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Europe Works to Contain Crisis Article Tools Sponsored By NYC Times By CARTER DOUGHERTY, NELSON SCHWARTZ and FLOYD NORRIS Published: October 6, 2008 European nations scrambled further Monday to prevent a growing credit crisis from bringing down major banks and alarming savers as Sweden followed Germany, Austria and Denmark in offering new protections for bank deposits. As troubles in financial markets spread around the world, some governments are eager to act to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s when authorities sat on their hands during the Wall Street crash and its aftermath, Julian Chillingworth, chief investment officer at Rathbone Unit Trust Management in London, said. Sweden became the latest European country to offer protection for bank deposits, after the German government offered blanket guarantees Sunday to all private savings accounts. Austria and Denmark also did the same. Britain’s government on Monday scrambled to find ways to help the country’s ailing banking sector and even considered a partial nationalization of the industry. The chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, continued to consult with advisers on Monday on ways to stabilize the banking sector, which may include a recapitalization financed by taxpayers, said a person at the Treasury who declined to be identified because the discussions were private. Stocks fell sharply on Monday in London, Paris and Frankfurt. New bailouts were arranged late Sunday for two European companies, Hypo Real Estate, a large German mortgage lender, and Fortis, a large banking and insurance company based in Belgium but active across much of the Continent. Under the agreement, BNP Paribas will acquire the Belgium and Luxembourg banking operations of Fortis for about $20 billion. The spreading worries came days after the United States Congress approved a $700 billion bailout package that officials had hoped would calm financial markets globally. The crisis in Europe appears to be the most serious one to face the Continent since a common currency, the euro, was created in 1999. Jean Pisani-Ferry, director of the Bruegel research group in Brussels, said Europe confronted “our first real financial crisis, and it’s not just any crisis. It’s a big one.” Britain is coming under increasing pressure to act. Some investors criticized the government for failing to set up an American-style rescue fund and for its piecemeal approach to deal with each problem. “The government needs to get on their front foot and get control of their own destiny,” Mr. Chillingworth said. “We could well be in a period where we see a quasi-nationalization in the banking sector, where taxpayers are taking equity stakes.” Britain partly nationalized Bradford & Bingley last week after the mortgage lender struggled to get financing and brokered a takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB after its shares lost most of its value. From Tuesday, the government will also increase the amount of retail deposits it guarantees to £50,000, or $88,600, from £35,000. Some analysts said guaranteeing deposits might reinstate client confidence but would fall short of bringing back the trust among banks that is desperately needed to encourage them to lend to each other. British banks remain burdened by their exposure to worthless mortgage assets, but the larger problem remains their unwillingness to lend to one another — even after an injection of £40 billion by the Bank of England. “Liquidity is drying up,” said Richard Portes, a professor of economics at the London Business School. “The authorities have to deal with this paralysis in the money markets.” The European Central Bank has aggressively lent money to banks as the crisis has grown. It had resisted lowering interest rates, but signaled on Thursday that it might cut rates soon. The extra money, aimed at ensuring that banks have adequate access to cash, has not reassured savers or investors, and European stock markets have performed even worse than the American markets. In Iceland, government officials and banking chiefs were discussing a possible rescue plan for the country’s commercial banks. In Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, appeared on television Sunday to promise that all bank deposits would be protected, although it was not clear whether legislation would be needed to make that promise good. Mindful of the rising public anger at the use of public money to buttress the business of high-earning bankers, Ms. Merkel promised a day of reckoning for them as well. “We are also saying that those who engaged in irresponsible behavior will be held responsible,” she said. The events in Berlin and Brussels underscored the failure of Europe’s case-by-case approach to restoring confidence in the Continent’s increasingly jittery banking sector. A meeting of European heads of state in Paris on Saturday did little to calm worries, though officials there pledged to work together to ensure market stability. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and his counterparts from Germany, Britain and Italy vowed to prevent a Lehman Brothers-like bankruptcy in Europe but they did not offer a sweeping American-style bailout package. The growing crisis has underlined the difficulty of taking concerted action in Europe because its economies are far more integrated than its governing structures. “We are not a political federation,” Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, said after the meeting. “We do not have a federal budget.” Last week, Ireland moved to guarantee both deposits and other liabilities at six major banks. There was grumbling in London and Berlin about the move giving those banks an unfair advantage. But Germany proposed its deposit guarantee Sunday after Britain raised its guarantee. The German officials emphasized that the guarantee applied only to private depositors, not to the banks themselves. But on Monday, Mr. Steinbrück said the government was considering an “umbrella” to protect the banking sector. Unlike in the United States, where deposits are now fully guaranteed up to a limit of $250,000 — a figure that was raised from $100,000 last week — deposits in most European countries have been only partly guaranteed, sometimes by groups of banks rather than governments. In Germany, the first 90 percent of deposits up to 20,000 euros, or about $27,000, was guaranteed. Even before the Paris meeting began it was becoming clear that two bailouts announced the week before had not succeeded and that UniCredit, a major Italian bank, might be in trouble. UniCredit announced plans on Sunday to raise as much as 6.6 billion euros. Fortis, which only a week ago received 11.2 billion euros from the governments of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, was unable to continue its operations. On Friday, the Dutch government seized its operations in that country, and late Sunday night the Belgian government helped to arrange for BNP Paribas, the French bank, to take control of the company for 14.5 billion euros, or about $20 billion. In Berlin, the government arranged a week ago for major banks to lend 35 billion euros to Hypo Real Estate, but that fell apart when the banks concluded that far more money would be needed. Late Sunday night the government said a package of 50 billion euros had been arranged, with both the government and other banks taking part. The credit crisis began in the United States, a fact that has led European politicians to assert superiority for their countries’ financial systems, in contrast to what Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, called the “speculative capitalism” of the United States. On Saturday, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, said the crisis “has come from America,” and Mr. Berlusconi bemoaned the lack of business ethics that had been exposed by the crisis. Many of the European banks’ problems have stemmed from bad loans in Europe, and Fortis got into trouble in part by borrowing money to make a major acquisition. But activities in the United States have played a role. Bankers said Sunday that the need for additional money at Hypo came from newly discovered guarantees it had issued to back American municipal bonds that it had sold to investors. The credit market worries came on top of heightening concerns about economic growth in Europe and the United States. “Unless there is a material easing of credit conditions,” said Bob Elliott of Bridgewater Associates, an American money management firm, after retail sales figures were announced, “it is unlikely that demand will turn around soon.” Henry M. Paulson Jr., the United States Treasury secretary, hoped that approval of the American bailout, which involved buying securities from banks at more than their current market value, would free up credit by making cash available for banks to lend and by reassuring participants in the credit markets. But that did not happen last week. Instead, credit grew more expensive and harder to get as investors became more skittish about buying commercial paper, essentially short-term loans to companies. Rates on such loans rose so fast that some feared the market could essentially close, leaving it to already-stressed banks to provide short-term corporate loans. Europe’s need to scramble is in part the legacy of a decision to establish the euro, which 15 countries now use, but not follow up with a parallel system of cross-border regulation and oversight of private banks. “First we had economic integration, then we had monetary integration,” said Sylvester Eijffinger, a member of the monetary expert panel advising the European Parliament. “But we never developed the parallel political and regulatory integration that would allow us to face a crisis like the one we are facing today.” In Brussels, Daniel Gros, director of the Center for European Policy Studies, agreed. “Maybe they will be shocked into thinking more strategically instead of running behind events,” he said. “The later you come, the higher the bill.” While the European Central Bank has power over interest rates and broader monetary policy, it was never granted parallel oversight of private banks, leaving that task to dozens of regulators across the Continent. This patchwork system includes national central banks in each of the euro zone’s 15 members and they still retain broad powers within their own borders, further complicating any regional approach to problem-solving. “The European banking landscape was transformed fairly recently,” Mr. Pisani-Ferry said. “When the euro was first introduced, the question of cross-border regulation didn’t really arise.” Optimists say one potential long-term benefit from the current turmoil is that it often takes a crisis to propel European integration forward. “Progress in Europe is usually the result of a crisis,” Mr. Eijffinger said. “This could be one of those rare moments in E.U. history.”

