One week ago, the release of the Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE) report provided the most comprehensive national data to date on antisemitism on Canadian university campuses. As I wrote in my post on it , there is a crisis: of the more than 900 Jewish students surveyed, 95.7% experienced or witnessed antisemitism over the previous year, 72% limit what they say in class, 57%…
Sovereignty, whether digital sovereignty, data sovereignty, or AI sovereignty, has been the hot-button issue in Canada for months. Governments have shifted policies in hopes of addressing the issue, the public has expressed interest in Canadian alternatives, and the business community has rushed to meet that interest. But what does it actually take to create a true, sovereign alternative? We now…
For the better part of two years, I have written about antisemitism on Canadian university campuses from the vantage point of personal experience: a post I never thought I would need to write on the right of Jewish students to feel safe on campus, the normalization of antisemitism at encampments including at my own university, the trepidation that accompanied a new academic year , and the chilling…
The Canadian government has a two-pronged legal strategy to counter rising hate: New Criminal Code provisions to address offline harms, such as intimidation or protests outside schools and places of worship, and the digital safety bill introduced in June, which targets online harms. A new legal duty to act responsibly , which would require internet platforms to publish digital safety plans,…
The Delhi High Court has released what may be one of the most consequential copyright decisions yet on artificial intelligence, ruling in ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. OpenAI that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted news articles to train the models behind ChatGPT is prima facie fair dealing. The 135-page decision of Justice Amit Bansal, released last week, dismissed an Indian news agency’s application for an…
When the government announced plans last month to kill the CRTC’s Online Streaming Act ruling , it left a critical question unanswered: was the target only the Commission’s decision to increase streamer contributions to 15 percent , or did the reversal extend to the original base contribution decision requiring foreign streamers to contribute five percent of their Canadian revenues? A new court…
Kiva’s, the well-known Toronto Jewish bakery, was struck by gunfire and smashed windows in two locations over the weekend . This one is personal as Kiva was my grandmother’s cousin. Both were Holocaust survivors who rebuilt their lives in Toronto, and though he sold the business years ago, the owners have kept his name on the window ever since. Whoever fired at that window almost certainly knew…
The Canadian government’s surprise decision to sign the UN Cybercrime Convention has sparked many questions about the convention, its risks, and what changed over the past nine months between Canada no-showing the signing in Vietnam and this month’s reversal. To help answer those questions, there is no one better than Kate Robertson , a senior research associate at the Citizen Lab, who has been…
Last week, the government announced that Canada has signed the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime , with Ministers Anita Anand, Gary Anandasangaree and Sean Fraser touting the treaty’s child protection provisions and human rights safeguards, which were described as “among the strongest found in an international criminal justice treaty.” The announcement, released in mid-July with few…
Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree and the government presumably hoped that pushing Bill C-22 through a House of Commons committee past midnight without debate or a recorded vote would put an end to the lawful access controversy. A new letter from U.S. Senator Ron Wyden , the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee that holds jurisdiction over trade, suggests the opposite. The…