The Governator's political career may be dead, but he's still fighting for his legacy. (Warner Bros.)

Arnold Schwarzenegger stepped down as California’s governor Monday and handed the reins to Democrat Jerry Brown. Schwarzenegger originally came to power in a 2003 special election on a platform of fiscal responsibility, but will be remembered for drastically increasing the size of government by initiating massive spending programs and championing a variety of progressive causes.

After introducing tough new environmental regulations, increasing infrastructure spending, and failing to reform a political system that makes it easy to raise spending and hard to increase taxes, Schwarzenegger leaves California in a dismal economic situation. The state now boasts the worst credit rating in the country, with a $28-billion budget deficit — up from just over $10-billion when he took office. During his tenure, California increased its debt level from $34- to $88-billion, which more than doubled the annual cost of servicing the debt. California is also faced with an estimated $500-billion shortfall in funding its pension obligations for public employees.

So what are people saying about the legacy of the movie star turned governor? Unsurprisingly, he seems to be getting mixed reviews.

Allowing people to freely debate issues and ideas in public is how we arrive at the truth

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC), an independent body that administers guidelines set out by Canada’s private broadcasters, recently made public a decision that finds the Christian television show Word TV in violation of its code of ethics.

The council condemned the show’s host, evangelical minister Charles McVety, for, among other things, making “disparaging and unacceptable” remarks about homosexuals during Toronto’s Gay Pride parade.

McVety was initially suspended by his network, and his show taken off the air, but was reinstated within a week. All’s well that ends well, right? Not exactly. McVety claims his program will now be “pre-screened and censored” before it goes on air.

McVety has been trying to spin this story ever since the decision was released. “How can the private broadcasters justify blacklisting McVety because he opposed spending tax dollars in support of the gay pride parade?” reads a statement on the Word TV website.

On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission — the government department charged with regulating the U.S. broadcasting and telecommunications industries — approved new net neutrality regulations, marking the agency’s first major step toward regulating the Internet.

The story of the Internet is a tale of a network of communities that developed organically and coalesced to form a virtual society — with its own rules and norms — where social status could be formed based on the merits of one’s ideas, instead of traditional class structures.

Initially competing with services like AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy, the Internet came to be the dominant network because it was based on open standards, which could be used by anyone to create new products and services.

No one told me there was porn on this Internet thingy. (arodlob/flickr)

In an apparent bid to catch up to authoritarian regimes like China and Iran in the Internet censorship race, governments in Canada and the UK are attempting to pressure Internet Service Providers (ISPs) into installing costly systems that would allow them to monitor online activity and filter unwanted content.

Canada’s Conservative government recently introduced legislation that would force ISPs to install real-time surveillance equipment on their networks and require them to provide police with personal information about their customers, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and intercepted communications — all without any judicial oversight.

In Britain, Communications Minister Ed Vaizey is trying to strong-arm ISPs into blocking legal adult websites.

Ralph Klein (Chuck Szmurlo/Wikimedia)

Rick Bell, a columnist at the Calgary Sun, has confirmed what Don Martin hinted at in the National Post on Saturday. That former Alberta premier Ralph Klein is facing serious health issues after years of smoking and will likely never recover to the point where he will be able to give another public address:

The Romans also spent huge sums of money on monuments and stadiums, and look where they are now.

It’s a cold day in hell when every Member of Parliament (MP) agrees on an issue, but if you’ve checked the temperature in Ottawa lately, you’d know that day might just have arrived. Last week, a bill to create a national Holocaust memorial passed through the House of Commons with all party support. The consensus, however, appears to have ended there.

As soon as the bill was passed, Liberal MP Joe Volpe began criticizing the government for not funding the project: “If that group wants to raise funds, it’s an additional voluntary tax. I don’t know if anybody wants to go down that road.” Speak for yourself Joe. Only a Liberal would have the fortitude to suggest that a coerced payment is better than a voluntary payment.

