Canadian Bill C-30 proposes a tax on people purchasing internet and phone services so that the cost of paying for surveillance equipment or responding to Law Enforcement lookups will not burden either the government or the ISP/Phone Company.
Canada plans on taxing users of systems so that they can be monitored by the government.
There is a certain amount of humor to all this, and both Christopher Parsons and Michael Geist are looking at this and somewhat shaking their heads.
In 2009, the CACP proposed several possibilities, including the creation of new public safety tax that would appear on monthly customer bills. The CACP adopted the position that law enforcement should not have to pay for the associated costs claiming it “brings the administration of justice into disrepute.” Instead, it proposed three alternatives:
The telecom companies and Internet providers could pass along the costs in the form of a “public safety tariff” that would apply on monthly consumer bills
The government could provide tax credits to telecom companies and Internet providers
The government could establish a federal funding pool to cover the costs
The government rejected all three possibilities, but incredibly does not seem to have its own plan to address the tens of millions of dollars in costs created by its online surveillance plans.
Depending on what you are thinking right now, do Canadians really want to pay for their own monitoring? I am going to be very interesting in seeing how all this ends up, because in the longer run, regardless of what government does, the taxed are the ones paying for everything.
(Cross-posted @ Techwag)
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