Post Tagged with: "budget"

Fortune Global Forum 2018 #27 by John Lehmann/Fortune  FORTUNE Global Forum (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/2c3SF2A

Chrystia Freeland’s Hidden Tax: How Canada Should Implement the Copyright Term Extension Buried in Budget 2022

Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland unveiled Budget 2022 yesterday. While much of the focus was on housing and the environment, buried in Annex 3 at page 274 was a promise to extend the term of copyright from the international standard of life of the author plus 50 years to life plus 70 years. The extension fulfills a commitment in the Canada-US-Mexico Trade Agreement with the specific implementation details presumably to come in several weeks in the Budget Implementation Act. This is both a terrible policy making approach (Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015 in part on a pledge not to use the budget to sneak through legislation this way) and terrible policy that experts have termed a “tax on consumers”. Indeed, term extension was long opposed by successive Canadian governments both Liberal and Conservative for good reason: it creates significant costs with limited to no benefits.

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April 8, 2022 8 comments News
38-365 Fingerprint by Bram Cymet (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/69jvLD

How the Budget Bill Quietly Reshapes Canadian Privacy Law

A budget implementation bill is an unlikely – and many would say inappropriate – place to make major changes to Canadian privacy law. Yet Bill C-59, the government’s 158-page bill that is set to sweep through the House of Commons, does just that.

The omnibus budget bill touches on a wide range of issues, including copyright term extension and retroactive reforms to access to information laws. But there are also privacy amendments that have received little attention. In fact, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada was not even granted the opportunity to appear before the committee that “studied” the bill, meaning that privacy was not discussed nor analyzed (the committee devoted only two sessions to external witnesses for study, meaning most issues were glossed over).

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that the bill raises at least three privacy-related concerns. First, the retroactive reforms to access to information, which are designed to backdate the application of privacy and access to information laws to data from the long-gun registry, has implications for the privacy rights of Canadians whose data is still contained in the registry. By backdating the law, the government is effectively removing the privacy protections associated with that information.

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June 15, 2015 6 comments Columns

Government Buries Massive Trademark Overhaul in Budget Implementation Bill

Appeared in the Toronto Star on April 19, 2014 as Trademark Overhaul Promises to Please No One It started innocuously enough with the House of Commons Committee on Industry, Science and Technology releasing its long-awaited report on intellectual property in Canada in March 2013. The report included a recommendation that […]

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April 23, 2014 Comments are Disabled Columns Archive

It’s (Almost) Here: Why the Canadian Digital Strategy Takes Shape With Budget 2014

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a post about how the Canadian digital economy strategy seemed to be taking shape. The government had moved on several legislative issues including copyright and spam, it was bringing together federal and provincial ministers to discuss the issue, the open government initiative was on the way, and telecom policy was beginning to emerge as a major concern. All that was missing was an announcement, identification of some targets, and the signal that this was a priority. While I’m told that some in government also saw it this way, then-Industry Minister Christian Paradis let the moment slip away and the entire digital strategy become little more than a punchline.

Yesterday’s federal budget marks the revival of the Canadian digital strategy. The government will undoubtedly still point to past accomplishments (the budget references reforms that date back to the 2006, so digital economy activities from several years ago are surely fair game), but this budget provides many of the remaining ingredients for a digital strategy (Mark Goldberg offers a similar perspective). Once again, all that is left is missing is the official announcement from Industry Minister James Moore. So what will the Canadian digital strategy contain? Based on this budget, it would seem to include:

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February 12, 2014 8 comments News

Canadian Government To Commit More Money Toward Rural Broadband Initiatives

The CBC is reporting that the 2014 federal budget, which is scheduled to be tabled tomorrow, will feature money to “extend or improve high-speed Internet access to 280,000 households and businesses in rural and remote areas.” A new commitment to broadband access, which was promised in last fall’s speech from […]

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February 10, 2014 6 comments News