Will the Conservative Party choose to fail like the US Democrats?

As a current Conservative party member I have received fundraising calls from the Conservative party.  The worst so far was from someone who started by talking about the leadership race, and I mentioned I have made a donation to my candidate.  She then spoke about how this increases the donation limit for the year : that I can donate to the candidate and to the party.

She then proceeded to list the party talking points, one of the first was how the Liberal carbon tax was a tax on everything.  To be honest, I didn't hear anything else she said as it was clear that there was no possibility I would be donating to my candidate -- Michael Chong -- and a party that was apparently campaigning against the only candidate that has resonated with me so far.  Michael Chong's revenue neutral green tax shift (from income to carbon) was the policy that made me take notice of the leadership race, and to learn about other policies we agreed on.

As politely as I could I hung up on her.

I also started to get emails from Maxime Bernier's campaign.  I never signed up for anything from his campaign, nor any of the other withdrawn candidates that endorsed him.  So I have to guess that the Conservative party itself added me to Bernier's list, as I opted-in to their list and to Michael Chong's list.

This reminded me of the US Democrats and how the party (staffers, fundraisers, etc) treated Clinton as "their candidate" even though Bernie Sanders was resonating with a whole new group of people who could have won the Democrats the Whitehouse.  Instead the party pushed (in ways some of us thought of as corruption) "their candidate" onto the ballot, and they managed to lose an election against a reality television star with no concrete policy ideas (just the run-of-the-mill angry political noise, what many are characterizing as "populism").

Has the Conservative party decided to give up the next general election and the possibility of their leader becoming the Prime Minister?  Maxime Bernier and I may have libertarian views, but the smaller you make government the more important it becomes what you believe must be left.  I do not recognize myself in what I hear from Maxime Bernier.

That isn't the same thing as saying that I won't be ranking him on my ballot.

The Conservatives will be using an advanced ranked ballot system.  Unlike a minimal-information single-X ballot, leadership voters need to think beyond who we most want to win the contest.  If we want to maximize the effectiveness of the ballot we need to rank all the way to who we would least like to win the contest.

While not focused on a single winner contest, an article by an Australian titled How To Best Use Your Vote In The New Senate System , specifically the question "I've numbered, say, 23 boxes and I don't like any of the other parties/candidates.  Should I stop now?", helps explain how to maximize a high-information ranked ballot.

A lot of voters - especially a lot of idealistic left-wing voters - are a bit silly about this and worry that if they preference a party they dislike they may help it win.  Well yes, but your preference can only ever reach that party if the only other parties left in the contest are the ones you have preferenced behind it or not at all! If that's the case then someone from that list is going to win a seat, whether you decide to help the lesser evils beat the greater evils or not. 

If Michael Chong becomes leader, I will be giving the Conservative candidate in my district a much closer look than I have in more recent elections.  Under our current electoral system it is the local candidate who needs to represent me, and their ability to do so is tied into the environment the party offers.  It is critical whether progressive conservative values (such as a green tax shift) will be embraced, or ignored by people who put blind ideology and slogans ahead of logic and evidence based decision making.

If Maxime Bernier becomes leader I know that no matter how good my local candidate is they won't be able to represent me, as a party that makes Mr. Bernier the leader will spend too much time chanting simplistic slogans and not enough time making evidence based decisions.

There is a line after which I won't be interested in voting for the locally nominated candidate as I will believe the party won't allow them to represent me.  As a progressive conservative (lower case as that party is gone) I can't support any of the social conservative candidates.  I think the party would lose many seats if one of the social conservative candidates won. I believe most Conservatives recognize that, so one of the social conservatives wining is unlikely.

If you exclude those who want to talk about their highly subjective idea of what constitutes "Canadian values" or "barbaric cultural practices", who do we have left?

I haven't made up my mind on all the candidates.  We still have 13 candidates, and only 4 more weeks to go.  I'm just very frustrated to learn that party staffers and volunteers are apparently campaigning against the best chance of the Conservative party leader being the next Canadian Prime Minister.

Making a living as an author vs. off of authors.

Two articles crossed my desk today that I thought were interesting contrasts.

Hackers, Amusement Parks, and Activism: Where to Start with Cory Doctorow is a review on Tor, a site for SF and fantasy readers. Cory is a science fiction author that I'm a fan of both for his fiction storytelling as well as his political views that are well grounded in science and evidence-based thinking.

John Degen: On Creative Commons and the future of the sharing economy is a familiar angry rant from John Degen about how the "free culture movement" is trying to make it hard for authors to make a living. I put "free culture movement" in quotations as his (ab)use of that term wouldn't be recognized by those who are part of the movement, such as Cory Doctorow.

