Right now we’re putting together a little series called “Canada’s Digital Wish List.” We’re asking people who work in tech and innovation to tell us what they think Canada needs to do now in order to be considered a major innovator in the future?
Another way of saying this is: What do you wish you were hearing from our politicians about technology and innovation?
We’re calling people who work in privacy, green IT, new media, and many other sectors, to weigh in on this question. We hope to have all of our “Wish List” people chosen within the next few days. You’ll hear them on the show soon.
But in the meantime, why don’t we open it up to you? What’s your digital wish list? What do you think Canadians should expect from their government when it comes to technology and our future?
Leave your comments below, or send us an email.
Original photo by soylentgreen23
What I want most from our government in the technology area is a sincere push to using open formats for all data. My data should be available to me without having to go through a specified product to get to it. It’s my data darned it!
You guys should consider an interview with the Open Document guys – one of them lives in Toronto and I bet he’d love to talk to you. Here’s a quick summary of him and the talks he does -
That’s a really interesting idea, furicle, and we always like to know about Canadians in the field, since so much of the tech press is US-oriented.
I’d like to see more wind turbines for generating power, more investigation and deployment of geothermal and solar technologies. I would love to see an industry spring up to create computer data centres in Canada’s North, where less energy would be required for air conditioning.
Over all, I would like see Canada not finish dead last in innovation surveys among industrialized nations.
Damn Canadian complacency!
I’d like to hear more from politicians on ways that we can establish and maintain our personal electronic health records. Better use of technology can enable a people-centered system in which we all take a more active role in managing our health.
I would like to hear a plan/vision from governments for how we are going to make government information more accessible.
The whole concept of making an access to information request is antiquated when most government information originates in electronic formats (word processors, databases). Anything that is obviously free from any privacy issues (policy papers, discussion documents, correspondence etc), and especially the type of stuff that is routinely requested, should be made easily available, searchable and consumable by other electronic agents.
I remember an interview with Adrian Holovaty, developer of http://www.everyblock.com, about the challenges of having to “screen scrape” and use other inefficient methods to aggregate government data for the project.
It seems to me there is an opportunity for our governments to lead the way in truly opening up government and government information. They all talk about how important it is to engage citizens, and access to information is key to true engagement.
The technology is there, waiting for the leadership.
I would like to see improvements in medical information technology. I agree that we need to have better personal medical records, but I think it should be taken a step further. I think that those records could be used in a large database to help medical researchers. I feel that Canada should be on the forefront of Preventative medicine and early detection and screening technology for things like cancer. Catch things before they get hard to treat. I think we should also be funding research in genetics and bio-tech.
I would like to see Canada working to develop Carbon Capture and other emission capture for power plants as well as trains, ship and other transport systems.
Finally, I think Canada should be on the forefront of drinking water delivery systems.
I see a global need in all these areas and think that the time is now for research in these areas before we miss the opportunity.
jimmy
Interesting comment, Stuart. The Guardian newspaper has been spearheading a campaign for a while called Free Our Data, aimed at freeing up access to information collected by government-funded agencies. Have you read about it? There’s a bit more here:
http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/
Nora, I hadn’t heard about the Free Our Data project, but I haven’t had that much free time to really get too deep into the issue.
I did have a look today at http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/ though, and it is an interesting project. What particularly caught my attention was that quite a bit of attention is paid to the value of geo-tagging dats, especially for local data.
I had never really stopped to think about it, but there must be all sorts of location specific data held by various government agencies. If this were made open and easily available, imagine the potential for unique analysis and use. I’ve always thought about it more in terms citizen education and engagement, but if all this technical data was “open sourced,” imagine what creative, armchair analysts might come up with!
Think about how much faster the turnaround on bug fixes is for open source software…now imaging that applied to the analysis of social and environmental data and the development of policy. Tie this together with the idea of technology enabled collaboration (via Clay Shirk and others), and maybe this is a new way to engage citizens with government.
Thanks for the pointer Nora. I’m definitely going to be diving into this more in the near future, and I’ll keep an eye out for any other interesting projects.
@Stuart,
Glad you found it helpful. Oh, how I love The Guardian…
All the suggestions mentioned so far are great. I too want government promotion of non-proprietary alternatives and better online databases of government information.
I agree with Mitch Kapoor; we need a Minister of Technology. These days, technology is as important as healthcare or industry. We have cabinet positions for those, why not technology?
