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Intellectual property? Haven't a clue what you're talking about…

As the federal government prepares to overhaul a key tool to protect intellectual property (IP) — Canada's copyright legislation — new research prepared the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) suggests that decision makers in Canada's business community have a poor understanding of what intellectual property is or what agencies in Canada are responsible for protecting IP. But they don't care that they don't know that: It seems none of the 2,016 respondents to the survey, done by The Strategic Counsel, ranked 'Intellectual Property' issues as one of the top issues for their company.

The data is in a study called Canadian Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs): Baseline Awareness of Intellectual Property, and was given to CIPO in March.

Here's some other highlights from the study:

  • When asked to name any formal methods or types of intellectual property protection, more than three-in-five senior decision makers (62%) were unable to do so
  • Four-out-of-five senior decision makers (81%) could not name an organization in Canada that is responsible for granting and/or registering IP protection.
  • And yet … One-third (32%) of senior business decision makers surveyed considered their company to have IP assets. One-quarter (26%) of companies with IP assets choose not to protect them.

Australia and Harper

Giving a Throne Speech in prime time was a first for any government. The Conservatives, I am told, got the idea from the Australian conservative party which, as it turns out, is called The Liberal Party of Australia. The Canadian Conservatives have long adopted some of the tactics that has helped Australian PM John Howard win four elections.

The Aussies also held a Throne Speech in prime time — and found it an effective way to bypass media commentators and reach a wider audiece of voters. Howard also did his last budget speech in prime time and Flaherty's office has already been asked what it thinks of doing that event in prime time.

Meanwhile, in Australia, Howard is campaigning for re-election. Polls there show him far behind his Labor rival.

Because of other established connections between the Aussie Liberals and the Canadian Conservatives, many here in Ottawa are watching Australian politics with unusual interest.

So here’s something that some in Ottawa took notice of: On the first day on the campaign trail Howard announced a whopper of a tax cut. My bet is the boys in Harper's PMO are watching this very closely. (Australia, like Canada, by the way, has a surplus of about $14-billion.) Here’s an article in the Australian press on that tax cut announcement.

Team Howard in $34bn income tax cut splurge

October 16, 2007

THE Coalition has seized the initiative on the first full day of election campaigning, unveiling a $34 billion tax package and putting Labor on the spot.

Under the plan announced jointly by Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello, all taxpayers would get a tax cut — about $20 a week for those currently on average weekly earnings from July, rising to about $35 in 2010.

The announcement caught Labor off guard. Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd said tax cuts were needed but they had to be made in a financially responsible fashion, while shadow treasurer Wayne Swan said Labor would not be rushed in its response.

Last night ALP economic spokesmen were discussing the party's next step.
Business immediately backed the Coalition tax plan, but the union movement was scathing.
The five-year plan is in two parts. The $34 billion cuts are a solid promise, to be delivered over three years. Further “goals” for the following two years include reducing the top marginal tax rate to 40 per cent.

Revised economic figures also released by Mr Costello show Australia's economic growth rate this financial year is now expected to be 4.25 per cent, up from the budget's forecast of 3.75 per cent. The forecast for employment has also been revised upwards.

After allowing for the new tax plan…[read the rest of the story]

 

"Who is Gordon Brown?"

Jonathan Freedland, who writes for the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian, has a fascinating look at Gordon Brown, who succeeded Tony Blair earlier this year as the Prime Minister of Great Britain. It would see, in Freedland’s estimation, that Brown may not, after all, be Paul Martin to Blair’s Jean Chretien:

