~ freelance journalist

Largely overlooked in the flap over Vikileaks was the main theme of a science conference in Vancouver that laid bare as big a threat to an open society as the ham-handed Internet snooping legislation.

The Harper government has essentially gagged civil servants so they can’t talk to reporters or the public. Weather forecasts may be the only communication that doesn’t require approval in advance.

The example that came up at the conference was federal scientists who discovered a new ozone hole, but couldn’t discuss it with anyone. However, the gag stretches across the federal bureaucracy. The most mundane request from a journalist takes days to get a response. It’s usually too late for the story, and most of the time, too general to be of any use.

The closure of the Electro-Motive Canada plant in London has ignited a furious debate about corporate greed, union misjudgment and political indifference. There’s also a lot of misinformation in the mix.

The decision by multinational Caterpillar Inc. to shutter the plant in Southwestern Ontario in favour of a larger operation in a U.S. state that offers employers all sorts of protection against unions hands the Occupy
Movement plenty of ammunition for its campaign against corporate greed and the exploitation of Canadian and American workers.

All of us have had those moments when we think we’ve got the perfect comeback or comment, but when we say it out loud, it goes splat.

That’s the position Conservative MP Larry Miller found himself in after trying to make a point about gun controls, Liberals and Nazis. The line isn’t worth repeating here and Miller has withdrawn it in the Commons and apologized.

A recent report from the George Morris Centre in Guelph linking ethanol production and higher feed costs for the livestock industry resurrects an old complaint and ignores the potential for a new economic driver in Canada.

The Centre’s report says raising corn and other crops to make ethanol raises the livestock industry’s production costs and reduces employment in the meat processing industry. It’s the same basic complaint as diverting crops into fuel production means more hungry people in the world.

What’s missing from the equation is why grain farmers, who are finally enjoying decent prices, have to forgo a revenue source. As well, the use of food crops in fuel production has likely peaked globally. It will decline as the alternate fuel industry learns how to make ethanol and bio-diesel from crop and wood waste and non food plants such as twitch grass and miscanthus as well as pond scum.

Canada’s supply management system for dairy and poultry farmers is a favourite punching bag for business columnists and free market economists. They aren’t going to like what Bruce Muirhead of the University of Waterloo and Hugh Campbell of the New Zealand Centre for Sustainability have to say about their arguments.

In a chapter in chapter in a soon to be released book called Rethinking Agriculture Policy Regimes, they conclude supply management is potentially more resilient to future shocks than New Zealand’s free market model that’s adored by the economic pundits. Their article also sets the record straight on some of the most often cited myths about the impact of supply management.

Ottawa—Labour ministers in a Conservative government are seldom seen or heard from. So Lisa Raitt’s recent speech on Cooperative Labour Relations to a Chamber of Marine Commerce luncheon in Toronto should have been a real eye opener except it attracted little media attention.

In it, Ms. Raitt bluntly challenged employers and employees in the federally-regulated sector, which includes transportation, telecommunications and banking, to look at the their national importance when they’re in the midst of contract talks. Left unsaid was what the government might contemplate if they don’t.

Back in his minority government days, Prime Minister Harper liked to brag about being a superb political strategist.

So who was the guy that used his moment in the spotlight as the leader of one of the world’s healthier economies at the World Economic Forum in Davos to fire up his critics back home with ill-chosen words about pension reform? Maybe he thought his speech would sound stirring in front of the other leaders.

Will farmers benefit?

By Alex Binkley

The re-opening of South Korea and the Philippines to Canadian beef is the latest bit of good news that’s winning Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz plenty of accolades. There’s no denying he’s logged a lot of air miles trying to improve market access for Canadian farm and food products.

However, we should temper the praise until we see whether these deals along with the end of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly on wheat and barley sales actually improve the financial position of producers. Add the Canada-European free trade and Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations to the list of developments that deserve close scrutiny to determine their actual results.

By Alex Binkley

When President Obama said no thanks for now to the Keystone Pipeline project to ship tar-sands oil to a Texas refinery, he did us a favour.
Sadly, not many people got it. Prime Minister Harper whined about Canada being treated as a nature preserve by Americans and vowed to sell the goop to China. That of course put the spotlight on the Northern Gateway project to pump the crude through a pipeline to Kitimat, B.C. for forwarding by tanker through tricky shipping lanes.

Editorialists and business page columnists at the major newspapers have been working themselves into a frenzy recently over that great insidious farmer plot called supply management.

Their free market indignation leads them to hope that either the Canada-Europe free trade talks or negotiations on the Trans Pacific Partnership will force Canada to pull the plug on the dairy and poultry boards. They offer sophomoric arguments to justify their positions. They flay at the boards as if they were the biggest issue in the trade arena.

Ottawa trade guru Peter Clark thrives on the details of trade negotiations and his recent column for the online news operation iPoliticsa.ca should be required reading for the overheated commentators.