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Friday, February 26, 2010

Canada and the politics of ACTA implementation

Nice post by Sara Bannerman about the potential effect of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) on Canadian copyright reform. I think she has the issue mostly surrounded, and that possibility number three – a treaty will simply introduce another element into the basics of the current copyright debate – is most likely. As she writes, pro-ACTA groups will say Canada has an obligation to implement the treaty; anti-ACTA groups will say we don’t and that it’s illegitimate (an argument that grows stronger every day the text stays secret).

Sounds a bit like a continuation of the Canadian debate over the WIPO Internet treaties, doesn’t it?

But the really big question is, will the Canadian government implement the ACTA (assuming it signs on)? While my guess is as good as the next guy’s (depending on who the next guy is, I guess), it’s worth remembering that the fact that Canada signs a treaty doesn’t really mean that much in terms of whether or not Canada will actually change its laws. As Howard Knopf has written several times, and as Sara also notes, signing a treaty does not require its implementation. If it did, the U.S. and Canada would have been implementing their Kyoto-mandated greenhouse gas reductions for about a decade now.

Directly related to this point, Queen’s University International Relations professor Kim Nossal was in Mexico City this week for a lecture that dealt extensively with the myth of Canadian multilateralism. His point was a simple one: Canada, like pretty much every other country, follows its own conception of the national interest. Nossal remarked that in cases like Kyoto and the Law of the Sea, Canadian governments of all stripes have demonstrated the willingness to act unilaterally and to ignore treaty obligations when they thought that the costs of compliance were too high.

The same is true of the WIPO Internet treaties and will be true of ACTA. Any government – Conservative or Liberal or NDP – will consider the potential effects of the treaty on its political fortunes and (relatedly) on the economy. It will also consider its effects on its international relations. While each party may come to different conclusions about how exactly ACTA implementation will affect each of these factors, domestic politics and international relations will determine whether and how the treaties will get implemented. Furthermore, my hunch is that it is unlikely that the treaty in and of itself will alter anyone's conception of what is in their national or specific interest, if only because the legitimacy of the treaties can be so easily called into question by asking why they are being negotiated in secret outside the World Intellectual Property Organization, the World Trade Organization, UNESCO or any other copyright-related international institution.

In this sense, ACTA will do little but add another rhetorical tool into the arsenal of proponents and opponents.

To put it bluntly, it's all about pain and reward. Treaty opponents will seek to convince the government that implementing the treaties will hurt the government, politically or economically, and/or that non-implementation will help the government. That’s what the Fair Copyright for Canada and the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook groups are all about.

Treaty proponents will try the opposite: arguing that implementation of the treaties will bring political and economic rewards, and that non-implementation will carry a cost.

Signing ACTA will only be the beginning (or continuation) of the debate. It all comes down to the politics, and it's way too early to guess how any of this will fall out. But arguments that Canada has an obligation of any kind (moral or otherwise) to implement a treaty it has signed should be seen for what they are: rhetorical exercises masking self-interest.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Understanding Facebook activism in two easy steps

After reading Michael Valpy’s confusing article on the political effectiveness of Facebook in this morning’s Globe and Mail, I have to wonder if reporters will ever get their minds around exactly what Facebook is. Judging from Valpy’s interview with a pollster about how Canadians feel about Facebook’s effect on politics – not, note, what Facebook activism has actually accomplished – I fear our intrepid reporters will be misunderstanding Facebook for a long time to come.

Valpy and his source, pollster Nick Nanos, essentially rehash that old chestnut: what does it mean when a bunch of people join a Facebook group? This is the wrong question and misses almost all that makes Facebook and social-networking sites important. I’ll try to put this in more traditional terms.

Facebook is the telephone. It is a way for people to share opinions and to organize online and offline activity. If you remember that Facebook is only a tool, and a tool is only as effective as the people using it, the whole idea of social-networking platforms becomes much easier to understand. It also demonstrates the silliness of asking, as Nick Nanos does, whether Facebook can replace political parties. This is as absurd as asking if a fax machine (remember them?) could replace the Conservative Party of Canada. Facebook is a tool for communicating and lobbying, not governing.

Facebook groups are mailing lists. The power of mailing lists isn’t necessarily in how many people are on that list, but in the amount of money they are able to raise, the number of people they are able to deliver at election time, the number of protestors they’re able to mobilize for a rally. Again, their effectiveness will depend on the people using the lists.

Facebook and other social-networking platforms make it much, much easier for individuals to organize. Before Facebook, getting over 25,000 people out to protest, on a single day, across the second-largest country in the world, with only a couple of weeks of organizing, would have been a massively expensive and complex logistical undertaking (to those who downplay this remarkable accomplishment: try doing it yourself sometime). Most interestingly, Facebook makes it easy for this to happen with little central organization, beyond the original Facebook page.

