Journey’s End doesn’t have much in the way of scientific coherence. It resolves its cliffhanger from The Stolen Earth in one of the biggest cheats in the history of the program. There are guns on the wall that don’t get fired. And yet, I don’t care. I came away from this episode with a very warm and fuzzy feel.

And this was more than just Russell T. Davies piling on the whiz-bang continuity-hungry feel. Instead, there is a structure here. Russell was thankfully given an additional twenty minutes to finish his story and he makes the most of it. The crowded feel of The Stolen Earth dissipates as each character is given time to tell their story (even with the introduction of three more companion characters). The story becomes more complex, with added bits of pathos to balance things out. On the whole, Journey’s End just feels right.

And I’ll give Russell T. Davies immense credit for not hitting the reset button on this one. The resolution is highly improbable, but no less fun, and no less worthwhile because it does come at a cost, and the cost sticks.

After having some time to think it over, I’ve decided I was too hard on The Stolen Earth. Instead of being the weakest story of the season, I’ll call it the second weakest and score it a passable five out of ten. Journey’s End gets seven, giving the two-parter an average of six, which I could raise on bonus points. It’s not Shakespeare and nor is it The Shakespeare Code, but like The Sontaran Stratagem, it was an enjoyable way to spend two hours.

A full spoilerific review takes place after the break.

Continue reading For the Young at Heart
Journey's End Reviewed.

A busy and stressful day, as Rosemarie finishes off her application to immigrate to Canada, and we prepare for a trip back to Des Moines. The latter has not gone off as well as we’re hoping, though it’s coming off better than it might have. More on that later, not to mention a few choice words about Amtrak’s customer service.

Part of the stress was the result of an Act of God — or rather, an Act of Steve Jobs. Yeah, an Act of Gates sounds better, but this was a complete crash of the battery power on Erin’s G4 iBook, which lost her about five days of work, including a letter to immigration that has to be rewritten (augh!). Or, more accurately, an Act of an Off-Price power cord, but if Jobs hadn’t charged $100 for a replacement Apple power cord, we wouldn’t have been in this pickle.

The crash reset the clock, that’s how serious it was. Fortunately, it wasn’t a complete hard drive failure, as most of our documents remain. A small consolation, considering that although we backed up our files, we last backed up a couple of days ago, and the file we wanted was written yesterday.

(In answer to Matt’s question, yes, the G4 iBook has a hard drive (40 Gb), but as Andrew notes, the crash wiped the PRAM, which killed any file that we had open and unsaved. Now, it’s a bit of a mystery how we managed to lose so much, since Erin feels she is a compulsive saver, but we still managed to lose a couple of days of work on Plain Kate and her letter to immigration, which was the last thing we need. Fortunately, with most of the work done and us now firmly esconsced in our travel, the stress is letting up.)

So, it’s a little stressful here. And we’re about to embark on a journey to Port Huron in a cramped car with two kids under the age of three. Should be interesting times. But at least there’s the train trip to look forward to tomorrow. Vivian is particularly eager.

Anyway, expect sporadic posting over the next couple of days. This post will cover more of today’s travel, once I get a spare moment. Wish us luck. It should be fun, but we might still need a little luck.

(Update: 10:42 p.m.): We made it to Port Huron and checked into a decent Comfort Inn not far from its downtown.

We had an excellent drive. Vivian and Nora were happy through most of it. Nora entranced us all by reaching out and grabbing an assortment of baubles that we’d dangled from the top of her carseat to entertain her. Vivian watched DVDs on my laptop. We crossed the Bluewater bridge against a glorious sunset, with a purple sky and clouds in the background and the bridge girders in silhouette. Lake Huron shone back up at us. I wish I had a camera ready, but Erin took some shots and we might upload them.

Now we have to get up around 4 a.m. to catch the train into Chicago. Why are we doing this, especially given that Vivian has made the drive to Des Moines before? Well, now there’s Nora, in her carseat, needing to be fed every two hours in the daytime. At this age, she’s a lot more portable on an airplane than in a car, but Vivian is just old enough to be charged for her own seat on the plane, so that’s not an option.

