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I feel most of us have been conditioned to prefer only the mildest and most inoffensive ways of protesting as valid and consider the rest impossible. In my view, governments today ignore protests because they don't actually threaten anything. A protest with teeth might be mass absenteeism from work, refusing to pay taxes, something that actually hurts.. although in this case it's probably a bit much, when the threat of real protest is completely gone you end up with authoritarian governments.

The fact is this political system of ours is heavily balanced in favor of those with the endless budgets and resources to spend engaging in "democratic" avenues of influence.

> emailed 9 senators and heard back from one

Good start. Calls are also excellent. Then get your neighbors to do the same.

For controversial stuff, you want tens to hundreds of outreach events recorded. It doesn’t take all that much for electeds to spell a festering primary threat.

Colin Deacon seems to care: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7519403...

Paula Simons has also been actively listening to Canadians on this subject. https://sencanada.ca/en/senators/simons-paula/

You won't be able to convince representatives with facts and logic. So many people want their attention that they can't pay enough attention to your arguments to be convinced. Contacting them is about showing that you care about it.

If they receive 100 calls of people saying they're strongly against a bill and no for they might reconsider their position.

Also calling is a better signal of showing you care then emailing.

Haha. You don't email them, you cut off their funding and smear their public image. This is how you make them move, not with emails. It takes some work though.

This sounds like an interesting argument, but it's damn hard to parse. I think you're saying that real democracy needs political (in the widest sense) engagement, which can't be got from the majority of people, so letting everyone participate without regard to such engagement gets in the way of real democracy, and therefore you suggest to "replace" (redistribute) power?

Anyway, this really needs an explanation of what your idea of "real democracy" is, and what "replace power" is supposed to mean.

Anyway, the answer to your question of "how" is likely: at your own peril. ;)

LBO maybe. Optimal governance would fix all bad mechanisms e.g. incentive traps, shooting self in the foot stuff, obvious inefficiencies, etc. - so it would result in a better future with more growth and wealth.

The difference can be used to bargain with incumbents to compensate for their current position, while installing a new type of government in its place that is better. It's a pretty hard problem but I don't think it's impossible. I'm pursuing this kind of thing in Finland presently.

This is why it's so important to have guardrails that limit what the government can do. The US tried to do that, and has probably been the most successful at it - though there's still been a lot of scope creep outside their constitution already. And that's probably a one-way street.

> do not believe that a majority of humans can be made to meaningfully engage with democracy

They don’t need to. When the informed minority on an issue gets lazy, stupid or cynical, however, the system dies.

> I do not believe that a majority of humans can be made to meaningfully engage with democracy.

Why not? Is it just that you have not experienced it, or is there a more principled argument?

My personal experience is that democracy feels to work much better in smaller (sub 10 million people) than larger, but it could also just be correlation not causation.

Voting for every little thing is compulsory in Australia and it’s honestly really annoying.

Signal, NordVPN, Psiphon VPN, Tailscale, Windscribe, and DuckDuckGo have already confirmed that they will stop offering their services in Canada, and not route any of their European services through Canadian proiders.

Hopefully it doesn’t get CRA (tax) enforcement where the little guy is relentlessly pursued while the rich are too much trouble to go after.

Canadian law enforcement have publicly stated that they intend to target encrypted messaging apps as soon as possible if the legislation become law.

Important services have already said they won't. It will be a disaster.

Is your president emulating Trump? Is he one of the smartshits?

> does Canada get access to Americans data in return?

It probably is reciprocal, but in reality Canadian companies sell very little (if any) digital services to Americans. There isn't much they can even access. It's why the arrangement is so lopsided.

Exactly. If it’s happened once, it will happen again.

Canadians acting like the consequences will never be the same because of one man, when you can walk over the French-German border today with a passport instead of a rifle.

I have an MP i can reliably count on to vote against bullshit like this, which means i have nobody who is accountable to me to write emails to.

Raise awareness about the legislation and what it means for the average person (bans on iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, VPNs, etc...) You need to also start emailing and calling members of the Senate, telling them to reject the bill.

Drive to Ottawa and take over the downtown core.

> the only thing that could make a difference is if apple, whatsapp

That is literally what is going to happen if this legislation is allowed to pass. WhatsApp will block Canada, and Apple will remove any impacted service from Canada, like iMessage.

Remember that media bias comes from being state funded media. Of course they're going to massage the narrative towards the party giving them funding.

