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Calgary Centre All Candidate Debate
If you live in Calgary Centre-North you might have missed the 2008 All Candidate Debate. (You may have missed it because it took place at noon on Tuesday.) Here is our coverage which is about one million times better than the Calgary Centre-North debacle.
A transcript of the 2008 Calgary Centre All Candidates Debate has been crowdsourced via Mechanical Turk’s CastingWords. An audio-only version is available as an MP3 download of Calgary Centre Candidates Debate.
You can use the following chart to locate topics of interest. Clicking on a timecode will play the content from that point forward via YouTube.
Calgary Centre is Cambrian House’s own riding (our office resides in it as do many of our staff) so this is the riding we’re covering. Please check back at this blog post for updates as we consolidate technology positions, and their thoughts on how today’s internet technologies impact democracy in Canada.
Also, affordable housing, the economic downturn, war in Afghanistan and global warming will be touched on.
Just kidding. We don’t know anything about those things. Just technology.
CANADIAN PARTY PLATFORMS vs THE INTERNETS
| Conservative | Liberal | NDP | Green |
| Stephen Harper | Stéphane Dion | Jack Layton | Elizabeth May |
Tech Sector |
|||
| Remove barriers to labour mobility, improve foreign credential recognition and Temporary Foreign Worker systems to ease staffing issues. Align the immigration program with the needs of the labour market. In 2007 released new national Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy promising increased impact of business R&D assistance programs: Support large-scale research and commercialization centres in partnership with other levels of government Consolidate the roles and responsibilities of Improve Canadian regulatory Address tax barriers to improve access to U.S. venture capital by Canadian entrepreneurs. Study the transfer of non-regulatory federal laboratories to universities or the private sector. |
Liberal Party Platform: Ensure broadband internet access to rural communities. |
Facilitate IT staffing by streamlining the recognition of foreign credentials and overseas degrees during immigration process. | Green platform:
Committed to network neutrality. Ensure that all new software developed for or by government is based on open Reduce the paperwork burden on small businesses by eliminating duplicative tax filings and red tape. Government agencies will share information from the same database. |
Copyright Reform |
|||
| “Improve protection of intellectual property rights in Canada, including copyright reform.”
Bill C-61 proposed by PCs (which was then killed by the process of calling an election) has been widely criticized as worse than its American predecessor, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). DMCA has been been acknowledged as a failure by its creator, and likely the same pressures which brought about its creation in the states were also applied during the creation of C-61. Jason Hatcher (Prentice spokesperson): “The Conservatives are committed to modernizing copyright |
Liberal Party Statement: We need wide consultation with everyone (including consumers, artists and business community) to ensure we properly understand all of the impacts the legislation. Liberals introduced C-60 which in retrospect is now regarded by its share of critics as superior to C-61. |
NDPs Strongly opposed C-61, focusing on its impact on consumers.
Their digital spokesperson says the NDP will focus on |
Green party’s position on copyright reform:
Oppose ratification of the WCT, recognizing both their imprecise definition of obligations and their incongruence with fair dealing. Establish a copyright registry that will facilitate tracking and protecting of copyrights where registration is optional for the original author, but mandatory upon the transfer of ownership or death of the author. Remove the Levy on Blank Audio Recording Media and replace it with private copying exemptions; Renounce the Crown Copyright applied to all government produced documents, thereby immediately releasing them into the public domain. Hold consultations with music and movie industry artists, producers and distributors along with citizen’s assemblies to address the issues of online peer-to-peer networks. |
Democracy 2.0 |
|||
| Conservatives have “Instituted fixed election dates” according to their website. (Fixed election dates starting… Now!) | Stéphane Dion personally endorsed instant runoff voting on CBC’s Cross Country Checkup, although he acknowledged this is not part of his party’s platform. | Green platform on Democratic Renewal:
Create Introduce fixed election dates. |
|
Web Gossip |
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| After calling the election, Harper’s campaign site showed an animated bird shitting on his Liberal opponent demonstrating complete mastery of 2002 web technologies. | NDP launched an AdWords campaign targeting keywords “Stephen Harper” and “Stephane Dion”, which is a first for a Canadian federal political party. And a bit risky. | Elizabeth May had a heavy handed dealing with blogger who posted footage of her saying something she denied saying. | |
If you’ve got any data to add to this table, leave it as a comment and we’ll throw it in.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
[…] If you are looking for Calgary Centre (not Calgary Centre-North) then check out our Calgary Centre debate coverage. […]
October 11th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Are you guys still in operation? I heard a rumor that Cambrian House is no longer open.
October 13th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Yes. TechCrunch stated we had a firesale of our assets in May, which was not true. However, despise our continued existence that rumor has continues to persist. TechCrunch has been contacted regarding this: http://www.cambrianhouse.com/blog/cambrian-house/for-the-record-we%E2%80%99re-not-dead/