We need copyright reform. Bill C-61 has demonstrated that many Canadians care about copyright reform. Even if one is in favour of the copyright protection measures outlined in Bill C-61 (I am not), critics have pointed out numerous flaws that make Bill C-61 a poor piece of legislation. I want our government to have open consultation with the public to craft viable, enforceable copyright legislation that balances intellectual property ownership with the need for access to information.
We have to catch up with technology and deal with the implications of tethered appliances, such as PVRs. I’m concerned by the trend of manufacturers to “sell” devices to consumers yet maintain control. It’s like you haven’t really bought the device.
More competition in the telecommunications sector. I am not a capitalist, but a lack of competition does mean that consumers have less choice. Here in Thunder Bay, we have one choice for cable TV service: Shaw. Until recently, only local TBayTel provided home phone service; now Shaw does too. Only TBayTel and Rogers provide cell phone service. That doesn’t leave the consumer much choice when it comes to negotiating contracts. On a national level, a lack of competition stifles innovation and growth.
Technology advances too quickly for a mechanism like government to legislate in real time. Like any social fad, once a technology becomes mainstream, it pretty much stays until rendered obsolete by newer technology. Rather than trying to create legislation about specific technology, the government needs to establish a framework that encourages the development of technology along certain trajectories.
Web2.0 sites are all the rage, from social networking to targeted e-commerce. Unfortunately, most if not all Web2.0 sites are not accessible to people with disabilities. A new specification by the W3C, WAI-ARIA, is currently being developed to meet the accessibility gaps in Web2.0 apps. Canada could contribute to specifications like ARIA and or be early adopters of ARIA and help make not only Canadian Web sites but contribute to global Web accessibility by setting an example for other countries and organizations can follow.
I realize that some of my wishes (mentioned in an earlier post) arn’t really digital wishes. Here is a real pipe dream. Free high-speed Satellite Internet for all Canadians! The Canadian government could launch a network of geosynchronous satellites, much like those used for “HughesNet” or the “IPSTAR” satellite. Perhaps we could sell bandwidth to Americans to help offset the cost. Maybe we could even setup a large network of low orbit satellites that could create a mesh network around the world and provide internet and communication for free to Canada but when the satellites are over other areas of the world, bandwidth can be sold. Pipedream? Yes. Is it possible? Maybe
“What do you think Canadians should expect from their government when it comes to technology and our future?”
1. Clear and reformed copyright, trademark and most especially libel laws so that use of the Internet to discuss public interest matters is not inhibited as it has been in the Wayne Crookes, Stephen Harper and Lisa Raitt SLAPP cases filed against political critics. It’s intolerable that political players can harass those who criticize them in their public role and then gain access to broad powers in a civil discovery. Canada is now a totally untrustworthy country in which to store politically or even economically sensitive data. There will be no future for any Canadian online service unless this is immediately fixed and the use of civil discovery impaired to at least those meritous cases involving only private parties.
California for instance is FAR ahead of Canada in this latter regard with its anti-SLAPP laws.
The issues are complex. Suggested reading http://uk.openingpolitics.org/index.php?title=Reynolds_defense
2. In the 1990s the US government adopted a policy of making it easy for government workers to become teleworkers – relieving commuting burdens on highways and making it relatively easy to re-invigorate struggling cities and towns with new government jobs, and also easy to employ disabled and part-time workers. The policy has not been implemented effectively. It needs to be. But Canada needs to do it too, and make effective use of all the vast talent that presently sits in wheelchairs or watching the kids at home, or won’t commute due to danger/expense/eco-harms.
These are the good people, folks. If you want people without a sense of risk or long term costs making all your important decisions, then keep letting governments and banks hire commuters. Who demonstrably do not care about the environment, their own safety nor that of their neighbours, nor value their time.
With telework for white collar jobs universal, it becomes practical to also require all governments to pay employees for travel time. So there would be a clear and direct incentive to refuse to hire anyone who commutes and refuses to telework instead.
3. As others have suggested, adopt only open accredited standard data formats and refuse to consider any bid from any vendor who does not support these as the primary data format – not as a secondary format supported as a sad cousin to their proprietary one.
3a. Not just the data but the actual working mechanics of government require more transparency also, especially in purchasing. With so many governments obligated to respect complex purchasing rules it should be mandatory to register all public purchasing systems and vendors in a way that permits the public to provide feedback on them and their performance and products (including environment, labour and social impacts). Feedback that, by law, must be considered in any large scale purchase decision.
A transparent pipeline of request for information, proposal and quotes in government purchasing that looks more like Wikipedia than like an IBM mainframe program would be a good start. One can’t rationally expect vendors and bidders to reveal damaging data about themselves, so if the public and NGOs and journalists can’t do it, who will?