And sitting between them, in the back seat of our Hyundai Elantra, is my mother-in-law. It was just bearable — enjoyable, even — in our four hours of driving (including a one hour stop at a McDonald’s in London), but imagine doing that for sixteen driving hours.

So we’re taking the train.

Rosemarie found us a good deal from Port Huron to Ocseola, IA for the five of us, at around $600, inclusive. Between hotel costs and gas, we’re probably not that bad off, and it would be impossible to get the five of us to fly for that amount. Unfortunately this fell through and we’ve had to pay more to change our itinerary, but more on that later.

I’m mourning the loss of the International Limited, which used to travel from Toronto to Chicago via Kitchener and would have been ideal for this, but the train died out after the September 11 terrorist attacks when an extra cheap bureaucrat at Homeland Security decided that it would be more effective to stop the train in Sarnia, have the passengers get off, board a bus to get across the border, clear them through customs there, and then take them back to the train on the Port Huron side. This and a desire to allow Michigan passengers a chance to transfer to a Midwest-bound train from Chicago on the same day (the Port Huron-Chicago remnant of the International, now the Bluewater, departs Port Huron at 5:15) probably would have had the train leaving Toronto at around 2 a.m. So, we’re driving to the train.

I don’t know how I’ll feel tomorrow at this time, but we’re still looking forward to the trip.

Well, this is a milestone if ever there was one.

What is it that makes childhood haircuts a terrifying experience? For everyone, I mean.

Perhaps we brought this on ourselves. We haven’t cut Vivian’s hair since she was born. For the most part, it functioned well without a trim, and we delighted when the hair was long enough to put back into a ponytail.

But then Vivian started to get very territorial about her hair. We weren’t allowed to put it back in a ponytail. We certainly weren’t allowed to comb out the tangles (of which there were many), and even the act of pulling it away from her eyes would sometimes result in a cry of protest and a swat. :Erin: said, we’ve got to cut her hair, or else people will think she’s an orphan. So, I made the call. “Hi, I’d like to book a haircutting appointment for my daughter, please. Do you do two-year-olds? Good. We’ve got a live one.”

The place we chose was recommended to us by a sympathetic mother at the Early Years program. It’s called “Cookie Cutters” and it specializes in giving haircuts to precocious young kids. If anybody would be able to handle giving Vivian a haircut, they would. They had an indoor play set, not to mention plenty of distractions to keep the kids occupied while the snip-snips came close to their face and ears, including individual video displays to show favourite movies (like Dora the Explorer) and seats shaped like airplanes and fire trucks.

In the end, we had to have :Erin: sit and hold Vivian on her lap as she cried, and then screamed that she didn’t want a haircut, she wanted her grandma, and she wanted to go home. “Do you want to wait until she’s less upset?” asked the hairstylist. “It’s not going to get any better,” we replied ruefully.

But the hairstylists were professionals. They gave her a lolli-pop, and when Dora appeared on the video screen, Vivian calmed right down, and the transformation began.

The hairstylist had a lot of good advice about what style to choose to keep the hair manageable, and we took her up on it. We also bought some industrial-strength detangler that worked a lot better than the bottle at home, and we invested in a certificate celebrating the first haircut, and a small baggie containing locks of Vivi-hair for the grandparents.

Vivian did wonderfully, much to our relief. Even her initial outburst was nothing that these folks had already seen. Indeed, a similar outburst occurred with another kid that followed us. According to the proprietor, they’ve faced much worse, including biting and extremely frazzled parents (I’ll bet).

As a parent, the relief that Vivian took to her haircut well was palpable, but the confusion over why this is such a terror remains. And yet I do recall that I also hated haircuts as a kid, but in my case I particularly hated those tapers that my father used, with dull razor blades to scrape down the back of my head. It eventually got so frustrating that they finally took me to a hairstylist. We never looked back.

Hairstylists today fill a key niche in the raising of children in North America. They know how to handle these tough customers, and they take what could be an extremely stressful situation out of the parents’ hands. We paid $50 for the whole experience. It was worth every penny.

More pictures of Vivian’s new look can be found on Erin’s Flickr stream.

Utter. Crap.

(Pause to let :dan: freak out a little)

My eight word addendum to my two word review on The Stolen Earth:

But. Why. Did. I. Enjoy. It. So. Much?

