Everybody knows the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows that the good guys lost
Everybody knows that the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor and the rich get rich
That's how it goes. Everybody knows.

In the words to this popular song, Leonard Cohen holds a mirror up to our society and invites us to take a look inside. Poets, writers and artists have an uncanny ability to reveal to us the elements of our environment that we have come to take for granted.

The evidence of social, economic, and political upheaval surrounds us. Everybody knows about the right wing agendas of Gingrich, Klein and Harris, and the politics of retribution and destruction sweeping various parts of the country. Everybody knows about the vast powers of multinational corporations, about the global economy exerting a downward pressure on wages, and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. And everybody knows about those impending suicidal horrors which humankind seems unable to contain -- the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons and the slow destruction of our environment. In this talk about the importance of activism, it is my intention to start with the assumption that everybody knows that our society is experiencing major challenges.

Well, if everybody knows, what is the problem? Does everybody agree that the world is unfolding as it should? Or is everybody just wondering what, if anything, can be done about it? It is this question of action that I would like to address here.

First of all, let me say that I think we tend to look at the world in a very fragmented way. Here, at this conference, we are looking at information policy issues. Across the hall, they may be looking at environmental issues. And across the street, perhaps the topic of the day is the fact that some people don't have a home or anything to eat. We have to realize that these and the other issues which are troubling us, are related. They are related to the fact that our political and economic systems no longer seem to be serving the interests of our communities.

Michael Lind, senior editor of Harper's Magazine, in an article in Harpers, July 1995 provides a good description of what is going on behind the scenes:

"The noise is deceptive. Off-camera, beyond the blazing lights, past the ropy tangle of black cords and down the hall in the corner offices (on Capital Hill as well as at General Electric, The Walt Disney company and CBS News), people in expensive suits quietly continue to go about the work of shifting the centre of gravity of wealth and power in the United States from the discounted many to the privileged few while public attention has been diverted to controversies as inflammatory as they are trivial -- Should the Constitution be amended to ban flag-burning! Should dirty pictures be allowed on the Internet?"

Although we see the world in a fragmented way, if you look at it closely, the world of the corner office is not really fragmented at all. For example, the General Electric Co. owns the NBC television network. A recent merger put Westinghouse in control of CBS. GE and Westinghouse also are, by far, the leading producers of commercial nuclear power plants in the U.S. How much news coverage of the controversy about the use of nuclear power to generate electricity do you expect from these television networks?

Here in Canada, the Prime Minister and several key ministers of the crown lay out the red carpet for Bill Gates, when he arrives in town on his "Windows '95" promo tour. The political campaigns of Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin were financed by Paul Demarais -- head of the Quebec-based Power Corporation. Power owns 80% of Power DirecTV - the direct to home satellite service which had enough lobbying power with Cabinet to have a CRTC decision directly overturned -- an unprecedented action. Vancouver's two major daily newspapers are both part of the Southam chain. Power Corporation, owns 20% of the Southam chain. The same sorts of connections can easily be drawn for other large players such as the major banks and Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE). The point I am making here is that the economic, political and scientific/technological sectors of the 20th century are not the distinct disciplines which we try to pretend they are. We have come to accept these alliances without questioning their impact on the democratic state.

Yes, power is being consolidated behind closed doors, and right now a large part of that consolidation concerns the control of communication tools. We have a revolution going on in the communications and information sector, and who is being consulted, at the federal level? Predominantly, the cable, telephone, computer and information industries -- through the good offices of Industry Canada with the help of $2.8 million of your money. The Information Highway Advisory Council, convened to give serious consideration to the question of policy development for a changing communications environment, had 29 members, 16 of whom were directly from the industries mentioned. Some of the others had some more subtle connections. The public was not invited to participate in the discussions. The government instructed the Council that industrial policy, specifically the promotion of competition, rather than communications policy, such as access and universal service, was to guide the discussions.

This is bad news for the us as citizens of a democratic state. In order to fight a battle to create and maintain the kind of political, economic and social environment we want, we need access to tools, especially communications tools. And we can't fight battles with tools that belong to, or are controlled by, other people. This is vitally important and I can't stress it enough. That's the struggle we must take on right away. Industry, or perhaps I should say "the market," will not look after the needs of citizens to accessible and affordable communications. It is not a profit generating activity. But it is an absolutely essential activity for a democratic state.

It is common knowledge now, but it was not all that clear early on, that the Internet -- that unique communications tool that finally allowed the voices of the people to be heard -- without editing, without censorship, without prejudice -- would be the object of such great desire by the huge entertainment and communications industries. When the Information Highway Advisory Council began its meetings in March of 1994, bureaucrats associated with it told concerned activists quite sincerely "Oh, don't worry. This isn't about the Internet. This is about the Information Highway." That's all changed of course. They've come to realize that the Internet is the highway they are talking about. But they have either deliberately downplayed or not yet completely grasped the fact that it is not just about information.

Today, if you believe in free and open communications as a cornerstone of democracy, you have to see the Internet as an important part of that structure. And you have to realize that it must be made accessible and affordable to all citizens -- not just in schools, libraries, and affluent urban homes -- but right in every home across the country, in the same way that the telephone is today. This is not the responsibility of the industries, who can and will roll out these services to the areas where sizable markets make it lucrative and easy. It should however, be of primary concern to the government, whose role it is to protect the interests of the public. But this appears unlikely unless Canadians speak a lot louder and a lot more clearly about the need to ensure that basic principles of affordable and accessible services guide the design and implementation of policy with respect to all communications technologies.