No surprise here: Harper remains fiscally off balance with Quebec JEFFREY SIMPSON September 24, 2008 at 11:00 PM EDT Right there, in bold type on page 144 of the 2007 budget, the Harper government declared: "Fiscal Balance Has Been Restored." Everywhere Prime Minister Stephen Harper goes in Quebec - the issue being of interest only in that province - he affirms that "we solved the problem of the fiscal imbalance." His Quebec ministers repeat the mantra; his candidates hammer home the message. The inference: Vote for us because we handed over all that money to Quebec (and the other provinces), just as we promised in the 2006 campaign. Case closed. Except that, as anyone with the slightest sense of Quebec could have predicted, the appetite there only grows with the eating. "The fiscal imbalance, according to us, is not yet solved," proclaims Quebec Finance Minister Monique Jérôme-Forget. Things are much better, she acknowledges. But, "is it finished?" she asks. "No." Quebec Premier Jean Charest also insists more money is needed to "solve" the problem. And, by the way, how about handing over all money and federal jurisdiction over "culture and communications," so that Quebec can achieve "cultural sovereignty"? And, while you're at it, Mr. Harper, hurry up with that promise to eliminate Ottawa's power to spend any money in areas of provincial jurisdiction. Mr. Charest has learned the ways of a Quebec premier. Always demand. Never be satisfied. Keep the heat on. Position yourself as the "defender" of Quebec's interests. Insist on more money and power from Ottawa. Mr. Harper ought to have seen this coming. No federal prime minister can ever out-national the nationalists, and none can ever satisfy any premier, at least not for long. As a result, he and Mr. Charest are no longer political allies, because it does not suit Mr. Charest to be other than a demandeur. Instead, the Action Démocratique has become the Conservatives' closest political ally in Quebec, especially in the rural and small-town ridings the Conservatives target. This is the crowd that whipped up alarm over immigration. This is the party that wants a separate constitution for Quebec, talks always of "autonomy" for Quebec, wants Quebec citizenship, demands a massive transfer of power (and money, of course) from Ottawa to Quebec, and sees Canada as a very loose association of two states. Mr. Harper has never repudiated any of these demands/statements from his erstwhile allies. Mr. Harper, as is his wont, plays with slippery language in Quebec, often using the word "autonomy." Of course, he reminds everyone that he got passed the resolution describing the Québécois as a "nation" within Canada. And he brags about having "solved" the "fiscal imbalance." These ADQ/Conservative voters are exactly those for whom artists whining about cuts to their subsidies are figures of scorn. The brouhaha about Mr. Harper's $46-million in cuts to the arts goes right over their heads, or even fires them up more to support the Conservatives. Mr. Harper says his government has increased cultural spending by 8 per cent. Where he gets that number from is unknown. He did increase the Canada Council's budget over two years by $50-million, and he put $60-million into "local arts and festivals" in the 2007 budget. But the biggest increase this year was for the Francophone Summit in Quebec City, which will happen just after the election - $38-million in 2008 and $13-million in 2007. Is that culture? The $46-million cut is a drop in the bucket of the tens of billions transferred to Quebec and the other provinces to "solve" the fiscal imbalance. The attention being paid to it represents a classic example of the urgent but minor driving out the huge and important. The whole fiscal imbalance was an invention that became a mythology in Quebec: Big, bad, fat Ottawa was rolling in dough, while the poor, beleaguered provinces had too little. A commission, established under the separatist government, produced a sum it claimed would resolve the problem. But even after the Paul Martin government transferred a larger sum than the commission had demanded, the mythology held. Still more was required to solve the "problem," claimed Quebec and those provinces that clung to Quebec's coattails. Mr. Harper, fishing for votes in Quebec and desirous of slimming the federal government anyway, obliged with a cool $40-billion in transfers. "We have solved the fiscal imbalance," he proclaimed. Nice try.

Let us decide its own cultural priorities, Charest says Quebec premier calls for reversal of arts funding cuts KEVIN DOUGHERTY, The Gazette Published: 8 hours ago (The Gazette)

Time to protect the 'green lace doily' of Montreal, environmentalists say Coalition is pressing Quebec to create a provincial park joining endangered lands MICHELLE LALONDE, The Gazette Published: 10 hours ago Environmental groups across southwestern Quebec are ratcheting up the pressure on the Quebec government to create a new kind of provincial park to stop the rapid destruction of forests, wetlands, islands and other natural spaces around Montreal. Fifty-five groups have united behind the innovative project to create the Montreal Archipelago Ecological Park, Montreal's answer to the "green belts" other Canadian cities have established to stop urban sprawl, combat climate change and preserve nearby natural green space. "We don't call it a green belt, though, it's more like a green lace doily," said David Fletcher, a spokesperson for the new coalition calling itself Partners for the Montreal Archipelago Ecological Park. The ship has sailed long ago on creating a true green belt around Montreal, since the island is surrounded by rapidly growing suburbs. But environmental groups say it would be possible for the province to legislate as protected the remaining forests, shorelines, wetlands and other natural spaces on Montreal Island and Laval's Île Jésus, as well as a number of undeveloped islands in the region. The groups want to see this "green doily" of remaining natural lands protected with the same status as a provincial park, or what the Quebec government refers to as a national park. The government has made repeated international commitments to protect at least eight per cent of its territory, ensuring that the protected areas reflect the biological diversity of the province. While the government has recently created some new conservation areas in northern Quebec, Fletcher says nothing is being done to protect southwestern Quebec, an ecologically rich domain that biodiversity experts refer to as the sugar maple bitternut hickory bioclimatic domain. Less than four per cent of this domain, which stretches from the lower Laurentians to the U.S. border, is protected from development. "The tough job that needs to be done is down here, where half the people of Quebec live, and this is is simply being ignored." Although former Liberal environment minister Thomas Mulcair had expressed enthusiasm for the park project, current minister Line Beauchamp has been at best lukewarm. In a recent letter to the project's proponents, responding to their request for support, an Environment Department official suggested the protection of these lands is a municipal and regional responsibility. "I share your concerns about the protection of biodiversity in southern Quebec, where we find a great richness of species and ecosystems, both land-based and aquatic," wrote Patrick Beauchesne, director of ecological heritage and parks in the Environment Department. But Beauchesne went on to suggest that municipalities are responsible for zoning of privately owned urban land, and did not offer support. Fletcher said his group is determined to take the debate to the National Assembly. Members of his group met last week with Mulcair, now an NDP member of Parliament, and with Parti Québécois environment critic Camil Bouchard. "The political establishment has to get behind this project," Fletcher said. "Quebec has (biodiversity) commitments that are international. ... Now it's time to move from statements of principle to action." mlalonde@ thegazette.canwest.com

August 7, 2008 VIA plans to invest $25 million to modernize Ottawa-Montreal railway infrastructure MONTREAL As part of the Government of Canada’s $692 million dollar investment to improve passenger rail service, VIA Rail Canada has announced it plans to invest more than $25 million on a multi-phase, multi-year program to modernize key parts of its rail infrastructure between Ottawa and Montréal. These improvements are part of VIA Rail’s overall capital investment plan. In this first phase, upgrades to the Ottawa-Montréal line will include the addition of a .76-km long passing track (siding) approximately 16 kilometres east of Ottawa, near Carlsbad Springs, a project which will be carried out by PNR RailWorks Inc. The siding will be constructed with remote-controlled power switches tied into the existing Centralized Traffic Control (CTC) system and Rail Traffic Control (RTC) dispatch system. The siding will also be equipped with a back track (additional track adjacent to the siding) for the storage of maintenance equipment, when required. VIA will also be installing new continuously-welded rail and performing other associated track work over some 40 track-miles between Coteau, Québec and Moose Creek, Ontario. This work, which is expected to be completed within the next few months, will be carried out by Total Track. Some trains on the Montréal-Ottawa route may experience minor delays while this work is being completed. Additionally, structural rehabilitation of the bridge over the South Nation River in Casselman, a project which has been awarded to SEMA Railway Structures, will also be completed. Improvements to VIA’s Ottawa station are also planned. VIA will be modernizing and improving the layout of the public washrooms, ticket office, baggage operations and Panorama (VIA 1) lounge. The lounge will also be enlarged to accommodate increased demand. As part of these renovations, VIA will be making both technological and environmental improvements to the station. The general contractor chosen for the project is Terlin Construction Ltd. of Ottawa. CSV Architects Inc. and Norr Ltd., also of Ottawa, will provide design and engineering support. Work on this project, worth some $500,000, will begin shortly and is expected to be completed by this fall. “These initiatives will improve comfort, speed, ride quality and reliability,” said VIA Rail president and chief executive officer Paul Côté. “They will also enhance overall safety, and increase scheduling flexibility and capacity for additional trains. Just as importantly”, he noted, “a more efficient operation will also contribute to reductions in fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.” “The projects on VIA’s Montréal-Ottawa route are part of the $692 million in new funding this government announced in 2007 as part of its commitment to providing Canadians with safe, reliable and sustainable passenger rail service,” said federal Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon.

New statistics from Citizenship and Immigration Canada suggests that mid-sized cities are beginning to attract an increasing number of immigrants due in large part to shifting economic and employment prospects. Government initiatives such as the provincial nominee program that allows provinces to select immigrants to fill specific labour needs; and the development of tools that help smaller centres draw and retain immigrants are some of the reasons attributed to his recent shift. In addition, a booming economy in Western Canada has lead to a surge of newcomers migrating to more rural areas thanks to the provincial nominee and family nominee programs enacted by the Government. The figures show the number of immigrants taking up residence in Toronto dropped to 87,136 last year from 99,293 a year earlier, a decline of roughly 12 per cent, while the number coming to Vancouver slipped to 32,920 from 36,273, a drop of just over nine per cent. Montreal was up slightly to 38,710 from 38,391. Meanwhile, Charlottetown was up 73 per cent to 801, Moncton 31 per cent to 343, Saskatoon 40 per cent to 1,618, Winnipeg 10 per cent to 8,472 and Red Deer 93 per cent to 567. It was a mixed picture in British Columbia's smaller centres, with gains in Kelowna, Chilliwack, Nanaimo and Victoria and declines in Kamloops, Abbotsford and Prince George. Despite these facts the preferred destination for the vast majority of immigrants are the larger cities, with 67 per cent of newcomers calling them home. The main reason for this is that larger cities tend to offer an established community of family and friends and a greater number of economic opportunities -- either low-skilled jobs that require few language skills or businesses that cater to particular ethnic groups. Interestingly, studies have shown that immigrants who settle in larger cities experience labour market advantages over those who settle in smaller cities and they can earn substantially more. Nevertheless, immigrants have begun to appreciate the advantages of living in a smaller city, away from the congestion, pollution, noise and stress of the big city. Many newcomers enjoy the smaller cities precisely because they are so different from the chaos, traffic and pollution of large cities. If you are interested in Visas to Canada, contact Migration Expert for information and advice on which visa is best suited to you. You can also try our visa eligibility assessment to see if you are eligible to apply for a visa to Canada. http://www.migrationexpert.com/Canada/visa/canadian_immigration_news/2008/Aug/0/538/Immigrants_Flocking_to_Canada's_Smaller_Cities_Where_Job_Growth_is_Strongest

