PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
TRANSPARENT PUBLIC CONSULTATION NEEDED FOR CROSS-BORDER TALKS
June 5, 2022 – The public consultation on cross-border security ended on June 3rd, 2011. Unfortunately, the details of the consultation, and the relevant information needed to properly discuss the issues involved were not available in a transparent manner, and negotiations between Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama have continued behind closed doors. Among the topics on table is “Critical Infrastructure and Cybersecurity”. The Pirate Party of Canada firmly believes that any consultation on these topics requires the information to be fully public to ensure that people can utilize their right to free speech and discuss these topics.
Lobbyists from major U.S. Entertainment companies have been pressuring world leaders to create and enforce excessively restrictive copyright and cybersecurity laws. Wikileaks cables have shown that the U.S. government is directly involved in exerting pressures in these areas on governments world-wide. As a part of this pressure, the Harper Government seeks to pass “Lawful Access Legislation”, a wide scale Internet surveillance bill allowing monitoring without obtaining a warrant from the courts. David T.C. Fraser, Vice-Chair of the National Privacy and Access Law section of the Canadian Bar Association criticized the bill, “Think about what this means, given the laundry list of data to be provided with no threshold of probable cause … One request to the telcos can get the names and addresses of virtually everyone who was there [at a protest].” Following the widespread arrest of innocent civilians at Toronto’s G20 summit, such a scenario is not far-fetched. Given the existing pressures, it is essential for these cross-border negotiations to be transparent and to allow for the Canadian public to have their input.
The Pirate Party of Canada is a federal political party focused on thoughtful information policy reform, genuine democracy, civil liberties, and the freedom of the Internet. You can find out more online at www.pirateparty.ca
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Media Contacts: Shawn Vulliez 1-877-850-7722 x *130 [email protected]
Did you expect anything less than Harper concluding talks behind closed doors? The lobby groups controlling both parties (the democrats in the USA, Cons in Canada) have such a grip on politics that it’ll be a miracle if there’s any fair outcome for Joe and Jill Public.