Because The Stolen Earth is the first part of a two-parter, I would normally wait until next Sunday before I review the story as a whole. But I find that I cannot do that in this case. For one thing, I suspect that next week’s episode is going to be a different kettle of fish. For another, this episode is such a textbook example of how to do Doctor Who wrong, that to wait a week potentially makes my review unmanageably long. And yet…

So, let’s roll up our sleeves, everyone. We’re going in. And don’t forget the shovels. We’ll need them.

Continue reading For the Kids
The Stolen Earth Reviewed.

And it came to pass that in that time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One:

‘Psst!’

During a visit to Toronto, I met up with :Cameron: and we talked a bit about our shared love of the works of Terry Pratchett. We both agreed that he changed as a writer, as all good writers should, especially one getting thirty or forty novels under his or her belt. But we expressed slightly different opinions about which stage of Pratchett we preferred.

Early Pratchett books tend to have a wilder humour, as Pratchett mercilessly goes up against the conventions of fantasy. As he gets older, however, the humour mellows, and Pratchett’s subject matter deepens. It becomes contemporary British life that gets parodied, and he offers more insight into how the minds of people really work. Consider the development of the witches from Wyrd Sisters to Wintersmith. In the former, Granny Weatherwax doesn’t have the wearwithall to understand that a play is only a play. By Wintersmith, the serious side of witchery is well known, and Granny is quite a dark character, usually called to a bedside when Death is near.

Cameron preferred the wilder humour of early Pratchett, while I preferred the deeper characterizations of his later works. At the apex of this, however, said Cameron, was the book Small Gods, which he strongly recommended I read.

Small Gods is not a Pratchett novel I would have picked up in the early going. Even though it stands alone, it has none of the characters that usually marks fans’ entry into the Discworld. The story likely takes place at least a century before the “present day” of Discworld. There’s no Commander Sam Vimes. There’s no Granny Weatherwax. There’s certainly no Tiffany Aching. There is even no Ankh-Morpork. What there is, however, is Brutha, a young novice in the Church of Om, and a conduit that allows Pratchett to roll up his sleeves and tell us what he really thinks about organized religion.

It’s prophetic that I should read this book and write this review, just as an aging Pratchett writes up his own contemplations about God. He seems a decent chap, who doesn’t take anything too seriously, least of all himself, and is quite serious in that philosophy. In Pratchett’s view religion, as in all things fundamentally human, is flawed, ignorant, capable of casual cruelty, and yet retaining the fundamental goodness of your average human, and the possibility of achieving something spectacular. It is, at the same time, a cynical yet optimistic philosophy, and it imbues the pages of this book. But Small Gods doesn’t stop there, and creates the concept of “small gods”, turning the concept of faith on its head.

A wise philosopher in Pratchett’s Discworld speculated that while there may have been a supreme being, it’s unlikely that the supreme being created the world, as one can clearly see given how flawed the world is. Therefore, what more likely happened is that one of the supreme being’s underlings created the world when the supreme being wasn’t looking, and so prayers to the supreme being should perhaps be avoided, in case he happened to notice them, and came looking to see what was the infernal racket that had been created in his name.

But beneath the supreme being, living within the universe of Discworld, are a myriad of “small gods” — creatures of psychic energy that float about in the ether, invisible and unintelligent, until a chance encounter gives a small god a believer. By the power of human belief, the gods grow, and can foster further human belief through chance miracles, or even manifestations and smiting. Om is one such god, a being who seems to have the character of a bored college student waiting for his next kegger.

“Ossory, Ossory,” said the tortoise. “No… no… can’t say I—”

“He said that you spoke to him from out of a pillar of flame,” said Brutha.

“Oh, that Ossory,” said the tortoise. “Pillar of flame. Yes.”

“And you dictated to him the Book of Ossory,” said Brutha. “Which contains the Directions, the Gateways, the Abjurations and the Precepts. One hundred and ninety-three chapters.”

“I don’t think I did all that,” said Om doubtfully. “I’m sure I would have remembered one hundred and ninety-three chapters.”

“What did you say to him, then?”

“As far as I can remember it was ‘Hey, see what I can do!’” said the tortoise.