While its decentralized, inexpensive nature make Facebook activism potentially much more effective for grassroots groups than more centralized forms of political activism, at the end of the day its effectiveness depends on the people involved. It’s still up to the people doing the organizing to make protests work.

So what do the numbers mean? Like everyone else, I don’t know how worried the Conservatives should be that over 225,000 people have joined the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook group (I'd be a bit worried). I do know that, via Facebook, Canadians across the country were able to get 25,000 people into the streets to voice their displeasure with Stephen Harper’s suspension of Parliament. I do know that since December, Conservative support has dropped dramatically into a statistical dead heat with a Liberal party that could most charitably be described as “adrift.”

I also know that two years ago, tens of thousands of Canadians joined the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, which they used to organize protests, including visits to MP’s offices, letter writing campaigns, and even showed up at the Industry minister’s riding’s Christmas party to call for public consultations to address copyright reform. I also know that these protests were at least partly responsible for delaying the introduction of a copyright bill long enough that it was killed when the Fall 2008 election was called. It also seems clear that the Summer 2009 public consultations into copyright reform (for which the Conservative government deserves praise) were at least partly the result of this public pressure.

From these two examples, it seems clear that joining a Facebook group does, in some cases, lead to political activism. To the extent that it facilitates this activism and makes people aware of the issues, it can have, as Nanos says, “political heft in (sic.) the ballot box.”

Look: Facebook is still relatively new. We need more research into the conditions under which joining a Facebook group leads to political activism (hmmmm, that would make a nice postdoc subject…). But it does happen. And I’m sure that some enterprising political aide or grad student can come up with a nifty formula that tells us how many voters are represented by each Facebook joiner. It’s not like there are no data on the subject: Facebook has been around for five years, and in Canada we have at least two, and probably more, examples of effective Facebook-based political campaigns.

Understanding the limits and possibilities of Facebook activism requires moving beyond a simplistic view of Facebook as a pseudo-pollster and toward a more nuanced understanding of how Facebook, as a communications tool, actually works.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Buy American: Surprise! No linkage!

Since I mentioned it before, I thought it worth noting that Canada and the United States have reached a tentative deal on the “Buy American” stimulus package, in which Canadian suppliers are allowed to bid on contracts funded by what remains of the $US 787 billion in stimulus money. In exchange, Canadian provinces and (according to the government press release) “a number of municipalities” will be covered by the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement. (The federal government is already covered by that agreement.) What this means is that American companies can now bid on government-procurement contracts in these provinces, territories and municipalities, and that Canadian companies will have access to government procurement contracts in 37 states, including New York, California, Texas and Pennsylvania. The provinces still have to sign off on the agreement.

Whether or not this is a good deal (of which more in a second), note that the agreement was reached without linking the issue (government procurement contracts) to any other separate issue (like copyright, for example). Which is what one would expect, given the complex nature of the Canada-U.S. relationship.

Is the deal itself a good one? Without a lot of digging (and I really do have to get back to writing my chapter on the Mexican implementation of the WIPO Internet treaties), it’s impossible to say. The fact that the press release, joint statement and the backgrounder on “Buy American” and the tentative agreement contain no numbers whatsoever (or useful links to where these numbers might be living) is, shall we say, less than helpful. They don’t even mention the size of the U.S. stimulus package. Not good.

There are a bunch of questions I hope the media and opposition politicians ask the government, for which the answers aren't immediately clear. (Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if Parliament were in session? Then the issue could be raised in Question Period and discussed in more depth in committee hearings. Ah, the good old days.)

Specifically, what were the government’s assumptions regarding:

  • How much of the remaining in stimulus funds would find its way to Canadian contractors (and, for that matter, how much is remaining). Obviously most won’t go to Canadians, so the direct benefit of this agreement is likely to be much lower than this headline number.
  • How much of the U.S. states’ government-procurement market would go to Canadian firms and workers?
  • How much of the $22-billion provincial and municipal government-procurement market would go to U.S. companies. (It would’ve been nice to mention the size of this market in the Backgrounder.)
  • The importance of government procurement for provincial and economic development.
  • How having more competitors for provincial and municipal contracts would affect the costs faced by provincial and municipal governments (presuming that more competition leads to lower prices).
  • Net employment, domestic economic activity and tax revenue, since the opening of this market could cut both ways (some effects will reduce employment, others increase it, everything else being equal).
As I said, without these basic facts, it's impossible to evaluate the agreement. I'm hoping that the fact that they weren't provided along with the announcement of this tentative deal was only an oversight. It would be nice to know that this government reached a deal that they believed made economic sense for Canada based on empirical evidence, not on some short-run political calculations. We’ve had enough of that lately.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Canada and the politics of ACTA implementation

Nice post by Sara Bannerman about the potential effect of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) on Canadian copyright reform. I think she has the issue mostly surrounded, and that possibility number three – a treaty will simply introduce another element into the basics of the current copyright debate – is most likely. As she writes, pro-ACTA groups will say Canada has an obligation to implement the treaty; anti-ACTA groups will say we don’t and that it’s illegitimate (an argument that grows stronger every day the text stays secret).

