#CDNpoli

[allthecanadianpolitics]

B.C.’s new home-flipping tax will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. This means that anyone who sells a home within a year of purchasing it will have to pay a 20 per cent tax rate on the profit.

That percentage drops to 10 per cent after 18 months and then down to zero after the person has owned the property for more than two years.

The tax is meant to crack down on house-flipping but some experts argue that it will impact people who are not trying to flip properties.

Continue reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[megafreeman]

Hey so Canada is apparently erasing "Palestine" from people's documents. If you apply for a new document to be issued, you have to say you have no place of birth, with Palestine not being an actual option you can use

[newsfromstolenland]

Butter continues to be a hot commodity in Guelph, Ont.

At least seven large-scale thefts have been reported over a 10-month period, including two hauls in just the last month.

On Oct. 12, at around 7:45 p.m., two men entered a store on Speedvale Avenue East.

“They placed a number of items in a cart – including three cases of butter with a value of $936 – and left out a receiving door,” the Guelph Police Service said in a news release.

Full article

Kind of obsessed with this...seven large scale butter heists?? What is happening in Guelph?? I have to know why but I don't want these guys to get caught

[purplespacecats]

HOLY SHIT THIS IS SUCH A WIN

@allthecanadianpolitics

[nuclearlemons]

New design because my home province of New Brunswick won't stop trying to incite a trans panic in schools

(free for non-commercial, nonprofit use)

[myalgias]

[violsva]

BC Election

Hey BC! You are probably sick of hearing about the American election by now. This is not about that!

The British Columbia provincial election is Saturday October 19th. That’s tomorrow. You need to vote.

If you received a Where to Vote card in the mail, your voter card will have your assigned voting location on it (but you can go to another one if it's easier). If you did not receive a Where to Vote card, or you’ve lost it, you can absolutely still vote. You can find voting locations HERE.

You will need to bring ID that has both your name and your address on it. Proof of address is important because the staff need to know you’re voting in the right district. There’s a list of ID you can use HERE.

The polls are open from 8AM to 8PM. Voting is quick and usually simple. What time they’re busy depends on what your neighbourhood is like.

Information for voters with disabilities is HERE. If you have feedback on accessibility, there are ways to provide that HERE.

Elections BC does not call voters - if someone called or texted you to say the time or location has changed, that’s fraud. Check the website for accurate information.

If you got a mail-in ballot and you have not sent it yet, you can drop it off in person at any polling place before 8pm.

More information here. Translations available here.

EVERYONE GO VOTE.

[farcillesbian]

there is a nationwide (Canada fyi) anti "trans ideology" protest being organized on Wednesday Sept 20 at every parliamentary (federal) and legislative (provincial) building in the country and they are also calling for local organizing too so even in non-capital cities and towns you may run into these protests.

please keep yourselves safe on this day and be aware of this. and if you have the means and can do so without putting yourself at risk (or feel comfortable taking such a risk, especially if you're an ally to the community) consider organizing or participating in counter protests. stay safe out there

they're calling it the 1 Million March For Children I believe so keep an eye out for that kind of signage

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Canada’s ground-breaking, hamstrung repair and interop laws

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

When the GOP trifecta assumes power in just a few months, they will pass laws, and those laws will be terrible, and they will cast long, long shadows.

This is the story of how another far-right conservative government used its bulletproof majority to pass a wildly unpopular law that continues to stymie progress to this day. It's the story of Canada's Harper Conservative government, and two of its key ministers: Tony Clement and James Moore.

Starting in 1998, the US Trade Rep embarked on a long campaign to force every country in the world to enact a new kind of IP law: an "anticircumvention" law that would criminalize the production and use of tools that allowed people to use their own property in ways that the manufacturer disliked.

This first entered the US statute books with the 1998 passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 established a new felony for circumventing an "access control." Crucially, DMCA 1201's prohibition on circumvention did not confine itself to protecting copyright.

Circumventing an access control is a felony, even if you never violate copyright law. For example, if you circumvent the access control on your own printer to disable the processes that check to make sure you're using an official HP cartridge, HP can come after you.

