CRTC PRIORITY: PROTECTING INDUSTRY PROFITS

   Canada’s communications system is overseen by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), an arm’s-length regulator acting in the public interest. Formed in 1968, the organization was created to ensure “Canadians retain control over new communications technologies.” Its mission includes ensuring “Canadians have access to a world-class communication system” and that we can “connect to quality and innovative communication services at affordable prices.”
   But a closer look at the CRTC’s role in the marketplace raises a number of questions about who the regulator is actually looking out for. If the CRTC were really achieving its mission, wouldn’t things look better for customers? Recent events and decisions raise questions about its willingness to put the public at the heart of its decision-making and suggest that the CRTC’s priorities are instead more aligned with protecting industry profits.
    Ultimately, the responsibility for the CRTC and for the future of Canada’s communications system lands with Ministers Bains and Joly. While both have raised Internet affordability as a concern, we have yet to see their departments succeed at shifting the CRTC’s focus. It’s time for these ministers to ensure we have a regulator whose prime concern is the public interest.

MAXIME TOSSED OVERBOARD

Hebert, Toronto Star:  Whatever Bernier's intention was when he uploaded to his personal website the supply management chapter of a future book on his political vision, it also looked like a shot across the Conservative bow in the imminent Chicoutimi-Le Fjord byelection.
  A four-way split in the vote allowed the Liberals to narrowly win the seat from the NDP in 2015. But since then New Democrat and BQ fortunes have declined precipitously. In a one-on-one battle with the Liberals in Quebec, the Conservatives believe they can deprive Trudeau of gains in his home province next year and in the process deny him a second term in government.
  With less than a week to go to the byelection, a local poll published on Wednesday showed the Conservatives with a strong lead on the Liberals. Under that light, Bernier’s decision to once again highlight his dissent could only too easily be construed by many of his caucus colleagues as a deliberate act of sabotage.

BOOZE AND THE 60's SCOOP CHILDREN

   The problem was booze — destroyer of marriages, jobs, families, relationships and supports. Booze scooped up children and dumped them in foster homes.
  I never ran across a parent who said, “I hate my kids. You keep ‘em.”  I recall them all saying they loved their children. They wanted their children home. But booze had become the master.
   We tried very hard to work within community structures: chiefs, councilors, band staff, families. Because the parents were problem drinkers who fought with everyone, folks were reluctant to offer support for the children, let alone the parents. Heard over and over was “We don’t want to get involved!”

WHEN YOUR PHONE BECOMES A TRACKING TOOL

   Hundreds of overt and covert spyware apps are available to abusive partners who want to turn a victim’s Iphone or Android into a surveillance tool, a recent U.S. study found.
   And malware detection programs the researchers tested are terrible at finding them, they discovered in a series of tests.
   Spyware apps range from those explicitly marketed at people who want to keep track of an intimate partner (as seen below) to more innocent ones, like Find My Phone, which can be re-purposed as tracking tools.

ALLEGED HARASSMENT TARGETING KARLSSON

   A series of allegations made by the wife of the captain of the Ottawa Senators against a fellow teammate’s fiancée, detailing a season-long campaign of targeted online harassment, threatens to upend Ottawa’s locker room, leaving the futures of two of the team’s stars in question.
   Melinda Karlsson, née Currey, has filed an application for an order of protection against the longtime girlfriend of Senators forward Mike Hoffman — alleging a campaign of harassment that plagued the Karlssons after the death of their son and through much of the last NHL season
   The application for a peace bond sworn in front of Justice of the Peace Louise Logue on May 4, alleges that Monika Caryk, Hoffman’s partner, had threatened Melinda and husband Erik Karlsson from November 2017 to the date the information was sworn to.

ONTARIO LIBERALS DESERVE THEIR RUMP CAUCUS

  NP:  Ontario’s incumbent Liberals have been obliterated. Outgoing premier Kathleen Wynne, narrowly re-elected in her own Toronto riding, will now lead a rump caucus of a mere seven MPPs. The Liberals had pinned their final hopes on simply maintaining official party status. They fell one seat short.
  Abject defeat is a good look for Wynne and Co. The party was properly and mightily punished by voters not merely for their policy debacles, of which there were many, or for their ethical failures, which exist in similar abundance. They were rejected in 117 out of 124 races this week because of their overwhelming arrogance. Even on those rare occasions when the party was forced to admit wrongdoing, they always stressed how their main failure was being too slow to catch on to a problem, rather than chronic mismanagement, while insisting they were always doing their best, most noble work.

EXPROPRIATING PHARMACEUTICAL PATENTS

    If Canada wants to decisively threaten maximum pain and stop the escalating trade war with the U.S., it should propose expropriating pharmaceutical patents
   Thanks to an obscure twist of world trade law, doing so is perfectly legal, too. In the years since NAFTA, developments in international law have made expropriation of pharmaceutical patents easier and less risky than ever. Between 1998 and 2005, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, the World Trade Organization cobbled together special rules making it lawful to “compulsory license”—or, essentially, expropriate—pharmaceutical patents. The rules allow Canada’s government to authorize Canadian companies to copy patented drugs controlled by U.S. companies. There is no need for an AIDS-like health emergency, so long as certain manageable procedural steps are followed. Further, those procedural steps can be shortcut “to remedy a practice determined after … administrative process to be anti-competitive”—likely an easy determination for President Trump’s bogus claim that aluminum and steel tariffs are needed for national security.