All Hail General Krull! (Canadian Friendly Dictator Edition)

This post has nothing to do with copyright, but being a Canadian and a political scientist, I had to jot down my thoughts on Stephen Harper’s astonishing decision – and ability – to suspend Parliament for over two months.

Harper’s move to suspend Parliament on the flimsiest of excuses and for the second time in a year, as Andrew Coyne suggests, represents a worrying turning point in the history of Canadian democracy, but it’s one that’s been a long time coming. And while it’s tempting for partisans to frame this as the result of the authoritarian tendencies of a Conservative leader, it’s much bigger than that.

While Stephen Harper, who campaigned on a platform of greater accountability, should be held personally responsible for a government that has repeatedly mocked the concept, does anyone really think that the Liberal Jean Chrétien, who inspired Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson to coin the phrase “The Friendly Dictatorship,” would have acted any differently? The only difference between Chrétien and Harper is circumstance: Chrétien headed a majority government, and thus controlled Parliament completely. He didn’t have to resort to blunt, thuggish measures like the suspension of Parliament because Parliament did his bidding. Harper doesn’t have that luxury, so he, as our current “Friendly Dictator,” is forced to take the low road in pursuit of total control over the federal government.

In other words, the problem is not just in our leaders, but in a political system that concentrates all power in the hands of one person. In the end, there are only two constraints on the power of the Prime Minister: the need to win re-election occasionally, and the need to retain the confidence of Parliament. This second constraint, however, was weakened almost irreparably last year when Stephen Harper managed to convince Canadians that coalition governments are somehow illegitimate, even though in the Westminster system – the Canadian form of government – nothing could be further from the truth.

As a result, the only way for Parliament to exert any influence at all is to force an election. Of course, when one party has a majority, that’s a non-starter. Even when there’s a minority government (like now), election threats are completely ineffective when your other main party doesn’t have the guts to call an election. And that’s assuming that the Prime Minister doesn’t simply suspend Parliament again to avoid any non-confidence votes.

My greatest fear is that we may have already missed our best possible opportunity to reform Parliament. In 2005, when the New Democratic Party held the balance of power in Parliament, they made their support for Paul Martin’s Liberal government contingent on the inclusion of some spending measures, now long forgotten, in the budget. Why they did not push for electoral reform –from which they would have benefitted, as a smaller party – is beyond me.

Now, things are worse. Electoral reform is nowhere on the political agenda. A Prime Minister who doesn’t even control a majority of seats in the House of Commons has demonstrated the ability to suspend Parliament at will. Coalition governments have been deligitimized. Future Prime Ministers – Liberal and Conservative – will take these facts and run with them.

The dismissal of Parliament should be a non-partisan issue that enrages all Canadians, regardless of political stripe. Today it’s a Conservative in power, and conservatives may be inclined to give Harper the benefit of the doubt (although his decision to prorogue Parliament also managed to further delay many law-and-order bills of interest to conservatives), but eventually the tide will turn.

As for me, I would rather Canada not be subject to the whims of any one person, Liberal or Conservative. One of the great benefits of democracy is that the presence of vigorous and effective opposition tends to moderate extreme political viewpoints, of all persuasions, while allowing for the pursuit of policies that satisfy the most people.

There is a sort of wisdom in this moderation. It’s a wisdom based on debate and compromise, eminently democratic and Canadian values. Unfortunately, since the time of Trudeau, Canada has been moving away from these values and sliding further toward not even rule by one party, but by one person. If Stephen Harper is allowed to get away with his disrespect of Parliament, and if Canadians do not work to get rid of the conditions that have allowed things to get this bad, all Canadians, Conservatives as well as Liberals, will regret it in the end.

The Value of Music, Beatles Edition

For sale on the Mexico City Metro: Two hundred and thirty-seven Beatles MP3s on one CD-ROM for 10 pesos (about 95 cents Canadian). As someone who understands the importance of The Beatles to pop music but wouldn’t cross the street to hear one of their songs, that sounds about right. Maybe a bit too high. (I passed.)

It did make me wonder whether the prospective set of customers for a bootleg CD of The Beatles back catalogue overlap with those for a Beatles box set. How about with those for authorized MP3s, if they ever get around to releasing them? Not being a Beatles fan, I can't imagine purchasing any of them at any price, but given that unauthorized Beatles MP3s are surely available somewhere online already (not being a fan, I can’t be bothered to check), and that presumably anyone with an interest in The Bealtes would have already ripped their own CDs to their computer, what would motivate someone to wait years for the authorized MP3s?