Born the son of a Presbyterian minister in 1951, Gordon Brown was exposed daily to the human cost of industrial decline. The poor appeared at the door of the Kirkcaldy manse, asking for help. From the pulpit, his father urged on both his community and his sons the duty of hard work and service to others, railing against inequality and the transience of riches. The young Brown was writing political commentaries for his brother's hand-produced newsletter when he was barely a teenager and was so accomplished a student that he enrolled at Edinburgh University when he was sixteen. However a rugby injury, which detached the retinas of both his eyes, meant that he spent six months of his freshman year in the hospital, bedridden and in complete darkness. The experience left him with a sentimental faith in the NHS that had nursed him to recovery, while confronting the fear of permanent blindness seems to have sealed Brown's identification with the vulnerable. He emerged blind in his left eye, his right damaged but functioning—though he still needs to print his speeches in large type and to rest them on a bulked-up dispatch box in the House of Commons in order to see them. An ancillary effect was on his face. Not only did the dead left eye alter his appearance, but one of the four operations was botched, so that a smile no longer triggered the appropriate facial muscles. The result is the dour countenance which has become so central to the popular conception of Brown. It means that one of the many shifts of June 27 was the transition from a prime minister who smiled all the time to a prime minister who cannot smile naturally at all.

….

[Brown] had been in Number Ten for about thirty-six hours when a car bomb was discovered in London's West End, followed by a failed attack on Glasgow airport. There was no sign of panic. Brown did not rush before the cameras insisting that he was taking personal charge or proclaiming a struggle for civilization, as his predecessor might have done. Instead he had his home secretary, Jacqui Smith, report to the public, making good on his promise to replace the presidentialism of Blair with a return to cabinet government.

When he did comment, following the Glasgow attack, he did so plainly and soberly as if discussing a serious crime rather than an act of war. This fitted Brown's disavowal of the phrase “war on terror,” which he believes grants too much status, even dignity, to the murderers of al-Qaeda. The new approach, which instantly took the heat out of the moment, spreading calm rather than panic, won universal plaudits, including from Britain's Muslim communities. A full-page advertisement appeared in several national newspapers a few days later, signed by leading British Muslim organizations, welcoming Brown's efforts and pledging their cooperation in bringing the guilty to justice. Nothing like that had happened under Blair.

There was a similar absence of grandstanding in Brown's handling of midsummer flooding in northern and central England, of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle, and of a financial panic in mid-September which saw a run on one of Britain's largest lenders, the Northern Rock bank (though in that last case Brown's initial invisibility brought criticism that his Macavity-like habit was resurfacing.) Brown felt able to rely on his ministers in part because he had appointed good ones. Even the usually hostile newspapers had to applaud a team which simultaneously conveyed the arrival of a new government— bringing in six ministers under the age of forty—and seemed to fit the right people into the right jobs.

I think it impossible for a Canadian journalist not consider the contrast to what one might describe as Prime Minister Harper’s ‘presidentialism’, although, to be fair, Harper’s party had not been in power for nearly ages prior to his ascension.

And finally, Brown, it seems to me, is the only leader in the Western World,  who refuses to acknolwedge that there is any such thing as a “war on terror.”

Brown gave notice as well that he planned to continue the ongoing “drawdown” of British troops from Iraq. Accordingly, September saw the British withdraw 550 men from Basra city, so that Britain's entire presence in Iraq is now confined to Basra airport. More deeply, Brown conveyed an entirely different understanding of what he didn't call the war on terror.

 

An 80-year-old Iraq refrain: "They don't want us"

Rory Stewart is a bright young Scotsman now engaged with rebuilding Afghanistan. But though he is not yet 40, he also lists on his resume a term as a coalition governor in the Iraqi provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar. In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Stewart reviews a series of books about Gertrude Bell, a British administrator in the 1920s in what was then called Mesopotamia but would later, of course, become Iraq.

Stewart sees in Bell's experience much of what he himself experienced while serving in Iraq. He quotes from Bell's own letters, written in 1920, in which she speaks about the attempts to establish a modern, secular Iraqi state. Again — this is from 1920:

No one knows exactly what they do want, least of all themselves, except that they don't want us.

…We are largely suffering from circumstances over which we couldn't have had any control. The wild drive of discontented nationalism … and of discontented Islam .. might have proved too much for us however far-seeing we had been; but that doesn't excuse us for being blind.