The two have a few things in common: both have released some of their own under creative commons licenses, and both are people I've sat down and spoken with in person (not surprisingly, copyright came up -- see notes from the first time I met with Mr Degen). They are both Canadians from Toronto, although Cory currently lives previously lived in London (Yes -- he can afford that as a writer :-).


There are more things they don't have in common: Cory Doctorow makes a living as science fiction author, while John Degen primarily makes his living as staff within groups that claim to represent authors (Currently the E.D. of the Writers Union of Canada, previously the E.D. of the Professional Writers Association of Canada). I say claim, as I've met a number of authors over the years who don't believe TWUC or PWAC represent their interests, and feel abandoned by those groups. As a software author I never expected to be represented by these groups, but it has always surprised me how hostile they are to my interests.


Creative Commons is not an alternative to copyright, but a series of licenses copyright holders can apply to their works. The idea is to harness a wider range of licensing models to better match the funding models and communities around creative works. It is naive to believe that business models that apply to the authoring and distribution of fiction novels applies to non-fiction educational and scientific material (textbooks, journals). This is only two very different areas of creativity which are primarily written text, and there are many more when you move from the written word intended for human audiences to computer software, or to audio, video, visual arts, photography, and so-on.


Creative Commons isn't about free as in no-money, and has never been about reducing payments to authors. You can tell Mr. Degen is trying to confuse you into thinking it is by mentioning the cost of conferences. It is about recognizing that authors are best rewarded financially and otherwise when the licensing and business model matches the type of creativity they are involved in.

Cory Doctorow understand these differences and will talk about that diversity, and how one-size-fits-all can't work and harms the interests of creators. This will be part of what will be discussed at the Creative Commons summit, support for creators who need more from their copyrighted works than a one-size-fits-all licensing model.





Diversity and choice is not a bad thing. Sometimes I really want to eat a Hamburger, but I would hate a world where I was not allowed to eat anything else. And unlike Mr Degen, I do not believe that the very existence of pasta dishes is a threat to the Hamburger.


(Note: Not the first time I've critiqued Mr. Degen's articles on this blog.)

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May 2 updates:

• Cory Doctorow doesn't live in London, and hasn't since 2015. I've been following his books and activism, but missed this change in his personal life.
• The misinformation that Mr. Degen is known for spreading, and that he never budges from when confronted with logic and evidence that contradicts his opinion, has been corrected by individuals and institutions globally. This includes Myth: Fair use decimated educational publishing in Canada from Australia.

OSI model layered approach to CRTC policy required to get quality of service

Re: Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2017-49: Review of the competitor quality of service regime

While the consultation is in the form of a series of questions, my intervention requires context.

While necessary at this time, I consider the "competitor quality of service regime" to be a transition policy to deal with problems caused by the way we managed convergence in Canada.  My recent submission to the Canadian content in a digital world consultations was focused on convergence policy.

If we are to solve the underlying problems on a more permanent basis we need to adopt policy that mirrors the OSI model layered approach of the underlying digital communications technology. The digital transition involved moving from purpose-built networks to a layered approach, and our regulations should have adapted from regulating as if the underlying technology were still purpose-built.

In short, this would mean:

• Municipal layers 1 and 2 (or rather, what is now often called layer 2.5) should be treated as a utility and be owned and managed by different levels of government as is the case for other utilities.  While I will use the term "last mile" as a short-form, this is a municipal network that shouldn't require private sector entities to make multiple connections to the same municipality.
• All services built "over the top" on layers 3 and above should exist in a competitive private sector marketplace.

The problem with trying to discuss a "competitor quality of service regime" is that incumbent last mile providers are providing layers 1-2.5  and claiming their own "over the top" (layer 3+) services should be regulated differently than other companies "over the top" (layer 3+) services.   They have re-defined the concept of "over the top" in an anti-competitive manner to mean services of competitors, rather than adopting neutral technology-driven language.

I made an intervention in front of the CRTC on 2009-12-09 to make these points.  I live and work in Ottawa, and can be available to discuss this with commissioners and staff at the CRTC in a formal or informal setting.

Q1. How has the current Q of S regime performed in fostering competition?

While the current regime might have disallowed private-sector last-mile providers from completely wiping out businesses built on layers 3+, I do not believe it has fostered competition.

Q2. Are market forces sufficient to ensure a high level of service or are Q of S regulatory measures required?

Market forces cannot function unless the market is correctly defined.

When a new retailer opens it does not have to get "permission" from a competing retailer for its customers to use the roads required to get to the retailer.  If Walmart claimed ownership of all the roads in a specific town we would never suggest that "market forces" were sufficient for any public policy goal.

Q3. If a competitor Q of S regime is required, what should its objectives be?

