Bob Trower

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Bob Trower: Candidate for the 2015 Federal Election
I have put my name forward as a Candidate for the Leeds Grenville riding.

Note: this is a rather turgid draft. I hope to revisit to tighten it up...

Pirate Party Background
I joined the party officially near its formal beginning in 2009. I am literally a Card-Carrying Member -- prime number 2081. However, my involvement with Piratical issues precedes the formation of the party. I have been involved in data security since the 1980s. I have maintained websites since the 1990s. I published widely used open source software in 2001. I have been a member of the EFF for more than a decade. I have written a number of related documents on things like copyrights over the years. I personally sued Bell Canada for misrepresenting their service and overcharging a few years ago. They settled out of court.

I was fairly active in early PPC forums, which have unfortunately not been preserved. Fortunately, I had some pretty clear ideas back then which have not changed. I have been reproducing contributions over the past year or two.

I put my name up as the person responsible for my local Federal riding Leeds—Grenville in 2009. I am in a second term as a member of the Political Council.

Meaningful Universal Suffrage
I am committed to Universal Suffrage. I am directing my energies toward equality for all Canadians, but I would like to see this happen across the globe. As much as possible, I think that we should set a good example for the rest of the world. As things currently stand, I think that in some ways we actually set some bad examples.

I would like to see people as individuals and as groups reach a state of meaningful equality on their own terms -- not just the terms dictated by the dominant culture.

I think that it is particularly important to recognize that the task of securing suffrage for Women is entirely incomplete. I appreciate that Men have their issues as well, but I think that the systemic disadvantage for women is so pervasive that it is hard to see. Fish don't concern themselves about being wet because they are surrounded by water. Most of us are unaware of the way everything including our language is skewed to disrespect and disadvantage women.

I also believe that we have two broad populations in our country whose Interests have not been properly recognized:


 * Aboriginal Canadians, including First Nations Peoples, Inuit and Metis.


 * Quebec nationalists

Both the above groups have, in my opinion, been victims of bad faith dealing by our federal government. Whether that is true or not, the perception is very strong in these groups and millions of Canadians are unhappy with their current relationship with the rest of Canada.

I would like to see a federal government acknowledge its unfinished business with various groups of Canadians with long standing grievances and begin good faith negotiations to set things right.

Politics
I come from a family that has been active politically since the CCF and later the NDP. Both of my parents were Union Staff representatives and the family participated in related political activities. I have worked in Federal and Provincial campaigns in the past. A family member was a delegate at the last NDP convention.

I have identified as a socialist most of my life, but identify more specifically now as a 'libertarian socialist'. That puts me in the same 'Political Compass' quadrant as Gandhi, Nelson Mandala and The Dalai Lama: Bob Trower Political Compass. I am pleased to be there. They have not put up values for the current Canadian Election, but here is how the parties stacked up in 2011: Canada 2011

My current concern with politics is to correct a variety of ills that have crept into our political system. It was ever thus, but a number of historically recent technological developments have placed us in a precarious position. We could live in a land that is virtually magic if the right people prevail and a land that is a vision of hell if the wrong people prevail. As of the 2015 Canadian Federal Election, the wrong people have the upper hand.

Part of my research has been into technical mechanisms for privacy, anonymity and things like secure voting and eCommerce and related trust mechanisms. I consider the current state of security on the Internet to be a political matter. We have placed our trust in the wrong parties and they have made the Internet unsafe and vulnerable. The extent to which the Internet is vulnerable is grossly underestimated by most. It is that way because people with political power have decided that an insecure, vulnerable and dangerous Internet servies their interests better than one that is sanely managed.

