David Akin’s On The Hill

I'm taking a brief one-day break from my business and technology reporting responsibilities Friday to try my hand at co-hosting Canada AM. Regular co-host Seamus O'Regan has the day off and I've been asked to sub in for him. Not sure why but it sounds like a lot of fun so I said yes. Thankfully, the super-skilled and unflappable Beverly Thomson, the other co-host, will be right next to me covering all my gaffes. The show, as you may be aware, airs in the morning across the country on your local CTV station.

Finally — after years of working in the business — I got to do the story every journalist dreams of: The Flying Squirrel Menace. I'm being less than serious, of course, but the story I did for last night's CTV National News[ look for the Video link on the right hand side of this page ] about the Government of Canada's attempts to deport a Northern Flying Squirrel — possibly the most common breed of squirrel in Canada — is a serious one. In fact, it's so serious, the case has top social justice lawyer Clayton Ruby defending the squirrel at the Federal Court of Appeal, the highest federal court in the country. Ruby and the squirrel — a baby squirrel named Sabrina — are in the Court of Appeal because the government lost its case at the Federal Court level when it first tried to force Sabrina out of the country.
My Globe and Mail colleague Colin Frieze broke the story in the paper Wednesday morning and I put the pictures to it that evening.

Queen's University English professor Laura J. Murray weighs in on the copyright debate in Canada with an interesting and provocative piece in First Monday. Here's the abstract (I've added the emphasis):

Canada is at a critical stage in the development of its copyright law: it has not yet ratified the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization “Internet Treaties,” but it is poised to do so. This article analyses the rhetoric of “protection” ubiquitous in Canadian discussions of copyright policy, and identifies among the various uses of the term both a problematic assumption that protection is or should be the primary function of copyright, and overblown claims about copyright’s power to protect Canadian culture and creators. These “common sense” ideas, fostered by rights–holder lobbies, emerge out of a peculiar Canadian history of cultural nationalism(s), but they may not promote the interests of Canadians. Ironically, while professing fear for their cultural sovereignty, and following the paths of their own internal political, bureaucratic, and rhetorical culture, Canadians appear to be constructing a copyright policy in complete harmony with the needs of American and international capital. I explore a proposal to license educational Internet use, endorsed by parliamentary committee, as one example of the relationship between protection rhetoric and policy development. By casting the Internet as more of a threat than an opportunity, copyright policy developers in Canada are gravely misunderstanding and threatening Canadians’ use of this medium. The participation of Canadians in national and global interaction is crucial to the Canadian public interest, and must not be forgotten in the rush to protection. Beyond its analysis of this specific proposal, this paper calls for a copyright policy in line with the Canadian tradition of balancing private and public interests.

The Treasury Board has just published its annual report on Access to Information and Privacy within that organization.

September's traffic here at the blog seems to be down a bit from the highs hit in August. The meters at the Blogware server say there were just over 21,000 visitors here last month — pretty good if you ask me. I have no idea where all these visitors come from, what they do or what they're interested in. Well, actually, I might have an idea what they're interested in because one of Blogware's chief benefits is that you can track the most popular posts for a given time period. And, as it turns out, just one item posted in September was among the 10 most popular posts accessed during the month.
Here, then, are the Top 10 for September at this blog. As an added bonus, the numbers in brackets refer to their position on the hit list last month:

1. (2) No blogging from Olympic village (?) Posted 8-8-2004
2. (4) Journalism ethics: Toronto police shoot a hostage taker. What do you show on TV? Posted 8-26-2004
3. (1) [What they said] Apple calculator a bad joke Posted 8-10-2004
4. (8) Finally!! Airport Extreme and my LinkSys router are talking! Posted 12-13-2003
5. (3) Who pays for this blog? Some disclaimers Posted 8-13-2004
6. (6) How to spell Internet and Web Posted 8-16-2004
7. (-) Canada best for access among world's largest economies Posted 11-24-2003
8. (-) Google by the numbers Posted 5-5-2004
9. (5) Participatory journalism — mid-day report Posted 8-3-2004
10. (na) Blogware gets a new version but Safari hates it Posted 9-21-2004

I was assigned a question from a viewer who wanted to know if some other hockey league, such as the Canadian Universities league, could compete for and be awarded hockey's Holy Grail if there was no NHL season.
I gave that viewer the answer and we shot it, naturally enough, at the Stanley Cup.
What was the answer?
Well . . . read on ….

I've been lucky enough to watch David Weinberger do what he does for a living — speak to a large group of people — and he's very funny. Here's a great example of his wit:

[microsoft] Swag

At the Search Champs private conference I'm at, Microsoft has been giving out excellent swag: A copy of Money, Office and Flight Simulator, a logo-ed windbreaker, sun visor and golf shirt, and a thumb storage device….all packed in a logoed-backpack. I'm too mature and self-knowing for swag to affect me, but I'm beginning to think that Microsoft has been badly misunderstood and under-appreciated. Plus, today we get to go to the Microsoft Store where we can spend up to $120 on heavily discounted Microsoft products. Unfortunately, I'm leaving before the trip to the store, so I assume I'm allowed to download $120's worth of copyright-challenged Microsoft products via BitTorrent at Suprnova.org or the P2P network of my choice. That's right, isn't it?

Mathew Englander says they can — but only if they get informed consent from all of their customers. And he is certain that Telus Communications, the phone company in his city of Vancouver, never got informed consent from its customers before it started selling names and numbers of Telus subscribers to telemarketers.
Englander believes that, by failing to get informed consent, Telus is violating Canada's privacy legislation.
Moreover, he believes that, under that legislation, Telus and other phone companies should not be able to charge a fee for unlisted numbers. “Telus is legally required to respect your privacy choices without charging an extra fee,” Englander says.
Englander, a non-practising lawyer interested in privacy rights, has not had much luck, so far, convincing judges of the merits of his views. Canada's privacy commissioner dismissed a complaint he filed and so did a Federal Court judge.
But later this month — Oct. 7 in Vancouver — Englander's appeal will be heard.
“The case has a significant business dimension, since if I win all Canadian phone companies will be affected. The case also could set an important legal precedent for the privacy rights of consumers,” Englander writes.

Lord Conrad Black (pictured at left) is suing all those at his New York-based operating company, Hollinger International, who authored or help to author the 600-page report which detail alleged abuses by him, his longtime associate David Radler and others. This report, you'll remember, was presented to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and to a court in Illinois and, in it, Black and his colleagues are accused of diverting at least $600-million of company money for their own unauthorized use.
Black is suing under Ontario laws in an Ontario court and is asking for $1-billion CDN (that's right, one billion) pluse $100-million in damages.
This suit is in addition to another libel suit, with many of the same defendants, in which he seeks $850-million in damages.
He also sued Toronto Life magazine but they're on the hook for a paltry $2.1-million.

Colby Cosh, an Alberta-based editorial page columnist for the National Post, says he got the call today that “contained the last words any human being wants to hear”. He'd been canned, “effective immediately.”
Cosh, at his blog, says he was told by the paper's comment editor that the Post is being re-organized further.
Anyone hear anything else?