We should be trying to migrate from the legacy analog-era regulatory regimes to a digital layered approach.  The objectives of the Q of S regime should be to seek to achieve in the current vertically integrated marketplace conditions as close to those that would be possible if we had structural separation.

Customers of different layer 3+ services should not be getting different treatment from layer 1-2.5 providers.    As long as last mile providers are allowed to also provide layer 3+ services, strongly enforced regulations will be required.

Q4. If other regulatory measures are required, what should they include?

The problems I am identifying are not specific to the Q of S regime, but all areas of CRTC policy (Broadcast and Telecom Acts) where the lack of structural separation has an ongoing impact.

My intervention in front of the CRTC in 2009 was in the context of local television, as I see what is traditionally called "Cable Television" in the analog era to be yet another layer 3+ service in the digital era.  While many more people have "cut the chord" (transitioning from analog-era video services) than 2009, my intervention still applies to the current situation.

Q5-Q8:

These questions relate to the rate rebate plan (RRP). As long as last mile providers are allowed to also sell layer 3+ services, financial as well as other incentives to provide good services to all layer 3+ companies is required.  This will require both carrot and stick, as vertically integrated providers will always want to privileged their own branded services.

Q9. What criteria should be used to select the types of services, if any, that should be included in the competitor Q of S regime?

All layer 3+ services should be included in the Q of S regime.

We need to transition from thinking of IPv4 and IPv6 with publicly routed addresses as being "special" compared to other protocols or private network addressing.

There is no legitimate reason why only Bell should be allowed to provide a "Fibe TV" style service. Other BDUs should be able to form to provide those services and directly compete with the services of any existing layer 1-2.5 provider.  We need to break the current oligopoly which, among other things, includes inappropriate policy in Bill C-11 from 2002 which defined  “new media retransmitter” in such a way as to disallow layer 3+ companies which weren't also last mile layer 1-2.5 providers.

Q10. What specific services should be subject to the regime?

What is called “Wholesale Network Access” should be the bare minimum immediately, but this should quickly expand to all layer3+ services.

While not explicitly part of this consultation, I also support CNOC's proposal to apply the Wholesale Network Access regime to fiber to the premises.  We have experienced this problem within our family where my parents-in-law moved into a condo where the condo corporation had already made a deal with a specific vertically integrated provider.  My father-in-law was unable to move his existing Internet service (with Teksavvy) to his new home, and there is no competition within that building.

Q11. Should the competitor Q of S regime be expanded to include cable carriers, wireless carriers, small ILECs, and Northwestel? If so, should the competitor Q of S regime apply to all such carriers or should there be a threshold based on the size of the company and/or other factors?

All private sector last mile wired or wireless layer 1-2.5 providers should be under Q of S.

Exceptions can be negotiated for specific public sector entities, such as very small municipalities who might not have the resources to provide quality of service for other than a bare minimum of communications services.

Northwestel is owned by Bell Canada, and need not be listed separately from other private sector entities.  Regional governments should have an incentive to own their own networks, and private sector providers being under more rigorous regulation should be one of those incentives.

Q12. Does the complaint-based system continue to be the best means of monitoring Q of S for small ILECs?

Most customers of communications services are not aware of who they should complain to.  Then a last-mile provider provides poor service it is the layer 3+ provider that often gets blamed.  The onus should not be on communications customers to understand these different layers, but for the regulator to work closely with layer 3+ providers to adequately regulate layer 1-2.5 providers.

Q13-17:

Further questions are at a level of detail that goes beyond the focus of this intervention, so I will leave unanswered.

Next steps for the Canadiana.org platform: IIIF, JHOVE

This is a new fiscal year.  I'm excited to discuss some of our current plans, and hopefully get some feedback and help from the community.

Some related Internal Projects for our 3 person DevOps team include adoption of IIIF APIs, JHOVE, and updates to associated METS application profile and schemas.

A quick note about when?

The Phoenix Project describes how IT Operations only do 4 things. This work falls under Internal Projects, and will be bumped by Business Projects as well as Unplanned Work. While this work may be exciting to the DevOps team, other work will take precedence.  This means that while I can say we are working on it, we can't offer any useful idea of when there will be something other people can use.

International Image Interoperability Framework

The name gives an impression much less than what this community is doing.  It isn't only a common way to access images, but a community that is working on common APIs and documentation for institutions like ours which offer access to images.  When I first glanced I thought this was a possible replacement for part of our Content Server (See: The Canadiana preservation network and access platform), but it turns out to be a community defining interoperability between most aspects of our access platform.