I am sensitive to the rights of others to determine their own course. I am respectful of both sides of a number of highly polarized debates. I think that we can steer a course through contentious issues such as religion, abortion, aboriginal rights, minority rights, Quebec nationalism, non-traditional marriages, LGBT suffrage, etc. Those polarizing these issues do not represent a majority on either side. I am not and would not be disrespectful to community members who hold different views. I am pro-choice, but I respect and I believe I understand the pro-life camp. It would be my aim to push the most personal and contentious of issues closer to the people. I respect the opinion of a pro-life person who believes in the sanctity of life, but would oppose giving them the power of surveillance and coercion of the behavior of others.

I believe that respect for the authority of both Church and State is important and that they are incommensurate by their nature. They must be separate. As a matter of political necessity I believe we must posit the existence of 'God' with a personal relationship to each individual such that the state can never entirely exercise authority over an individual. Some things belong with a person and their personal individual relationship with God. That includes atheists. They have the right to certain dictates of conscience, however they frame them internally. The power of both the Church and the State over individuals must have limits and they must be made to respect those limits.

I believe that it is the job of a federal government to protect individual rights. Prime among those rights is liberty. We have what I once thought was a good Canadian Charter of Rights that was simply not been properly enforced. However, upon closer inspection I see that it has a fatal flaw. It essentially says in its preamble that the reigning masters can do as they wish as long as they have some sort of rationale. Originally I thought that this was just a sane safety valve to allow a response to imminent danger such as a military attack. In practice it has been abused to the point where the Charter is no longer effective. I think this needs to be corrected. Language somewhere in our laws has allowed any reasonable interpretation of our Charter Rights to be violated and this needs to stop.

I believe that sovereignty does and must flow from the people on up. Ultimate authority rests not with the state, the laws or even the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It rests with the people. This has gotten lost and I believe that it is important to correct legislation so that it is crystal clear that the people are the masters and the state is a servant with a very much lower status.

I am optimistic that the correct pitch can be made for the Pirate Party to form a government. We need to convince people that a vote for us is not a 'protest vote', but a genuine vote for a Pirate Party government. We need to convince the usual non-voters that a vote for us will actually count; that they will have a voice. A big part of that pitch will come from deeds, not words. We need to put feet on the ground, begin campaigning directly and make inclusion and co-operation an integral part of that campaign.

About Me
I have many different roles over the years. I know what it is like to work on a farm. I know what it is like to push a broom or operate machinery on the factory floor and what it is like to direct strategy in the executive suite. I have worked for companies like Microsoft and Sybase, in banking, telecommunications, the Energy Industry and health services. I know what it is like to be laid off and pounding the pavement for work in a weak economy. I worked my way through University and spent nearly a decade paying off student loans. I am a husband and an actively involved father.

I am a typical 'nerd' auto-didact so I have studied things like drafting, accounting, electronics, psychology, law, etc on my own.

I consider myself something of a ['social loafer']. For me to become this much of an activist, the situation must be pretty dire. I believe it is.

I have a respect for and an appreciation for people in all walks of life and at all stages of their life. It has been my experience that most people are good. They want to do good things. They help one another. There is a minority of truly dreadful people out there and they have a disproportionate influence, but I think that can be corrected.

I have worked professionally and am conversant with both technical and legal aspects of data security and privacy. This includes existing legislation, technology and related problems as well as techniques for correcting shortcomings.

I have BSc. Degree from a time when people had to actually know what they were doing. I have undergone various industry training in management, project management, networking, databases, security, server operating systems, etc.

I have been a professional Software Developer since 1982.

I have been a small business owner since 1992 -- Systems Services, Software development, data analysis, etc.

I am a Former 'Networking Professor' at St. Lawrence College and a former Advisory Board Member of Trilon Network (at the time the largest private telecommunications network in Canada).

I was the Designer and Author of a Secure Dialup System used by Senior Executives and IT Maintenance for Royal Trust/Royal Bank -- designed and coded proprietary encryption for the system. The system was never breached in approximately 3,000 man years of use.

I am Chief Scientist on Trantor 'Data Packaging' Research Project involving Compression, Encryption, Fault Tolerance, Authentication, etc.