Ontario: the Province that thinks it's Canada Amid regional grievances, McGuinty fights for a fair share of taxpayers' dollars MURRAY CAMPBELL From Saturday's Globe and Mail August 2, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT Dalton McGuinty was doing a favour for reporters afflicted with summer-brain stupor. “Here's the news,” the Ontario Premier said, helpfully, after a speech late last month. “Ontarians are coming together to more effectively assert themselves in the face of an unfairness caused by the financial arrangements between us and Ottawa.” Indeed, it would be news if this coming-together was actually happening, and it would be momentous given the suggestion by the federal government this week that it is prepared to shift some economic powers to the provinces. But the residents of Canada's most populous province do not have an unbroken history of rising up as one to take on the federal government. Ontario is not Alberta, and the philosophy that provincial rights should be paramount has always had to compete with a powerful sense that Canada comes first. Mr. McGuinty embodies this duality. For more than three years, he has wasted few opportunities to make his claim that Ontario is being treated unfairly in Confederation because it receives, by the latest estimate, about $20-billion less in services from federal government than its taxpayers remit to Ottawa. He criticizes the federal equalization program – financed predominantly by Ontario taxpayers – for redistributing money to provinces that are more prosperous than his. He takes issue with health and other transfer payments that are less generous than those given to other provinces. And he asks why an unemployed worker in Ontario is treated more severely than in the rest of the country and why the Harper government wants to leave the province under-represented in the Commons. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty gestures during his public lecture 'Ontario's Place in the 21st century' at the London School of Economics and Political Science in London, Monday, May 19, 2008. Hanging over all this is the feeling in Ontario that the 1988 U.S. free-trade pact broke the bargain of Confederation in which Canadians bought their manufactured goods from Ontario in return for a recycling of some of its wealth through programs such as equalization. The Premier is always careful to say that he is a proud Canadian and that he understands his province has been blessed by geography and circumstances that give it a responsibility to share its wealth. But the Premier's sustained effort – reflected in his website fairness.ca – suggests a growing sense of regionalism in Ontario. “My friends, it is time to stand up for our province, time to stand up for Ontario,” he said in his speech last month to the Chamber of Commerce in London, Ont. He suggested that lessons could be learned from other provinces that have gone mano-a-mano with federal administrations although he shied away from emulating Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams, who stormed out of one federal-provincial meeting in protest and then removed Canadian flags from provincial buildings. Ontarians who realize that Newfoundland has a much larger per-capita income than Ontario, thanks in part to $477-million in equalization payments this year may wish their Premier to be as aggressive. But while his tactics may be lower-key, Mr. McGuinty isn't going away. “It's becoming more and more urgent, and there's a continuing need to speak about it, because there hasn't been an appetite at the federal level to really engage in fixing the system,” said an official in the Premier's office. The question is whether Ontarians are likely to respond to his appeal or whether circumstances will transform Ontario into a province with a profound regional grievance. The trend line of estrangement from Ottawa suggests it is possible, but this has to be countered by the strong identification with Canada that Ontario residents have always shown. Mr. McGuinty recognizes other provinces will resent Ontario throwing its weight around. “There is a lazy caricature that is convenient for people, which people can resort to, which is that we're being greedy, we're being uncharitable, we're being un-Canadian,” he told the editorial board of The Globe and Mail in 2006. He also knows that talk of regionalism makes his voters uncomfortable. He is fond of comparing the province's role in Confederation to his own situation growing up as the eldest of 10 children. “My responsibility in the eyes of my parents could be summed up in one word: compliance,” he said in London. “Just be quiet and set a good example. Maybe there is a little bit of that to us here in Ontario.” Neither analysis deals completely with Ontario's complex, shifting history. The province had a very strong sense of identity right from the formation of Canada in 1867 but it also was proud that one of its own, John A. Macdonald, was its first prime minister. And Ontario was conscious that it owed its growing prosperity to the high-tariff walls erected as part of Macdonald's National Policy that sustained its manufacturing industries. But, as historian Randall White notes, long-serving premier Oliver Mowat (1872-1896) battled Macdonald for control of provincial resources (earning the nickname “the little tyrant”) and, later, both Howard Ferguson and Mitch Hepburn fought pitched battles with Ottawa over federal encroachment on provincial jurisdiction. Prevailing attitudes changed during the Second World War, which transformed Canada into a modern industrial state with Ontario at its centre. The postwar province was so diversified economically that it was touched by almost every federal policy. As Queen's University political economist Thomas Courchene has noted, “national policy had frequently had little choice but to be cast in a pro-Ontario light.” Leslie Frost believed that political relations had to reflect these economic ties. When he became Ontario's premier in 1949, he set about building a co-operative relationship with Ottawa. The province surrendered much of its taxing authority and agreed to the equalization scheme that vexes Mr. McGuinty. During Mr. Frost's 12 years in office, the old confrontations died away and the modern notion of Ontario as a helpful saviour of Confederation – exemplified by John Robarts' Confederation of Tomorrow conference in 1967 – took hold. So complete was this subsuming of Ontario's regional identity that historian Arthur Lower concluded in 1968 that the province had little collective will and asked in an article: “Does Ontario exist?” No one laughed and, indeed, historian Peter Oliver questioned seven years later why “anyone would attempt to write the history of a region which isn't.” Ontario was firmly by the federal government's side during the energy battles of the 1970s, supporting Ottawa's move, through the National Energy Program, to gain a larger share of Alberta's oil revenues. And Ontario forsook its old alliances with Quebec to side with the Trudeau government's push to patriate the Constitution and enact the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The MPs that Ontarians send to Ottawa are still more likely to represent the federal argument to Ontario than vice versa – Mr. McGuinty has found few allies in any federal government caucus – but MPPs at Queen's Park began to fall out of step in the 1980s. The Peterson government was impatient with Brian Mulroney's agenda of fiscal restraint and free trade. In particular, Ontario saw the free-trade pact with the United States – the end of the old National Policy – as evidence that Ottawa was promoting the rest of Canada at its expense. By the early 1990s, Bob Rae concluded that the country seemed to be “based on the premise that everyone else could speak ill of Ontario and that this inherently wealthy place would continue to bankroll Canada.” In a 1993 speech, he described Ontario as “the part of Canada that dare not speak its name.” Mr. McGuinty owes much to Mr. Rae's decision to engage a consulting firm to draft a cost-benefit analysis to buttress his belief that the structure of Confederation in the wake of the free-trade deal and cuts in transfer payments neglected Ontario. Mr. Rae's “fair shares federalism” argument is the precursor of the current premier's “fairness” campaign. Mr. Harris agreed that the structure of Confederation served Ontario ill. He, too, fought the federal government (often along with other premiers) on everything from employment insurance to the Kyoto greenhouse-gas protocol. But the federal government at the time was preoccupied with Quebec, after the wake of the 1995 referendum that narrowly kept that province in the country. The federal Liberals' stranglehold on Ontario gave Mr. Harris's Progressive Conservative government no allies on Parliament Hill and Ontario's fundamental objections remained. Mr. McGuinty has earned some concessions in the past three years but the broad-ranging reform of fiscal relations he is seeking eludes him. His efforts seem to resonate with voters who find the notion of a $20-billion “gap” easy to comprehend. One opinion poll earlier this year gave him two-to-one support over federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty in their war of words over Ontario's economic strategy. But will 13 million Ontarians find a will to act collectively and heed their Premier's call to arms? Mr. White concedes only that the province “is gradually recovering some sense of a regional identity it lost after the Second World War.” Mr. Courchene, too, is careful about predicting the future. “They're thinking of themselves as meriting better treatment from the federal government,” he said. “Does that make them a region? I don't know.” Certainly not in the way that Quebec is distinctive or the West feels it has been victimized by Bay Street and the NEP. It is also hard to define Ontario: The northwest feels closer to Manitoba and there is little identification with Toronto in the eastern part of the province. In addition, immigrants – and Ontario has been getting 125,000 or more a year – have only to look at their new passports to discern their allegiance. But circumstances may yet push Ontario into regional belligerence as the belief grows that the equalization program is unsustainable. Its taxpayers contribute 40 per cent of the cost of the scheme – $13.6-billion now, and growing by leaps and bounds – and this burden rises every year whether its economy grows or not. Conversely, while Alberta's oil revenues are part of the equation that determines payouts, the revenues themselves are off limits to the federal treasury. Mr. Courchene calculates that, partly as a result of this scheme, Ontario's per-capita revenues trail every other province. The prediction that Ontario will soon become a have-not province and qualify for payments that, absurdly, are largely funded by its own taxpayers casts a harsh light on the scheme's shortcomings. Mr. Courchene calls this prospect “fiscalamity,” and if Ontarians catch his drift Mr. McGuinty will have a blank cheque to throw some weight around. The eldest child may decide he's fed up with setting a good example and looking after the other kids.