Despite Mr. Volpe’s objections, however, the legislation that he and every other MP voted for is pretty clear. It calls for the Minister (Lawrence Cannon) to put together a council of no more than five unpaid members who will be responsible for spearheading a “fundraising campaign to cover the cost of constructing the Monument.” Although the bill doesn’t preclude the possibility of the government funding part of the project, there’s certainly no money attached to it.

The Quebec government has backed off a plan that would have reduced the legal blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) to .05 and brought its regulations in line with the other provinces.

While the Criminal Code sets the legal limit at .08, most provinces have created a legal grey area where drivers with a blood-alcohol level above .05 can be fined or lose their license. In Ontario, for example, drivers with a BAC between .05 and .08 face a three-day roadside suspension the first time they’re caught, which increases to one month for people who break the rules a third time.

The law effectively makes it illegal to have a glass of wine or two with dinner before driving home. Yet, these are not the people who are endangering lives. According to Transport Canada, over 80 per cent of alcohol-related fatal injury crashes involve a driver with a BAC above .08. In comparison, only five per cent of fatal injury crashes involve drivers between .05 and .08. In fact, the odds of a driver with a BAC of .015 and someone driving at .08 getting into a fatal crash are statistically the same.

Wildrose Alliance Leader Danielle Smith is not afraid of talking about a role for private enterprise in Alberta's health system. (Kempton Lam/Flickr)

Another government is coming under fire after confidential information was leaked on the Internet. Only this time, Julian Assange has nothing to do with it. Opposition parties launched a predictable attack on Alberta’s Progressive Conservative government last week after a PowerPoint presentation detailing a multi-phased health care reform plan surfaced online.

The opposition Liberals quickly picked up on one slide, which said that doctors should have the “ability to opt-in and opt-out of the public health system,” and accused the Tories of having a hidden agenda to privatize health care. “Will the Premier, in writing, promise Albertans he will not allow doctors to work in both the public and private systems at the same time,” asked Liberal Leader David Swann, effectively cutting off any meaningful debate on the issue in favour of scoring cheap political points.

Should publishers be subjected to government coercion and censorship based on the information they decide to make public? The U.S. Supreme Court didn’t think so when it reversed an injunction prohibiting The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Neither did Ezra Levant when the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission pursued a case against him for publishing a series of cartoons.

The cartoons, which depict the Muslim prophet Mohammad, garnered international headlines at the beginning of 2006. They were originally printed in a Danish newspaper and republished in Levant’s Western Standard magazine alongside an article about press freedoms.

When a human rights officer asked why the magazine published the cartoons, he responded that it was, “for the intention and purpose of exercising our inalienable rights as free-born Albertans to publish whatever the hell we want, no matter what the hell you think.”

Levant did not draw the cartoons, he provided context to an important news story. Similarly, Wikileak’s Julian Assange didn’t steal the 250,000 documents taken from the U.S. government. The man suspected of doing this is currently behind bars.

Last week, the Government of Canada reintroduced legislation that will strengthen the state's ability to monitor the online activity of its citizens. Ostensibly billed as a means of combating child predators and terrorists, the bills would turn the Internet—once a bastion of freedom and liberty—into a virtual police state.

The legislation would allow police and intelligence agencies to circumvent the court system by intercepting online communications and obtaining personal information about Internet users without obtaining a warrant. It also forces private Internet service providers to install costly monitoring equipment on their networks to facilitate big brother.

The two bills—known as the Investigative Power for the 21^st Century Act and the Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act—were first introduced in the summer of 2009, but died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued last Christmas. At the time they were originally introduced, I wrote a series of feature articles for the Western Standard, explaining what the legislation means and how people can protect themselves. The first article takes an in-depth look at the legislation and why freedom loving Canadians should be concerned. The second looks at a number of technologies that allow people to subvert government surveillance.

Although it is possible to take steps to protect your privacy on the Internet, we would all be far better off if this legislation does not become law.