US politics might be "crazy" but definitely healthier than the managed decline we're seeing in Canada.

It has the same problem that the US has, which is it is stuck in a two party duopoly, with both major parties sharing fundamentally the same political economic outlook. Just with different takes on culture wars stuff.

The only significant opposition to this bill has been coming from the NDP, which was decimated to a small number of seats by people piling into the Liberals because of nationalism and by its previous pathetic fealty to the Liberals in the last two parliaments.

Unfortunately Signal has threatened to leave the Canadian market should this bill go through, as have NordVPN, Windscribe, DuckDuckGo's VPN, Psiphon VPN, and Proton VPN. I imagine more may follow suit.

One of the main lobbyists behind Bill C-22, The Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) has been trying to target Tor's funding for years now. So unfortunately it would be unsurprising to see them convince the Liberals to try and target Tor.

Oh yeah totally, you'll 100% beat surveillance with a chinese phone and a Russian email service. No way anyone at all will spy on you that way.

The best privacy tech comes from people who live in these 5 and 14 eyes countries. Try a little bit of threat modeling instead of thinking about the problem emotionally.

We have a very complacent population, which explains the lack of innovation coming out of the country. People's idea of "business' right now is simply renting out their basement.

Most go to work, accept whatever policy the government decides is good for them, and don't push back as their living conditions decline. Given that, is it surprising that we don't see much activism?

I wish it was different but I don't know what to do. Perhaps Canadians should steal a page from the French?

Thanks dude, back at you.

Well, I'm American, and I watched my peers lose this fight 10+ years ago.

I was in school when the Snowden leaks came around, and asked dozens of students and teachers what they thought about it. The majority of them had no idea what had happened, some even outright rejecting it as a foreign smear campaign. A handful of people showed interest, but lost interest when there was no connection to aliens or the Bermuda triangle. My freedom-loving cohort was too preoccupied with YouTube, Twitter and Instagram for it to matter.

Fast forward to today, you're probably running USA-designed spyware on whatever computer and phone you import from America. Canada already belongs to FIVE EYES, your mobile handset market is almost entirely captured by pushover US corporations that backdoor Push Notifications and rename lakes apropos of nothing.

No matter what happens with this bill, the threat of surveillance will loom long over Canadians. Political motivation is important, but trusting the United States is an albatross on the neck.

But the Vancouver elections are a microcosm of left-leaning Canadians across the country. There's no hope for the foreseeable future while boomer power remains.

CPC should take down the punching bag if they're tired of it being used.

> except for the party in power.

The votes for this bill seem to indicate that nearly all MPs regardless of party voted in favour, and none of them voted against.

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it's not a conservative talking point. i know many people who voted liberal to "stick it to trump" (their words). all they do is talk about trump. they have no idea what is happening in their own country, it's just trump vs canada and carney is the hero. it's ridiculous. and the media fuels it constantly.

as a liberal voter how do you feel about this bill?

You can think of them as the equivalent of the DNC-preferred wing of the democrats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Canada

In Canada, it just refers to the Power Corporation

It does not and it's quite confusing. You'll often see people use the term LPC or Liberal and avoid lower-case liberal due to the confusion of that word. In Canada the Liberal party is a fiscally centrist/corporate & socially liberal(ish) (aka it's similar to the traditional British definition of Liberal). The Conservatives are a large right wing reactionary block that seems to be perpetually in the minority but with a large loyal voting block while the actual opposition mostly comes from three parties that rotate in and out of relevance as a left-wing voice BQ (Bloq-quebecois), NDP (New Democratic Party - fading since the death of Jack Layton), and the Greens (Environmental sorta, but also weirdly anti-science sometimes). And that's on the national level - at the provincial level it gets even weirder with the BCLiberals (recently named BCUP) being socially and fiscally conservative and opposed by the BC NDP and other minor parties.

Liberal doesn't mean the same as it does in the US because it barely has a consistent meaning up here.

No, I probably should have used "Liberal" to indicate I'm talking about the Liberal Party of Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Canada

it's a bit of a misnomer imo. if we're talking about classical liberalism, the conservatives fit that label better. if we're talking about "liberals" i.e. the left, the NDP would fit that label better. the modern Liberals are more like neoliberal technocrats, who favour top-down state interventionism and who are the ones driving surveillance bills and attacking privacy.

This is Canada, he's spot on. It's insane here.

Frankly surprised that username didn't get some kind of auto flag on its own

traitor to what? what does our country even stand for?

When did I mention america?