Without this, Canada might as well rip up every “green” purchasing commitment it ever signed. Without transparency there can be no sustainability.
4. Implement a state of the art fibre optic backbone to each and every government building in the country, including any remote locations suitable for hosting wireless transceivers. Updating this network continuously, with a policy of deploying a second higher capacity backbone as soon as the current one is finished, ensures Canada cannot fall behind in overall capacity. Renting the “dark fibre” to telecom providers but keeping the overall ownership public, perhaps in the hands of a public power distributor (who in the long term is by far the most viable bandwidth provider), and staying out of the wireless market but letting competitors put up their towers on government lands, creates a very level playing field for large nad small, local and national players. Ensuring maximum innovation.
Also, keeping the backbone public prevents a vast range of abuses of “traffic shaping” and other powers.
4a. Nothing creates domestic suppliers and services like a guaranteed market. Accordingly, to advance the “green economy”, government-run buildings also need their power systems updated to use new power-over-ethernet security, voice and building control devices and implement conservation and demand management (CDM) – cutting their energy use by up to a third.
These four (well, six) measures would put Canada permanently at the top of industrial innovators in communications infrastructure. Anyone, anywhere, could pursue a career in Canada’s civil service or start a wireless relay business or an arbitrary large web service or high-bandwidth service business (in graphics, media editing, high finance and insurance, software…).
Our outlying communities would be revived. Our towns would become live-and-work centers not just commuter parking lots. Our cities stabilized at livable scales and focus on more creative activities that reward teams actually working in physical proximity. Everyone would be safer due to less moving bodies and many more moving bits.
new technology? i just wish the government could get up to speed with old technology…
just because i choose to live in the country, doesn’t mean i should have to wait 10 minutes for this page to load on dial-up.
high-speed for everyone!
- Are we criminals if we use google map on our cellphones?
- Are we criminals if we want to use our Telus phone with Aliant?
Apparently we are as per the canadian criminal code. If you want to switch from Telus to Aliant while keeping your Telus phone, you can go to jail. Our cell phones have an ESN # associated with each provider. In some phone, you just have to copy a file from phone A to phone B. Technically its very easy, but if you do so, you can go to jail. Why can a Rogers customer take his SIM card to another phone without going to Jail???
If you want to use google map on your phone, you just have to re-activate the GPS chip in your phone if you have one. The GPS service is now available from the Acadian Peninsula to Montreal through any data plan. There is no firewall on the ISP side, so why not just use it. You can go to jail with the simple fact that you own such a phone…
Such a law is in place since the the blue box that was used a few decades ago to make free long distance calls… A cellphone is a tool, not a national security risk.
Section 326 – Theft of a Telecommunication System & 327 – Possession of Device To Obtain Telecommunication Facility or Service of the criminal code of Canada
Quote:
326. (1) Every one commits theft who fraudulently, maliciously, or without colour of right,
(a) abstracts, consumes or uses electricity or gas or causes it to be wasted or diverted; or
(b) uses any telecommunication facility or obtains any telecommunication service.
Definition of “telecommunication”
(2) In this section and section 327, “telecommunication” means any transmission, emission or reception of signs, signals, writing, images or sounds or intelligence of any nature by wire, radio, visual or other electromagnetic system.
R.S., c. C-34, s. 287; 1974-75-76, c. 93, s. 23.
Possession of device to obtain telecommunication facility or service
327. (1) Every one who, without lawful excuse, the proof of which lies on him, manufactures, possesses, sells or offers for sale or distributes any instrument or device or any component thereof, the design of which renders it primarily useful for obtaining the use of any telecommunication facility or service, under circumstances that give rise to a reasonable inference that the device has been used or is or was intended to be used to obtain the use of any telecommunication facility or service without payment of a lawful charge therefor, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.
Forfeiture
(2) Where a person is convicted of an offence under subsection (1) or paragraph 326(1)(b), any instrument or device in relation to which the offence was committed or the possession of which constituted the offence, on such conviction, in addition to any punishment that is imposed, may be ordered forfeited to Her Majesty, whereupon it may be disposed of as the Attorney General directs.
Limitation
(3) No order for forfeiture shall be made under subsection (2) in respect of telephone, telegraph or other communication facilities or equipment owned by a person engaged in providing telephone, telegraph or other communication service to the public or forming part of the telephone, telegraph or other communication service or system of such a person by means of which an offence under subsection (1) has been committed if such person was not a party to the offence.
