Canada

Stop Online Spying of Canadians (Bill C-11)

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It’s clear that the Conservative Party of Canada is out of touch with reality with their most recent attempt to police and monitor the internet. Their new policy (Bill C-11) will mandate ISPs to store and track everything you do online then hand over your internet history to the police without a warrant!

This is insane and ought to be stopped.

But that’s not all. The government will pay private companies to monitor what you do online!

Watch this video below then sign the petition to stop this internet monitoring.

(un)LAWFUL ACCESS from The New Transparency on Vimeo.

From OpenMedia.ca:

The government is trying to push through a set of electronic surveillance laws that will invade your privacy and cost you money. The plan is to force every phone and Internet provider to allow “authorities” to collect the private information of any Canadian, at any time, without a warrant.

This bizarre legislation will create Internet surveillance that is:

Warrantless: A range of “authorities” will have the ability to invade the private lives of law-abiding Canadians and our families using wired Internet and mobile devices, without justification.
Invasive: The laws leave our personal and financial information less secure and more susceptible to cybercrime.
Costly: Internet services providers may be forced to install millions of dollars worth of spying technology and the cost will be passed down to YOU.

Sign the petition!

Tax Breaks: A Misunderstanding

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Jesse Brown has published an article that has enraged the entire Canadian games industry – and rightly so! Brown wrote a piece called Grand theft tax break that is based off of a New York Times article on tax breaks in the USA for the video game industry there.

Brown’s piece ignores a lot of the great stuff that has come out of the video game industry here in Canada. Torontoist has a really good rebuttal to Brown that among other things points out how Toronto had an indie scene before Ubisoft came to town:

In Toronto, tax incentives make sense; our local industry is fledgling relative to those in Vancouver and Montreal. In fact, Ontario has smartly focused on supporting the industry here with tax breaks and grants and has tangible results to show for it: Toronto is now a rising star in the games world. However, what convinced Ontario to invest? It’d be hard to argue that the success of Vancouver and Montreal wasn’t a major factor. So, while Brown would like a Canadian industry of our “own,” the presence of one was undoubtedly catalyzed by the draw of foreign corporations, which brought along their knowledgebase and visibility.

Brown also called game developers slobs (essentially) which is just insulting and has no merit. Village Gamer has a good response to that:

These people – to whom Mr. Brown referred to as “code monkeys” and “grunts” are my friends, and it is these “grunts” who help to bring entire worlds to life, whether it is in an adventure – and sneakily educational – game like Assassin’s Creed, or an educational game that is sneakily fun like those coming out of Vivity Labs’ Fit Brains – all of them are built on top of a foundation built from computer code. Even the military relies on “grunts” to get things done, and done well, Mr. Brown.

What’s more is that Brown assumes that people who are working in the games industry now will inevitably lose their jobs when tax breaks get better elsewhere. I don’t think that’s true. In manufacturing, jobs do go elsewhere (look at NAFTA), but when it comes to the culture industry we can also create more culture no matter how many companies are here (unlike cars).

A lot of the companies that have produced best-selling games here have gotten a helping hand from the government but they have also helped the industry throughout Canada by bringing and attracting talent. People who wanted to get into game production use to leave the country but now, thanks to the tax incentives companies are coming here to access that talent.

If the big companies leave we’ll still have talent that can produce top-quality content because they’ll have the know-how and the connections to it.

The game industry is helping to retain (and attract) culture-producing people to Canada and that’s good for everyone.