I an Open Source Author (http://base64.sourceforge.net/b64.c -- code in use in many places from security systems to document systems to hardware like Cable Boxes, etc.) -- Derived from Data Packaging Project above.

I designed a Secure Audit-able Electronic Voting System and Vote by Mail System.

I have a Canadian Secret Security Clearance

I am comfortable with public speaking. I have taught several times at community colleges and have taught various industry courses and given presentations for various purposes.

I am comfortable writing large and technical documents. I am typically the author of technical documents and 'backgrounders' on my various projects, have authored Grant documents for various companies, etc. I have, at one point, written 200 pages of RFP documents for a $25 million dollar leg of a $250 million dollar project.

I consulted on the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) prior to its passage and on compliance after passage.

I designed and wrote data collection code for upload of medical information to the Ontario Government. It passed audit for Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA) compliance. It is currently in production.

I am comfortable managing teams as large as 60 people including other managers. I was formally trained as a manager in 1987 and have acted off and on as a department manager or project manager in the years since then.

I am comfortable initiating, specifying, staffing, managing, delivering and retiring projects. I have worked in one capacity or another on projects whose total budgets would be in the $1 Billion dollar range.

I am concerned with the whole of the issues that a governing party must face. Here, for instance, is what I wrote about the divisive issue of Quebec's concerns: https://wiki.pirateparty.ca/index.php?title=Talk:Ridings&oldid=745#Quebec

Policy Views
I identify with the Canadian Politician Tommy Douglas, who was a much admired family friend. He gave us socialized medicine and when in power he ran a budget *surplus*. I would like to see cost savings by reducing money spent on the coercive power of the state, rather than taking things away from the poor.

If it were up to me, the entirety of the Government would be transparent. People would know where the money was coming from and where it was going and why.

I think a primary task of a government committed to returning power to the electorate is to rationalize and reduce the size of the government. I think the current federal state apparatus is too large to control and is therefore not under control.

I believe that government funded information should be in the public domain -- the same as in the United States. We currently have a situation where all of us pay for government developed data but very few of us can afford to pay the extra charges demanded to see that data.

I am fine spending budget on a police force to ensure that the population's persons and property are protected. I am not fine with spending money so the police can listen to my family in our bedrooms.

Nobody should be spying on our citizens. This should be made clearly illegal, with significant financial and criminal penalties. Those laws would apply not only to Canadian Citizens. Anybody breaking the law by spying on Canadian Citizens should be subject to extradition and criminal prosecution.

I believe that supra-national organizations and secretive treaties like the (Trans-Pacific Partnership) TPP are improper encroachments on Canadian Sovereignty. Our sovereign citizens should not be subject to criminal sanctions mandated essentially by persons unknown. As far as I am concerned such things cannot properly have legal force here and we should alter legislation to make this clear.

I do not believe that either Copyrights or Patents serve the public interest. I believe they should be abolished. I support a sane and sensible approach whereby we do some solid research to quantify costs and benefits and that abolition should be accompanied by mechanisms to ensure that any dislocation is minimized. The beneficiaries of these state sanctioned monopolies gain hundreds of billions of dollars from them. Given this enormous wealth it is telling that their arguments do not contain cogent financial information showing how we benefit from them. The conclusion is obvious. The public does *not* benefit from them.

Current copyright law in particular is financially equivalent to a financial instrument called a 'perpetuity'. The length of the terms are so long they are effectively no longer limited terms. In my opinion this makes them unlawful. Copyrights were supposed to be for 'limited' terms and current terms are not limited for any practical purpose.

Criminalization of what is a civil breach is entirely wrong. I would move to push through legislation correcting this quickly. It is not up to the public to pay, through their tax dollars, for the investigation and enforcement of civil wrongs done to some privileged segment of industry.

