Dare we see ourselves repeating the darkest chapters of history:
The teaching of Canadian history in the nation’s universities is in trouble. Course enrolments have been and are continuing to fall dramatically and the numbers of history majors have collapsed. This, it is said, is true in all areas of historical study, not least in the history of Canada.
Why? First, there are few jobs for history graduates. A sensible student will opt for business or IT or law where they might even be able to make a living from their studies.
But there are likely many additional reasons and one surely is that historians have been working for decades to turn their discipline away from narrative and towards theory. Narrative tells a factual story while theory posits an abstruse rationale for what did or did not occur. The theorists prevail. Another reason is that the woke Canadian historians, now apparently the majority in the profession, have turned away from national history. The York University history calendar ungrammatically says it all: “Our courses focus on the thematic areas of indigeneity, culture, gender, social, political, environmental and sexuality.”
There are no “great men” any longer in Canadian history, no formative events worth studying. The world wars, the fights over compulsory military service that divided French and English Canadians, the struggles for independence from Britain and the United States—these no longer matter very much in today’s lecture courses and seminars. As an academic friend puts it, Canada’s history is becoming the history that dares not speak its name.
The lack of national position is a salient point, to be sure, but one must still wonder why.
If positions are available for every aggrieved sub-culture and not for people whose interest in the past that shaped Canada, then it is clear why. A Canada that remembers that it fought the Nazi war machine is less like to embrace the politics that put in gear in the first place.
But here we are:
Bill 100, the “Keeping Ontario Open For Business Act” also does the reverse of what its title implies. The Bill is seeking to ban protest in Ontario by making the federal Emergencies Act powers permanent in Ontario allowing police officers to detain people and seize property that is being used for a protest like the Freedom Convoy.
Feel free to lose the election, Doug.
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Cohen strongly condemned the protests and voiced concerns they could happen again. He also said Canada and U.S. government officials are looking at how to eliminate jurisdictional snafus that complicated law enforcement efforts to stop the blockades, along with measures to tackle the disinformation that fuelled the protests in the first place.
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The head of Canada’s unelected broadcasting and telecommunications regulator has said that Canadians can trust the group to regulate the internet once the Liberal government’s Bill C-11 gives it that power.
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) Chairman Ian Scott was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the position in 2021.
“Users of online and social media services expect freedom of expression, and they will continue to enjoy this under the new Broadcasting Act,” Scott claimed in a recent speech.
“Put another way, the CRTC issues about 250 broadcasting decisions annually. Not a single one has ever been successfully challenged on the basis that it somehow infringed Canadians’ freedom of expression.”
(Sidebar: well, if you own the mechanisms of entertaining such challenges, who is expected to win? I think you know.)
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In doing so, it eviscerates the claim that there is a tangible connection between the requirement to pay for the value of news articles on social media and search platforms (called digital news intermediaries or DNI’s in the bill). Rather, Bill C-18 is a shakedown with requirements to pay for nothing more than listing Canadian media organizations with hyperlinks in a search index, social media post, or possibly even a tweet. At a time when we need the public to access to credible news, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez believes that large Internet companies that engage in the act of facilitating access to news – not copying, not using, not even directly linking – should pay for doing so. ...
The bill proceeds to require payments – either by way of agreements that must be approved by the CRTC or final offer arbitration – for DNIs who make available news content. Section 2(2)(a) covers what most Canadians would likely consider constitutes the “use” mentioned by the Prime Minister yesterday, namely the reproduction of news content by a DNI such as Facebook or Google. As it happens, those companies largely agree and have licensed news content where they reproduce the content in full.
More notable is Section 2(2)(b), which covers facilitating access to news content. This is certainly designed to cover linking but the broad language almost surely extends beyond linking to a specific article. Indeed, a link to the general home page of the Toronto Star, National Post, Globe and Mail or many other Canadian media sites can be said to facilitate access to news content, particularly since the provision adds that it can be just a “portion of it” and the facilitation can occur “by any means.” ...
There was a time when this government fashioned itself as pro-Internet, supportive of net neutrality, and a staunch defender of fundamental freedoms, including freedom of the press and other media of communication. Yet it cannot credibly claim to support those principles and simultaneously legislate barriers to accessing media by mandating payments for facilitating access to media sources.
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