Industry Minister Maxime Bernier has introduced legislation that grants the Competition Bureau greater fining power over telecommunications companies that abuse their market power. The bill is rightly seen as another step toward telecommunications deregulation in Canada.
Post Tagged with: "bernier"
The Free Market Champion
The Globe and Mail features two major articles today that involve Industry Minister Maxime Bernier which demonstrate that current choices are all about politics, not principles. The first indicates that Bernier plans to scuttle the CRTC's revised VoIP decision, the "first time in years a Minister intervened to overrule a […]
Speechless
The Hill Times this week features a special section on Canadian innovation policy that includes an email question and answer session with Industry Minister Maxime Bernier. The answers to some critical innovation questions are instructive: You are said to take a 'consumer-first' approach to your department. If you agree with […]
Tech Law Research Hurt By Budget Cuts
My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version , homepage version ) examines last week's announcement that the Conservative government plans to cut funding for the Law Commission of Canada. I cite a series of important technology law research projects, noting that the common link is that the LCC, an independent law reform agency that advises Parliament on how to improve and modernize Canada’s laws, has provided the necessary financial support.
Government has limited capacity to conduct comprehensive research analysis on its own, leaving it increasingly dependent on outside contractors or academic studies to support its policy work.
Industry Minister Should Put Spam Law Back on Agenda
My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) highlights the failure of the Canadian government to follow through on a task force report that recommended new anti-spam legislation. Industry Minister Bernier was recently asked about his efforts in combating spam, an ongoing nuisance that costs Canadian business millions of dollars while harming the consumer confidence needed to support emerging businesses. Bernier indicated that he had just received the 2005 National Task Force on Spam report (I was a member of the task force) and would respond to its recommendations in the coming weeks.
While he acknowledged that a "big group of experts" had called on the government to do something, he seemed to foreshadow a rejection of the Task Force's legislative recommendations, commenting that "the question is, what can we do? And I'm not sure right now. Maybe the market will decide in the end." I argue that should the Minister take the time to carefully read the report, he will find that a broad cross-section of Canadians representing Internet service providers, marketers, and the public, do not share his doubts about the role of government.
Moreover, the Minister's claim that he only recently received the Task Force report is contradicted by documents recently obtained under the Access to Information Act. They reveal that just days after Bernier was sworn in as Canada’s Industry Minister, department officials delivered a briefing titled "Building Business Confidence and Consumer Trust Online."
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