Sunshine
🇨🇦🇪🇺
- 2.41K Posts
- 565 Comments
1·6 days agothus be punished at the ballot booth accordingly.
Not when FPTP has unpredictable results and could actually end up rewarding the questionable party with more seats even if the public reduced their ballot support.
Governments should be elected on the will of the majority not minority.
Again, there is not really an equivalent mechanism under PR. Who is to blame for any particular decision in a 4 way coalition?
People can see who pushed for certain parts of an agreement then not vote for them again extinguishing their political power. That’s why we have journalists investigating the inner-workings of parliament.
A proportional system reflects the views of the people much sooner than first-past-the-post.
even more radical party (consider Israel, or the Czech’s far right Motorist’s party) while avoiding accountability.
A mainstream party can get hijacked by extremists and govern with a minority vote share under first-past-the-post. The threshold for far-right politics under our electoral system is much lower.
It was a minority of Canadians who supported the conservatives but thanks to first-past-the-post they could’ve had more than half of the seats.
Can we also ban and punish forced cruel surgeries on intersex infants?
2·11 days agoAustralia already made a mistake with a similar bill and saw a 22% drop in R&D investment. We can’t afford the same here for both our businesses and our citizens.
I believe Canberra has signed a deal with Washington to allow the American authorities access to Australian data from Australian companies and the Canadian government has been planning on a similar agreement since 2022. It’s bad enough we’re part of the 5 eyes.
It is widely known that, since 2022, Canada has been negotiating, behind closed doors, a cross-border data-sharing agreement with the United States under the US Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act—or the CLOUD Act. The agreement is controversial. It would require Canada to change its laws to allow US law enforcement to directly issue demands for personal data held by Canadian technology providers.
The big tech social media companies are bad. Their business model is bad; it is based on mass surveillance and manipulation, and they cooperate with governments in mapping entire populations. But age verification is fundamentally the wrong approach to preventing children from using big tech social media platforms. Introducing age verification is based on the state being able to force social media companies to verify their users’ identities. But the big tech social media platforms already know which of their users are children. Their business model depends on knowing this. They know how old users are, who their friends are and what ice cream they like. As age verification is based on coercion of the social media platforms, politicians could instead force them to stop doing the things politicians consider harmful to children, or force them to block children (again, they know who they are) from using their services. But instead, politicians seek to massively invade everyone’s privacy and undermine democratic rights on a global scale. In other words, the latter is the real objective – they do not want to protect children; they want to impose control.
Australia has already introduced a social media age restriction for users under 16. The same applies to Indonesia and Brazil. Age restrictions have been approved but not yet implemented in Denmark, Portugal, and Malaysia. In France, an agreement has been reached, though details are still being discussed. Proposals are on the table in Spain and Turkey. In Germany, the major parties agree on introducing age restrictions, and in Sweden the issue is under investigation. The topic is also being discussed in countries such as the Czech Republic, Greece, Austria, Poland, Canada, Slovenia, and the Netherlands. In April 2026, the European Commission launched an EU age verification app, and one month later Ursula von der Leyen presented plans for EU-wide age restrictions. In the United States, half of all states either have pending legislation or have already introduced laws imposing age restrictions for inappropriate content and/or social media. The number of countries preparing age verification measures is growing rapidly. Updates can be followed on Techpolicy.press.
The consequence of introducing identity verification is therefore that freedom of information is restricted (you can no longer visit regulated websites anonymously) and that you can no longer post anonymously on social media. You cannot be certain that your criticism of the government will not be followed up by the authorities. You can no longer start a digital initiative on a social media platform aimed at gathering people to criticize an authority without facing a significant risk of consequences. Depending on the country you live in, this could even endanger your life. In its current form, social media identity verification removes important tools for activists in countries where criticizing those in power is dangerous.
Broad and arbitrary legislation, along with mandatory ID tagging for every post, hardly provides a strong foundation for freedom of expression. Today, 30 people are arrested every day in the United Kingdom for posting something online that authorities classify as “grossly offensive.” In Germany, police conduct raids on people’s homes for insulting politicians online. One infamous example is the so-called “Pimmelgate,” where a person was subject to a police search after calling a German politician a term for male genitalia. In the United States, authorities are trying to pressure tech companies into revealing the identities behind accounts protesting ICE. Another example is when Canada introduced emergency acts during the 2022 trucker protests and then used social media to identify demonstrators and freeze the bank accounts of people who financially supported the protest.
