World
Dissolve parliament, says Canadian PM
Ottawa: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Sunday that he has officially asked Canadian Governor General David Johnston to dissolve parliament.
He asked to dissolve the parliament kicking off an 11-week campaign ahead of the country’s 42nd election slated for October 19.
“I feel very strongly that those campaigns need to be conducted under the rules of the law. The money come from the parties themselves, not from government resources, parliamentary resources or taxpayer resources,” Harper said answering a question as to why he launched the campaign so far in advance of the fixed election date, which is the longest and most costly in the country’s political history.
“In terms of the fact that we’re a better organised political party, and better supported by Canadians — those advantages exist whether we call this campaign or not,” he said.
Canadian opposition leaders accused him of poor economic management and of ignoring the plight of Canada’s jobless and middle class Canadians who have seen their incomes become stagnant.
Stretching over 78 days, the campaign’s result will set the country on a course that either solidifies a decade of change under Harper’s conservative party on everything from taxes to foreign policy, or rejects the ideology behind those policies and embraces a more progressive approach promised by Tom Mulcair’s New Democrat Party and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party.
If Harper wins the election, he will be making a history. It would be the first time since Wilfrid Laurier in 1908 that a prime minister won four consecutive elections.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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