The text of the bill is now available:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32401372/Copyright-Bill-C32
Categories
Tag: legislative
The BC Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum released the Green Energy Advisory Task Force Report on Wednesday. The province also passed the Clean Energy Act (Bill 17) on the same day. According to the BC News Release the Act builds on a number of recommendations from the task force, including:
- Confirming our commitment to the Heritage Contract, to ensure B.C. ratepayers continue to receive the benefits of B.C.’s low-cost electricity assets.
- Moving forward on critical infrastructure projects such as Site C and the Mica and Revelstoke upgrades.
- Increasing B.C.’s clean energy supply to meet domestic and future export demand.
- Better align implementation of policy between BC Hydro and BCUC and review the need for a separate transmission corporation.
- Enabling utilities to implement initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and/or improve energy efficiency, such as encouraging installation of high-efficiency heating systems like heat pumps or vehicle electrification and charging infrastructure.
- Creating a First Nations Clean Energy Business Fund to support revenue sharing opportunities and to increase First Nations participation in clean energy resource development.
For another opinion read the article What Voters weren’t told about the Clean Energy Act from the Tyee.
Ever wondered how MPs and Senators research issues? Did you know that the Library of Parliament has a research service for parliamentarians – the Parliamentary Information & Research Service (PIRS)? Or that PIRS provides free public access to its publications? Click here to view the list of available research publications.
“PIRS (responds) to questions that require research and analysis on legal, economic, scientific, or social science matters. Researchers obtain and analyze material, and write letters, short notes and longer research papers at the request of Senators and Members of the House of Commons.”
- These documents provide insight into the depth/type of information that MPs and Senators have prior to debates and votes
- Publication categories include Aboriginal issues, agriculture, business, copyright, crime, public debt, defense – including much about Afghanistan, education, environment, fisheries, health, human rights, immigration, legislative summaries, taxation and transport.
- Documents added since January 2010 include Clean Coal?; Cybersecurity and Intelligence: The US Approach and Productivity: Its Increasing Influence over Canadians’ Standard of Living and Quality of Life.
Students, faculty and staff at UBC Library now have online access to the session laws of the Acts of the Parliament of Canada – 1926 – 2007 via the subscription database HeinOnline. Print copies are also available – covering the years 1867 – 2007 at call number KG16 .A25
This isn’t exactly news, since this project began in 2007, but it was news to me! According to a statement on the Gazette website “the Canada Gazette Directorate is working in partnership with LAC to digitize all issues dating from 1841 to 1997, so as to make them accessible to the public.”
The project is slated to be completed at the end of 2009, so not all the issues from this time range are available yet. When the website was launched in May 2008, only 30% of the collection had been digitized. Presumably at this late date, the project is much further along…. In any event, the collection digitized thus far is available for keyword searching at: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/canada-gazette/index-e.html
Issues from 1997 to present are available on the Canada Gazette website at: http://www.gazette.gc.ca/index-eng.html