Adoption will come in stages, with the replacement of our Content Server being the first step.  The content server can be thought of as having 3 parts:

• Authentication
• Authenticated direct access to files
• Authenticated access to derivatives of images

IIIF Image API

We have decided to adopt Cantaloupe, which provides a simple configuration method to handle our authentication and access to images in our TDR (Trustworthy Digital Repository).  We could have enhanced our own image server to handle IIIF, but we felt it better if we adopted and participated in an existing community.  We will be retrofitting our existing access services to use the IIIF image server and decommission our existing server.

Setting up a test Cantaloupe server with access to TDR files involved writing a small self.get_pathname(identifier)  Ruby function to return the correct filesystem pathname based on an identifier.  What will take more work is the authorization function to denying access to files we aren't able to offer access to.

IIIF Authentication API

The authentication model that IIIF uses is different than what we have been using, so we'll need to adjust.  Our existing authorization token was presumed to be unique to accessing content within an AIP (See: OAIS) within our TDR, and a new token would be requested if the client needed access to a new AIP.  We will be adopting a different token, and require a database lookup to confirm the AIP being accessed is part of a collection the patron is authorized to access.  While most AIPs are sponsored, not all are and thus not every patron will have access to every AIP.

Direct access to files

Once we have the first two in place, all we need to do for direct access is verify credentials, find the base path for the AIP in the disk pools, and allow the HTTP server to send the file to the client.

IIIF Presentation API

Reading the API documentation reminded us of many conversations at our whiteboard. Our current collection management interface is simple: a collection is a tag that is attached to an AIP ID within a non-TDR database.

We planned to move to collections being a list which can contain other collections or AIPs, which is the model IIIF uses.  Specific collections would be able to be purchased, and for these we would compile that to tags to allow for a quick reverse-lookup for authentication.

The same is true of other aspects of the Presentation API that map to expansion ideas we have had for a few years.

Our current (2012 edition) AIP and SIP documents describe a layout and a METS profile that was designed for the ECO project.

• Set of scanned images (JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF)
• Single down-loadable PDF, usually derived from OCR of all the images
• Single "physical" order for the images  (METS structMap, IIIF Sequence)

There are a number of enhancements to our AIP structure we have been discussing, and each fit well within the IIIF presentation API

• Allowing multiple structMaps to define multiple orders, such as when image corrections are made (pages removed, or added), or the order wasn't correct. One structMap can describe all the images within the AIP, but other named structMaps(sequences) can describe a separate sequence for display.
• Storing the "master" as well as other derived formats (other image formats, ALTO XML OCR data, OCR derived PDF) associated with that master, making the relationship between the master image and the derivatives clear.

We had a prototype a summer student created for us of a tool which was intended to edit those structMaps.  Now that we are moving towards IIIF we are most likely to adopt using  an IIIF Manifest Editor instead, providing mechanisms for IIIF Manifests to be used by our AIP manipulation software to generate METS structMaps.

Adoption of IIIF will impact most aspects of our platform, making full integration into many incremental projects.

JHOVE

It all started with IIIF Manifests needing the height and width dimensions for canvas and image resources.  This is metadata our lead software developer has wanted the front end interface to have access to for some time, and our metadata architect had planned to look into MIX (NISO Metadata for Images in XML) as a way to store this information in our METS records.  The MIX documentation references JHOVE, and JHOVE has been mentioned to us quite often over the years.  It was in our list of tools to investigate adopting.

In our TDR we have tens of millions of files, with some of the earliest scanned and OCR'd in the late 1990's.  As part of the CRL TDR certification we added checks for new files being added to our TDR (ImageMagick's identify for our JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF and PDF files).  Prior to that our guarantee was based on our use of Bagit for AIPs and revisions, which was that if any change happened to the file in the TDR (bit rot, etc) that we would detect it with our constant re-validation of the MD5's of all files in all AIPs.  We always keep copies of files in multiple physical server rooms across the country.  During content ingest we would also confirm our METS record referenced all the files being submitted.   While we wanted to adopt something more robust such as JHOVE for identification and validation of the format of files, we weren't able to allocate the resources at the time to implement.



On March 24 I downloaded the latest JHOVE (XML files generated indicate release="1.16.5") and set it to generate an XML file for all of our files.  This process is ongoing, with 60 million files categorized and counting.


I expected to find problems with our earliest files, but was surprised to find issues reported from our most recent additions.  We would like to have JHOVE file identification/validation as part of our ingest process, only adding new files which are recognized.  Before we can do this we need to work out compatibility issues.

If you have adopted JHOVE, and manipulate PDF files as part of your processing, I am curious if you have seen the problem we found when joining single-page PDFs into multi-page PDFs using Poppler (via Ubuntu) or PDFTK (via Ubuntu). It is surprising that JHOVE is finding errors for multi-page PDF files generated with these common utilities.