Kaizen is a Japanese term that means continuous improvement. I’ve heard it used in business many times and with slightly different interpretations. The most interesting business version was a particular company I consulted for that wanted to impose a new licensing scheme. The problem was to just impose it on their customers would be bad for business. In order to reach their goal, they did it very slowly. As new features came out on new versions of their software, they started adding additional license requirements. It took them longer, but they got most of their customers converted to the new scheme all paying effectively more and their customer lost was negligible. The president of the company described the process to me as ‘Kaizen’ — obtain your goal in baby steps, otherwise you will not be successful.
A similar western analogy is that of a frog in water. It goes like this. If you put a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out. If you put the frog in room temperature water and slowly increase the temperature of the water to a boil, the frog not sensing a big difference will stay in the water and eventually die.
Kaizen is exactly what the governments do. To me this is the bigger picture of what some of Bill C-10 represents. Bill C-10 among other things, permits the government to decide if a particular film should get funding based on some unpublished ‘guidelines’. These ‘guidelines’, probably have a fair bit of subjectivity to them, can be changed at anytime and most likely can be interpreted in many different ways. The word guideline implies a suggestion of a path to take to come to a decision, which is different than a rule which implies you must take a specific path or a specific action.
On March 4th, The Current, a CBC Radio show, discussed Bill C-10. You can find the podcast here. Pierre Poilievre was interviewed about the bill. One of his first statements was that these ‘guidelines’ are not new and are already used for books and magazines. Bill C-10 permits these same ‘guidelines’ to be applied to film. If you listen to him, he implies that this is nothing new and there is nothing to worry about. These guidelines have obviously worked, we are just now going to apply them to film. Why all the fuss? No big deal … right? This to me is Kaizen or the frog analogy. If I want to change things and I execute the change in baby steps, people tend to not notice or not enough people notice, so the concern is not brought to the forefront for the general public to become aware. I had no idea till I heard this interview that this process was applied to books and magazines. Now that I know it actually bothers me and it doesn’t make me worry less. His implication that because I didn’t know about it, it obviously didn’t affect me tone is crap. Maybe the book and magazine people don’t care. Or maybe they did care, but for reasons of popularity they didn’t get enough press to make people aware of it at the time. Regardless, it is not a justification for applying these guidelines to film. Nor is it a justification to imply that people are overreacting and shouldn’t be concerned.
Sam Trosow said the government should publish these ‘guidelines’ and I completely agree with him. However, I would suggest they remain published on a government website and changes can not be applied to requests for funding unless the website is kept up-to-date. This should be a rule with penalties if it is broken. It should also include a history of all changes. What is to stop the government from changing these ‘guidelines’ in the future without any justification to the public? Since they are guidelines and not rules or law, changing them without notifying the public is probably permitted.
Kaizen when used by governments and business can be a bad thing. Expectation of privacy is just one of many examples. With the advances in technology and the cost of technology dropping, privacy is not the same as it was. It used to be that a employee could assume a general amount of geographical location privacy while not at work. My PDA that work provides me with has a GPS. The PDA is constantly connected servers at my place of employment. Technically, they can know and track my whereabouts anytime they want. They don’t do this of course (I do know that) they are not that type of company, but at any point in time they could. After all the PDA is owned by the company. It is technically their property so they have a right to track it … right?
As a fictional example, lets say this company is a office and they started questioning why their employees were at certain places during their off hours. This would probably not be acceptable today. Now, take the same scenario and lets pretend it is a PDA that belongs to a paramedic. The paramedic is off duty till 6:00 in the morning, but someone notices that their PDA was at a bar till 3:00 in the morning. Does the employer have a right to question the paramedic? People might say ‘yes’ they do because unlike the office scenario, the responsibilities entrusted to a paramedic by the public should allow them to be questioned and it is the responsibility of the organization to do so. Most people would naturally agree, and it becomes acceptable and maybe the company even requires them to now sign a contract giving permission for the company to track their whereabouts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. After all, this is now perfectly normal and generally people feel this is acceptable. A year later, I could impose a similar policy on the police department. It’s in the publics best interest right? And really it’s not a new policy. The policy is in place for paramedics, we are just applying the same policy to the police force. What would be next? Fire fighters, construction workers, security guards …. I don’t know about you, but I see a pattern. At what point will the public start to speak up? Probably when it is too late.