Om manifests periodically to do some smiting and miracle work (mostly smiting), and has feasted on the belief of thousands within the land of Omnia. So it is something of a surprise when, when manifesting again after a long time away, he materializes as a small one-eyed tortoise who, worse, thinks like a tortoise.

It’s only by luck that he finds Brother Brutha, whose belief allows Om to think like the god that he is. He is still trapped in the body of the tortoise, though. And this is a perplexing mystery: the Church of Om is still extremely powerful. There are no other religions (and the small gods they support) challenging the church for prominence. Any dissenting thought is ruthlessly rooted out by the Quisition. There are thousands of followers of the Church of Om, but it seems that Brother Brutha is the only human alive who actually believes in Om himself.

And so begins the criticism of organized religion: the dogmatic, hidebound institutions that will slowly substitute themselves for God in the minds of the believers if they’re not careful. Brutha has his preconceptions challenged, about his god, and about everything the Church has told him about what is holy. Some of this does not come as too much of a revelation, as Brutha is assigned to the entourage of the Exquisitor Vorbis, and sees first hand the official’s righteous evil. Everybody within the Church of Om is afraid of its power structure, and the subversive elements trying to overthrow it have to work very carefully. Brutha eventually realizes that he has to do something, but what? Fortunately, he has god on his side. Sort of. Maybe.

The attentions of Vorbis are focused on the neighbouring kingdom of Ephebe, which is a seat of learning (heresy) and a meeting place for a wide range of philosophies and religions (heresy). Indeed, shopowners are used to see naked men running down the streets, dripping from their bath, desperate for a tablet or something to write their new ideas down. This sort of freedom of thought is an affront to the will of Om (though Om himself disagrees) and must be stamped out. And only a mind like Vorbis could be so evil as to carefully plan out Omnia’s retaliation before Ephebe’s original “attack”.

There is something very compelling about the idea of gods needing humans more than humans needing gods, but it’s worth noting that Pratchett maintains a fundamental respect for the human desire to have something to believe in. Atheists are not spared his merciless satire, and are often struck by lightning from the gods that do exist. All the philosophers of Ephebe, bar one (Didactylos), are too wrapped up in their deep thinking to be really thoughtful. And while all the institutions of the Church are laid waste, Pratchett backs away from Phillip Pullman’s call for a Republic of Heaven, favouring instead a constitutional monarchy. Witness this snippet of dialogue when Om and Brutha debate establishing a new set of commandments.

“I Like One About Not Killing,” said Om, from far above. “It’s Got A Good Ring To It. Hurry Up. I’ve Got Some Smiting To Do”

“You see?” said Brutha. “No. No smiting. No commandments unless you obey them too.”

All of the touchstones of religion are mined, here. Brutha and Om have a long trek through the desert before them, and Brutha has his own cross to bear. There’s even a subtle and funny reference to Plato’s shadows as only Pratchett can do. And through this tale, an unassuming man will become Pope, and a god will learn humility. If that isn’t a remarkable literary achievement, I don’t know what is. Brutha, through it all, retains his faith, and shows a very Christian conviction about forgiveness and redemption. It makes him perhaps the most compelling character in the Pratchett canon.

Small Gods deserves more attention than it gets in the Discworld canon, as it is the apex of Pratchett’s depth of thinking and wildness of humour. It would be an ideal candidate for a movie adaptation, especially from the people who gave us The Hogfather and The Colour of Magic. Rarely do I encounter a story that makes me think and makes me care as much as it makes me laugh, but Small Gods has it all.

Read this book, or I will smite you.

Further to my last post about fuel prices and the rising fortunes of our continent’s railroads, the Toronto Star reports that work is beginning on a project to expand full, hourly, two-way service on the Milton GO line, seven days a week.

GO Transit is Toronto’s “other” transit network, the second most travelled and, with the TTC finally getting additional subsidy, the most “profitable”, with a farebox recovery of 89%, but of the seven train lines operating on the service, only the route along the Lakeshore offers off-peak and weekend service, with trains operating even on Sundays between Aldershot and Oshawa. Additional service is slowly being added to other routes, but it’s still very much a commuter line connecting suburban residents to jobs in downtown Toronto and that doesn’t describe people like me.

