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calls on decision-makers, governments and stakeholders to step up their efforts to prevent global warming from threatening the nation’s air quality, saying the bad air increased the spread of diseases and caused premature deaths. It also warns that Canadians can expect inevitable and at times severe health-related impacts associated with climate change.

because, of course, our knowing that would be bad.

The Tories’s mendacity lies in their method. First, publication of the report was apparently delayed for over a year (no doubt, once apprised of its contents bureaucrats decided further “study” was required). Then, a Canadian tour to promote the report was cancelled (no doubt, scheduling conflicts). Remarkably, once the report was “ready” it was released quietly, without fanfare. The Tories have had practice using this ploy:

A similar fate befell another major climate-change study released earlier this year by Natural Resources Canada.

After years of research, input from more than 140 experts and $50,000 paid to a public-relations firm to plan its release, Natural Resources posted the study online after 5 p.m. on a Friday with no flourish.

Finally, bizarrely, once the report was released it was not made available online. Why not? “Yesterday, Montreal-based newspaper Le Devoir quoted Health Canada spokesman Paul Spendlove as saying the report is not up for download because of it’s big “size.”" The english version is a 9 meg file, which makes it a trivial download, by any honest standard.

One of the contributors to the report, who’s obviously been in a few knife fights, had some pointed observations:

Mr. Soskolne said the government has a “strange” approach in handling the release of reports and drew a parallel with an environmental assessment he did five years ago for the Azerbaijan government that will finally be released in the coming year.

He said the similarities in the handling of the release of the Health Canada report and that of the report for the former Soviet state gave him “a reason to reflect on the state of the current governance in Canada.”

Ouch. In any event, our Government is a shockingly inept liar. Bad things happen in the dark. Weaselly, juvenile efforts by government to avoid taking responsibility for itself should be assiduously rooted out and exposed. Cue blogosphere.

English version here, French here.

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Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

It is profoundly depressing, after 26 years full-time in a field I love, to be a constant voice of dissent.

It’s worth remembering that Lessig left this same field some time ago, in part because of what he described as a “corruption” of the political process:

Think, for example, about term extension. From a public policy perspective, the question of extending existing copyright terms is, as Milton Friedman put it, a “no brainer.” As the Gowers Commission concluded in Britain, a government should never extend an existing copyright term. No public regarding justification could justify the extraordinary deadweight loss that such extensions impose.

Yet governments continue to push ahead with this idiot idea — both Britain and Japan for example are considering extending existing terms. Why?

The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process. Or better, a “corruption” of the political process. I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can’t even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

It’s hard to observe these events, and the betrayal that our Bill C-61 represents, and not conclude, with apologies to Little Carmine, that we are standing at the precipice of an enormous crossroad. I’m ashamed of my Government for doing what it has done with Bill C-61. I see no sense in it. And I can’t explain rationally how they have come to the choices they’ve made, without hearing Lessig’s observations about the corruption of the political process in my head. I don’t know the answer, but Patry and Lessig’s departure from the field has me thinking that the time for statesmen and intellectuals has passed. Perhaps what we need now is an army.

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Come for the strategy, stay for the Appropos group exhibition:

The Appropos group exhibition is based on the work of artists whose use of imagery integrates existing popular culture products/icons. One of the purposes of the exhibition is to emphasize the crucial relevance of appropriation to contemporary visual artists and their studio practice. As revisions to Copyright Act legislation, known as the Act to Amend the Copyright Act, are currently underway by the Canadian government, there are valid concerns that the elements of contemporary artistic practice such as appropriation and “quoting” could potentially be outlawed by draconian legislation.

Also please note the Wiki, which has just been posted.

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