Dear Justin, Please Fix This. NOW!

We knew that Harper and civil liberties were like an oil spill and water. Nothing good could come of that combination. After all, it's what gave us C-51.

In no time it's been shown that C-51 has become a powerful suppressant of press freedom in Canada. CBC News has a report on La Presse journo, Patrick LaGace and how the Montreal police were able to use Harper's new police state laws to obtain 24-warrants this past year to monitor LaGace's iPhone.

"The new powers that the police have to survey Canadians are absolutely horrifying, they're basically limitless, there's very little oversight, and when that happens the system will be ripe for abuse, and this is just an example of how it's abused," said Tom Henheffer, executive director of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

LaGace says this was an exercise in pure intimidation:

Lagacé said police told him he was being used as a "tool" in an investigation into one of its own officers.

"I was flabbergasted because I thought that in this country it takes very, very serious motives to track and spy on a journalist like that — motives that are so serious that's it's never happened before," Lagacé said in an interview with CBC News on Monday.

"My metadata was transferred to the police. The police had the right to activate the GPS in my phone — to locate me at any time. I lived in this fiction that this could not happen in this country."

And there's more, much more:

In September, the Sûreté du Québec seized Journal de Montréal reporter Michael Nguyen's computer because they believed he illegally obtained information cited in a story he wrote.

At the same time, the RCMP has been trying to get a reporter from Vice News to hand over background materials used for stories on a suspected terrorist.

Last May, CBC News revealed that a rogue group of Mounties investigating the leak of a secret document spied on two Canadian journalists for more than a week without any authorization.

So, Justin, don't be a total dick. You've got the big majority. Fix this. NOW!

Peeking Past Paywalls

I'm not rich.   There I've said it.  Like most people my age I have to be a bit frugal.  Extravagance is for those on the way up.

And so I have to bid a temporary adieu to the Toronto Star after discovering I have used up my quota of 10-free stories a month.  I don't begrudge them their paywall.  In fact I think paywalls are necessary to sustain quality journalism, an argument made convincingly in last month's Harper's magazine.

I already subscribe to a newspaper, the Victoria Times Colonist, and I enjoy finding it waiting for me at my front door every morning save Monday.  As far as online newspapers go, there's only one I would pay for and that's The Guardian.  It's my "go to" newspaper and I wouldn't do without it.

I wanted to check out the latest on Rob Ford this morning, just gawking.  That's when I found out I have to go away for a week or two until the "reset button" let's me back in.  No problem, there were plenty of free sources of the real skinny on the real fatty to be had. 

The thing with paywall news websites is that you come to realize just what most of them are really worth to you.  To me, Torstar simply isn't worth the price of admission.  If I lived in Toronto or anywhere in Ontario for that matter it might be a different story but I don't even live on the same continental landmass as Toronto.

So I'll gratefully accept the ten free stories they'll allow me a month.  It will mean just a very little bit of effort to find the stories I want elsewhere.  At the same time I hope you Ontarians will subscribe to Torstar.  It's just about our only hope of holding back the barbarians of the corporate media cartel.  If you want genuine, valuable information you have to be willing to pay for it.  If you want free, you have to accept that you won't be getting information, you will be fed messaging packaged as information.   That's how corporate media works and you are their lawful prey.