With the news that George Takach has dropped out of the Liberal leadership race, there is no longer a candidate who puts digital issues in such a position of prominence in their campaign. The end of his campaign was news that was appropriately released on Twitter:
I am ending my #lpcldr campaign + supporting @justintrudeau to make Canada work better #cdnpoli bit.ly/jt-gt-en
— George Takach (@georgetakach) February 25, 2013
And with that, we will need to see who will take on the title of “digital candidate”. Mr. Takach had tried to recruit support from the gamer community, creating Geeks4George, to take advantage of the Liberal Party’s new “supporter” category of voters that doesn’t require full membership. As Warren Kinsella recently wrote, it is a category of leadership voters that appears ripe for gaming the system.
Who will provide the most serious voice for digital economy issues? Marc Garneau has been the Industry critic for the Liberals and has therefore owned party responsibility for the digital file. As I wrote before, from the beginning, Mr. Garneau has promised “As leader, I will place a relentless focus on the development of a balanced, creative, knowledge-based economy.”
Joyce Murray claims to have been first to include digital issues in her campaign. Citing her past experience as Minister of Management Services in British Columbia, Ms. Murray led the “Bridging the Digital Divide” project connecting 119 rural and remote communities. Strangely, the digital policy page acknowledges that 7 years later, BC still hasn’t achieved her goal (“Today, B.C. is very close to her target of 98% of communities connected to affordable high speed service”). Rural broadband projects use government money to subsidize broadband prices in regions without regard to financial need. It is a supply side approach that is politically expedient and popular, but we have seen that such programmes ignore urban households that find “affordable high speed service” to be not so affordable.
Like many candidates, Ms. Murray’s position paper is silent on policies that address the income divide which left more than 100,000 Vancouver households without a computer, let alone broadband.
With Mr. Takach out of the race, will a new digital candidate emerge? Where does the Digital Economy rank as an issue for the Liberal party leadership candidates?