Later in his review essay, Stewart writes:

In 1920, Sunni nationalists, Shia ayatollahs, and tribal sheikhs rose against the British. Their revolution, although suppressed, revealed to the British public as much as to Iraqis that there could be no sustainable British colony in Iraq. T.E. Lawrence was typically the first to acknowledge this:

We say we are in [Iraq] to develop it for the benefit of the world…. How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of imperial troops and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of a form of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but the administrators?

And he closes his essay with this passage:

Bell is thus both the model of a policymaker and an example of the inescapable frailty and ineptitude on the part of Western powers in the face of all that is chaotic and uncertain in the fashion for “nation-building.” Despite the prejudices of her culture and the contortions of her bureaucratic environment, she was highly intelligent, articulate, and courageous. Her colleagues were talented, creative, well informed, and determined to succeed. They had an imperial confidence. They were not unduly constrained by the press or by their own bureaucracies. They were dealing with a simpler Iraq: a smaller, more rural population at a time when Arab national-ism and political Islam were yet to develop their modern strength and appeal.

But their task was still impossible. Iraqis refused to permit foreign political officers to play at founding their new nation. T.E. Lawrence was right to demand the withdrawal of every British soldier and no stronger link between Britain and Iraq than existed between Britain and Canada. For the same reason, more language training and contact with the tribes, more troops and better counterinsurgency tactics—in short a more considered imperial approach—are equally unlikely to allow the US today to build a state in Iraq, in southern Afghanistan, or Iran. If Bell is a heroine, it is not as a visionary but as a witness to the absurdity and horror of building nations for peoples with other loyalties, models, and priorities.

Conservatives target Ontario

Are the federal Tories thinking about election gains Ontario? They're all over the place there today and, notably, they are in places where the party wants and needs to win:

And, of course, yesterday, Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty decided to use the backdrop of Union Station in downtown Toronto to announce they were giving $690-million to VIA Rail. VIA Rail, of course, is headquartered in Montreal and this announcement likely makes just as much of a difference for Montrealers as it does for Torontonians.

As the Throne Speech nears, pleas for cash go out

The votes on the Speech from the Throne will either sustain Canada’s Conservative government or topple it, sending the country to the polls later this fall. And while many Ottawa insiders believe that, in the end, the government will not fall on the Throne Speech, the opposition parties sent out the call to supporters this week looking for money, just in case they have to fight an election.

I have not seen a ‘we need money’ letter from the federal Conservatives. One may exist but I also suspect that the Conservatives have plenty of cash to fight an election already. It’s the other parties that need to match the Conservatives.

Here’s Conservative-turned-Liberal Garth Turner’s pitch to Liberal supporters, contained in an e-mail that landed in my inbox today:

[Stephen Harper and the Conservatives favour] a concept called ‘incremental Conservativism’ – a plan for a right-wing government to hoodwink voters by making popular, moderate promises and then, once in majority, to unleash a pure, hardcore fundamentalist agenda.

Why would Tom Flanagan admit this in print? Because he’s telling Mr. Harper’s social conservative supporters to be patient, to lie in the weeds, and wait for unsuspecting Canadians to give this minority government a majority mandate.

My opposition to this agenda that the majority of my constituents do not want is what drove me from the Conservative caucus. I joined Stephane Dion and the Liberal Party to stand up for the agenda of tolerance and moderation and ethics in Ottawa. And now we need you.

All Canadians need to be told what the stakes are in the next election. That takes money, and your small donation will help get that message out. It is so important.

Mr. Harper and Mr. Flanagan have this all figured out. You and I and Stephane Dion stand in their way. Please take the time to donate, and give us the weapons to fight for the best interests of Canada.

Mind you, the NDP believes that Turner, Dion and the Liberals are ready to lie down and take one for the team when the Throne Speech comes down. In the NDP pitch for funds, which was sent by e-mail Thursday from Éric Hébert-Daly at NDP Election Headquarters, the NDP says only Jack Layton is ready to stand up to Harper:

You know that it’s just a matter of time before Stephen Harper’s Conservative government falls. With a confidence vote on Harper’s Throne Speech next Tuesday, we could be in an election as early as next week.