The expansion of Milton service is long overdue, but what is frustratingly not mentioned is the status of the much-desired (by Waterloo Region, anyway) extension of that service to Cambridge (either at the east end of town or near downtown Galt). Our regional council keeps on making overtures, but nothing seems to get done. Perhaps when full service is extended to Milton, GO Transit, or possibly Greyhound, will start running shuttles between downtown Kitchener, Cambridge and the end of the Milton line.

If this happened, or if trains operated at convenient times to Cambridge, this would change my behaviour. Currently, when I travel into Toronto, I tend to drive to an outlying subway parking lot and take the TTC the rest of the way. If I’m travelling into Toronto during rush hour, I head for the Aldershot GO station and take the GO train the rest of the way. VIA Rail is an excellent service, but it’s expensive, and the few runs are centred around commuter travel. If I could take public transit to the end of the Milton line, and reasonably expect to have a train waiting for me when I needed it, I’d leave my car at home more often.

And, as this website shows, I’m not alone.

That’s one step forward. For two steps back, consider Greyhound’s boneheaded decision to suspend ticket sales at Kitchener’s downtown bus terminal, relocating the ticket centre to the Sportsworld development on the south side of town.

When I took the bus into Toronto earlier this month, this was the talk of a number of commuters who were very displeased at the inconvenience involved, not to mention the ten minutes the new stop added to the schedule.

I can see why Greyhound wants to stop at Sportsworld. It’s on the route between Kitchener and the 401, so it’s no major inconvenience. It also has oodles of free parking, which might be the deciding factor, here. But why suspend ticket sales in the downtown terminal? That makes no sense. Kitchener commuters to Toronto now have to drive or take transit down to Sportsworld and take the bus there. Kitchener commuters to Guelph are even more screwed, because either they won’t be able to purchase tickets for their bus running along Victoria Street (likely they’ll have to buy the ticket from the driver), or that bus is going to go well out of its way in order to serve the Sportsworld facility.

Just when GO Transit tantalizes us with the hope of improved transit service for the region, the private provider of public transit sees fit to kick us in the nuts. For shame!

The picture at the top of this post was taken from the observation car of the Waterloo Central Railway as it headed backwards from St. Jacobs to Waterloo, crossing Randall Road in the north end of the city.

After reading about the Milton GO train preparations, I felt a sudden desire to take the train again, and arranged to have Vivian and I take our tourist line up to St. Jacobs just a few hours later. Vivian loved it, and especially loved being invited to check out the observation car (actually, the business car) which was being used by the railroad as a cab that allowed the crew here to drive the train backwards by radio.

The line has been doing well since the charitable organization dedicated to restoring steam trains picked up the pieces left by a private excursion company who couldn’t make the previous version of the tourist line work. With a lower capital outlay and backing from Waterloo Region, service has flourished, and talking with a crew member, there’s talk about expansion. There will be a station and a passing siding built at the Farmer’s Market (thanks to a contribution from the nearby Walmart store going up there) and a proper station platform at St. Jacobs. The talk is of running two trains, providing hourly service to the Market, and possibly even to Elmira.

The line is being used as an extended parking lot, allowing people to leave their cars in Uptown Waterloo and shop at the Farmer’s Market and St. Jacobs at the north end of the city. There is further talk about how to turn this into more of a commuter service, and how to keep the service operating alongside a proposed LRT.

As the crew member noted, ten years ago there was serious talk about pulling up this freight line. Now there’s not. The end of cheap oil may be doing this. So that’s a silver lining to this cloud.

But, then, Russell Davies has surprised us before, most recently with Midnight, so optimism outweighs cynicism… so far.

Turn Left is this year’s “Doctor-lite” episode of the season, where the stars sit things out for a week due to budgetary and scheduling concerns. This year, the production crew shook things up a bit, splitting up the “lite” duties between two episodes. Midnight was Donna-light, allowing David Tennant to carry the story. Turn Left is now Donna’s moment to shine, and writer Russell T. Davies makes the most of it.

I have a full, spoilery review after the break.

Continue reading The Road Less Travelled
Turn Left Reviewed.