La Gazette se permet un méga liste d'infrastructure en réparation et à venir. Je copie l'article ici, mais je vous averti, elle est longue cette liste. Source: http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=1250a439-510a-4947-8b97-ee3995f04682 What construction holiday? After years of infrastructure neglect, a quiet revolution is under way to overhaul Quebec's roads and bridges DAVID JOHNSTON The Gazette Saturday, August 02, 2008 This summer's construction holiday has turned out to be a holiday in name only. Sort of like the summer of 2008 so far. One image dominates. It is of the eastbound Highway 20, at the Turcot interchange. Orange pylons are configured into one giant funnel, forcing motorists into a single lane up through the interchange to the Ville Marie Expressway downtown. Why one lane? Because construction work is going on. During the construction break. The 41-year-old Turcot, slated for demolition over six years beginning next July, has been getting some geriatric care. The ensuing traffic bottlenecks have been stretching back the full length of the Turcot yards. Cue in frequent bursts of intense rain, and you get a picture of the summer of 2008. But it isn't just Montreal. It's the same in all of Quebec, as far as the supposed construction holiday is concerned. Normally, the drills and the jackhammers are silent during the last two weeks of July, and traffic flows freely. But not this year. Because after years of infrastructure neglect, a not-so-quiet revolution is under way, thanks to the Charest government and the federal infrastructure-support program conceived by the former federal Liberal government. An unprecedented $2.7 billion in provincial money and $3.2 billion overall is being spent on road and bridge infrastructure renewal in 1,800 locations throughout Quebec this year. "This is a record year for Quebec," said Nicole Ste-Marie of the Quebec Transport Department. But this is only the beginning of something much bigger. A three-year overhaul of the Mercier Bridge began in May. A six-year reconstruction of the entire Turcot interchange is to begin July next year. This fall, the first actual work on the proposed new Dorval interchange is expected to begin. And then there's the proposed new downtown-airport shuttle waiting in the planning wings. And that's just the western suburbs of Montreal. The Mohawks of Kahnawake saw all this coming. Five Mohawk firms are currently doing repair work on the Mercier. The local band council looked at the Mercier and Turcot projects and put two and two together and came to the realization that commuter traffic is going to be very difficult between the south side of the Mercier and downtown Montreal over the next six years. As a result, the band council has been lobbying for a commuter-rail station for Kahnawake on the Delson-Candiac line. "We're afraid a lot of our kids going into CEGEP and university in Montreal are going to look at the traffic and say, 'Well, forget about it,' " said Joe Delaronde, a band-council official. Dorval Mayor Edgar Rouleau said he has received assurances that measures will be taken to minimize disruption for motorists when the Dorval project gets under way. But he said Montreal has no choice but to move ahead with improving the state of the rail and road infrastructure serving the airport. Things aren't just bad; they're embarrassingly bad, he says. "Can you imagine? You come from Europe. You're finally out of the airport. You're in this taxi or bus, and you're stopped in traffic under the railway bridge (beside Dorval Circle) and you look up and you see screens to catch any concrete that might fall down on you." The September 2005 collapse of the de la Concorde Blvd. overpass in Laval, which killed five people, showed that the consequences of infrastructure neglect can be deadly. Since the Concorde incident, the provincial government has done a thorough review of Quebec's infrastructure and established new priorities for repairs and new undertakings. The Gazette today publishes a map describing 10 of the most important projects in and around the Montreal region, either under way or on the near time horizon. - - - 1. TURCOT INTERCHANGE Background: In June 2007, the provincial government announced a plan to tear down the elevated interchange and replace it over six years, beginning next summer, at a cost of $1.5 billion. Most of the new Turcot network will be built at surface level, although there will be a few elevated ramps - notably linking the new Highway 20 with the higher ground of the Décarie and Ville Marie Expressways. Highway 20 through the Turcot yards will be rebuilt more to the north, closer to the Falaise St. Jacques escarpment. That, in turn, will make the Turcot yards contiguous with adjoining industrial properties along the Lachine Canal, and make it more attractive for redevelopment. What's new: Various interchange ramps have been undergoing reinforcement work this summer, creating traffic bottlenecks. Provincial environmental hearings are likely to begin in the fall. The government has begun negotiations to buy land required to carry out the interchange modernization. Work is to begin next July. About 180 housing units are to be demolished. Tenants who are dislodged will receive at least three months' rent as compensation. 2. NOTRE DAME ST. E. Background: In development limbo since the late 1960s, a nine-kilometre stretch of Notre Dame St. E. was finally given the green light for modernization last November. A new "urban boulevard" was approved over the other option, a sunken Décarie Expressway-like highway. Quebec will pay $625 million of the $750-million cost, the city of Montreal $125 million. What's new: Public hearings were held last winter to work out operational details. As a result, changes were announced in May. Among other things, traffic-light synchronization will be altered to let traffic move with fewer red-light stops; one lane will be reserved for carpoolers; the entire nine-kilometre stretch will be subject to photo radar. Construction is to begin in October. 3. HIGHWAY 25 Background: Construction of a toll bridge between the Rivière des Prairies district of Montreal and the Duvernay district of Laval will link Highway 40 in Montreal to Highway 440 in Laval. In June 2007, the Quebec government announced a consortium headed by an engineering subsidiary of Macquarie Bank Ltd. of Australia had won the bidding to build and operate the $400-million bridge as a public-private partnership. The span is slated to open in 2011. Government regulations have set a $2.40 cap in 2011 dollars for a one-way trip over the bridge for an ordinary car, over the 35-year term of the PPP deal. What's new: Dynamite work took place in the spring on the Laval side of the proposed bridge. In June, environmental groups lost a court bid to shut down the project. On July 15, dynamiting took place on the Montreal side. In recent weeks, a lot of bridge materials have been delivered to the job site. 4. DORVAL Background: There are two projects on the horizon for Dorval. One is the proposed airport shuttle between downtown Montreal and Pierre Elliott Trudeau airport. The other is the Dorval Circle modernization. Both have been on the drawing board for more than a decade. What's new: The airport-shuttle project is stalled. Different levels of government are still trying to work out a financing agreement. All parties, however, agree that the shuttle is desirable and should have its own dedicated rail lines. So the plan is to eventually add two new rail lines north of Highway 20, parallel to existing CP and CN lines. But there is still no consensus on whether to use Central Station or Lucien L'Allier Station as the downtown terminal. Cost estimates vary from $600 million to $800 million. As for the Dorval Circle project, the provincial government passed a decree in December setting aside $210 million for the new interchange, to be known as Carrefour Dorval. The overhaul will see Trudeau airport connected to Highway 20 via a new link that will be reserved for airport traffic. The new link will pass in front of the Hilton Hotel and run through where the Budget Rent-a-Car property is now situated. It will rise over the rail lines situated between Budget and Highway 20 and connect to the highway near the Novartis building. Budget is to relocate to a new site under the plan. Highways 20 and 520 (Côte de Liesse Rd.) will also get new interchange connections. As for Dorval Circle itself, it will end up serving only local traffic. Highway 20 traffic between Pointe Claire and Lachine will continue to run over the circle in overpass fashion. Engineers are putting final touches to the Carrefour Dorval project and an official announcement is likely for the fall. Work could also begin this fall, sources say. 5. HIGHWAY 15 Background: Work began in April to completely rebuild the northbound Laurentian Autoroute lanes between Mirabel and St. Jérôme. The new surface will be done in concrete. The southbound lanes between the two towns were redone last summer. What's new: Work is proceeding on schedule and is expected to end Nov. 21. 6. HIGHWAY 13 Background: Work began in April to completely rebuild the southbound lanes of Highway 13 on Montreal Island between Highway 40 and the Mille Îles River. Work is also being done on the Louis Bisson Bridge that spans the river. Work on the northbound lanes between the 40 and the river was done last summer. What's new: Work is proceeding as planned. It is scheduled to end Sept. 30. 7. MERCIER BRIDGE Background: On June 16, the federal and provincial governments announced a plan to renovate the Mercier Bridge through November 2011. Work began in April. Federal officials said the Mercier modernization represents the largest bridge-repair project in Canadian history. Work is to be carried out in two phases, with a consortium of Mohawk firms doing $66 million of work in the first phase. Bidding will open next year for the second phase. What's new: In recent weeks, Mohawk ironworkers have been concentrating on the reinforcement of existing gusset plates under the bridge deck. They have also been installing new gusset plates. These plates support the joints where horizontal, vertical and diagonal beams meet. Later, ironworkers will bring in hydraulic jacks and start replacing individual rusted beams where necessary. About half of all the main diagonal support beams are to be replaced on the upstream bridge, which carries southbound traffic. This bridge opened in 1934. The downstream bridge, which carries northbound traffic, opened in 1963; no reinforcement work is required on it. Similarly, only the upstream span will be getting a new deck. All ramps linking the South Shore to both the 1934 and 1963 bridges are to be reinforced and given new decks. 8. HIGHWAY 35 Background: Progress has been slow with the longstanding plan to extend Highway 35 from St. Jean sur Richelieu to the Vermont border. Converting the 39-kilometre stretch of secondary Highway 133 south of St. Jean into a primary autoroute would finally give Montreal an expressway link to Interstate 89. What's new: Last August, the Quebec government passed a decree allowing for the agricultural dezoning required to carry out the project. The federal government has promised $57 million in infrastructure money for the $300-million project. A federal environmental assessment is being done. If, as expected, the process results in the feds giving the project a green light, preliminary land-preparation work could begin in October. 9. GALIPEAULT BRIDGE Background: Work began in May to rebuild the deck of the eastbound lanes and add a third lane to accommodate growing volumes of off-island commuter traffic. The Galipeault, like the Mercier Bridge, consists of two separate spans, side by side. The southern of the two, built in 1924, handles eastbound traffic between Île Perrot and Ste. Anne de Bellevue. The northern bridge, built in 1964, handles westbound traffic. While work on the southern bridge takes place, eastbound traffic is being diverted onto the northern span. What's new: Work is proceeding smoothly. 10. HIGHWAY 30 Background: After many delays, a plan to complete construction of the South Shore ring road was announced in the fall of 2006. There are two unfinished stretches to complete: a section through dezoned farm land between Candiac and Ste. Catherine, and a section between Châteauguay and the town of Vaudrueuil-Dorion. What's new: Work on the 13-kilometre Candiac-Ste. Catherine link began in early June after a political agreement was reached between the provincial government and the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake over how to proceed with settling a land-claim issue. As for the section west of Châteauguay, the government in late June announced that a Spanish-led consortium had won the bidding to build it as a part of a public-private partnership. A Canadian arm of the Spanish engineering firm Acciona won the competition. The 42-kilometre western link will see toll bridges built over the Beauharnois Canal and St. Lawrence River. Final details on the financing and construction are to be announced in September. The completed Highway 30 is expected to open in 2012. djohnston@thegazette.canwest.com

Tories looking for ways to cut gas price DANIEL LEBLANC Globe and Mail Update July 30, 2008 at 2:01 PM EDT LÉVIS, Que. — The Conservative Party will look over the next two days for ways to bring down the price of gas even though there is no room for major tax cuts, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said. Speaking to reporters Wednesday morning, Mr. Flaherty said his constituents have clearly told him about the impact of high gas prices on their household budgets in recent weeks. However, Mr. Flaherty cautioned that “this is a time of economic slowdown” and that his government has no plans to drastically change its course in coming months. “This is not a year for big new spending projects or big new tax reductions,” he said. Still, Mr. Flaherty said that the Conservative caucus will be exploring solutions to high gas prices at its current two-day meeting, including looking at a variety of tax measures that will be proposed by MPs. However, Mr. Flaherty shot down the notion that he could use $4-billion in revenue from a recent auction of wireless spectrum to send cheques directly to taxpayers to offset their heating bills. Mr. Flaherty said it is likely that a portion of the auction funds will be used to pay down the debt. “Our preference is to have structural change,” he said. “You can't spend your way out of a situation like this.” On law and order, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day showed that the Conservatives will continue to press for tough measures against criminals as a way to differentiate themselves from its political opponents. “We are alone on this,” Mr. Nicholson said, promising to toughen the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Mr. Day said his government is also looking to improve security in prisons, including getting rid of rules that prevent the government from forcing inmates to work or that hinder proper searches for drugs in prisons. On federal-provincial relations, Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon said his government will continue to foster the autonomy of the provincial governments in their areas of jurisdiction. Mr. Cannon, who is the Quebec lieutenant in the Harper government, said his party's position is clearly different from the Bloc Québécois's focus on sovereignty and the Liberal Party's centralizing view. “Our autonomy position as a political party is to respect the Constitution as it was written,” he said. Conservative MP Maxime Bernier also addressed reporters, saying he has nothing more to say about the controversy over his relationship with Julie Couillard, a woman who had relationships with a number of people tied to criminal biker gangs.