With his leadership in crisis, Stéphane Dion and the Liberals are looking inward, focusing on internal strife – they’re in no position to stand up to the Conservatives. 

So it’s up to Jack Layton and New Democrats like you and I to take on Harper.

I’m writing to ask you to make a generous pre-campaign donation right now. I need your help to ensure the NDP is election-ready before this crucial confidence vote.

Stephen Harper will be using the Throne Speech vote to secure a mandate that is wrong for today’s families.

With money in the bank, the corporate-backed Conservatives are ready for an election.  Harper is betting that the opposition will be intimidated into giving him a free pass.

It’s time for the other parties to show their cards. Who will stand up to Stephen Harper’s agenda? 

I’m a little curious how the NDP figures the Conservatives are ‘corporate-backed’. With new campaign finance laws, corporations (or unions, for that matter) can’t give money to any party. And back in the days when corporations could, it was the federal Liberal Party that reaped the most money from Corporate Canada. Moreover, the Conservatives huge success in raising money has come as a result of being the party which is best at tapping into small ‘grassroots’ donations.

And, finally, here is Green Party deputy leader Adrienne Carr from e-mail pitch yesterday:

Last week, Mr. Harper told the opposition parties that they must support his entire agenda or force an election.  Or, to use his words, “It's time to fish or cut bait.”

But what does his ultimatum mean?

It means that from now on it’s Harper’s way or the highway. It means government refusing to listen to other ideas. It means:

  • Canada continuing to conspire with George W. Bush to sabotage the Kyoto Accord solution and fiddle around with half-hearted measures while the planet burns its way to climate catastrophe;
  • Canada continuing to send our brave men and women in uniform to war in Afghanistan;
  • Canada surrendering our sovereignty to the United States under the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership.

The last thing Canadians want is to spend millions of their tax dollars on the third general election in four years. But if it comes down to a choice between giving Harper free rein to force through his agenda unchanged or giving Canadians the opportunity to cast judgment on the dangerous direction he is taking our nation, the decision is easy.

… We need to hire people so that we can fully prepare our slate of candidates. We need to get our election signs, pamphlets and ads into production. We need to set up canvasses and phone banks to reach out to voters. We need to finalize thousands of details for Elizabeth’s campaign tour.

What we need most to accomplish all of this is money, and lots of it. Elizabeth came a close second in the London North by-election last fall. Her fully-funded $80,000 campaign needed every dollar. (Thank you to everyone who donated!)

I cannot imagine a Green who doesn’t think as I do: that this election is the chance for us to break through. The people and the planet are with us. To be a major player in this election and elect Canada’s first Green Party MPs, we must build a massive Hope Chest, and we need to do it right now. We must ready ourselves to mount a campaign the likes of which we’ve never run before.

So I am joining Elizabeth in asking you, for the sake of Canada and the planet, please donate now

 

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, by the way, has already launched her campaign Web site. She hopes to unseat Defence Minister Peter MacKay in the Nova Scotia riding of Central Nova.

In case you were wondering about Bill Casey …

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Nova Scotia Premier Rodney Macdonald stood side-by-side in the foyer of the House of Commons to announce that they had pretty much sorted out their differences over the Atlantic Accord and equalization payments.

Bill Casey, the MP from Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, had stood on the side of Macdonald and many Nova Scotians in this dispute and felt so strongly about it that he voted against his own government’s budget over it. That act got him turfed from the Conservative caucus.

So, now that things with Nova Scotia are patched up, we asked the Prime Minister this week if he was ready to bury the hatchet with Casey:

No. 

Mr. Casey made demands that he knew were incompatible with our budget, that he knew that this government would not agree to and has not agreed to. 

Mr. Casey is not welcome into our caucus and just so I can be as clear as I can be on it, when there is a federal election there will be a Conservative candidate in Mr. Casey's riding and it will not be Mr. Casey.

And for those who just can’t get enough of this whole equalization debate, we have for you a copy of the letter Finance Minister Jim Flaherty wrote to his counterpart in Nova Scotia, Michael Baker, to “conclude our discussions on the application of the 2007 Budget to Nova Scotia”.