By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada, in a highly unusual travel warning, on Wednesday urged Canadian citizens born in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia to think carefully before entering the United States, saying they could fall afoul of tough new U.S. anti-terrorism laws.

The Foreign Ministry said it issued the advisory after Washington stipulated that anyone born in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, or Syria needed to be photographed and fingerprinted on arrival in the United States.

This includes citizens of Canada, a country which is traditionally regarded as one of the closest allies of the United States.

“It’s not something we approve of and we’ve registered our strongest disapproval with the United States authorities,” Foreign Minister Bill Graham told reporters.

“We can’t tell the Americans what to do on their own territory. What we’re telling them is that we don’t accept this and we find it very troubling…I am certain that in due course common sense will prevail.” The Foreign Ministry advisory, posted on its Web site, is another indication of how ties between the two neighbors have soured in past months amid disputes over trade, policy toward Iraq and immigration policies.

Before the Sept. 11 suicide attacks, people from both countries crossed the shared 5,525 mile border with barely a thought. Security and identity checks have now been tightened considerably.

The U.S. rules, introduced on Sept. 11 this year, are designed to tighten security by authorizing the Immigration and Naturalization Service to track the arrival and departure of non-immigrants.

Ottawa’s travel warning follows the controversial deportation of a Canadian citizen by the United States to Syria, his birthplace, earlier this month.

The advisory also said Canadians born in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Yemen could attract special attention from U.S. authorities.

“In these circumstances, the (ministry) advises Canadians who were born in the above (eight) countries or who may be citizens of these countries to consider carefully whether they should attempt to enter the United States for any reason, including transit to or from third countries,” it said.

Graham said he had raised the issue last month with Secretary of State Colin Powell (news – web sites), who gave assurances that some kind of flexibility would be introduced for Canadian citizens.

“We’re expecting some news from the Americans. They have not brought in that flexibility,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Reynald Doiron.

In Washington, the State Department said the new rules were designed to make the United States safer.

“I think we are concerned that many, many countries in the world have had problems with terrorists,” spokesman Richard Boucher told a briefing.

He referred specifically to the case of Algerian-born Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested in December 1999 trying to enter the United States from Canada in a car packed with explosives. It later emerged that he had ignored a Canadian deportation order against him and even managed to obtain a Canadian passport.

“So, yes, it’s a big border and bad guys try to come across. I think that goes without saying. The question is what we, in cooperation with the Canadian government, can do to make both our countries safer,” said Boucher.

Last month, U.S. agents at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport arrested a Canadian they suspected of links to militant groups, finally expelling him to Syria on Oct. 8.

Mohamed Arar — who also holds a Syrian passport — was arrested as he was changing planes on his way back to Canada from Tunisia. He is in detention in Syria, where authorities are probing whether he has links to groups such as al Qaeda.

U.S. critics charge that Canada’s immigration system does not do enough to weed out militants who might want to launch attacks in the United States. Graham said he had stressed to U.S. officials that all immigrants had to go through tough security screening before coming to Canada.

“I have pointed out to them that both our countries are countries of immigration and that Canadian citizens have a right to be treated as Canadian citizens wherever they may be born,” he said.

Hussein Amery, president of the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations, said the U.S. rules were a clear case of racial profiling and urged Ottawa to toughen its stance.

“It certainly looks, smells and feels like racism…the Americans are certainly not treating Canadians as friends when they do this,” he added, referring to the Arar case.

Canada’s ties with the United States are already under strain over a protracted trade dispute about Canadian lumber exports, fresh tensions over wheat exports and Ottawa’s opposition to a unilateral U.S. attack on Iraq.

———–

Not only is the Canadian government treading into uncharted waters with a tax on a medium that they are ill-equipped to understand, but they’re merely serving to further entrench a music industry that has steadfastly refused to accept change.

This is the same music industry that has inhibited Canadian artists in their quest to find worldwide audiences for decades because of their own assumption that all Canadian musicians benefit exclusively from the 30% CanCon rule to a much greater degree than their own talent.

In the era of digital convergence what IS or ISN’T a “music playing device”?? I can guarantee you that this language in law will be clumsy and open to vastly varying interpretations. Those loopholes in definitions will be used by the RIAA to punish everyone from PC makers to Set Top Box manufacturers to car stereo manufacturers.

How much of this tax will get back to the artists who are supposedly being victimized by the technology? Probably none: it’s a win-win deal for government and the RIAA — the bureaucrats get to line their wallets and the RIAA gets to further inhibit the growth in diversity in how we access music.

