One important part of our political system is the Throne Speech. It’s where the Governor General tells Parliament, and the rest of Canada, what the Federal Government’s goals are for the current session of Parliament. After that’s been presented and everyone’s had a chance to think about it, Parliament has a debate on the issues it raised.
Google decided that Canadians might be interested in these debates. After all, this is where the government and opposition parties let the public know how they feel about the issues raised by the Throne Speech and can attack the positions of the other parties. Therefore, Google approached the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) with an offer to stream the debate live on Youtube.
Now, this sounds like a good thing on the surface. After all, any way of making politics more accessible to the average Canadian is probably a good thing. However, there are some problems in the details.
Google only streamed the Prime Minister’s response to the Throne Speech. No other party’s comments or criticisms on the statements of the government were available live. After all, who would want to worry about what the majority of the MPs think?
Google insists that this was not favouritism, or an attempt to influence the government. They claim that all the parties were offered the same opportunity to have their Throne Speech responses aired live, however only the Conservatives took them up on the offer. The NDP communications director, Nammi Poorooshasb, states that for at least his party, there was no such offer made. He says that when his party spoke to Google, Google stated that they did not yet have the infrastructure to support live streaming in Canada. They also were told that, once the infrastructure was in place, the NDP would be paying for this service. This is a very different story from the one presented to the Conservatives, who received this apparently unavailable service free of charge.
This is not the only free service that the Conservatives have been given by Google. Google hosted an event where Canadians could submit questions and vote for the top questions asked. The top questions were presented to the Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and he was able to speak on the issues at length. This could be like a normal interview, except that it avoided those inconvenient things like follow-up questions, or an interviewer pointing out that he hadn’t really answered the question.
Now, while this may seem rather unfair, it’s still not illegal. After all, people are free to give gifts to whoever they’d like to, right?
Actually, not quite. The thing is, Google is registered to lobby the Prime Minister’s Office on issues regarding copyright and telecommunications. There are rules regarding gifts from organizations that are registered to lobby the government. These rules are very simple: don’t accept them.
Now, don’t worry. Our government has an answer for this problem too. After all, organizations like the CBC are registered to lobby the government, yet they also cover the government’s activities, often live. How could this possibly be different? Clearly, Google has every right to do this as well.
However, the Google coverage wasn’t exactly like a news agency covering the Prime Minister. The PMO was able to decide almost every word of what was said. There was no analysis, not even a pretext of a marginally unbiased view. And Google isn’t a news source. CBC News and Google are completely different organizations offering completely different services. Comparing an interviewer asking pointed questions, with follow-up questions, forcing Harper to stay on topic with letting him ramble on however he likes is ridiculous.
So, why isn’t there a huge public outcry about this blatant violation of the rules meant to protect the fairness in the decisions made by our government? Well, why don’t you Google it and find out?
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