Unemployment, even frictional unemployment, has no place in a reasonable society. People are being fed and housed anyway. We have the funds. We are leaving a segment of the population idle and begging while another segment works so long they never see their families. Let's make sure everyone has an income and nobody is idle who does not wish to be idle. In some instances, we can probably just reduced the hours one person works and share them with another. In instances where there is a skills mismatch we should be retraining. In instances where retraining is not possible (not everyone is cut out to be an engineer) we have plenty of wasteful 'self-serve' situations that should be replaced with service people.

We can and should be retraining a portion of our unemployed or underemployed population to work in industries aimed at automating things.

Apropos of the above, we have shamefully shipped our industrial infrastructure abroad. We need to repatriate strategic infrastructure as soon as possible. We are currently vulnerable to (and already experiencing) unilateral price increases from producers in China.

With respect to industry, a main priority should be the development of energy sources to support automation and things like increasing growing seasons and things like hydroponics with grow lights. With abundant cheap energy, we can do almost anything we wish.

I would like to see legislation radically reduced in size. I think a major goal of a PPC government should be not to introduce new legislation creating even more rules, but instead to streamline, rationalize and reduce legislation to remove as many rules as possible and to combine similar rules so that it does not require a team of lawyers to run a small business.

We are overtaxed. We take money from everyone and then redistribute the money in all sorts of ways whose net effect is just to cost extra money moving the money about. I am a socialist and I believe that we should seek common cause for many things like health-care. However, some things, however admirable they might be in theory are not appropriate for federal involvement.

There are a number of stupid, noxious taxes that I would abolish as soon as I could figure out which legislation would do the job. We should not be taxing necessities of life like food, toilet paper, sanitary napkins, etc. Salted nuts should not be subject to tax. Restaurant meals from places like McDonald's and Pizza Hut should not be taxed. This is food that forms, for good or ill, a part of the diet of many of our poorest citizens. I don't even know how we got to the point where we are taxing food, but I am sure that it should be stopped immediately.

I just got my new health card. Unlike my old one, which I had for more than twenty years, this one requires renewal in five years. The old card did not have an expiry date. The new one does. This is just one of many examples where the government bureaucracy has made their job into my job and passed a new cost on to me to boot. This is a provincial matter, but it is still something that I would like to address in principle.

In the absence of 'probable cause', any law enforcement personnel have no business interfering with people in the conduct of their affairs. Routine stops to see if you are licensed for this or that should be stopped. They cost money all around and produce nothing of value. If, in the fullness of time, it becomes cost-effective and sensible, perhaps we could automate systems to ensure drivers were sober, properly licensed, etc. Until then, a police state is not the answer.

We have long since paid for the infrastructure and the rationale no longer exists for monopolies so EM spectrum and right-of-ways for cable should return to the public. The entire system should be re-structured into a reasonably future proof low-latency high-bandwidth ubiquitous network. It is ridiculous when a private individual can install and use 10GE on their own premises and they have to slow that to a 6Mbps trickle to get on to the Internet backbone.

IPv6 is a crappy solution, but it is the only one we have. The entirety of the Canadian telecom infrastructure should be upgraded so that we can move to this. It ultimately provides greater speed and security and it cures a pressing issue with the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space. Canada was once a world leader in telecommunications. We are now a second-rate also-ran. A PPC government should pledge to put us back on top.

I am a pacifist. However, our military is in a shambles. We should increase the spend in terms of GDP to at least the 2% originally a part of our NATO commitment. We have an enormous border and coastlines and we have countries beginning to encroach on our space. Canada is a particularly rich country with a relatively small population. We currently are protected under the umbrella of Nato and by our peculiar relationship with our neighbor to the south. However, things change. The best way to maintain peace is by being an unattractive target for attack. I would like to see this tempered by a mechanism that places control under joint custody so that adventurism at the top can be vetoed by the provinces.

In general, I would like to see both budget and mandate moved closer to the people: Move some Federal function and budget to provinces, move some Provincial function and budget to counties, regions or municipalities and move any budget not necessary to appropriate government functions back to the individual people to whom it belongs.

