I am sending this to the candidates in my riding of Ottawa South. Since the Liberal candidate is also the Liberal leader and current Premier, I am sending copies to the leaders of the other parties running a candidate in my riding.
There are two broad areas that are of concern to me during this election which I wish to obtain your views on: the referendum and public education. I wish to obtain permission to publicly publish your answers so that other people with similar concerns will be able to use your words to help make their decision on October 10.
Russell McOrmond
http://flora.ca/#contact
* Referendum:
I believe that by splitting our ballot into two questions, separating votes for a person and votes for a party, it will make both parties and electoral district representatives more accountable. Do you support the proposed MMP system for Ontario? Why or why not?
* Education: One School System
I strongly support the Education Equity in Ontario campaign. http://OneSchoolSystem.org
I agree with the UN Human Rights Committee who has twice censured Canada (1999, 2005) for violating the equality rights of its own citizens by virtue of the discrimination against non-Catholics in the Ontario school system. The Committee indicated that in order to live up to our human rights obligations, we must fund all religious schools equally or fund none. Of these two reasonable options I believe we should not be funding separate religious schools.
Where do you and your party stand on this issue?
* Education: Peer Production, Peer Distribution
The rising cost of text books, proprietary software and other "works of the mind" necessary in education is causing rising student debt. An alternative exists that harness the nature of knowledge, which has a zero marginal cost to the producer. The one-time fixed cost to develop the knowledge is directly funded, rather than charging an unnecessary marginal price in the form of royalties on the results. This would remove the monopoly that currently exists on this educational material and software, radically driving down costs.
Open Access is growing in scientific and medical journals, radically lowering the costs to libraries and educational institutions. Granting institutions such as the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR) are moving towards Open Access models to ensure that the results of publicly funded research are available freely to the public.
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) provides royalty-free software which protects the rights of its users to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Being able to study and make derivatives of previous software is as important to the study of computer science as being able to read and comment on past literature is to the study of English. The adoption of FLOSS is also the most effective solution to the so-called "Software Piracy" problem given the activities that most people wish to do with software are already pre-authorized by FLOSS licenses without additional permission or payment.
What would you do to support this modernization in our educational system? Would you support redirecting funding that is currently sent to educational publishers and royalty-bearing software manufacturers and instead directly fund the collaborative authoring and review of educational material and software that would then be freely accessible?
* Education: Educational use of the Internet
The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) have called for an institutional exception to Copyright which would allow students and staff to access and make derivatives of this material without needing additional permission or payment. While this may seem beneficial to those within the confines of provincially chartered educational institutions, this has the harmful effect of suggesting that everyone outside of these institutions are infringing copyright.
Access Copyright has responded by proposing a levy that would be charged to educational institutions to "license" students to access and make derivatives of material acquired via the Internet. The fact is that the vast majority of material on the Internet is already licensed (explicit or implied) for these uses, and the members of Access Copyright (primarily educational publishers) do not represent a significant percentage of works available from the Internet.
What will you do to lobby the next Ontario Minister of Education to change direction on this policy, and to instead lobby for clarity in the Copyright act to ensure that students, their parents and all Canadians have the same clear rights outside of school as they do within school.
Thank You.