To defend itself against a lawsuit by the widows of three American soldiers who died on one of its planes in Afghanistan, a sister company of the private military firm Blackwater has asked a federal court to decide the case using the Islamic law known as Shari’a.

(link) (hat tip: The Vanity Press)

The reason this news story has gotten so much air play on a number of anti-war blogs is because they’ve listened to far more than their fair share of commentators railing against Muslims in general and Sharia law in particular.

Outside of this charged environment, the cognitive dissonance transforms into the merely heartless. The deaths occurred in Afghanistan, and the company facing the lawsuit is simply trying to avoid as much financial damage as possible by picking the legal system that is most advantageous to itself:

If the judge agrees, it would essentially end the lawsuit over a botched flight supporting the U.S. military. Shari’a law does not hold a company responsible for the actions of employees performed within the course of their work.

Which says what many of us have known for some time: capitalism can sometimes be quite a heartless system.

Is Toronto Recession Proof?

That’s what the Globe and Mail wants to know. While noting the problems that the Ontario economy is having, with auto plants closing in Oshawa, and an accident of federal statistics turning us into a “have not” province (note: only in comparison to Alberta’s windfall growth), Toronto doesn’t appear to have noticed:

Every developer fears the worst. In the meantime, they are all scrambling to meet insistent demand for new places to work and live.

The vacancy rate for top-quality downtown office space “went into freefall” in the first quarter of 2008, according to Cushman & Wakefield Lepage, dragging down vacancy rates for all kinds of commercial space in central Toronto.

Rental rates rose correspondingly: Companies scrambling to find a good address in the financial core drove up rents by the annual equivalent of 14 per cent in the first three months of this year, according to Cushman, leasing almost one million square feet of space over the same time.

That’s why so many new office buildings are going up downtown, with 3.4 million square feet - the equivalent of the entire Toronto-Dominion Centre - coming to market next year.

And this despite the fact that the American sub-prime lending crisis has trashed real-estate values and has started to empty out the weaker suburbs.

Well, I don’t know if this report is true or not, but given that during the last recession (1990-1994), Toronto lagged the rest of the country in coming out of it, I’d have to say that it would be a very nice change indeed.

Here in Kitchener-Waterloo, we seem to be doing well as well. Perhaps this is a new-economy/old-economy thing. I say again, I don’t think we can save the old tech auto sector jobs. We need to say goodbye to all that, invest heavily in the new information and bio-tech economy, and bulk up our training programs so we don’t leave the old workers behind.

Sultry Saturday

And, finally, as some blogs seem to like to stop their commentary once in a while for a musical interlude, I offer you this video by Jorane, singing “Pour Ton Sourire” with Daniel Lanois. Great stuff! I apologize for Yahoo’s commercial.

Dear Ministers Prentice and Vernier,

Thank you for your e-mail of June 12th, notifying me of the government’s introduction of Bill C-61, and assuring me that certain privileges I now enjoy, such as copying CDs I own onto iPods I own, would be maintained, and that border agents would not be empowered “to seize (my) iPod or laptop at border crossings.” This is, indeed, a relief. However, I remain disappointed by the details of the Bill.

I think you should know that I am an individual this copyright legislation is supposed to protect. I am an author of two young adult fantasy novels and now five non-fiction books for children due to come out later this year. I am a member of Access Copyright, and I am aware of the problems of plagiarism and piracy and the need to limit these activities. However, I also am an individual who believes that people should be as free as possible, that the government should have as little business as possible in our homes.

I fear that this legislation does not fully address the interests of Canadian consumers, or even individual copyright holders, while favouring quite strongly large corporate interests at the expense of individual privacy and individual property rights. For instance, though your legislation expressly allows individuals to copy CDs to other media, such as iPods, it does not extend that same provision to DVDs.

You do realize that Apple’s iTunes has the capability to copy DVD movies into a format that can be viewed from an iPod, don’t you? Why do you believe that this activity, performed by ordinary Canadians, should be criminalized? I’m inclined to believe that the DVD exception was left out as an oversight, but it speaks to the point that the bill is approaching the problem of piracy in the wrong direction. Rather than allowing individuals a blanket right to “format shift” from one media to another the content they have purchased, you have set up “exceptions”, blocking the right to all except those who which to copy music, photos, books, newspapers, magazines and VHS and Betamax videocassettes, and so on. If it isn’t on the list, it appears to become illegal.