China's Olympic Nightmare What the Games Mean for Beijing's Future Elizabeth C. Economy and Adam Segal From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2008 ELIZABETH C. ECONOMY is C. V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. ADAM SEGAL is Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Of Related Interest On the night of July 13, 2001, tens of thousands of people poured into Tiananmen Square to celebrate the International Olympic Committee's decision to award the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing. Firecrackers exploded, flags flew high, and cars honked wildly. It was a moment to be savored. Chinese President Jiang Zemin and other leaders exhorted the crowds to work together to prepare for the Olympics. "Winning the host rights means winning the respect, trust, and favor of the international community," Wang Wei, a senior Beijing Olympic official, proclaimed. The official Xinhua News Agency reveled in the moment, calling the decision "another milestone in China's rising international status and a historical event in the great renaissance of the Chinese nation." Hosting the Olympics was supposed to be a chance for China's leaders to showcase the country's rapid economic growth and modernization to the rest of the world. Domestically, it provided an opportunity for the Chinese government to demonstrate the Communist Party's competence and affirm the country's status as a major power on equal footing with the West. And wrapping itself in the values of the Olympic movement gave China the chance to portray itself not only as a rising power but also as a "peace-loving" country. For much of the lead-up to the Olympics, Beijing succeeded in promoting just such a message. The process of preparing for the Games is tailor-made to display China's greatest political and economic strengths: the top-down mobilization of resources, the development and execution of grand-scale campaigns to reform public behavior, and the ability to attract foreign interest and investment to one of the world's brightest new centers of culture and business. Mobilizing massive resources for large infrastructure projects comes easily to China. Throughout history, China's leaders have drawn on the ingenuity of China's massive population to realize some of the world's most spectacular construction projects, the Great Wall, the Grand Canal, and the Three Gorges Dam among them. The Olympic construction spree has been no different. Beijing has built 19 new venues for the events, doubled the capacity of the subway, and added a new terminal to the airport. Neighborhoods throughout the city have been either spruced up to prepare for Olympic visitors or simply cleared out to make room for new Olympic sites. Official government spending for the construction bonanza is nearing $40 billion. In anticipation of the Olympics, the government has also embarked on a series of efforts to transform individual behavior and modernize the capital city. It has launched etiquette campaigns forbidding spitting, smoking, littering, and cutting in lines and introduced programs to teach English to cab drivers, police officers, hotel workers, and waiters. City officials have used Olympic projects as a means to refurbish decaying buildings and reduce air pollution, water shortages, and traffic jams. Yet even as Beijing has worked tirelessly to ensure the most impressive of Olympic spectacles, it is clear that the Games have come to highlight not only the awesome achievements of the country but also the grave shortcomings of the current regime. Few in the central leadership seem to have anticipated the extent to which the Olympic Games would stoke the persistent political challenges to the legitimacy of the Communist Party and the stability of the country. Demands for political liberalization, greater autonomy for Tibet, increased pressure on Sudan, better environmental protection, and an improved product-safety record now threaten to put a damper on the country's coming-out party. As the Olympic torch circled the globe with legions of protesters in tow, Beijing's Olympic dream quickly turned into a public-relations nightmare. Although the Chinese government excels when it comes to infrastructure projects, its record is poor when it comes to transparency, official accountability, and the rule of law. It has responded clumsily to internal and external political challenges -- by initially ignoring the international community's desire for China to play a more active role in resolving the human rights crisis in Darfur, arresting prominent Chinese political activists, and cracking down violently on demonstrators. Although there is no organized opposition unified around this set of demands, the cacophony of voices pressuring China to change its policies has taken much of the luster off of the Beijing Games. Moreover, although the Communist Party has gained domestic support from the nationalist backlash that has arisen in response to the Tibetan protesters and their supporters in the West, it also worries that this public anger will spin out of control, further damaging the country's international reputation. Already, China's coveted image as a responsible rising power has been tarnished. For many in the international community, it has now become impossible to separate the competing narratives of China's awe-inspiring development and its poor record on human rights and the environment. It is no longer possible to discuss China's future without taking its internal fault lines seriously. For the Chinese government, the stakes are huge. China's credibility as a global leader, its potential as a model for the developing world, and its position as an emerging center of global business and culture are all at risk if these political challenges cannot be peacefully and successfully addressed. TIANANMEN'S GHOSTS Nothing has threatened to ruin China's Olympic moment as much as criticism of the country's repressive political system. China lost its bid for the 2000 Summer Olympics to Sydney, Australia, at least in part because of the memory of the violent Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 1989. When China made its bid for the 2008 Games, Liu Jingmin, vice president of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee, argued, "By allowing Beijing to host the Games, you will help the development of human rights." François Carrard, director general of the International Olympic Committee, warily supported such a sentiment: acknowledging the seriousness of China's human rights violations, he nonetheless explained, "We are taking the bet that seven years from now ... we shall see many changes." Few would place such a bet today. For months, human rights activists, democracy advocates, and ethnic minorities in China have been pressuring the government to demonstrate its commitment to greater political freedom. For many of them, the Olympics highlight the yawning gap between the very attractive face that Beijing presents to the world and the much uglier political reality at home. Exactly one year before the Olympics, a group of 40 prominent Chinese democracy supporters posted an open letter online denouncing the Olympic glitz and glamour. "We know too well how these glories are built on the ruins of the lives of ordinary people, on the forced removal of urban migrants, and on the sufferings of victims of brutal land grabbing, forced eviction, exploitation of labor, and arbitrary detention," they wrote. "All this violates the Olympic spirit." Even Ai Weiwei, an artistic consultant for Beijing's signature "Bird's Nest" stadium, has been critical of the Chinese government. He declared in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, "The government wants to use these games to celebrate itself and its policy of opening up China .... By now, it has become clear to me that this hope of liberalization cannot be fulfilled .... The system won't allow it." Protests have arisen around virtually every Olympic Games in recent history, but Beijing, with its authoritarian political system, is uniquely threatened by dissenting voices, and it has responded with a traditional mix of intimidation, imprisonment, and violent repression. Teng Biao, a lawyer and human rights activist, was seized in March 2008, held by plainclothes police for two days, and warned to stop writing critically about the Olympics. Yang Chunlin, a land-rights activist, was arrested for inciting subversion because he had gathered more than 10,000 signatures from farmers whose property had been expropriated by officials for development projects. After a 20-minute trial, he was sentenced to five years in prison. In April, the HIV/AIDS activist Hu Jia, who was also one of the authors of the open letter, was sentenced to three and a half years in jail for subversion, after being held under house arrest for several months along with his wife and baby daughter. Although the vast majority of Chinese are probably unaware of these protests and arrests, Beijing's overreaction demonstrates how fearful the Chinese government is that any dissent or protests could garner broader political support and threaten the party's authority. CRASHING THE PARTY The international community has also raised its own human rights concerns. For more than a year, China has endured heightened scrutiny of its close economic and political ties to Sudan. A coalition of U.S. celebrities and international human rights activists has ratcheted up the pressure on Beijing to do more to help bring an end to the atrocities in Darfur, labeling the 2008 Olympics "the genocide Olympics." The very public attention they have brought to China's relations with the Sudanese government prompted the movie director Steven Spielberg to withdraw as the artistic adviser for the opening and closing ceremonies for the Games. It also seems to have had some effect on Beijing, which now strives to appear as if it is placing more pressure on Khartoum. The Chinese government's questionable human rights record has received even more scrutiny since its violent suppression of Tibetan demonstrators in the spring. In March, Tibetan Buddhist monks marched to commemorate the 49th anniversary of Tibet's failed independence uprising and to call for greater autonomy for Tibet and the return of their exiled religious leader, the Dalai Lama. The demonstrations soon escalated into violent protests. Chinese police forcefully cracked down on the protesters in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and throughout other Tibetan areas of western China, leaving more than a hundred dead and injuring hundreds more. Ignoring international calls for restraint, Beijing closed off much of the affected region, detained or expelled foreign journalists from the area, and created a "most wanted" list of Tibetan protesters. All independent sources of news, including broadcasts by foreign television stations and YouTube videos, were blacked out in China, and text messages in and out of Tibet were filtered. Vitriolic government propaganda condemned the Dalai Lama as a "wolf in monk's robes" and a "devil with a human face but the heart of a beast." Chinese officials accused the "evil Dalai clique" of attempting to restore "feudalist serfdom" in the region and called for a "people's war" against it. The international community immediately condemned the crackdown and called for Beijing to resume negotiations with representatives of the Dalai Lama. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Czech President Václav Klaus, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk have since announced that they will not be attending the Olympics' opening ceremonies. As the Olympic torch made its way across the globe, the number of protesters along its path ballooned, from a few in Athens to thousands in London, Paris, San Francisco, and Seoul. These large-scale disruptions of Olympic pageantry humiliated the Chinese government and angered Chinese citizens, producing a wave of nationalist counterdemonstrations by Chinese living abroad and millions of virulent anti-Western posts on Chinese Web sites. A bit more than a month after Beijing's initial crackdown, senior Chinese leaders indicated a willingness to meet with the Dalai Lama's envoys. But this does not represent a fundamental shift in policy; it is merely a stopgap measure designed to quell the international outrage. WAITING TO INHALE Although some foreign athletes have joined the chorus of China's critics, the more immediate concern for many Olympians will be whether Beijing can ensure clean air and safe food for the duration of the Games. The city has reportedly spent as much as $16 billion to deliver a "green Olympics"; many of the Olympic sites showcase a number of clean-energy and water-conservation technologies, and for the past seven years the city has been shutting down many of the biggest polluters and steadily weaning the city's energy infrastructure off coal, replacing it with natural gas. On February 26, senior Chinese officials formally announced a more sweeping effort, including restrictions on heavy industry in five neighboring provinces surrounding Beijing, a ban on construction in the months immediately preceding the Olympics, and plans to compensate car owners for staying off the road during the Games. But pollution levels in Beijing are still far above average. On a typical day, the city's air pollution is three times as bad as the standard deemed safe by the World Health Organization. Last August, an air-quality test revealed that pollution levels in the city had barely improved despite one-third of the cars having been removed from the city's roads. Even some senior Chinese officials have reservations about the prospects for a green Olympics. The mayor of Beijing, Guo Jinlong, admitted in early 2008 that bringing traffic and environmental pollution under control by the time the Games begin would be an "arduous" task. After all, there are few economic incentives for businesses to reduce pollution; the central government routinely calls on local officials and businesses to clean up their act to no effect. Many factory managers have agreed to slow production during the Olympics but not to shut down. In the brutally competitive Chinese economy, closing factories for several weeks could well spell the end of those enterprises unless the government provides significant financial compensation. Meanwhile, corruption flourishes, and local officials openly flout environmental laws and regulations. In January 2008, it was revealed by a Western environmental consultant, Steven Andrews, that officials in Beijing's Environmental Protection Bureau had for several years been skewing the city's air-quality data by eliminating readings from some monitoring stations in heavily congested areas. Faced with the prospect of dangerously high levels of air pollution during the Games, International Olympic Committee officials have warned that competition in endurance sports, such as the marathon and long-distance cycling, might be postponed or even canceled. The world's fastest marathon runner, Haile Gebrselassie, has already withdrawn from the Olympic race for fear that air pollution might permanently damage his health. Many athletes are planning to take precautions, such as arriving in Beijing as late as possible, coming well equipped with medication for possible asthma attacks, and wearing masks once there. Beijing's capacity to provide safe food and clean water for the athletes is also in question. In the past year, China has endured a rash of scandals involving food tainted with steroids and insecticides, and as much as half of the bottled water in Beijing does not meet potable-water standards. Some teams, such as the United States' and Australia's, have announced that they will be bringing some or all of their own food and that their bottled water will be supplied by Coca-Cola. Olympic officials have put in place a massive food-security apparatus that will track the athletes' food from the producers and distributors to the Olympic Village. Having promised a safe and green Olympics, Beijing must now deliver. Otherwise, it risks irrevocably damaging the historic legacy of the 2008 Games. BEIJING'S BLIND SPOT Beijing's failure to respond creatively to its critics and effectively manage its environmental and product-safety issues reveals a certain political myopia. China's leaders have long been aware that opponents of the regime would try to disrupt the Olympics. They prepared extensively for disturbances by developing a citywide network of surveillance cameras and training, outfitting, and deploying riot squads and other special police. They also made some attempts to defuse international hostility, such as offering to renew the human rights dialogue with Washington that was suspended in 2004 and publicly pressuring Khartoum to accept a joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping force. But Beijing has been unable to counter the images emanating from Darfur and Tibet. Chinese leaders simply saw no relationship between the pageantry of the Olympics and Tibet, Sudan, or broader human rights concerns, and they never figured out how to engage and disarm those who did. They continue to fail in this regard. As a result, tensions will run high until the end of the Games. There are also real worries that with the spotlight focused on Beijing during the Games, some of the opposition to the regime could take an extreme form. For example, Chinese security forces have expressed concern that activists from the religious movement Falun Gong might attempt to immolate themselves in Tiananmen Square. Because of such concerns, the 30,000 journalists covering the Games may find themselves straitjacketed when reporting on controversial stories. And despite recent assurances that a live feed from Beijing will be allowed and that the Internet will be uncensored in China, the government has yet to fulfill its promise to allow foreign journalists unfettered access throughout the country. The Chinese public is already angry about what it sees as a pervasive bias toward Tibet and disrespect of China in the Western media. Chinese citizens are likely to view any disturbances of the Games as an effort to embarrass the country and undermine China's rise. Foreign media, corporations, and governments might all bear the brunt of the sort of nationalist backlash that the French retailer Carrefour endured -- in the form of a consumer boycott -- in the wake of the disrupted torch ceremony in Paris. The combination of demonstrators desperate for the world's attention and the heightened nationalism of Chinese citizens makes for an extremely combustible situation. The official Beijing Olympic motto of "One World, One Dream" suggests an easy cosmopolitanism, but Chinese nationalist sentiment will be running high during the Games, stoked by the heat of competition. In the past, sporting events in China, in particular soccer matches against Japanese teams, have led to ugly riots, and the same could happen during the Olympics. If the Games do not go well, there will be infighting and blame shifting within the party's central leadership, and it will likely adopt a bunker mentality. Vice President Xi Jinping, the government's point man on the Olympics and President Hu Jintao's heir apparent, would likely face challenges to his presumed leadership. A poor outcome for the Games could engender another round of nationalist outbursts and Chinese citizens decrying what they see as racism, anti-Chinese bias, and a misguided sense of Western superiority. This inflamed form of Chinese nationalism could be the most enduring and dangerous outcome of the protests surrounding the Olympics. If the international community does not welcome China's rise, the Chinese people may ask themselves why China should be bound by its rules. As a result, Beijing may find the room it has for foreign policy maneuvering more restricted by public opinion. This form of heightened nationalism has occasionally hurt the Chinese government, as happened after a U.S. spy plane was shot down over China in 2001. When the crew was eventually released, an outraged Chinese public accused the government of weakness and kowtowing to the West. More recently, despite a decade of increasingly close economic, political, and cultural ties between Beijing and Seoul, South Koreans were outraged by the Chinese counterprotests during the Olympic torch ceremony; in response, the South Korean government imposed tight restrictions on the number of Chinese students permitted to study in the country. Sensing the potentially damaging consequences of a prolonged nationalist backlash, the official Chinese media began signaling in May that it was time for people to move on, focus on economic development, and steer clear of staging counterprotests and boycotting Western companies. The barrage of criticism China has endured prior to the Olympics may have brought a short-term gain in forcing the Chinese leadership to agree to meet with the Dalai Lama's envoys, but real reform of China's Tibet policy or a broader willingness to embrace domestic reforms is unlikely to follow in the near term. Nevertheless, the current controversy could yield positive results in the long run. Beijing's Olympic trials and tribulations could provoke soul searching among China's leaders and demonstrate to them that their hold on domestic stability and the country's continued rise depend on greater transparency and accountability and a broader commitment to human rights. Already, some Chinese bloggers, intellectuals, and journalists, such as Wang Lixiong and Chang Ping, have seized the moment to call for less nationalist rhetoric and more thoughtful engagement of outside criticism. The nationalist outburst has provided them with an opening to ask publicly how Chinese citizens can legitimately attack Western media organizations if their own government does not allow them to watch media outlets such as CNN and the BBC. Similarly, they have used the Olympics as a springboard to discuss the significance of Taiwan's thriving democracy for the mainland's own political future, the need for rethinking China's approach to Tibet, and the desirability of an open press. Whatever the longer-term implications of the 2008 Olympics, what has transpired thus far bears little resemblance to Beijing's dreams of Olympic glory. Rather than basking in the admiration of the world, China is beset by internal protests and international condemnation. The world is increasingly doubtful that Beijing will reform politically and become a responsible global actor. The Olympics were supposed to put these questions to bed, not raise them all anew. http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080701faessay87403-p0/elizabeth-c-economy-adam-segal/china-s-olympic-nightmare.html