I think it’s fair to say that the RIAA and Artists ARE losing money because of digital replication technologies. But it’s appropriate to ask whether this is because we as consumers have malicious intent in copying music for free or whether this is because we as consumers want to explore music through diverse media and the industry steadfastly refuses to alter their ideology to meet that need?

The music industry, powered by its own arrogance, thinks that it rules the market. MP3 and other media are examples where the consumers have voiced their discontent with the music industry’s definition of “choice”. Perhaps we ought to let RIAA members, and Artists who work within that system, starve under rampant piracy until they learn that their model of distribution and copyright is fundamentally broken. Only then might they adopt strategies that reflect the desires of the music-consuming public.

-Ian.

———- Forwarded message ———- Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 08:56:38 -0800 (PST) From: Salim Virani Reply-To: me [at] salimvirani [dot] com To: info [at] digitalconsumer [dot] org Cc: webmaster [at] digitalconsumer [dot] org Subject: Canadian Content

It seems that we Canadians are paving the way for the RIAA and others. If you havent heard already, the Canadian Government has legislated a new tax of $21CDN ($13US)/GB on non-removable storage in music playing devices.

Of course, with enough attention, this can be reversed. They are entertaining reactions until May 8th.

Read: http://news.dmusic.com/article/4580

And please make this information available on your site as well as adding a Canadian option to the Get Active section. If the site could fire off an email similar to the fax you have prepared, that would be a great start.

The Canadian Government contact (from the link above) is: CLAUDE MAJEAU Secretary General 56 Sparks Street, Suite 800 Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0C9 (613) 952-8621 (Telephone) (613) 952-8630 (Facsimile) majeau.claude [at] cb-cda.gc [dot] ca (Electronic mail)

Let me know how it goes. Thanks.

Salim Virani

—— End of Forwarded Message

———- Forwarded message ———- Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 09:46:35 -0800 (PST) From: Salim Virani Reply-To: me [at] salimvirani [dot] com To: majeau.claude [at] cb-cda.gc [dot] ca Subject: New Media Tarrifs and Fair Use Rights

As a constituent and an ardent consumer of digital media, I write today to urge you to support a Consumer Technology Bill of Rights, and to express my concerns about the recent trend toward allowing one-sided copyright laws to eliminate my Fair Use rights. I am also writing to oppose the new levies and tarrifs placed on recordable media, specifically those placed on hard drives and flash memory.

These tarrifs have not been thought through. They will simply remove our rights as consumers in the short term and shift the portable music hardware industry to more tax-sensible media in the long-term. For instance, the Rio Volt stores MP3s on a CD so I can lower the tarrif I pay by simply storing MP3s on a CD instead of a hard-drive-based player. Or wait a year, and you’ll see hard-drive-based player being sold with no hard-drive at all. You can just pick up a tarrif-free hard drive at the computer store and plug it in. This approach in ineffective. All you are doing is slowing innovation in the media industry without making a dent in the piracy problem.

Historically, our country has enjoyed a balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of citizens who legally acquire copyrighted works. Generally speaking, rights holders have the exclusive right to distribute and profit from artistic works. Consumers like me who legally acquire these works are free to use them in most noncommercial ways. Unfortunately, this balance has shifted dramatically in recent years, much to the detriment of consumers.

To prevent further erosion of my rights, I would like to add my voice to support the consumer rights supported by DigitalConsumer.org in the U.S. in calling for a “consumer technology bill of rights”. It is simply an attempt to assert positively the public’s personal use rights. These rights are not new; they are historic rights granted in previous legislation and court rulings that have over the last four years been whittled away.

Under the guise of “preventing illegal copying” I believe Hollywood is vilifying their customers – people like me – and using the legislative process to create new lines of business at my expense. Their goal is to create a legal system that takes away my long-cherished personal use rights and then to charge me an additional fee to regain those rights!

I understand the intention of your approach. Apply a tarrif on media in the player to cover an (alleged) loss of income from copyrighted material. First of all, if you take an unbiased look at the data, you will find evidence indicating that sharing services increase legitimate sales. Until this trend is clearly reversed, these measures are premature.

But even if we assume it is true that this new technology is causing the media companies to lose revenue, it is their business model which is outdated. In this case, these new tarrifs can only be considered progress if you also force the businesses out of their old model. You must then allow copyrighted material to move freely, knowing that the compensation is taken care of by the tarrifs placed on the player. You cant charge me twice for the same thing. I’ve already paid for the album at the CD store so I shouldn’t have to pay for it again just to listen to it while I’m jogging. That is my right.