You haven't violated any copyright, but the ink-checking code is a copyrighted work, and you had to circumvent a block in order to reach it. Thus, if I provide you a tool to escape HP's ink racket, I commit a felony with penalties of five years in prison and a $500k fine, for a first offense. So it is that HP ink costs more per ounce than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

This was clearly a bad idea in 1998, though it wasn't clear how bad an idea it was at the time. In 1998, chips were expensive and underpowered. By 2010, a chip that cost less than a dollar could easily implement a DMCA-triggering access control, and manufacturers of all kinds were adding superfluous chips to everything from engine parts to smart lightbulbs whose sole purpose was to transform modification into felonies. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business-model."

So when the Harper government set out to import US-style anticircumvention law to Canada, Canadians were furious. A consultation on the proposal received 6,138 responses opposing the law, and 54 in support:

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/04/copycon-final-numbers/

And yet, James Moore and Tony Clement pressed on. When asked how they could advance such an unpopular bill, opposed by experts and the general public alike, Moore told the International Chamber of Commerce that every objector who responded to his consultation was a "radical extremist" with a "babyish" approach to copyright:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/copyright-debate-turns-ugly-1.898216

As is so often the case, history vindicated the babyish radical extremists. The DMCA actually has an official way to keep score on this one. Every three years, the US Copyright Office invites public submissions for exemptions to DMCA 1201, creating a detailed, evidence-backed record of all the legitimate activities that anticircumvention law interferes with.

Unfortunately, "a record" is all we get out of this proceeding. Even though the Copyright Office is allowed to grant "exemptions," these don't mean what you think they mean. The statute is very clear on this: the US Copyright Office is required to grant exemptions for the act of circumvention, but is forbidden from granting exemptions for tools needed to carry out these acts.

This is headspinningly and deliberately obscure, but there's one anecdote from my long crusade against this stupid law that lays it bare. As I mentioned, the US Trade Rep has made the passage of DMCA-like laws in other countries a top priority since the Clinton years. In 2001, the EU adopted the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 copy-pastes the provisions of DMCA 1201.

In 2003, I found myself in Oslo, debating the minister who'd just completed Norway's EUCD implementation. The minister was very proud of his law, boasting that he'd researched the flaws in other countries' anticircumvention laws and addressed them in Norway's law. For example, Norway's law explicitly allowed blind people to bypass access controls on ebooks in order to feed them into text-to-speech engines, Braille printers and other accessibility tools.

I knew where this was going. I asked the minister how this would work in practice. Could someone sell a blind person a tool to break the DRM on their ebooks? Of course not, that's totally illegal. Could a nonprofit blind rights group make such a tool and give it away to blind people? No, that's illegal too. What about hobbyists, could they make the tool for their blind friends? No, not that either.

OK, so how do blind people exercise their right to bypass access controls on ebooks they own so they can actually read them?

Here's how. Each blind person, all by themself, is expected to decompile and reverse-engineer Adobe Reader, locate a vulnerability in the code and write a new program that exploits that vulnerability to extract their ebooks. While blind people are individually empowered to undertake this otherwise prohibited activity, they must do so on their own: they can't share notes with one another on the process. They certainly can't give each other the circumvention program they write in this way:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

That's what a use-only exemption is: the right to individually put a locked down device up on your own workbench, and, laboring in perfect secrecy, figure out how it works and then defeat the locks that stop you from changing those workings so they benefit you instead of the manufacturer. Without a "tools" exemption, a use exemption is basically a decorative ornament.

So the many use exemptions that the US Copyright Office has granted since 1998 really amount to nothing more than a list of defects in the DMCA that the Copyright Office has painstaking verified but is powerless to fix. We could probably save everyone a lot of time by scrapping the triennial exemptions process and replacing it with an permanent sign over the doors of the Library of Congress reading "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

All of this was well understood by 2010, when Moore and Clement were working on the Canadian version of the DMCA. All of this was explained in eye-watering detail to Moore and Clement, but was roundly ignored. I even had a go at it, publicly picking a fight with Moore on Twitter:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130407101911if_/http://eaves.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/Conversations%20between%20@doctorow%20and%20@mpjamesmoore.jpg