Corn-based ethanol: The negatives outweigh the positives JEFFREY SIMPSON From Wednesday's Globe and Mail July 30, 2008 at 7:58 AM EDT Canada's governments have done something really stupid in subsidizing corn-based ethanol, and requiring its increased use, but apparently cannot correct their mistake. As a policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, corn-based ethanol is a poor option; as a farm subsidy program, it's also a poor bet. Making matters worse, corn-based ethanol takes corn-for-food out of production, and moves land from other kinds of production into corn, thereby adding to what are already rising food prices. Governments, here and in the U.S., thought they were doing great things for the environment and helping farmers, too. Ethanol policy was, to quote the Harper government, a "win-win." Actually, it was a lose-lose policy for all but corn producers, who, naturally enough, have rallied furiously to protect their good fortune. Many researchers have exposed the follies of subsidizing corn-based ethanol production, the latest being Douglas Auld, in an extremely well-documented paper for the C.D. Howe Institute. Mr. Auld has surveyed the research literature about the putatively beneficial effects of corn-based ethanol on replacing gasoline. The theory is that such ethanol produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline from a vehicle engine. Indeed, it does, but that simple statement ignores what energy is required to produce a litre of ethanol. When the so-called "lifecycle" of ethanol production is counted, Mr. Auld concludes (as have many others) that ethanol doesn't lower GHG outputs. Remember, too, that ethanol delivers less energy per litre than gasoline, so more litres of production are required to move a vehicle a certain distance. Mr. Auld, therefore, correctly concludes, "It is clear from the evidence to date that there is no consensus regarding the efficacy of corn-based ethanol either to reduce GHGs or reduce overall energy demands." But we aren't dealing with "evidence," rather with political optics from governments wanting to look "green" and from a desire to help farmers. And so, the Harper government replaced the previous special tax exemption for ethanol to a producer credit that will cost the country about $1.5-billion. To this sum were added loans, biofuel research grants plus mandatory ethanol content requirements. In other words, the government pushed up the supply of corn-based ethanol through subsidies, then pushed up the demand through regulation. Provinces got in on the act, offering producer credits and mandatory ethanol content requirements. Putting the provincial and federal policies together produced whopping advantages for ethanol of about $400-million a year. For such money, Canadians might expect at least some decline in greenhouse gas emissions. They will be disappointed. There will be few reductions, and Mr. Auld estimates that these might cost $368 a tonne - way, way higher than other per-tonne costs for eliminating carbon dioxide, the main climate-warming gas. By contrast, one part of the Harper government's proposed climate-change policy would see big companies that do not meet their intensity-based reduction targets paying $15 a tonne into a technology fund. World prices for carbon offsetting these days are about $30 a tonne. However, even if this form of ethanol is a climate-change bust, at least it's great for farmers. Not so fast. It's a boon to the corn producers, but to supply all the additional demand for ethanol, up to half the current farmland for corn will be used. As more land is diverted to corn for ethanol, there will be less corn for human and animal consumption. So whereas corn producers will gain, livestock producers will suffer. As their costs rise, so will the price of their products to consumers. It's wrong to blame the rush to ethanol for rising food prices here and abroad. Let's just say the rush contributes to the problem. Mr. Auld estimates that if you take the direct subsidies for ethanol production of $400-million a year, and add the costs of higher food to consumers, the wealth transfer to corn-based farmers could soon be about $800-million. It's the classic case of subsidies distorting markets: One group gains and mobilizes all of its resources to protect its gains, insisting these gains reflect the public good; whereas in reality almost everyone else loses but doesn't complain. So we have a silly policy with hundreds of millions of dollars going down the policy drain, achieving none of the objectives the politicians claimed.