At the very least, all levels of government should be entirely more transparent so we know where money is coming from, where it is going to and why. Strategy

I would like to see us (the PPC) address all the issues involved in going from where we are now to the end of a term as the governing party.

We need viable strategies for getting elected. Work on fund-raising mechanisms is critical. My review a number of years ago showed that the most important thing by far in terms of getting elected was the amount of money spent on the campaign.

As far as I know, people can make a $400 donation to the PPC and get $300 of that back on their income tax return. We have a whole year to figure out how to make this work for us. There are at least some people for whom the $100 net is no big deal. However, others may find going with something like $20 for a net of $5 the way to go. We need to do some testing of this to see what the best pitch is.

We need to build a party grass-roots to support us across the country. We need to make people happy working for the Pirate Party. For us, feet on the ground is what will raise the awareness, the funds and finally the votes.

Realistically, we need to field viable candidates. This will be problematic early on, but as we build the organization, get buzz, gain funding, etc, we should have little problem getting good candidates in ridings where there is a reasonable shot at a win.

We need to involve *all* stakeholders. That means everyone in the Country and some people outside the Country as well. I would particularly like to start formal outreaches to:


 * University Administrations and Student Councils
 * Government Departments
 * Major Political Entities: Union organizations, corporations, etc.

We should discuss some testing strategies to see what works best and whether or not certain avenues are worth pursuing.

It is a terrible thing, but realistically, we need to be prepared for a host of 'dirty tricks' by opposing parties. I do not think we should even consider getting down in the mud with them, but we should do the research of past cheating, be on the lookout for any warnings signs and be prepared to respond to minimize the effect. If we are well prepared and artful in our responses we could turn such things into positives that boomerang on the perpetrators.

We should be looking anywhere and everywhere we can for support, advice and input on our plans. I am particularly thinking of things like people actually in the federal civil service. We are not the enemy. We should seek input, information and guidance from people actually in the bureaucratic trenches. My experience is that workers in all places are actually more skilled, knowledgeable and conscientious than outsiders realize. Their jobs are usually more complex and difficult than they appear and they are usually doing a pretty good job under the circumstances.

As a practical matter, I think we should assess our situation coming in to the election and if we are very weak offer to put our local riding resources toward helping someone from another party provided they are compatible enough with our platform. I would seek a "gentleman's" agreement with them that if we can form a government with them and their party cannot form a government that they would support us to form a government. They would be free, as would any of our own members, to vote their conscience on any legislation.

If we were to form a government, we would be confronted with the variety of confusing unknowns anybody faces with a new job. In addition, since these are very particular jobs with power, traditions, various interested parties, etc we should look toward mitigating this by reaching out, for instance to some of the people in the NDP who were new members and asking them for pointers. In addition, we should familiarize ourselves with the environment we are heading into.

We should have a logistics team ready to deal with setting up offices, hiring or confirming staff, finding accommodations in Ottawa for members, sorting out meeting facilities, meeting with MPs from other parties, etc. We should know in advance whatever formal niceties are required, protocols, etc and be prepared to run through whatever training or practice is required right away.

In addition to human factors like the above, we should have a clear plan to hit the ground running. We should have already groomed the ground ahead of us in terms of departments, Deputy Ministers, continuity plans as we take over, movement of problematic people, etc. We should have our agenda mostly formed and be prepared to start rapid-fire work of all kinds be it reforming departments, downsizing, upsizing, renegotiating various arrangements (I bet the government is paying, for a lot of empty buildings, for instance), budgeting for and starting research teams, tearing down unwanted legislation, putting up new legislation, etc.

Thorny Issues
There are a number of highly complex entangled things that will require review once we are on the scene. This is particularly true with respect to monetary policy, international agreements, international relations and geopolitical things that will not be evident until we are actually privy to them as the sitting government.