Moore and Clement rammed their proposal through in the next session of Parliament, passing it as Bill C-11 in 2012:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Modernization_Act

This was something of a grand finale for the pair. Today, Moore is a faceless corporate lawyer, while Clement was last seen grifting covid PPE (Clement's political career ended abruptly when he sent dick pics to a young woman who turned out to be a pair of sextortionists from Cote D'Ivoire, and was revealed as a serial sex-pest in the ensuing scandal:)

https://globalnews.ca/news/4646287/tony-clement-instagram-women/

Even though Moore and Clement are long gone from public life, their signature achievement remains a Canadian disgrace, an anchor chain tied around the Canadian economy's throat, and an impediment to Canadian progress.

This week, two excellent new Canadian laws received royal assent: Bill C-244 is a broad, national Right to Repair law; and Bill C-294 is a broad, national interoperability law. Both laws establish the right to circumvent access controls for the purpose of fixing and improving things, something Canadians deserve and need.

But neither law contains a tools exemption. Like the blind people of Norway, a Canadian farmer who wants to attach a made-in-Canada Honeybee tool to their John Deere tractor is required to personally, individually reverse-engineer the John Deere tractor and modify it to talk to the Honeybee accessory, laboring in total secrecy:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/12/canada_right_to_repair/

Likewise the Canadian repair tech who fixes a smart speaker or a busted smartphone – they are legally permitted to circumvent in order to torture the device's repair codes out of it or force it to recognize a replacement part, but each technician must personally figure out how to get the device firmware to do this, without discussing it with anyone else.

Thus do Moore and Clement stand athwart Canadian self-reliance and economic development, shouting "STOP!" though both men have been out of politics for years.

There has never been a better time to hit Clement and Moore's political legacy over the head with a shovel and bury it in a shallow grave. Canadian technologists could be making a fortune creating circumvention devices that repair and improve devices marketed by foreign companies.

They could make circumvention tools to allow owners of consoles to play games by Canadian studios that are directly sold to Canadian gamers, bypassing the stores operated by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo and the 30% commissions they charge. Canadian technologists could be making diagnostic tools that allow every auto-mechanic in Canada to fix any car manufactured anywhere in the world.

Canadian cloud servers could power devices long after their US-based manufacturers discontinue support for them, providing income to Canadian cloud companies and continued enjoyment for Canadian owners of these otherwise bricked gadgets.

Canada's gigantic auto-parts sector could clone the security chips that foreign auto manufacturers use to block the use of third party parts, and every Canadian could enjoy a steep discount every time they fix their cars. Every farmer could avail themselves of third party parts for their tractors, which they could install themselves, bypassing the $200 service call from a John Deere technician who does nothing more than look over the farmer's own repair and then types an unlock code into the tractor's console.

Every Canadian who prints out a shopping list or their kid's homework could use third party ink that sells for pennies per liter, rather than HP's official colored water that cost more than vintage Veuve Cliquot.

A Canadian e-waste dump generates five low-paid jobs per ton of waste, and that waste itself will poison the land and water for centuries to come. A circumvention-enabled Canadian repair sector could generate 150 skilled, high-paid community jobs that saves gadgets and the Earth, all while saving Canadians millions.

Canadians could enjoy the resliency that comes of having a domestic tech and repair sector, and could count on it through pandemics and Trumpian trade-war.

All of that and more could be ours, except for the cowardice and greed of Tony Clement and James Moore and the Harper Tories who voted C-11 into law in 2012.

Everything the "radical extremists" warned them of has come true. It's long past time Canadians tore up anticircumvention law and put the interests of the Canadian public and Canadian tech businesses ahead of the rent-seeking enshittification of American Big Tech.

Until we do that, we can keep on passing all the repair and interop laws we want, but each one will be hamstrung by Moore and Clement's "felony contempt of business model" law, and the contempt it showed for the Canadian people.

Image: JeffJ (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tony_Clement_-_2007-06-30_in_Kearney,_Ontario.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

--

Jorge Franganillo (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duga_radar_system-_wreckage_of_electronic_devices_(37885984654).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[sciencetynan]

I just voted in the #BCElection2024

Advance polls are open now.

