Bill C-11 Officially Delayed for the Summer As Senate Adjourns for Break

It is official: Bill C-11 is delayed because of the Summer break. The Senate won’t be back until September.

For a while, it seemed like nothing was going to stop the looming disaster that is Bill C-11. Indeed, the legislation passed the House of Commons stage thanks to multiple efforts to shut down debate, ignoring stakeholders, and voting on amendments in a secret process. All democratic norms had long been thrown out the window in the Liberals deliberate quest to crack down on the open Internet and regulate user generated content.

While the Canadian government basically lied their way to get to where they are, attacking anyone that dared to step in their way, lies and being abusive was never going to solve the problem of time ticking down to the Summer break. With the Canadian Senate expressing interest in properly studying the legislation – something that failed to materialize at the House of Commons stage – it seemed all but a sure thing that this legislation was going to get delayed for the Summer.

Well, today is the 30th and, looking at the Senate calendar, it appears as though today is the last sitting day for the Canadian Senate. The calendar suggests that there is no possibility to really extend the sitting schedule. With no real options to continue pushing for this legislation, the Senate will pause whatever it is they are working on. According to the progress page for the legislation, the second reading of this bill is still “in progress” with committee not even working on the bill. All this leads to one conclusion: Bill C-11 is officially delayed for the Summer.

And the crowd goes wild!

While this is fantastic news for Internet users and digital first creators alike, the next question then becomes, how long is this Summer break? According to the Senate schedule, the next time the Senate is moving forward with work is September 19. So, thing will start to pick up at that point in time. What we don’t really know is how long it will take after that day for Bill C-11 to move forward again or how long it will take before a final vote takes place. What we do know is when work will start for the Liberals to move the legislation forward.

While the free and open Internet has been bought a little over two months of reprieve, that is really all people on the Internet got out of all of this. Considering what all happened in the debate, we’ll take what we can get their hands on. As we noted earlier, Open Media is passing around a letter writing campaign to get Canadians to urge the Canadian Senate to fix Bill C-11. While we’re not sure if lawmakers are willing to listen to Canadians (this especially the gong show that was the House of Commons stage), we do hope that the letter writing campaign is successful and that major fixes can be implemented in this bill if it is destined to pass. We all hope that it never passes in the first place, but it is safe to say that this is an extremely unlikely long shot at this point.

Still, the Summer break is going to be nice where things might finally start to settle down and we can more regularly follow what all is happening in other countries. That is one thing I certainly miss being able to do because that feels like an area where we are missing a lot on. Still, we have to do our part to defend the home turf.

Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.

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