAI should fix this (as well as the response issues which has me using Gemini and Poe more often than not). Having to convert the image is a dumb workaround, but that is what you are left with. I have, in the past had to do various things with images, and although it can be a bit awkward if you are not familiar with it, ImageMagick is surprisingly competent with conversions and a vanilla type conversion is intuitively simple. Confusingly, the ImageMagick executable is 'convert'. To convert a webp to a png:  magick convert WhyThis.webp WhyThis.png ** With some installations, convert can be ca...
Read more

Received Development Methodology

-
Image
Received Development Methodology Introduction This is called 'The Received Methodology' because nothing has really been invented here beyond tidying up the process and describing it. It is, in bits and pieces, what some working programmers pass on to one another. It already exists in the wild on its own. It is 'what we do'. There is some merit in formalizing some of the stages so that work is easier to characterize and carve off and so that developers do not have to make apologies for the real-world fact that things generally are not 'first time right' in the meaningful sense of being 'the best' or surviving in the marketplace without revision. Things like 'pair programming', 'design patterns', 'RAD', 'Use cases', 'XP' (eXtreme Programming)', 'Agile Programming', test driven design, etc, all have their place within this framework, if only because they *DO* happen and this is a description of ...
Read more

Our education system is broken

-
I have struggled over the years with a persistent feeling that there is something profoundly wrong with our system of education. I expect that everyone wonders, from time to time, if we might do things better. I am increasingly of the opinion that we could do things a lot better. However, I expect that this will require some very large changes to the way we do things now. I am reluctant to criticize the way people working in a field conduct their business. I have spent a significant portion of my career examining how people do their work and I have invariably found that people are skilled, knowledgeable and conscientious. They know what they are doing better than an outsider would. Often, even though it seems from the outside that things do not work as well as they should, a closer look will reveal that the problem domain is larger and more complex than it looks and the solutions being pursued by working experts in the field are mature and effective. I have spent a lot of time ...
Read more