festus

Worth pointing out that the reason schools talk about LGBTQ issues in the first place is that some of the students and their classmates are themselves LGBTQ - this isn't just a distant political issue that can be ignored until students are adults. How is Poilievre imagining schools should respond if say a transgender child is getting bullied by their classmates? "Ask your parents if it's okay to bully them"?

I grew up in a Christian school / environment that completely ignored LGBTQ issues. Knowing I was different in some way and not having a word for it, and not knowing why my classmates weren't reciprocating my crushes (why wouldn't other guys want an exclusive super best-friend of the same gender...) was hugely damaging for me. Schools have a responsibility to help all kids thrive, and you can't do that if you don't educate kids about the very things affecting them and their classmates.

Thanks for the advice! I'm definitely taking everything said with a huge grain of salt and I'm going to demand some of the non-monetary aspects be put into the contract (like the rules around working remotely). I'm also actively applying to other positions too - I'm hoping I'll find something more reliable.

Thanks for this, this is super helpful. It's a Canadian firm.

So far I've only talked with the recruitment agency - I definitely plan on getting more details about what kind of work they're expecting and what data they have available to see if it's even feasible to get them what they want.

I'm a Data Scientist working my first job since my masters, where I've had an extremely successful last 2.5 years at my employer with the different projects I've done. I don't think I'm making very much though, only $78K. In addition, due to a coworker leaving all my time is being spent doing simple SQL reporting that isn't developing my skill set, and the company isn't hiring a replacement.

I recently applied to a position posted by a recruitment agency and got an interview with them. It would be a for a 12 month contract but the pay would be around $150K if I got it. In addition the work would be more senior and relevant in the sense that I'd be basically building their data science capabilities from scratch. Being self-employed I'd have to take care of paying taxes, the employer portion of CPP, etc. - but for that increase in pay I'd be crazy to not take it, right?

It's also worth mentioning that I have fairly minimal monthly expenses and about $100K in savings in case something goes wrong, so it's not like I'd be risking a mortgage or anything terrible if something went wrong.

My worry is that there's so much NIMBYism against building housing so that if we slow down immigration for housing to catch-up then with the lower urgency we'll just not build.

For what it's worth I believe Meta should pay taxes here too - but let's tax them on their revenue and not on something arbitrary like how much traffic they send news organizations. That happens to be the view of Michael Geist as well - he'd rather that we just tax Meta & Google directly and then use the money to create a fund to support news organizations, instead of this roundabout way where we try to force them to pay some unknown amount of $ directly to the organizations.

My understanding (getting this all entirely from Michael Geist, who's been remarkably consistent advocating for an open internet for years now) is that the government's ability to set regulations for this bill are quite limited.

Now that the bill is passed and could take effect at any time, and that there really isn't much the government can offer in negotiations at this point, is that Meta is just moving on and putting all this behind them. From an implementation standpoint, Meta also needs time to make sure that their news blocking is done correctly as any bugs in that process after the law takes effect could be extremely costly.

Plus, the government and supporters of the bill are slowly being forced to realize that Meta wasn't lying when they said that they could live without news content. Engaging in a negotiation process, especially one that won't deliver what Meta wants, will only delay when the bill's supporters eventually recognize that the assumptions underpinning this bill (that Meta is stealing value from news organizations) were false.

From the text (very end of the bill):

180 days after royal assent

(6) Despite subsections (1) to (5), any provision of this Act that does not come into force by order before the 180th day following the day on which this Act receives royal assent comes into force 180 days after the day on which this Act receives royal assent.

The bill received royal assent on June 22nd, 2023, which actually means this law takes effect in December at the latest.

EDIT - I think we were updating our messages at the same time as I added the above before yours was finished.

I think it's clear that Meta would be covered if it links to news given this section:

This Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to the following factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses:

(a) the size of the intermediary or the operator;

(b) whether the market for the intermediary gives the operator a strategic advantage over news businesses; and

(c ) whether the intermediary occupies a prominent market position.

7 (1) If this Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary, its operator must so notify the Commission.

There's doesn't seem much room for Meta here - if they link to news they'll be covered by this law. The only possible escape might be in Section 11 where it allow the Governor in Council to write regulations that exempt organizations, and if the government is going to exempt Meta they might as well just repeal the law.

While I'm sure there are some messaging aspects to doing it early, it's worth pointing out that by January, unless the government repeals the law, Meta will be penalized for allowing links during emergencies. This specific law comes into operation regardless of whether the government has published any framework or not.

This is a power play protest about avoiding being subject to other countries’ law.

Meta is complying with this law. The idea behind the law was that Meta was stealing ad revenue from news organizations by linking to them, and that if they wanted to continue linking to them they needed to compensate news organizations. Meta has thus stopped 'stealing' the ad revenue. That's complying with the law. It did exactly what it was expected to do, in the same way that when you tax cigarettes you expect some people to cut back on smoking. Even better, Meta stopped 'stealing' before the law even came into force!

Seriously it's like there's nothing they can do to satisfy their critics - they get accused of stealing news so they stop it, and then they get accused of harming news sites by not stealing.

Which is it? Is Meta beneficial to news organizations or harmful to them? If harmful then there's no problem with Meta blocking news links. If beneficial, then maybe this is a dumb law that's akin to the government putting a tax on exercising.

Should they? Not if we punish them with fees for linking. I mean, imagine you're trying to warn your neighbours about an approaching fire and a police officer pulls up to tell you that you'll have to pay $50 for each neighbour you warn. I wouldn't blame you if you stopped, I'd blame whatever law stopped you. Similarly here, I don't blame Meta for not linking but I blame the government that will penalize Meta the moment any link points to a news outlet, emergency or not.

Every single one of then? Even my landlord who has never raised my rent, drove me to and from the hospital when I had emergencies, and has regularly offered to help out in other ways too?

I get that many landlords are not saints, but being a landlord doesn't automatically make someone a bad person.

Musk 'lost' when he had to spend the $44 billion. I can totally believe that he's burning Twitter out of spite from having to buy it.