Prime Minister Stephen Harper lashed out Wednesday at critics who say the Canadian public was not properly consulted in the planned revision of the Copyright Act, widely expected to be tabled before Christmas.

“To suggest that we didn’t ask Canadians what they wanted is irresponsible,” he told reporters outside an upscale Ottawa restaurant. “There were thousands of pages of testimony from the public, and I can tell you it took [Time Warner CEO] Rich Parsons and I almost a full week to burn it at all that Whistler retreat.”

A spokesman for the Department of Canadian Heritage told reporters that the decision-making process on the issue of copyright was “actually very complex”, and after nearly a month of trying to assemble a comprehensive strategy that “reflected diverse opinions from across the country”, it was decided at a senior level to “give up and just use whatever the MPAA sent us”.

“The real problem is that most of the insipid whining – sorry, I mean ‘debate’ – was pushing abstract ideals like ’sovereignty’ and ‘Canadian culture’,” said Thomas Bélanger, Assistant Deputy Minister at Heritage, “I don’t know what those mean, but when I saw the pictures of the sad, broken faces of Hollywood studio executives… crushed by years of rampant piracy, barely able to put out a decent movie for all the mental anguish… well, you’d have to be pretty cold to deny them complete control over our cultural agenda.”

Opponents of the expected bill claim adopting a Canadian equivalent of the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act will set the country back at least 10 years, and potentially cripple the booming technology sector, while the Canadian Music Creators Coalition reiterated their platform opposing draconian laws that restrict the rights of artists and their fans. But in an impassioned speech at a Moosepaw Club luncheon in Toronto, Canadian Recording Industry Association president Graham Henderson reminded voters not to listen to “under-paid dandruff-covered hacks who couldn’t cut it in the USA”.

“You hear all these complaints from this rag-tag group of crybabies,” Henderson said to a packed crowd of easily-swayed decision makers, “But they don’t speak for Canadians. I speak for Canadians, because my American stakeholders told me I do. Oh, and also we have the word ‘Canadian’ in our name. So there.”

Both the Liberal and Bloc parties had no official comment on the proposed legislation, but the NDP did release a statement promising to “bluster ineffectually, as we tend to do when it counts.”

Note: Various words in this article have fallen victim to Text Links for Hope, a fund raising drive for sick kids.

You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.