The military and various law-enforcement and para-military organizations will require a fair amount of research. From where I sit now, I think a lot of stuff has to change. Accomplishing that will be tricky. By the time we are there, some of the agencies we are attempting to shift will have large secret dossiers on us as individuals and who knows what kinds of nonsense they will get up to. We need to 'hope for the best', but 'prepare for the worst'. When they come back with whatever compromising thing they have cooked up on somebody we need to have a response. For the most part, I think the response should be 'big deal' and answers to inappropriate questions by media should be met with a clear indication that we consider the question inappropriate and will not comment. Naturally, apropos of something like this, there should be something akin to reasonable disclosure by cabinet members at least as to ways in which they might be vulnerable to embarrassment.

I think that we likely have too many people in prison. I don't know how we would sort this out, but we have time before an election to come up with research and some sensible policies. Victim-less crimes like simple possession of drugs, prostitution, etc. should be reviewed and if they present no danger to society they should be released. If there is no compelling reason not to, I would be inclined to set up an amnesty program whereby people who keep themselves clean for a few years get their record entirely expunged and they return to being just normal citizens again. There are some genuinely dangerous bad people locked up. Some cannot be rehabilitated. Better we concentrate our resources on them rather than wasting them on people who otherwise would be out being productive members of society.

For some things, I expect that we have laws in place that are putting people in prison and tainting them with criminal records needlessly. It would be good that we don't end up snaring the people we released right back into the system for trivial breaches.

Stupid little thing, but the Conservatives changed the law that gives parties funding based on the votes cast for them. This favors the Conservatives, making it easier for them to get funding and get elected and harder for other parties, especially parties like the PPC. We should fix that and perhaps look into making a way that makes it harder for subsequent Conservative governments to go right back to their old tricks.

Election reform. I would like to see us put in place something similar to the system I designed that makes it possible to guarantee a fair vote. People would be able to validate their vote was counted as cast, that only valid votes were cast, nobody would be able to determine what you voted, etc. Cheating is not rampant, but make no mistake, it happens and it is not happening in favor of anyone we want to see get elected.

Also something of a stupid little thing, but ... I don't know if it is still in place, but there was a levy placed on recording media sent to the record companies or something. I would like to squash that out of existence and legislate so it could never come back. It irks me that I have paid for hundreds of disks, half of them never even used and *never* copied music or video on any of them and paid a tax to those bottom feeders.

I have some material on this, but the GM/GE food fiasco is a potential nightmare. We need to legislate the holes away at least. First order of business would be to make labeling of GM/GE frankenfoods mandatory. Consumers have a right to decide for themselves whether or not they wish to consume genetically altered food and whether or not they wish to lend financial support to companies attempting to gain monopoly control of our food supply.

Platform
I would like a simple statement of the principles guiding our platform, give an indication of where we will stand firm and exercise leadership and where we will be more consultative.

I would like to break out separately the ridiculous motherhood issues and mostly dispense with them as a group. In our matrix we would just have a note that it is an empty motherhood issue. None of us are coming out against families, why is this nonsense polluting debate on substantive issues where we differ?

I would like to see a matrix that shows how all the parties stack up on the various issues. Where appropriate, I would like to come out with firm unambiguous language about things like a social safety net and health care. Both are being systematically eroded. We should state categorically that we will set these straight again. I would like to produce a detailed breakdown of our positions and concerns with respect to all the existing government departments.

For detailed platform positions I would like to explain the positions properly including indicating who we consulted with and where we agree or disagree.

In developing our platform, I would like to go through a series of consultative refinements where we go to all stakeholders to address their concerns and incorporate their input. I would include as stakeholders candidates from the other parties. All things being equal, I am for co-operation and conciliation rather than the fractious politics as usual. It bugs me so much time was spent on Mike Duffy's $90K or whatever while the government was literally letting millions evaporate. We should, as much as possible, simply refuse to participate in the wasteful heckling and nonsense you see in Parliament.