(Courtesy of CBC News)

Has Canada slipped into recession without anyone noticing? July 16, 2008 - 6:35 pm By: Julian Beltrame, THE CANADIAN PRESS OTTAWA - Canada is within a hair's breadth of slipping into a technical recession, economists said Wednesday, a day after the outlook for the North American economy soured sharply. But they add that it won't seem like recessions of the past. In fact, says University of Toronto economist Peter Dungan, Canadians may already have lived through a technical recession - two quarters in a row of a shrinking economy - and not noticed. "Our forecast is there's a recession now," Dungan said. "There may be a slight revision to the first quarter, but the second (which ended June 30) is almost certainly negative. "This is nothing like the recessions we had in the early '90s and early '80s, however, when we had serious recessions and serious unemployment," he added. The early '80s recession came after two major oil price shocks in the 1970s that battered the North American economy and led to a restructuring of heavy industry, especially steel and autos, with the loss of millions of jobs. The early 1990s recession produced widespread bankruptcies in real estate and retail before growth resumed a few years earlier. Speaking in Calgary, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty expressed confidence that the economy would stay on the positive side of the ledger and insisted Ottawa won't fall into a deficit as a result of the slowdown. "We are on track in terms of our budget in Canada, that we will continue to run a surplus," he said, adding that the country's "strong fundamentals" and status as an emerging energy superpower will keep it in better shape than the United States, although not immune to a global economic slowdown. "Canada is not an island," Flaherty said earlier in a speech to a Calgary Chamber of Commerce luncheon. Following a first quarter contraction that saw gross domestic product fall 0.3 per cent and continuing signs of stress, economists and policy makers have been routinely revising their growth projections for the year, all trending downward. In the last week, Canadians have been hit by a series of bad news announcements. Employment fell in June for the first time this year and full-time employment tumbled for the second straight month. Average home sale prices edged down during the month, the first year-over year price decline in nearly a decade. And General Motors Corp. (NYSE:GM) announced plans to lay off 20 per cent of its white collar staff in North America, a further cut of thousands of jobs. Meanwhile, the Bank of Canada warned of rising inflation Tuesday while lowering its 2008 growth forecast from 1.4 per cent in April to one per cent. On Wednesday, the Conference Board of Canada downgraded its projection from 2.2 per cent this spring to 1.7 per cent. For both, it was the second downward revision so far this year. Both are overly optimistic, says David Wolf, chief economist with Merrill Lynch Canada, who says gross domestic product increase will likely come in at a tepid 0.5 per cent this year, a statistical blip from recessionary times. "Absolutely, by the informal definition of recession we could be in recession," agrees Global Insight economist Dale Orr, noting that nobody will know for sure until late in August, when Statistics Canada releases the second quarter growth tally. But Orr also points out that the Canadian economy still has some legs, particularly in the resource and oil and sector, consumer spending, and employment and housing that while slowing, are coming off record-setting years. Even manufacturing showed signs of life in May. Statistics Canada reported Wednesday that manufacturing sales rose 2.7 per cent from April, the fourth increase in five months. The details behind the aggregate number were weaker as sales remain below last year's levels and most of the gain was due to higher prices, not increased production. The strongest pillar remains high-priced commodities, particularly Alberta oil, which is bringing tremendous wealth into the country and helping grease the general economy through corporate profits, job creation, and higher government revenues that get passed along in lower taxes and higher spending. "Perhaps the volume of what we produce is going down, but the wealth effect (from commodity exports) is very much there," said Pedro Antunes of the Conference Board. "We often think that's beneficial for some regions and sectors, but there have been redistributive effects. The federal government has collected dividends that's been fanned out to all Canadians in the form of tax cuts, and the effect on stock prices, wages, employment have been distributed all over the country." That has kept nominal gross domestic product growth - which measures the actual worth of what Canadians produce - above four per cent, as opposed to the flat performance in real growth, which measures the amount produced. "The hurt in Canada is narrowly focused in the trade sector," Orr says. "If you are in Windsor, Ont., where unemployment is near 10 per cent and the value of your home is falling, or in the auto sector, or if you are in a forestry one-industry town in northern Ontario or Quebec or B.C., then you are really hurting." But for most Canadians the slump has yet to register and likely won't if forecasts of a second-half improvement prove accurate. And for those who live off the resource sector, this is boom times, says Orr. Dungan says another difference between today and recessions of the previous two decades is that inflation, while rising, remains relatively tame, and governments now have the wherewithal to stimulate the economy or at least not inflict further harm. "The Bank of Canada is trying to keep inflation from rising, not reduce it, and generally speaking prevention is not as costly and not as unpleasant as cure," he explained. "And our government balances are basically OK. It's not like 1991 when we had huge deficits and therefore you couldn't do anything, if anything you were trying to raise taxes to make those better, which only makes the downturn worse."

(Courtesy of the Associated Press)

The New York Times June 28, 2008 By BEN SISARIO MONTREAL — On Wednesday night, in the last of his three concerts presented as preludes to the Montreal International Jazz Festival, Leonard Cohen, the 73-year-old hometown poet-hero on tour for the first time in 15 years, said that on his last time through town he was “60 years old, just a kid with a crazy dream.” Between waves of applause and hollers in French and English, he added, “I am so grateful to be here and to be from here.” Mr. Cohen’s math notwithstanding, hometown pride and musical reverence are at the center of the festival, which opened its 29th season on Thursday and runs through July 6. Billing itself as the largest jazz festival in the world, it attracts one million visitors a year to more than 500 concerts in a three-block music zone downtown and brings about $100 million in revenue to the city, according to Canadian government estimates. With CD sales in a chronic slump, the music industry has been turning increasingly to live events for income, and in recent years big smorgasbord festivals have sprouted up all over North America, aiming to present all kinds of music for all kinds of people. But with a setting ideal for tourists as well as for local residents, and a solid history of eclectic programming — among the attractions this year are Woody Allen, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Public Enemy and the local debut of Steely Dan — Montreal has held on to a rare prestige. “There is no parallel in North America and perhaps no parallel around the world,” said Scott Southard, a jazz and world-music booking agent who has 15 artists at the festival. “In Europe or Bonnaroo, for instance, they have to erect an entire village in a remote location. Here you have an urban environment without having to reconstruct the venue infrastructure every year.” Begun in 1980 by two concert promoters, Alain Simard and André Ménard, as a way to fill up what was then a dry summer concert calendar, the festival takes over four concert halls of the Place des Arts performing arts complex as well as numerous theaters and clubs around the perimeter. Several blocks of downtown streets are closed for outdoor stages, retail and food booths and children’s activities. Despite the size, Mr. Simard, the president of the festival’s parent company, L’Équipe Spectra, said that “the goal is not to be the biggest jazz festival in the world, it’s to be the best.” But as the festival approaches its 30th season, it is preparing to grow even bigger, with help from a four-year, $120 million government plan to develop the area around Place des Arts. The first phase, to be completed by next summer, includes a 75,000-square-foot park and performance ground, the Place du Quartier des Spectacles. The festival has also been given a 30-year lease and a $10 million grant from the Province of Quebec to renovate a nearby vacant building; when completed it will add one club for use year-round. As a tourist draw second only to Grand Prix du Canada, the Formula One race held in Montreal in early June, the jazz festival has become an important symbol of Montreal’s cosmopolitan lifestyle, said Charles Lapointe, the chief executive of Tourism Montreal, a nonprofit agency financed through a hotel tax. “The jazz festival exemplifies perfectly what we are presenting on the foreign market,” Mr. Lapointe said. “You can celebrate on the streets without any problems with security and express all the pleasure you want.” Civic pride and creative abundance was clear on Thursday, the official opening. (Mr. Cohen’s touring schedule prevented him from being part of the festival proper; he appears at the enormous Glastonbury pop festival in Britain on Sunday.) During the afternoon crowds gradually filled up the Place des Arts campus, slurping on ice cream cones beside the fountain and listening to the sound check for a tribute to Mr. Cohen featuring Chris Botti, Madeleine Peyroux, Buffy Sainte-Marie and others. Darting between indoor evening concerts by the veteran jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, the young British songwriter Katie Melua and the African performers Vieux Farka Touré and Salif Keita, a visitor could quickly take in half a dozen outdoor concerts, parades and magicians. Two-thirds of the concerts are free. The Cohen tribute drew an estimated audience of 100,000, filling the plaza and nearby streets. But the concerts by Mr. Cohen himself were the clear early highlight. Dressed like a spy in a crisp black suit and fedora, Mr. Cohen, who has said that after years in a Zen Buddhist retreat in California, his lifelong depression has finally begun to lift, sang a sleek and emotional set of nearly three hours. In “Bird on the Wire,” “Hallelujah” and “Tower of Song” he sang of being weighted down by cynicism and starving for affection, but between songs he doffed his hat and smiled broadly for sustained ovations. The festival, a nonprofit enterprise run by the for-profit company L’Équipe Spectra, has an operating budget of $25 million. And though about 18 percent of that comes from national, provincial and city sources, the biggest form of government support is the closing of several blocks of busy city streets. The bulk of the budget comes from corporate sponsorships (40 percent) and sales of tickets and memorabilia (39 percent). The prominence of sponsorships gives the festival a sense of hyperbranding. Looking over Place des Arts, it is almost impossible not to see a giant symbol of General Motors, the lead sponsor: besides GM logos on banners and fliers throughout the grounds, the company also has five displays of new cars for contests, and at least one of the many marching bands wended its way around, wearing black GM T-shirts. Festival organizers say that they have made efforts to ensure that the sponsorship is tasteful and not intrusive. Signs are only seen outdoors, where concerts are free, they say. There is no advertising for the paid concerts indoors, and the organizers say they will not rename the event to suit any sponsor. To create an egalitarian atmosphere, the festival also shuns velvet ropes. “You will never see a V.I.P. area on the site,” Mr. Ménard said. “There’s never a place where people walk and are told, ‘No, that’s not for you.’ The unemployed can stand next to the president of the sponsor company.” For the Cohen tribute on Thursday night, however, there was a small area of bleachers near the stage reserved for the news media and others. But a reporter who lacked the necessary badges was still able to enter with a few kind words. And unlike many large festivals, this one had a network of fenced-off pathways that made quick travel through even a crowd of 100,000 tightly packed fans on Thursday evening easy for anyone needing or wanting to get through. “The vibe is very peaceful,” Mr. Ménard said of the festival. “The fabric of this city is all about the quality of life. The fact is, we have long, deadly winters, so come summertime, everybody is in for a party — but a civilized party.”

