The partial lifting of the publication ban on Gomery Inquiry testimony today confirms that we really do live in a widely empowered information age where everyone has the potential to be a publisher.
That has long been theoretically true, but what happened with the outing of Jean Brault's testimony takes us beyond faxing some messages out of China, or adding some Homolka/Bernardo information to an obscure web site somewhere.
The combination of blogs, e-mail, mainstream media and overwhelming public interest pushed us over a threshold. This was the tipping point, if you will, of an era when official channels realize they cannot control the flow of information.
For Americans and others, this barely registered in their news. For Canadians, the Gomery Commission's recognition that the cat is already out of the bag rewrites the rule book for future proceedings.
The laws are still intact. Someone in Canada violating a Canadian
publication ban could still be prosecuted. But these measures didn't
stop someone from feeding an American blog with a recap of former
Groupaction Marketing executive Brault's testimony before Justice
Gomery.
And it didn't stop Canadian blogs, media outlets and individual citizens from spreading the news about how to find a report of the damning testimony. It's only a matter of time before Canadians realize that the same tools can be used to draw attention to any number of issues and activities that are currently bubbling below the radar.
There is a community of conservative bloggers in Canada that have flexed their vrtual muscles. Winning the battle over the publication ban will almost certainly encourage them to take on new targets in the days and weeks ahead.
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