The Bloc Quebecois Platform Examined

Our series of party platforms compared continued with the Bloc Quebecois. This, as usual, is through the lens of digital rights and technology.

Early voting is already taking place, but that isn’t stopping us from at least trying to get these party platforms analyzed as early as possible. Already, we analyzed the Green Party, the Liberal Party, and the People’s Party of Canada. Now, you might be thinking it’s an odd order with particularly late timing, but part of that has to do with not only the short time window for this overall election, but the fact that parties are seemingly leaving the release of their platform all the way up to the last minute. I have actually been checking in on the Conservative Party and the NDP daily for the last while and neither have released their full platform. The NDP released their costed platform, but not their general party platform.

While we continue to wait for those platforms, one party that has already released their platform is the Bloc Quebecois. I’m always mixed on this particular platform because it typically only released in French. As a result, this only increases the chances of me missing something as I scramble to figure out what it’s saying through a machine translator (hey, it’s better than nothing). So, if I miss something or something happens to get mistranslated, feel free to correct me.

The platform can be found on the official party website. Just mouse over “Plateforme politique” and click on “Plateforme”. You’ll get the party platform which is… also in French. If you don’t want to follow those steps, you can just get the platform here (PDF)

Since we won’t be able to translate the entire platform, we were able to translate the index page (thank goodness this platform has one unlike the Liberal party). We think relevant sections for us are on page 11 and 12 under “Accélérer l’innovation québécoise” (Accelerating Quebec Innovation) and page 14 under “Faire porter notre voix” (Making Our Voices Heard). Not saying it will be relevant, but that is our best guesses based on the index.

In those sections, we see sections seemingly revolving around aerospace, finance, and research. Thinking the last section might have something, we did a translation of that section and found that the first part talks about scientific research, the Trump tariffs. After that, it talks about studying quantum sciences abroad in countries like the Netherlands and the UK. It does talk about government oversight of new technologies in the quantum fields. After that, they seemingly called for the relaunching of a public debate about artificial intelligence and what role Quebec could play in all of that. Finally, it mentions a research centre network in Quebec as well.

So, not a whole lot to really work with from our standpoint since it doesn’t really seemingly say much.

Moving on to page 14, our other guess for where relevant sections are. It mentions fighting “fast fashion” since it relates to the genocide of the Uyghur population in China. After that, it mentions fighting the suppression of people from other states through surveillance and intimidation. That’s something I have no problem with, personally. After that, it just talks about taking steps to prepare for Quebec separation from Canada (naturally).

As a result, we got, well, nothing to work with for the most part.

We then took a different approach and started translating words to French to see if there is anything relevant in the platform. For instance, we tried “internet” (which, luckily, is the same thing in French). Two results popped up. The first one was on page 7. In that paragraph, they called for the protection of culture in trade agreements and accused tech giants of pirating people’s work.

There are only two things I am aware of that can even remotely make that make sense. The first possibility is the lie being used to push the Online News Act. That lie being, of course, that platforms allow the posting of links to news stories, therefore, they are stealing from publishers. It’s a complete and total lie because the publishers themselves were largely posting those links on those platforms in the first place knowing that they are the ones that derive a benefit from their links being on there in the form of added traffic and subsequent advertising views and subscriptions. Whether or not that is in reference to that is unclear, but it’s possible from our standpoint.

The other possibility that I can think of that makes that make any sense at all is the lie that reading is copyright infringement. This has to do with the AI debate. Specifically, as the lie goes, companies use publicly available information to train their AI models by reading that information. After that, AI can then learn from the content and produce completely unique results.

While there may be something to be said about some companies causing downtime by aggressive crawlers that routinely scrape whole databases for updates, copyright law does nothing in such a scenario. This is because the law is quite clear: reading material is not copyright infringement. What’s more, facts cannot be protected by copyright. So, if someone publishes a comment saying that “water is wet”, if I later agree with that fact and make my own post saying “water is wet”, I’m not violating copyright law by publishing that fact. In fact, the writing economy would collapse if that was copyright infringement.

The same is true for generative AI. If an AI reads someone’s work and finds out that water is wet, then if that AI offers a series of facts including the fact that water is wet, that’s not copyright infringement. AI is generating it’s own content here, not copying and pasting whole works verbatim. I’m far from alone on this. Experts have long agreed on this notion that reading is not copyright infringement. In all likelihood, saving for an unfortunate surprise, I wouldn’t be surprised if the courts go along with this as well because it’s, well, basic common freaking sense. Simply saying it’s different because a computer is doing it is not really a defence here.

Now, what the Bloc here is referring to is unclear. It could be both, one of the above, or neither. I can’t personally tell. Still, if that is in reference to either one or both, then it’s basically disinformation in the platform.

The other reference to “internet” was found on page 13 which talks about expanding cellular access in Quebec. I don’t have a problem with that at all and I would say it’s a good proposal. I think marrying that to the expansion of broadband access in rural and indigenous communities would also be nice, but a half good proposal is better than none.

Next, we tried “nouvelles” (news) and found 5 results. The first result had to do with aluminum (not relevant). The second result had to do with scientific research (already covered above and not relevant).