Of course, no one fights a battle by themselves. Our first instinct is to seek out allies, kindred spirits, and like-minded travellers. This is where electronic media excels, and another reason why we have to maintain some control over it. Ursula Franklin, former member of the Science Council of Canada, lifelong activist, and author of "The Real World of Technology", in a recent speech to community groups, asked listeners to imagine the world as a cake sliced in vertical slices and to imagine each one of those slices as a constituency. She dryly noted that there were, of course, some people who resided in the icing and there were always those to be found in the crumbs at the bottom. She pointed out that the major impact of technology was that it had enabled the horizontal slicing of this cake, thereby enabling many things. We move money around the world through computer links of stock markets. So doing, we devastated the economy of a whole country, Mexico, in a short few hours. We move people and machines, in the interests of war as well as of peace, from constituency to constituency with ease. We move our garbage into someone else's back yard.

But, we can also talk to eachother horizontally over great distances -- one to one with the telephone, many to many with computers. So the technology can make it easier to find our allies and marshall our resources. In my case it led to a collaboration which became the Internet lobby group called "The Public Information Highway Advisory Council." Together with a friend and co-conspirator and many on-line supporters, we have used this tool to collect and disseminate information, get support for petitions, and submit briefs with pages and pages of Internet signatures attached, to various federal bodies. At the CRTC hearings on the Rogers - MacLean Hunter merger application, we pointed out the dangers of concentration of ownership in the media. At the CRTC Convergence hearings, we pointed out that the Information Highway the government was designing was headed for a dead-end because it was designed to serve industry instead of community. To the Information Highway Advisory Council itself, we pointed out that the ability to communicate is critical to the existence of a democracy.

How does the communications landscape look at the moment? Not very encouraging. The recently released report of the Information Highway Advisory Council gave us, as expected, an industrial policy, not a communications policy. There was lip service paid to the concepts of access, universal service and affordability. But making a priority of these issues was not part of the mandate. The CRTC released its "Convergence" report recognizing that some form of subsidy system would be necessary if universal access was to be realized, but failed to offer any suggestions about how this might be accomplished. Meanwhile, the CRTC is engaged in addressing applications from telephone companies for rate changes which will make our telephone system unrecognizable -- unless you have spent some time in the U.S. lately, where telephone services are unbundled to the extent that a well-know telecommunications professor has admitted he has trouble figuring out the monthly bills. And of course, Rogers Communications Incorporated (RCI) is the proud owner of what was the Maclean-Hunter publishing, cable and radio empire.

Today I bring you news about a wider initiative, the "Alliance for a Connected Canada," a broad-based alliance of citizen's groups. The members of this alliance are working together to promote public understanding, vigorous and open debate, and concerted social action to shape Canada's communications policies; influence the design and evolution of basic and enhanced networks and electronic public spaces based on values of social equity and equality of opportunity; and present policies that will strengthen the fabric of society as a conterbalance to the focus on the "construction" of and "information highway" for the distribution of electronic goods and services. The first task of this alliance will be to pressure the federal government to order the CRTC to conduct public hearings on the subject of basic and essential services in both electronic and traditional communications -- what does this mean, who defines it, who implements it, who pays for it?

I have talked, so far the need to control the tools, about the need to find allies. As a third point, I would emphasize the need to trust your instincts. You are all power information gatherers. Decide when you have enough information. Information on its own is useless. At some point you have got to decide to turn to action. Expect that, no matter how well reasoned your arguments, no matter how much information you have gathered, you will be presented with a barrage of "expert opinion" from the opposition telling you that you do not have the correct information or enough information to make an informed decision about the matter at hand.

You do need to ask the right questions -- especially of those who come to your door selling the doctrine of freedom through choice. In most instances this philosophy results in more choice and freedom for those who already have it. In the area of communications policy, it benefits the service providers, not the individual users.

You are about to be offered the "choice" of access to the long distance telephone network. The Alberta Government Telephones (AGT) has just applied for permission to offer a multi-tiered service in which basic access would not include access to the long distance network.

You are about to be offered the "choice" of paying for time and distance charges on local calls. Bell Canada is in the process of submitting an application to the CRTC to offer such a local measured service option to its business customers. Most people believe that this is only a "softening of the market" strategy in order to eventually get this kind of billing into the home market.

All of these initiatives are initially presented as a substantial cost saving for telephone users. But the fact that you now have a "choice" of long distance telephone carriers will very shortly result in substantially higher monthly costs for local telephone service for each and every one of us. The imminent CRTC decision on rate rebalancing to compensate the local carrier for loss of long distance revenues will not result in savings for most of us. That's what happens under the "choice" ideology. The question to ask is "choice for whom."

Our society is being redefined. By all indicators, we are about to construct a cake of icing and crumbs alone. At this time, as never before, every one of us is needed to keep the middle in that cake. We need to think about the kind of people we really want to be.

Do we believe, for example, as Margaret Thatcher did, that there is no such thing as a society, only individuals and families pursuing their own self-interest. Or do we believe, as Vaclav Havel said in an address the U.S. Congress, in the need to create a "people with an elementary sense of justice, the ability to see things as others do, a sense of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion and faith."

I would say to you that if you believe in the society we have created here in Canada, a society that does indeed have an elementary sense of justice, some transcendental responsibility and some compassion, you have no choice but to become part of the struggle to save it. It is eroding very quickly.

Democracy, if we want to save it, cannot be a spectator sport. And participation in democracy starts with communications networks that are accessible and affordable to all citizens. Now it is time for all of us to get involved in the process.

Thank you.

--
Marita Moll
Ottawa, Ontario
[email protected]

Copyright © 1995 BCLA Information Policy Committee

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