Ten pesos is also an interesting price when you consider that those 10 pesos has to cover the costs of production (buying the blank CDs, and the computers to burn them) and distribution and labour costs (the network of hawkers selling the CDs) and still make a profit. Whoever sells these CDs must be making some money, since you can't go five minutes on the subway without being interrupted by a hawker pitching The Beatles or the Greatest Hits of the 80s or whatever.

By the way, I just purchased an e-book version of Landes and Posner's The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law from the Sony E-bookstore. For about $60. I leave the link between the Beatles and Landes and Posner as an exercise for the reader.

Why Buy American has nothing to do with Canadian copyright reform

One of the fun things about doing a dissertation on copyright is that you can’t go a day without something interesting happening (unfortunately, this is also one of the annoying things when you’re trying to finish said dissertation).

Yesterday’s news had lobbyist Scotty Greenwood, of the Washington-based Canadian American Business Council, suggesting that Canada could get around the country’s exclusion from the Buy American program, which allows U.S. governments to favour U.S. suppliers, if the Canadian government addressed U.S. concerns on copyright. Howard Knopf was quick off the bat decrying this as a bad idea.

And it could be (it would depend on the net economic and social benefits of such a deal). However, thanks to the NAFTA and the decentralized nature of the American political system, this kind of quid pro quo is highly unlikely. Conservative Industry minister spokesperson Darren Cunningham gets it exactly right when, as the Globe’s Bill Curry reports, he “notes that state and municipal governments, which are the source of the tensions, are unlikely to share Washington’s level of interest when it comes to copyright policy.”

Happily, my dissertation is examining exactly this issue, specifically why Canada and Mexico have taken over 12 years and counting to implement the WIPO Internet Treaties despite constant pressure from the United States and its content industries to do so. The United States is without question the region’s superpower. But, despite the fact that copyright has been at the top of the American trade agenda throughout the Bush Jr. and now Obama regimes, Canada has proposed (and failed to pass, thanks to minority government-related election calls), first a 2005 bill (legislative summary) that didn’t do what the U.S. wanted, and then a 2008 bill (legislative summary) would have given the U.S. much, but not all, of what it wanted. (Mexico’s experience, which I’m currently researching, is somewhat different.)

While lobbyists like Greenwood can suggest that Canadian movement on issue X will yield American movement on issue Y (what political scientists call “linkage”), it’s actually really hard to link issues in Canada-U.S. relations, for two reasons.

First, as Cunningham suggests, unlike Canada’s, the U.S. political system is not concentrated in one person. Stephen Harper can make credible promises to link unrelated issues because he, for all intents and purposes, controls Parliament. Barack Obama can’t deliver in the same way, because he has to deal with a Congress that he does not control and whose interests may differ from his. The politics are much more complicated. A basic point, but one that politicians, journalists, lobbyists and we political scientists don’t always remember.

Second, there is currently no regional institutional framework to allow for the easy linking of issues. This is where the NAFTA comes in. The NAFTA sets baselines and rules governing North American economic activity, but it contains no way to modify (easily) these rules, meaning they’re essentially stuck in amber.

There’s a reason why the United States has incorporated successfully its demands on copyright protection into its trade agreements: they’re trading something the other guy wants (access to the U.S. market) for something that the U.S. wants (U.S.-style copyright laws). But because Canada and Mexico already have guaranteed access to the U.S. market, thanks to the NAFTA, the U.S. has relatively little to offer its trading partners. Somewhat ironically, the NAFTA has provided North America’s juniour partners with a not-insignificant degree of policy autonomy.

(Given the reality that copyright laws are changed regularly in response to technological developments, the American strategy of using trade agreements, which can’t be modified easily, to set other countries’ copyright laws may backfire in the long run.

On another point, the lack of issue linkage in the current Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is one of the more puzzling things about those negotiations. Given the secrecy surrounding the talks, it’s unclear even why countries like Canada are negotiating this agreement. But that’s a topic for another day.)

While the second point is a bit underappreciated (though Stephen Clarkson hypothesized it a few years ago, in a paper that kickstarted my own thinking on the issue), the first point is a cornerstone of the study of Canada-U.S. relations, since at least the publication of Keohane and Nye’s Power and Interdependence in the 1970s.

I’m not saying that linkage is either impossible or always undesirable. The moribund Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America provided a forum that allowed for policy linkages and may have provided an opportunity for the United States to exert pressure in 2008 to get what it wanted in what eventually became Bill C-61. Canada and Mexico may decide to implement U.S.-style copyright policies.

The two governments may attempt to link issues. But absent some kind of new regional institutional structure, or a new round of free-trade talks, any kind of Buy American-copyright linkage has the odds stacked against it.