Our series of platform analysis is continuing with the Conservative party platform. It finally released.
We are now approaching the end of our series on analyzing different political party platforms through the lens of digital rights and technology. Our series has already covered the Green Party, the Liberal Party, the People’s Party of Canada, the Bloc Quebecois, Open Media, and, for a lark, the Canada Future Party.
There are, of course, two notable exceptions to this list. That is the Conservative Party and the NDP. While we are still waiting for the NDP platform to be released in full (as opposed to the random series of “commitments”), the Conservative Party finally got around to releasing a party platform. This as advanced voting and mail in voting is closing and the general election is the only other time to vote. Better late than never, I guess.
To check out this particular platform, you have to go to this particular webpage on the Conservative party website, scroll down, and click on the little link that is buried below the letter to find it. Again, I don’t know why they decided to bury their own platform (not the first time we’ve encountered this), but here we are. Alternatively, if you don’t want to jump through all of those hoops, you can see this platform here (PDF).
So, with that out of the way, let’s take a look at this one and see if there is anything to really be inspired by (I’m not overly optimistic on that prospect especially after failing all but Open Media’s platform).
There is no index page at all which makes skimming through this one a bit harder for the topics we are interested in (seriously, why is this becoming a thing of the past these days?), so we’re just going to brute force our way through the whole thing, hoping to catch everything that is relevant to our analysis.
After scrolling through some awkward pictures of the party leader, we finally found something relevant on page 11 which reads as follows:
Protect Canadians online with new laws for AI deepfakes of intimate images, modernized laws against online harassment, and stronger child protection online. Unlike the Liberals, we will protect children and vulnerable people online without infringing upon the civil liberties of law-abiding Canadians.
There’s a lot of vagueness in here – especially when it comes to “stronger child protection online”. What does that actually mean? Who knows? Given the history of the Conservative party, it is actually possible to speculate that this is in relation to Bill S-210, Canada’s age verification bill which, mercifully, died on the orderpaper when the election was called. Bill S-210 was an assault on civil liberties, requiring a “papers please” approach to access the full internet. It requires handing over highly detailed personal information so that your identity can be tracked across the internet.
It would also censor websites that the government decides is “pornographic” (which could be anything). So, it is also an internet censorship bill.
Even worse was the fact that the legislation was poorly handled and poorly crafted, making it trivial for users to circumvent these regulations anyway. This as other users are encouraged to access more dodgy websites, putting them at greater risk.
In the end, it is a law that attacks personal privacy and freedom of expression all the while being completely ineffective at achieving the very goals it set out to accomplish. It was horrendous and there was a very good reason why Canadians were standing up to oppose this legislation in droves.
From there, I wound up giving my mouse wheel quite the workout and got all the way to page 21 to finally see this scrap of policy:
Stopping scams targeting seniors by passing the Stop Scamming Seniors Act to force banks and telecoms to block fraud in real-time, delay suspicious transactions, and impose minimum jail time for fraudsters.
This would be nice to see. Now, whether or not they would ever actually bother with fighting this just like the Harper era never really bothered with this longstanding problem) is a different question entirely, but it is nice to see this actually getting a mention at all. Still, even then, scams aren’t exclusively hitting seniors. Everyone is getting scam calls on a regular basis. So, why specifically target one demographic for this particular problem when it’s a problem everyone is facing? That’s the real puzzling part about this.
Moving on to page 23, after a forward that mixes freedom of expression with thinly veiled racism, we get this:
We will support media freedom by:
• Introducing a Freedom of Speech Act to repeal Liberal censorship laws and restore Canadian news on Meta and other platforms.
I’m not sure why the Conservatives aren’t more direct with this point. Essentially, this is a promise to repeal the Online News Act (formerly Bill C-18). Obviously, this is a great step forward and I have no problem with it. The Online News Act has caused significant damage for the news ecosystem and has impoverished (or even bankrupted) news outlets. For many of the sites that did survive, they became entirely dependent on government subsidies just to stay open. Nothing good came from that law and it’s good to see the suggestion to repeal it so we can restore the online news ecosystem.
Then there is this point:
Ensuring all domestic government advertising dollars are spent on Canadian platforms only.
This is a proposal that sounds good in theory, but in practice, it only serves to limit the reach of the Canadian government. If the purpose of government advertising is to enrich private Canadian organizations, then there isn’t a problem with this proposal. If, however, the Canadian government is needing to reach out to Canadian’s, then this idea only serves to limit the reach of the Canadian government with regards to its messaging. The Liberal government actually tried to boycott Meta after their Online News Act predictably blew up in their faces just as every real expert warned would happen. That boycott ended in February when even the Canadian government realized it was doing them no good. It was a failed idea and it’s bizarre to see the Conservative party think that the failed boycott should be restarted anyway even though it’s trying to repeal the Online News Act.
Then, there is this point:
Supporting remote-area internet connectivity so every Canadian has reliable access to news.
I’ve been a long time advocate of increasing broadband access to rural and indigenous community. To be fair, the previous Conservative government tried and failed to accomplish this. This by pushing the ill-fated wireless spectrum auction which ended with the large ISPs and carriers gobbling up a vast majority of the spectrum and putting us all back to square one on this whole issue. It was ideology that drove the auction and, unsurprisingly, it ended in an epic fail. So, while it is nice to see that this is even getting a mention, the Conservative party track record on this front has been pretty abysmal.
Unsurprisingly, this was followed up by this:
We will save by defunding the CBC
The only reason this is even being pushed in the first place is because facts keep getting in the way of the Conservative party. Right wingers bought up a large chunk of the private sector news organizations so they can shill for the Conservative party, but the public broadcaster can’t be bought out. So, they are trying to basically kill the organization entirely for not following the party line. It really raises the question of what the party will do to outlets publishing facts if they finally get their way with the CBC.
After that, we see the following:
Free speech is a cornerstone of Canadian democracy. We will ensure campuses remain places of debate, not censorship by:
• Requiring universities to enforce the standards of section 2 of the Charter’s freedom of expression as a condition for federal funding.
This is basically double speak for the Conservative party to try and crack down on free speech on campuses. This by threatening the finances of campuses that down specifically tow the right wing ideology. So, quite the concerning bit there.
Then we get to this particularly ironic part of the platform:
Oppose any move toward mandatory digital ID systems.
It’s ironic because through the Age Verification laws that they’ve been pushing (even vaguely through this platform with the whole ‘protect the children’ call), this is exactly the kind of thing they are supporting, rather than opposing. So, contradictory at the very least.
From there, the platform goes into numbers for the general platform.
Conclusions
It has been a deeply ironic thing that the party screaming the most for the longest for an election ends up being one of the least prepared parties for that very election they’ve been crying out for all this time. They haven’t had a strategy to make headway in this election, they are woefully late to the party when it comes to actually releasing a platform, and when a platform is actually released, it simply sucks. Opportunities were missed to really “bring home” a platform that would inspire, but what ultimately was finally released was little more than disappointment. Sad.
The Good
- Repealing the Online News Act
- Possibly repealing the Online Streaming Act
- Increasing broadband to rural and indigenous communities
The Mixed
- Stopping telephone scams for seniors (placed here because why not just try and stop scams for all Canadian’s instead of just protecting one specific demographic?)
- Ending government advertising that reaches the most Canadians
The Bad
- Supports mass surveillance of Canadians and hiding it behind a “protect the children” mantra (the platform also offers the contradiction that it would oppose this, but the parties history and the previous promise holds more weight here)
- Controlling speech on campuses ironically in the name of free speech on campus
- Defunding the CBC for obvious political gain and narrative control
- No plan to reform Canadian privacy laws
- 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 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
