Liberal MPs, staff create ‘think tank’ for digital issues

OTTAWA — It wasn’t a hard sell for David Graham to recruit Liberal colleagues for a new Parliament Hill research body. “ ‘I want to talk about digital issues. Who’s with me?’” Graham, Liberal MP for Laurentides-Labelle, recalled during an interview. “There’s an immense interest, so it wasn’t difficult at all to get started.” That interest led to the January formation of the digital infrastructure caucus, a subset of roughly 40 Liberal members of Parliament and staff, chaired by Graham, with a shared goal of taking a deeper dive into issues related to the digital sphere. Graham and caucus co-founder LaSalle-Émard-Verdun MP David Lametti had a shared interest in the field — Graham had worked as a journalist covering tech issues and Lametti had a two-decade career as an intellectual property professor, often focusing on digital issues. “Both of us also attracted people around us with equally, if not more, interesting backgrounds,” Lametti said. Unlike a traditional party caucus, the digital infrastructure group’s membership is not limited to elected officials. Gillian Nycum, special assistant to Lametti, spent more than a decade working in the music business, witnessing “first hand the digital revolution and how that affected that industry,” she said. Other staff members come from academia, such as Dominic Chartrand, who is a master’s student engaged in research relating to digital equality from an education perspective and Francis Czyzowicz, undertaking a Harvard PhD in the psychological foundations of social change. “So you put the five of us together with 35 other people who have similar backgrounds and interests and you have a caucus with an awful lot of brainpower to do a lot of interesting work,” Graham said. The caucus is “a bit like a think tank,” Lametti said, “and because of that, we can think about issues across a wide spectrum of topics, a wide spectrum of ministries.” Careful to note that they’re not making policy, caucus members said their function is to research and study issues of interest and provide insight, if asked, to ministers. The caucus has already met with Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains. Working within the looser structure of the caucus instead of the stricter confines of a ministry or committee or formal hearing allows for outside-the-box thinking, members said. The caucus is divided into four sub-groups, each tackling a different area of an ever-growing field. Graham chairs the group examining regulation and deployment of telecom infrastructure. “Our job is to look at the ideas for how to get Internet to everybody in the country. I think it’s a very practical side of the digital economy, the here and now,” said Graham, who appeared before the CRTC’s basic service hearing in April to make the case for rural Internet connectivity. Representing a rural Quebec riding, Graham said connecting remote and underserved areas is his No. 1 concern “because if you don’t have the Internet connections, then all of the rest of the digital economy is sort of irrelevant; that’s step one. No point in having a car if you don’t have a road.” Lametti is leading the sub-caucus examining the digital ecosystem, which he said covers “general innovation components, if you will, of intellectual properties, or copyright, patent,” as well as other “building blocks” of innovation policy. Sub groups have also been formed to look at open government and strategic opportunities for Canada and the economy, but work isn't limited to those four topics. “There are other areas we’ve identified where the caucus has some interest and some expertise and we want to look further,” Nycum said. The group has already received some feedback from Joly, noted Czyzowicz, who said the heritage minister “strongly suggested” the caucus “look into questions of the promotion of Canadian digital content and cultural creativity.” Last month, Joly announced an overarching review of Canadian agencies, policies and funding programs in a bid to help the domestic creative sector navigate the digital age. The ultimate goal of all this research is yet to be determined, said Graham. “We take our ideas together and figure out what to do with them and where to go with them,” he said. “And I wouldn’t prejudge where we’re going to go with it.” There are many people interested in being involved in the conversation, Graham added, which he said may stem from a perception there’s been a lack of such discussions in recent years. “I think there’s also a feeling of Canada falling behind some other countries in the last decade. We see what’s happening in some European countries and the U.S.,” Czyzowicz said. “As far as we’re aware there hasn’t been a digital innovation policy, per se, that would have been pushed forward in the last few years.” That’s a sentiment that both House and Senate committees studying the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement have heard explicitly from former BlackBerry Ltd. co-CEO Jim Balsillie. Balsillie has told both committees that there has been a “catastrophic confusion of a science and technology strategy with an innovation strategy,” leaving Canadian entrepreneurs looking to take their businesses to a global market eating the dust of others. Aside from it being important to modernize government and governance, Lametti said it goes deeper. “I’m the old man here,” he laughed, “but for everybody younger than me, it’s just the way people – do business is the wrong word – this is the way people live. This is a digital generation.” The digital infrastructure caucus reports to the party’s national caucus, but doesn’t have a set timeline or benchmark for its work. According to Graham, one target has already been met. “I think we’ve already achieved the first goal in raising awareness of the digital economy among our colleagues and that’s a very important thing,” he said. “Now we’ve got to get into the details.” And as long as technology keeps changing, caucus members said they suspect their work will be continuous. “There’s no due date on ‘forward,’” Chartrand said. — With reporting by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Liberal MPs, staff create ‘think tank’ for digital issues

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Liberal MPs, staff create ‘think tank’ for digital issues

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