Our justice system demands that we be considered innocent until proven guilty. It is shameful to have companies assume that because we want the ability to format shift or time shift or cut and paste, that we will misuse it. Yes, as an author, I would not want an individual to copy whole hog the text of an eBook version of my novel to sell as their own, but if it becomes illegal to circumvent Digital Rights Management provisions to cut and paste a paragraph from my novel to quote in an academic essay, we’ve pushed the law too far. Where is the trust in the trustworthiness of ordinary Canadians?

Moreover, the specified exceptions, allowing Canadians free reign to copy CDs to other media is rendered moot with the blanket prohibition against circumventing Digital Rights Management software on purchased media, even when done in the privacy of one’s home for personal use. This would be like making it illegal to open up my laptop, looking inside, and seeing how it’s put together. I do not see the justice in this. Yes, I’m aware such an act will invalidate my warranty, but it shouldn’t put me in jail.

Similarly, the bill’s apparent blanket prohibition of file sharing programs is an attempt to muzzle the technology rather than catch the criminals. Bittorrents are not just used to download illegal software as the bill’s authors seem to assume; legal software is also distributed in this manner, and I fear that this bill criminalizes my ability to download perfectly legal copies of programs such as NeoOffice using my (currently) perfectly legal piece of bittorrent software.

(Update): Since writing this e-mail, I have learned that there is no blanket prohibition on file sharing programs. I was in error, and I expect I’ll be corrected on this in Prentice’s reply. Instead, the fines of $500 per track for illegally possessing copyright materials like songs or videos increases to $20,000 if you upload said material to peer-to-peer file sharing programs or to YouTube. That removes one of my objections to this bill, but my concerns in other areas remain.

The e-mail continues:

Furthermore, the lack of protections offered by this bill to quote from, parody or criticize copyrighted material disturb me. We have already had cases where companies have used trademark lawsuits to try and shut down sites critical of their activities, and this bill would seem to enhance that ability. The new legislation makes it much more difficult to quote supporting material in academic essays, and requires librarians to ensure that any material they transfer electronically is disposed of within five days. This is a significant imposition on academic freedom in this country, and it could potentially restrict our freedom of speech.

As you run for a party which has argued in favour of personal property rights, I’m surprised that you no longer see fit to protect the right of Canadians to watch what they want, when they want, and how they want after they have legally purchased their song, video or software. You say that this bill is a “made-in-Canada” solution, and yet you failed to meet with any Canadian consumer group while you were drafting this legislation, while sitting down with lobbyists from the American Entertainment industry. The bill as presented criminalizes activities which don’t deserve to be criminalized. It revokes presumption of innocence, and it takes too much power away from consumers.

I cannot support this legislation as it has been presented and ask that it be amended, to tilt the balance more towards the individual Canadians that you are supposed to be serving. Failing that, I ask that you withdraw this bill, and set up public consultations across this country to hear from ordinary Canadians as well as corporate interests. I and many others will be watching Bill C-61 as it proceeds through the House, and I assure you we will be tailoring our votes come the next election accordingly.

Yours sincerely,
James Bow

cc. Karen Redman, MP Kitchener Center
Hon. Stephane Dion, Leader of the Opposition
Charles Angus, MP Timmins-James Bay
Jack Layton, Leader, New Democratic Party
Rt Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada

Further Notes

• For my own mistakes on what is in this bill, Cory Doctorow’s review of Jim Prentice’s brief appearance on the CBC Radio show Search Engine suggests that the minister himself isn’t clear on the content or the implications of his bill. Either that, or he came to the interview unprepared, which doesn’t seem to me to be a very professional approach to take.
• I would like to note that Blogging Tory member the Atheist Conservative shares many of my concerns about this legislation. In his words: “Copyright legislation SHOULD EXPRESSLY ALLOW fair use by consumers… …Copyright legislation SHOULD EXPRESSLY PROHIBIT overly restrictive DRM, which created this problem in the first place.” Hear, here!