1974-75-76, c. 93, s. 24.
It doesn’t matter what the intention is, 10 phones with the same ESN can easily be used for fraud.
Department of Justice
I would like to see new rules for advertising, especially for products that contain chemicals, such as air fresheners, shampoos, fabric softeners, and detergents.
No advertising would be allowed unless accompanied by full disclosure about all the ingredients of the products (no hiding behind “proprietary” claims) as well as information about potential health effects of all the ingredients.
The chemical companies are doing their very best to contaminate the air, with products such as Bounce Awakenings, and deodorants that continually with chemicals such as pthalates that guarantee that fragrance chemicals have longevity.
Many people in Canada suffer from Environmental Illness, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, and/or Asthma, and have physical reactions to the chemicals that these companies hide in their products. Many other people unknowingly use these hazardous products, unaware of their health hazards, because no information is readily available. They assume that a lack of information about the ingredients means that the ingredients are safe, individually and in combination.
Since the actual question was about “innovation” and not just information technology innovation, I ought to mention also the tax system.
A green tax shift to reduce taxes on labour and services and information but increase taxes on pollution and energy and materials would seriously advantage all Canadian technological innovators. In Germany we see many new technological innovations with a strong domestic demand due to their strong regulation and tax shifting and commitment to reduce available energy from dirty sources.
So either the Liberal or Green plan to impose carbon taxes and build larger pools of government capital (now SORELY needed with the collapse of the US investment banking industry) to enable green shifts in specific industries, is desirable. The NDP, US or UK cap and trade systems won’t actually do this as a cap and trade system puts the money not in government hands but in the hands of vendors of offsets, who will be all over the world. It isn’t possible in a cap and trade regime to choose the projects that have other benefits such as forest preservation, water remediation, flood prevention and local job creation. A country like Canada trying to wean itself off dependency on resource exports probably needs to choose strategic projects and invest larger amounts of government capital in them – as Norway and Sweden and Iceland and Ireland did to create successful innovation-based economies.
Other changes to the tax system that would aid innovation would be
1. a better tax-integrated scheme to support people seeking advanced educations to support their debts,
2. total eradication of securities industry regulation for innovation equities – this regulation does not work, it only forces innovative companies to go through criminal intermediaries and liars to sell stock – we’re better off with a buyer-beware Chinese-style market that any innovator is able to access to raise a million bucks or less, than forcing them to pay hundreds of thousands to lawyers and accountants who all lie anyway,
in other words let innovators sell stock on eBay-type markets with a totally transparent comment/ranking system
3. while we’re at it, open up UK-style betting on literally any scientific or technological event so that army of people who likes to play lotteries starts paying attention to science & technology instead
and if you want better government then let markets open to bet against politicians keeping their promises, and report the odds on the news especially at elections
keep the winnings tax free, too, to reward people for paying such close attention to important news
4. remove the GST from services entirely, and put it on food packaging and transport (so local food without packaging is still untaxed but plastic-wrapped imported food would bear some tax) to encourage development of better technologies for food preservation and transportation and local growing
and definitely take all tax off any and all food plants and garden supplies specific to food plants
5. scale the capital gains tax to the risk of particular industries – if you get rich on real estate or logging you should pay a lot of tax, but if you get rich on some riskier innovation venture, your threshold should be much higher
in Japan and Germany confiscatory rates of tax on real estate speculation effectively make it more profitable to invest in industry rather than speculate on land prices
5. reform the income tax system to favour guilds or consortia of many small tradespeople and artisans or artists who cooperate on very risky speculative ventures such as producing new plays or inventing a new online or mobile phone service
for instance provide a single free or share-alike software framework that such projects can use to set up share and revenue relationships and change them during a project as deadlines are met (or not), etc.