Sounds a bit like a continuation of the Canadian debate over the WIPO Internet treaties, doesn’t it?

But the really big question is, will the Canadian government implement the ACTA (assuming it signs on)? While my guess is as good as the next guy’s (depending on who the next guy is, I guess), it’s worth remembering that the fact that Canada signs a treaty doesn’t really mean that much in terms of whether or not Canada will actually change its laws. As Howard Knopf has written several times, and as Sara also notes, signing a treaty does not require its implementation. If it did, the U.S. and Canada would have been implementing their Kyoto-mandated greenhouse gas reductions for about a decade now.

Directly related to this point, Queen’s University International Relations professor Kim Nossal was in Mexico City this week for a lecture that dealt extensively with the myth of Canadian multilateralism. His point was a simple one: Canada, like pretty much every other country, follows its own conception of the national interest. Nossal remarked that in cases like Kyoto and the Law of the Sea, Canadian governments of all stripes have demonstrated the willingness to act unilaterally and to ignore treaty obligations when they thought that the costs of compliance were too high.

The same is true of the WIPO Internet treaties and will be true of ACTA. Any government – Conservative or Liberal or NDP – will consider the potential effects of the treaty on its political fortunes and (relatedly) on the economy. It will also consider its effects on its international relations. While each party may come to different conclusions about how exactly ACTA implementation will affect each of these factors, domestic politics and international relations will determine whether and how the treaties will get implemented. Furthermore, my hunch is that it is unlikely that the treaty in and of itself will alter anyone's conception of what is in their national or specific interest, if only because the legitimacy of the treaties can be so easily called into question by asking why they are being negotiated in secret outside the World Intellectual Property Organization, the World Trade Organization, UNESCO or any other copyright-related international institution.

In this sense, ACTA will do little but add another rhetorical tool into the arsenal of proponents and opponents.

To put it bluntly, it's all about pain and reward. Treaty opponents will seek to convince the government that implementing the treaties will hurt the government, politically or economically, and/or that non-implementation will help the government. That’s what the Fair Copyright for Canada and the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook groups are all about.

Treaty proponents will try the opposite: arguing that implementation of the treaties will bring political and economic rewards, and that non-implementation will carry a cost.

Signing ACTA will only be the beginning (or continuation) of the debate. It all comes down to the politics, and it's way too early to guess how any of this will fall out. But arguments that Canada has an obligation of any kind (moral or otherwise) to implement a treaty it has signed should be seen for what they are: rhetorical exercises masking self-interest.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Understanding Facebook activism in two easy steps

After reading Michael Valpy’s confusing article on the political effectiveness of Facebook in this morning’s Globe and Mail, I have to wonder if reporters will ever get their minds around exactly what Facebook is. Judging from Valpy’s interview with a pollster about how Canadians feel about Facebook’s effect on politics – not, note, what Facebook activism has actually accomplished – I fear our intrepid reporters will be misunderstanding Facebook for a long time to come.

Valpy and his source, pollster Nick Nanos, essentially rehash that old chestnut: what does it mean when a bunch of people join a Facebook group? This is the wrong question and misses almost all that makes Facebook and social-networking sites important. I’ll try to put this in more traditional terms.

Facebook is the telephone. It is a way for people to share opinions and to organize online and offline activity. If you remember that Facebook is only a tool, and a tool is only as effective as the people using it, the whole idea of social-networking platforms becomes much easier to understand. It also demonstrates the silliness of asking, as Nick Nanos does, whether Facebook can replace political parties. This is as absurd as asking if a fax machine (remember them?) could replace the Conservative Party of Canada. Facebook is a tool for communicating and lobbying, not governing.

Facebook groups are mailing lists. The power of mailing lists isn’t necessarily in how many people are on that list, but in the amount of money they are able to raise, the number of people they are able to deliver at election time, the number of protestors they’re able to mobilize for a rally. Again, their effectiveness will depend on the people using the lists.

Facebook and other social-networking platforms make it much, much easier for individuals to organize. Before Facebook, getting over 25,000 people out to protest, on a single day, across the second-largest country in the world, with only a couple of weeks of organizing, would have been a massively expensive and complex logistical undertaking (to those who downplay this remarkable accomplishment: try doing it yourself sometime). Most interestingly, Facebook makes it easy for this to happen with little central organization, beyond the original Facebook page.

