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The main takeaway: The centralized role of coordinating a wide breadth of media organizations and incrementally corralling them towards one narrative, something essentially unique in the space no one else has, and with total lack of transparency, is the biggest distinction between them and everyone else.

Really talking about (American) Chatham Asset Management and PostMedia (a subsidiary), that own almost 80-90% of print media (written news and periodicals, including almost all rural papers and online content). Even now, most people I speak to barely know about either, and it’s reach is way beyond the listed periodicals.

Is this as big a deal as it sounds? Kind of. Because the CEO determined they were “insufficiently conservative”, he appointed Kevin Libin to coordinate all of the organizations under their umbrella to provide “reliably conservative media.” Consider what that phrase even means - it’s not perspective, it’s an introduction of bias. This isn’t something that really exists anywhere else in Canadian News ecosystem, even in the far right, and is one part of the media ecosystem’s challenges.

However, they also get the benefit of being “center” between lunatics like Rebel News and True North and the CBC; this gives both them and further right rags more legitimacy than earned by virtue of the total absence of a Canadian far left media ecosystem, hence the attacks on the CBC itself (which does contain editorial, but is general one of the most fact based and investigative journalism driven media organizations in Canada). It also allows them to “create a consensus” by essentially just agreeing with themselves.

Even the Toronto Star, one of the “most left” credible independent media organizations, is now under (separate) conservative ownership.

Frankly, if you’re a subsidiary, you should be forced to wear every one of your ownership’s emblem “Chatham/PostMedia presents” in double font every time you throw up your Vancouver Sun or Calgary Herald.

You don’t have to like or dislike any of these organizations, but the total lack of transparency while structuring this discussion as central consensus is about as disingenuous as you can get.

Things like Ground News (factuality and partisan bias news screeners) help somewhat, but require some literacy in terms of statistics and data. It’s worth learning tools like these (or tracking it yourself across everything you read, and looking at a wide berth of the various perspectives in Canada, which is extremely laborious especially in an age where we can barely get people to click past headlines, hence the specific name drop for Ground News which does a lot of this for people).

Privacy focused browsers can help (but don’t fully resolve). Not to redo the work of others, copy/pasta:

What makes fingerprinting a threat to online privacy? It is pretty simple. First, there is no need to ask for permissions to collect all this information. Any script running in your browser can silently build a fingerprint of your device without you even knowing about it. Second, if one attribute of your browser fingerprint is unique or if the combination of several attributes is unique, your device can be identified and tracked online. In that case, no need for a cookie with an ID in it, the fingerprint is enough.

A couple of useful articles:

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

https://blog.torproject.org/browser-fingerprinting-introduction-and-challenges-ahead/ (Excerpt above)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2022/3363335

There’s also a number of interviews with white and red hat hackers who delve quite deeply into the subject and how they’ve used this telemetry to go after black hats (mainly to emphasize that even with some degree of sophistication this can be difficult to evade, especially when compounded with other methods and telemetry already modelled against your identity).

Frankly already a moot point - your browser fingerprints are already uniquely identifying (even before IP, cookies, and backend analytics). Realistically, tho, just more info for them to sell, leak and then eventually pay $0.25 per person in Google Play credit in the class action settlement.

It depends; if by “electoral reform” you strictly mean switching to PR/RB without addressing provincial seat allocations (which assume FPTP), 7:50 likely isn’t required, per the 2014/2016 rulings and recommendations (although they certainly would have faced challenges).

However, PR, and especially MMP, would naturally create an imbalance, necessitating either seat adjustments or additions (which increases costs), which could likely trigger 7:50. Any meaningful Senate or Governor General reforms would definitely require it.

That said, this was likely a moot point. ERRE recommended PR, but the Liberals preferred RB, ostensibly because it was easier to implement (and, not coincidentally, would have favored them long-term). The Conservative Senate caucus opposed any reform, while the ISG in 2018/19 - which Trudeau had aggressively pushed to be less partisan - was dubious at best just as the Liberals were losing ground before the election. Public sentiment was another obstacle; two years later, people occupied Ottawa for months over American border policy and Timbits, and largely coordinated disinformation campaigns. Pushing electoral reform then could have been a death knell for the Liberals.

It was an incredibly messy, uncertain process, costly both politically and legislatively, and still subject to Senate roadblocks and revisions had it passed. There was no simple path, even just for the ballot format portion of that reform.

It needs to pass 3 readings in the house, 3 readings in the Senate, and likely has to face the 7:50 rule (7 provinces representing 50% of the population).

In his first term, he had the house and not the Senate. In his second and third, he didn’t even have the house (and the Senate situation would be nebulous now as well). And they’d have always struggled on 7:50.

His real regret is not putting it forward and letting his opponents vote against it.

All that said, even an incremental improvement, like decoupling the leadership vote from the MPs/MLAs would have helped a lot with getting rid of a lot of our worst MPs/MLAs; not all of them, but baby steps to making all the parties healthier (including our the ones most beholden to their crazy factions).