providing a major tax advantage to projects that work this way reduces the paper burden on the government and the legal contract management burden on the business partners and reduces black market dealings and makes it possible to actually identify projects that may qualify for government aid or may be able to employ someone who is presently getting government aid or perhaps set up a shop or shoot footage in a depressed place where people really need the work
6. place a direct tax on complex corporate share relationships (like an extra two percent per layer of ownership, four per layer to or from an offshore tax haven) or on some opacity measure like the amount of time it takes to get a complete balance sheet – and on speculative transactions (as the UK does) that don’t result in holding an actual asset to use
this radically reduces the payoff of speculation and complexity in corporate structures and drives investment money towards the more fundamental investment and smaller simpler transparent corporate structures such as innovators use
7. ban all subsidies to oil and gas, forest and fishing industries that are not directly and provably (to a global academic boards’ satisfaction) intended to restore and preserve natural ecosystems
while Canada gives away free chips (free water, free dumping in the atmosphere, free dumping in the Athabaska river, free health care for workers, low royalty rates) in a giant poker game in the Tar Sands it’s not possible to attract players into any more honest game
and the rise in the Canadian dollar due to demand for chips in this poker game is killing every other industry in this country and will continue to, until Harper goes
Its about time Canada has it’s own car. The timing is perfect too with auto worker lost their job and American car company is pulling out. We have the skills and the know how so why not. Better yet given it is a clean start why not put out environmental friendly cars and get ahead. Korea has it’s own car, China has it’s own yet Canada a G8 country has nothing. It is a shame.
There are a lot of achievable technologies that are being pursued but perhaps not in Canada, or not very enthusiastically, or too cautiously. If the government of Canada were to identify specific technology goals that would benefit Canadians and the world (e.g. photovoltaic cells of a certain efficiency per dollar, solar power satellite to Earth, electric car that works reliably at -50C, etc.) and provide substantial prizes ($500 million to $2 billion) for their successful realization by Canadian companies in Canada, by a certain date, global researchers would see it as nonsensical to do their work anywhere but Canada.
Money invested in the projects would almost certainly offset the cost of the prizes (with carefully thought out rules and requirements in place); Paul Allen invested over $20 million to win the $10 million Ansari X-Prize with Scaled Composites, and there were several other companies investing similar funds in other ventures, vying for the same prize.
To make capitalization easier, regulators could create a special security category for companies that met certain criteria (doing developmental research on a designated technology product, audited, supervised for certain criteria), wherein a loss was 200% deductible from taxes, and a gain of up to 300% was non-taxable. This would encourage investment in these very risky ventures; even if they were completely unsuccessful, the money would have been spent in Canada, and any possible tax loss from a 200% write-off would be all or nearly offset.
Prizes have been used very effectively to meet technology goals in the past, but putting up very large prizes (over $500 million) has not. Canada could become a destination for researchers for high-risk, game changing technology development companies.
Newest Technology Deployed in Most Remote Areas First
Imagine what would happen if the newest technology had to be deployed in the most remote areas first. Very often technologies are deployed in dense urban areas to cream profits. Sometimes the incremental cost to make the same technologies deploy in rural or remote areas is small but ignored because you can get away with it.
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Sat are a good example.
The fewer people in the Spot the more bandwidth is available. How the pricing is set determines if this is a good thing in remote areas or not.
Often technologies that work well in remote areas scale well to urban environments but not the other way around.
http://folkstone.ca/election
Hi guys, I’m here to grant one wish.
The wish to vote based on the issues and cut through the campaigning.
http://www.theundecided.ca
This site we (The Movement), built for the last election helps with that. It takes all the issues, stacks the party stances up in front of you side by side for you to taste-test, without a label. So you pick what you like, not who you like. The site then does some magic math and helps you decide who to vote for!
If you’re concerned and need to vote strategically rather than on the issues, try either one of these clever initiatives
http://www.anyonebutharper.ca
or
http://www.voteforenvironment.ca
which will tell you who in your riding you should be voting for to make sure Harper doesn’t get a majority.
Best,
-Alan Smith
i wish Chinese goverment’s information will be easy for the common people to access,.,.,.but,.,.seem for now ~it will take another couple of hundreds years…..
While frustrating, the Conservative Party platform forced me to join the various “anyone but Conservative” campaigns.
Technology law suggests that conservatives shouldn’t vote Conservative
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/4946
It is not only the government that needs a CTO in order to tell the difference between science and science fiction with technology issues, but the political parties themselves. I believe if the Conservative party actually understood their own Bill C-61 that they would be opposed to it, rather than tabling it. They appear to be so proud of what they are doing against property rights owners that they dedicated half a page of their platform to it.
Thanks for covering the election, and what little technology law issues have surfaced. One that didn’t get covered much was Copyright. Michael Geist did get a Copyright Pledge out, and had many responses. I’ve added the data for this to the Candidates list on Digital Copyright Canada.
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/election2008/candidates
I’ve also posted a list of the top 10 ridings I’ll be watching this election, with most relating to technology law.
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/4956
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More things towards green technology will be a good start. Provide more grants for companies which invested in technology to increase productivity will be another good one. Other than day, technology and innovation in the fields medical and health care should takes priority as well.