While its decentralized, inexpensive nature make Facebook activism potentially much more effective for grassroots groups than more centralized forms of political activism, at the end of the day its effectiveness depends on the people involved. It’s still up to the people doing the organizing to make protests work.

So what do the numbers mean? Like everyone else, I don’t know how worried the Conservatives should be that over 225,000 people have joined the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook group (I'd be a bit worried). I do know that, via Facebook, Canadians across the country were able to get 25,000 people into the streets to voice their displeasure with Stephen Harper’s suspension of Parliament. I do know that since December, Conservative support has dropped dramatically into a statistical dead heat with a Liberal party that could most charitably be described as “adrift.”

I also know that two years ago, tens of thousands of Canadians joined the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, which they used to organize protests, including visits to MP’s offices, letter writing campaigns, and even showed up at the Industry minister’s riding’s Christmas party to call for public consultations to address copyright reform. I also know that these protests were at least partly responsible for delaying the introduction of a copyright bill long enough that it was killed when the Fall 2008 election was called. It also seems clear that the Summer 2009 public consultations into copyright reform (for which the Conservative government deserves praise) were at least partly the result of this public pressure.

From these two examples, it seems clear that joining a Facebook group does, in some cases, lead to political activism. To the extent that it facilitates this activism and makes people aware of the issues, it can have, as Nanos says, “political heft in (sic.) the ballot box.”

Look: Facebook is still relatively new. We need more research into the conditions under which joining a Facebook group leads to political activism (hmmmm, that would make a nice postdoc subject…). But it does happen. And I’m sure that some enterprising political aide or grad student can come up with a nifty formula that tells us how many voters are represented by each Facebook joiner. It’s not like there are no data on the subject: Facebook has been around for five years, and in Canada we have at least two, and probably more, examples of effective Facebook-based political campaigns.

Understanding the limits and possibilities of Facebook activism requires moving beyond a simplistic view of Facebook as a pseudo-pollster and toward a more nuanced understanding of how Facebook, as a communications tool, actually works.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Buy American: Surprise! No linkage!

Since I mentioned it before, I thought it worth noting that Canada and the United States have reached a tentative deal on the “Buy American” stimulus package, in which Canadian suppliers are allowed to bid on contracts funded by what remains of the $US 787 billion in stimulus money. In exchange, Canadian provinces and (according to the government press release) “a number of municipalities” will be covered by the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement. (The federal government is already covered by that agreement.) What this means is that American companies can now bid on government-procurement contracts in these provinces, territories and municipalities, and that Canadian companies will have access to government procurement contracts in 37 states, including New York, California, Texas and Pennsylvania. The provinces still have to sign off on the agreement.

Whether or not this is a good deal (of which more in a second), note that the agreement was reached without linking the issue (government procurement contracts) to any other separate issue (like copyright, for example). Which is what one would expect, given the complex nature of the Canada-U.S. relationship.

Is the deal itself a good one? Without a lot of digging (and I really do have to get back to writing my chapter on the Mexican implementation of the WIPO Internet treaties), it’s impossible to say. The fact that the press release, joint statement and the backgrounder on “Buy American” and the tentative agreement contain no numbers whatsoever (or useful links to where these numbers might be living) is, shall we say, less than helpful. They don’t even mention the size of the U.S. stimulus package. Not good.

There are a bunch of questions I hope the media and opposition politicians ask the government, for which the answers aren't immediately clear. (Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if Parliament were in session? Then the issue could be raised in Question Period and discussed in more depth in committee hearings. Ah, the good old days.)

Specifically, what were the government’s assumptions regarding:

  • How much of the remaining in stimulus funds would find its way to Canadian contractors (and, for that matter, how much is remaining). Obviously most won’t go to Canadians, so the direct benefit of this agreement is likely to be much lower than this headline number.
  • How much of the U.S. states’ government-procurement market would go to Canadian firms and workers?
  • How much of the $22-billion provincial and municipal government-procurement market would go to U.S. companies. (It would’ve been nice to mention the size of this market in the Backgrounder.)
  • The importance of government procurement for provincial and economic development.
  • How having more competitors for provincial and municipal contracts would affect the costs faced by provincial and municipal governments (presuming that more competition leads to lower prices).
  • Net employment, domestic economic activity and tax revenue, since the opening of this market could cut both ways (some effects will reduce employment, others increase it, everything else being equal).
As I said, without these basic facts, it's impossible to evaluate the agreement. I'm hoping that the fact that they weren't provided along with the announcement of this tentative deal was only an oversight. It would be nice to know that this government reached a deal that they believed made economic sense for Canada based on empirical evidence, not on some short-run political calculations. We’ve had enough of that lately.