Making the case for age verification (and other bits)
A mini-MacDougall blitz across the Canadian media
A few bits and bobs from me:
First up is my oped in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, in which I set out the stall for age verification and what it must do to support Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act.
The nut graf:
With all due respect to critics, there is no requirement or need for the government to play the deciding, or indeed any direct role, in individual age verification techniques. What the government must do, however, is create the broader legislative architecture required to ensure user data is both respected and protected by private sector actors, as is done in Britain. Canada’s privacy regime isn’t yet up to scratch, a fact that will hopefully be addressed by the recently tabled Bill C-36.
Please give the full column a read.
Earlier in the week, I wrote in the Toronto Star about the reaction to Canadian prime minister Mark Carney at the recent G-7 meeting in Evian, France.
The difference between Davos Carney and Évian Carney would be enough to make anyone’s head spin. That it’s all good politics is the point. Still, Carney is a central banker. He wasn’t meant to be this good at politics, but he is. Astoundingly good. To borrow one of Trump’s bons mot: right now, Carney could shoot somebody on Bay Street, and his supporters would love him for it.
The full column is here.
And then the Star asked me to write about Keir Starmer’s exit from UK politics, a request I was happy to oblige.
An excerpt:
The man who stayed and fought was Starmer. He entered politics following a distinguished legal career, only to watch Corbyn turn Labour into a festival of hard-left radicals and antisemitism. Not that Starmer seemed to mind: he served under Corbyn until Boris Johnson crushed Corbynism in the 2019 general election.
It was only later on that Starmer moved to “detoxify” Labour. And in the four years he served as opposition leader, he failed to develop a vision, devise a plan or establish his bona fides. He won in 2024 primarily because he wasn’t a Conservative.
Worse still, he didn’t have the antennae to detect disunity within his party. He presumably thought winning over a massive majority of Labour members would be enough. It wasn’t. Corbyn lost, but remnants of Corbynism remained. Labour was divided between hard left, soft left and centre-right factions, and Starmer didn’t bother to court any of them. That dereliction is now coming home to roost.
The full column can be found here.
And if that wasn’t enough Starmer, I jumped on an emergency pod with Matt Gurney of The Line, which you can listen to here (it’s the back half of the pod).
Thanks for reading/listening.