Do not allow the media companies to rest on their laurels at the cost of my Fair Use Rights. Every other industry is adopting new technology and innovating. They are improving the way they do business and evolving with the Information Age. The media industry is asking you to let them be an exception. Why should they be? And why at the cost of consumer rights?

Copy protection, especially to prevent overseas piracy for illicit sale, is an important issue. But before you consider yet another change in the law at the behest of the copyright holders, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to protect my Fair Use rights.

Thank you very much for your attention to this important matter.

—

Most major Canadian companies (except Bombardier) have long since left the province of Quebec thanks to the separatist movement, and any potential suitors from ROC (Rest Of Canada) are too frightened by Jacques Parizeau’s cronies to make any significant investments in the province.

So now the pride of Francophone Canada (once the pride of all Canadians) is owned by an American, after the best French-Canadian potential owner they could spring was Celine Dion, who lives in Florida.

What’s ironic, though, is that this is the first time that a major cultural institution of French Canada has been attacked, partially as a result of their own skullduggery.

This article, though, is quick to assign blame to the Canadian government for overtaxing hockey. Huh? Isn’t hockey a business?

-Ian.

I think that the Blackberry is a kick-ass product that acutely hits the market it’s focused on. I also think that, even with the smaller screen of the 950, it is 200% more useful than any of the three Palm Computing devices I’ve owned (and subsequently abandoned to my stack of milk crates containing useless gadgetry).

I certainly hope that we’re not going to get into a debate because your correspondent thinks that the Canadian government is engaging in unfair trade practises and trying to kill the US PDA market with cheaper, inferior products.

Technology Partnerships Canada is a highly elitist and conservative venture capital fund that the government has created to help established companies (not startups) go-to-market and which returns short-term revenue both to the company and to the fund. Beyond the initial grant, TPC his supposed to be %50 self-funding. It goes without saying that TPC has a potential audience of fewer than 200 companies, and RIM is one of a handful of companies (read: NORTEL) for which TPC was specifically created.

The RIM Blackberry is the fastest-to-market wide-area-coverage wireless email device on the market. Full stop. It’s an amazing success story from a company that’s really not the world’s greatest marketer, but with the right push it could unseat Palm and Handspring as the collective heirs apparent to the connected PIM (hell, even just the PIM) market.

The RIM 957 has embarrassed everyone else:

Palm, Minstrel, Microsoft, Handspring, IBM… they were all caught sleeping by the MOBITEX network (of all things!) and the device which exploits it.

If I was RIM I’d be spending that $23M on opening up a can of marketing whup-ass on the PDA guys (looks like they are). Let’s see if the 957 passes the Palm VII in sales in the next few months.

-Ian.

12:31 PM ET 08/24/99

Onex Wants To Buy Canada Airlines

Onex Wants To Buy Canada Airlines MONTREAL (AP) _ Onex Corp., a Toronto-based conglomerate, is offering $3.8 billion to buy and combine Air Canada and Canadian Airlines. A single airline, which would retain the Air Canada name, would be more efficient and financially stronger than the separate operations, said Gerald Schwartz, the president and chief executive of Onex. The buyout and merger would involve the loss of 5,000 jobs, Schwartz told a news conference. The cuts would be handled mostly through retirements and normal attrition, he said. The plan has already been approved by the board of Calgary-based Canadian Airlines, he said. Canadian Airlines, with 14,000 employees, has been seeking new investors to keep flying. It has said it needs up to $500 million to allow it to restructure and move away from what has been a chronic cash crisis over the past decade. “This is a good deal for Canada and for all Canadians,” said Schwartz, a takeover specialist. Last week, Air Canada asked the Canadian government to approve a takeover of Canadian’s international business while the smaller airline focused on domestic routes. But Canadian Airlines rejected the proposal, saying its international routes were the most profitable part of its operations. Montreal-based Air Canada, with 23,000 employees, would not disclose financial terms. The government has relaxed antitrust laws for 90 days so the two airlines and any other interested investors could share sensitive financial data to keep Canadian flying. “We all know the Canadian airline industry cannot maintain the status quo,” said Schwartz. “This is the time for a bold step.” Schwartz, who is also a prominent Liberal Party fundraiser, has already submitted the plan to federal Transport Minister David Collenette. In Ottawa, federal Industry Minister John Manley said the government would ask the federal Competition Bureau “what a restructured industry might look like.”