Restrictions introduced at the national level can be bypassed by changing one’s geographic location digitally, using tools such as VPNs, virtual phone numbers, eSIM cards, Tor and dedicated services. This has already led politicians in several countries to consider introducing identity verification for VPN services (presumably because VPNs are the most common and accessible method of changing digital location).
In the United Kingdom, the House of Lords sent an amendment in early 2026 (regarding the the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill) to the House of Commons, proposing an 18-year age limit for using VPN services. The House of Commons rejected the House of Lords amendment four separate times. However, the House of Commons instead introduced its own proposal, which was passed and has now become law. This agreement grants the government the power to introduce restrictions through secondary legislation, with only limited parliamentary scrutiny. The government has confirmed that it intends to act on this and introduce some form of social media restriction for children under 16. The government has also hinted that it may consider introducing identity verification for VPN usage, effectively joining countries such as China and Russia in opposing VPN services.
The issue has also been raised in France. As Minister for AI and Digital Affairs Anne Le Hénanff put it: “If [this legislation] allows us to protect a very large majority of children, we will continue. And VPNs are the next topic on my list.”
Discussions about VPN restrictions have also occurred in the United States. Utah has gone the furthest by introducing a law making it illegal to circumvent restrictions using a VPN. Within the EU, VPN restrictions have been discussed both under the Going Dark initiative and in discussions related to age verification. In response to a direct question about VPNs as a tool for bypassing age verification, EU Commissioner Henna Virkkunen said in April: “Of course, it’s an important part of the next steps also to look at that it [age verification] shouldn’t be circumvented.”
If VPN providers were to impose an age limit on their service, this would also mean that underage users would effectively lose their right to online privacy. Ironically, one consequence would be that social media companies mapping people’s lives through third-party trackers on websites could continue monitoring young people’s online behavior via their IP addresses without any interference. In other words, politicians would remove one of the protections children have against the very companies they claim to want to protect children from.
As identity verification is now being introduced globally, different parts of the world are implementing it in different ways. Some countries believe the best solution is to impose controls through major app stores such as Apple’s App Store and Google Play. In Australia, Brazil, South Korea, Singapore, and several US states, Apple has already begun introducing identity verification at the App Store level to restrict access to apps containing adult content.
In Brazil, a law implemented in March 2026 states that identity verification must be carried out both at the app store level and within the operating system itself (including open-source systems), or companies distributing these services will face fines of up to $10 million. A similar law has passed in California which will require identity verification at the operating system level starting in January 2027. Open-source systems were initially included, but later removed, while web browsers and websites were added to the scope. Similar proposals exist in states such as Colorado and New York. In April 2026, a federal proposal was introduced that would require OS-level identity verification across the United States.
13·12 days agoOh great… more useful idiots for Mango Mussolini. I hope this doesn’t end up like Chile.
Good thing Carney promised to increase the rcmp’s funding…
Canadians love giving Carney free passes.
Gary Anandasangaree lies to your faces that bill c-22 was “never meant to breach encryption” when there’s a demand in there for a government backdoor in every service. Thus letting the government and hackers snoop through your messages.
Down with tyrannical bill c-22!
I haven’t seen any reporting on actual discoveries of human remains at any of these sites.
What an obvious attempt at feigning ignorance while pushing genocide denial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_gravesites
https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/tribunal-missing-indigenous-children-unmarked-graves-9.7201317
https://indiginews.com/features/st-augustines-survivor-unmarked-graves/
Can you show me the #1 rule?
I thought this was shelved to appease Mango Mussolini.
Big telecom/banks love their countless gotcha fees.
5·14 days agoWe gonna have this service protecting the rich by limiting orders for certain stocks.
While Questrade makes it super difficult to close your account and holds your data for 7 years.
Abel liked this meme
8·15 days agoPlaying as dinosaurs in hardcore horror with linux compatibility and no micro-transactions looked interesting until I heard about the poor gameplay changes over the years, the unfriendly experience to new players, and Dondi’s alleged mistreatment of slandering and firing of the og dev Deathly Rage who built the game from the ground up, the shielding of a predator, the project’s lead lack of contributions to the game, banning people from his stream and discord on flimsy reasons, his random acts of donating thousands to streamers while only giving 10k to an employee battling cancer.
Moderates
You do not have any accountability with a political party who has a minority of vote winning most of the seats. Stop being anti-democratic.