I will not let these Transphobic Conservative ghouls take over my province.

Vote NDP please.

[osmanthusoolong]

“A Canada Post worker says she was suspended after refusing to deliver flyers that compare gender-affirming medical care to child mutilation.

The flyer from Campaign Life Coalition, an anti-abortion group based in Hamilton, Ont., calls for a ban on "child sex-change."

Shannon Aitchison said she is the mother of a transgender adult and given that gender-affirming surgery is only available to people aged 18 and above, believes the wording of the flyers is harmful and discriminatory against transgender people.

"It's misinformation. It is lies and misinformation being presented as truth," she said.

This is the third flyer sent by the group since August. The first two were in support of the Blaine Higgs government's changes to Policy 713, requiring parental consent before school staff can use a child under the age of 16's chosen name and pronouns.

Higgs's campaign manager, Steve Outhouse, has previously said the Progressive Conservatives have "no involvement with this flyer or the actions" of the group.

The most recent flyer calls for banning gender-affirming health care for youth.”

“The Medical Consent of Minors Act in New Brunswick gives anyone 16 years or older the right to consent to medical treatment, including taking medications, such as hormones, or going to counselling. Medical professionals may grant parental-consent exceptions for younger teens who are deemed mature enough to make decisions.

Gender-affirming surgeries are available for those over 18 years of age in New Brunswick.”

…

“Aitchison said she's delivered mail in the past that she personally didn't agree with, but the flyer goes a step further.

"This is the first time I have ever drawn a line in the sand and said … I will not be party to delivering propaganda," she said.”

…

“When the first of these flyers showed up in New Brunswick mailboxes last month, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers said its workers "have been given the option of not delivering the offensive material if it would cause them mental anguish or if they fear for their health and safety."”

…

“It's not clear whether the option was given by the union or Canada Post, and why Aitchison was suspended despite what the union said. The union has not yet responded to CBC questions on the issue.

After three days of suspension, Aitchison said she had a disciplinary meeting and is still awaiting a decision. She said the union has filed a grievance on her behalf.”

I really hope she wins, this is horrendous.

@allthecanadianpolitics

[allthecanadianpolitics]

It's a simple concept: transit riders in Mississauga with a hidden disability wear a sunflower lanyard — but the hope is that it makes a big difference for people living with a disability. "You wear something that doesn't point out that you are different or that you have special needs, it isn't obvious," explains Doris Cooper, a member of Mississauga's transit advisory committee and a participant in the  Hidden Disabilities Sunflower program. The City of Mississauga recently joined the program, making it Canada's first municipal transit provider to become a member. The lanyard is meant to discreetly inform transit staff that the rider may need more help or time. It also aims to support and improve the travel experience of riders with hidden disabilities, making their trips smooth, seamless and respectful. 

Continue Reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[quasi-normalcy]

Don't let the door hit you in the ass, doc.

[newsfromstolenland]

Frontline officers in B.C. got the mozzarella but didn't get their man in a recent "cheese heist" at a Whole Foods in North Vancouver.

RCMP say they were on patrol Sept. 29 when they found a cart full of cheese outside the grocery store near East 13th Street and Lonsdale Avenue.

It was 4 a.m., and the store was closed, so police say they started to investigate and identified a suspect, who fled on foot, leaving the cheese behind.

Full article

Glad the person got away, but what the fuck is up with all the dairy heists happening right now? Guelph just had a string of butter heists.

Tagging: @allthecanadianpolitics

[terriwriting]

"Axe the Tax", unless the Liberals do it in which case it's "irresponsible and inflationist"

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says his party will vote against the Liberal government's proposed tax holiday, calling it "irresponsible and inflationist." "This isn't a tax cut. This is an inflationary, two month, temporary tax trick," Poilievre told reporters in Ottawa on Thursday morning. "We need tax relief that actually encourages the economy to produce more of the stuff that cash buys."

Got that? Conservatives want tax cuts for corporations, not you.

Mind you, I don't think this is an effective measure to address the cost of living crisis. But Poilievre's policies would make things worse. And notice that he isn't criticizing any of the Conservative premiers who are temporarily cutting their provincial HSTs and PSTs.