It isn’t until the third result that we got something. On page 21, there is mention that they will continue to push for the sharing of advertising revenue from web giants to news rooms. So, they support the theft of money as seen in the Online News Act (which was disastrous).

The Online News Act was a very public and unnecessary battle that the government waged against the online platforms. What’s more, the government very publicly lost that battle when Meta dropped news links in Canada. There’s… really nothing more the government can do at this point apart from repealing the failed law. I’m aware of the insane legal theory of users posting screenshots means Meta is liable under the law, but that is ultimately a no win strategy for the government. Either Meta (rightfully) argues that screenshots are not covered under the Online News Act or Meta simply blocks Canada entirely. At that point, the question then becomes how truly stupid the government is. For now, the government has seemingly decided that it has done enough damage to the general media industry. Pressing on this front will only cause further harm to the industry.

Now, if that is in reference to the Online Streaming Act, that is not going to work out any better for the government. Right now, everyone is waiting to see what comes out the other side of the CRTC consultation process. Still, litigation based on very strong constitutional grounds is likely going to come out of this whole process. Then there is the trade challenges that are inevitably going to come from the US (and the Canadian government will not have a defence to that). Over top of that, there is likely going to be challenges from the platforms themselves. This isn’t even getting into the idea that users are going to firmly reject the low quality content that the “Cancon” system produces and downvote bomb that content into oblivion when the government force feeds that content onto users afterwards. Ultimately, it’s a law that has nothing but legal challenges facing it for the foreseeable future. All of this to prop up a legacy media who is producing content that consumers are increasingly rejecting through cord cutting and other measures.

Either way, it’s unlikely any of this is going to work out and the entitled thinking that the platforms somehow owe the legacy media money through all of this is insane.

While I disagree with that point in the platform, the next result, which is found on page 24, is a different matter. In the third to last paragraph, the party mentions that they support privacy reform. I agree that the Privacy laws in Canada need to be reformed and needed to be reformed a decade ago. That is just obvious. What I do find amazing is the fact that this is only the second time I came across this no brainer campaign promise. This should be in every party platform because of how badly it is needed, yet fewer parties are even giving this the time of day. At least the Bloc supports this idea anyway which is… something at least.

The final result was on page 31 which talks about green bonds. Again, not really relevant for the scope of this analysis.

The next search we tried was “droit de réparation” (right to repair). That delivered no results.

We also tried “réparation” (repair). We found a mention of this on page 16 where the party says that they support right to repair legislation. It doesn’t really say how they plan on further supporting this, but they at least support the concept for Quebec. I totally agree with that.

Another word search for us was “téléphone portable” (cellphone). That turned up no results. So, we tried “téléphone”, but got nothing. After that, we tried “fournisseuse” and “fournisseur” (provider) but got nothing (trying to think of anything related to cellphone providers and ISPs. Another one we tried was “plate-forme” (platform) and “plates-formes” (platforms) but got nothing (thinking of the online platforms). Another one we tried was Google, Facebook, YouTube, and “Méta”, but got nothing. We even tried “réseaux sociaux” (social media), but got nothing as well.

Finally, we tried “intelligence artificielle” (artificial intelligence) and got a few results. Apart from what was already mentioned above, we found a result on page 20 which talks about revising fair dealing and compelling AI companies to disclose sources for their outputs. At least with Google, that is already done. So, I’m not entirely sure how necessary that is. I don’t know if they have a specific company in mind when wanting to make such legislation, so I don’t really know of any impact that would really have on AI in the first place.

The other mention was found on page 32 (the last page) which generally calls for Quebec to develop artificial intelligence.

At this point, we’re not sure how much more mileage we’re going to get with our efforts, but it was at least a reasonable effort. There’s a good change we might have missed something. This is particularly since we don’t really speak French that well. Still, an effort was made. Feel free to let us know if there is anything else to this platform or if there is anything else you can get out of this.

Conclusions

Based on what we were able to gather, there’s only thin passing mentions of the issues that are within our areas of coverage. It’s not exactly the most inspiring thing to read, but we did our best to find what we can. While there was a sporadic good idea here and there, it wasn’t enough for us to give it a passing grade.

The Good

• Supports privacy reform
• Supports right to repair
• Supports the expansion of cell phone coverage

The Mixed

• More regulatory oversight of AI (such a call can go either way)

The Bad

• Seemingly wants to go further with either the terrible Online News Act, the Online Streaming Act, or both
• Reform fair dealing to possibly exclude AI from protections (it’s legal nonsense)
• No plan to expand broadband to rural and indigenous communities
• No plan on helping digital first creators that are currently driving economic growth in the online space
• No plan to break up advertising monopolies of tech giants
• No plan to tackle abusive market practices of various carriers
• No plan to increase competition in the cellular and internet space
• No plan to crack down on scam calls
• No plan to modernize the definitions of Cancon
• No plan to fix the problem of the Digital Services Tax
• No plan to combat digital frisking at the border (US border patrol demanding passwords to devices, etc.)

Overall Rating: F

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.