Why duel over our dual national holidays? Split our differences and create a third! JOSH FREED, The Gazette Published: 9 hours ago We are entering the annual period of dueling national days, when Quebec's national celebration takes on Canada's in the battle of the fêtes. The action starts Tuesday with Quebec's Fête nationale, the holiday formerly known as St. Jean Baptiste Day. This was originally a holy day celebrated only by French Catholics, but the government removed religion and renamed it the Fête nationale so it would belong to all Quebecers. Our dueling holidays reveal our differences. In a recent poll, most francophones said Canada was founded by the French, while anglos named the British and immigrants said the native peoples. In reality, of course, the native peoples found our country over 10,000 years ago, the French found the natives 500 years ago and the British found the French difficult to manage and granted Canada its independence. Canada's real problem is that we have different histories, so we can't celebrate the same holidays or the same heroes. We'd probably rename Victoria Day tomorrow if we could think of someone to name it after without a national fight. John A. Macdonald is not loved in Quebec or Newfoundland. Pierre Trudeau is hated by half the country, while René Lévesque is hated by the other half. Who else is known from coast to coast - Celine Dion? Terry Fox? Mordecai Richler? Hockey is our most unifying Canadian event. Maybe we could agree on a Rocket Richard/ Wayne Gretzky National Day. But it's easier just to leave it as Queen-Victoria-Vs.-The-Patriotes-Day for another century. The good news is that our dueling holidays are becoming irrelevant relics that aren't that indicative of who we are. In the past few days, there are far more Portuguese, Italian and Turkish flags flying on cars for Euro soccer than there are Fête nationale fleurs-de-lys. Likewise, the Canadiens hockey playoffs brought out more flags than Canada Day will ever see. In fact, there is one common holiday in Montreal when millions of French, English and other nationalities all rush into the streets to celebrate together. It's the Montreal Jazzfest, our city's true "national" day. Why don't we declare a third statutory day off on June 28, halfway between the Fête nationale and Canada Day, when everyone can party together - for National Jazz Day. In fact, with three holidays in eight days, it would become just like Christmas and New Year: We could all take two weeks off. The Fête is correctly marked by waving the fleur-de-lys - France's old royalist flag - and passionately singing Gens du Pays, the sovereignist anthem, which few anglos ever sing except at birthday parties, when they mouth the words. There is also a terrific parade where revelers celebrate June 24 by symbolically drinking a two-four of beer. By contrast, next week's Canada Day is a cooler, kitschier affair marked by Mounties, maple leafs and the traditional carrying of fridges and other heavy furniture for Moving Day. Canada Day is a recently invented holiday. It was known as Dominion Day until 1982, when Ottawa decided to compete with Quebec's new Fête nationale by having a flag-waving federalist day, too. However, it turned out that real Canadians do not passionately wave flags - unless they're part of a sponsorship scandal. Most Canadians won't even sing their national anthem on July 1, because the government has changed the words so often no one has a clue what they are. In fact, O Canada only became the official English anthem in 1980 and many people still know the words to God Save the Queen better. In addition, Canadians are embarrassed by patriotism - and would be more comfortable humming the hockey song. Overall, for Quebecers La Féte is an emotional day to honour their survival. But for Canadians, Canada Day is just our National Day Off Day - a day to be thankful we live in a country so calm we can ignore our national day. St. Jean and Canada Day are not the only divided holidays in our semi-detached national duplex. Just last month, we marked Victoria Day, when Canadians celebrate a British queen who died in 1901 - even though England hasn't for decades. Until the 1980s, anglo Quebecers marked this day by holding an annual riot in Point St. Charles. But the tradition has faded and today Victoria Day is typically marked by The Opening of the Country Cottage - Or Garden. Franco Quebecers never liked the Queen's birthday and set up their own competing holiday back in the 1920s - called Dollard des Ormeaux Day. But the Parti Québécois government obviously found it embarrassing to have a holiday named after a West Island suburb, because in 2004 they renamed it the Journée nationale des patriotes. This ensured no anglo Quebecer would ever celebrate it again. In Quebec, we make war with dates, not battles. This year's big dispute is over the 400th anniversary of Quebec City's founding. French nationalists say the celebration marks the birth of the Quebec nation, but federalists say it marks the founding of Canada - and warring words have been flying over the Plains of Abraham like musket fire. Josh_freed@hotmail.com http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=8435f7ac-92cd-4790-afbb-f18cdbd40d3b&p=2

52% oppose Bill C-10 Proposed change targets filmmakers. Don't censor content by refusing tax credits, slim majority of Canadians say in survey TIFFANY CRAWFORD, Canwest News Service Published: 6 hours ago A slim majority of Canadians believe it would be wrong for the government to screen the content of films and deny tax credits to projects it deems offensive, a new Ipsos Reid poll conducted for Canwest News Service and Global TV indicates. The poll, conducted from June 10 to 12, found that 52 per cent of the 1,002 Canadians surveyed disagree with Bill C-10, a proposed change to the Income Tax Act that would deny tax money to filmmakers whose content is "contrary to public policy." At 62 per cent, residents of film-industry-heavy British Columbia are most likely to say the government is "wrong" to interfere in such a way. That's followed by those living in the mostly Conservative province of Alberta at 57 per cent, indicating the reaction of Canadians is largely ideological. "(The bill) has obviously touched a nerve," said John Wright with Ipsos Reid. "If it's not going to pass the sniff test, it's going to be gagged," said the senior vice-president of Ipsos Reid. "It has a good majority in the country that are going to go against this." Although the idea to deny tax credits was raised under the previous Liberal government, Wright suggests people may be concerned about the "slippery slope" of censorship with the Conservative Party. "While it may have been acceptable under the Liberals because they were more flexible on content, this government has the trappings of moral and religious rigour," he said. "So they might wear this more than the last government." According to the poll, 45 per cent of Canadians believe it's right for the government to screen the content of films, because it involves taxpayers' money - and because government has the right to determine what's in the public interest. As the poll was released, the Canadian independent film, Young People F*****g, opened in cinemas on the weekend. The film has become the poster child for the controversial bill that has many Canadian film and TV stars, including actress and director Sarah Polley, lobbying the government to stop the bill. The reason, say opponents of C-10, such as Polley, actor-director Paul Gross and Oscar-winning director Ang Lee, is that Young People is the type of film that would have been denied funding. Young People, a movie about four couples and a threesome trying to find satisfactory sex lives, has been viewed as pornographic by some religious groups, while others say it's just a bit of fun. In any case, the film is not as raunchy as its title suggests. Although there's a lot of nudity, mostly it's just a series of sketches where the characters seek to balance their lives with love and sex. The film's director, Martin Gero, says it's a harmless comedy, but he agreed it may not have got the funding had it been judged by the title. The poll found younger Canadians aged 18 to 34 were more likely to say the government is "wrong" to censor content by refusing tax credits, followed by Canadians age 35 to 54. Those with post-secondary education and those who live in urban areas were also more likely to disagree with the bill, the poll suggests. While the poll suggests a majority of Canadians disagree with the bill, the government argues the proposed change to the federal tax-credit system does not jeopardize the creative freedom of Canadian film and TV production. Heritage Minister Josée Verner says the government is trying to make sure Canadian taxpayers' money won't fund extreme violence or pornography. http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=a7f81b30-f97e-4570-84d8-dff373f9f66e

Couillard pushed Quebec City project to Tories after firm lost Montreal bid DANIEL LEBLANC AND INGRID PERITZ With reports from Tu Thanh Ha in Toronto and Rhéal Seguin in Quebec City June 13, 2008 OTTAWA AND MONTREAL -- The Kevlar Group was losing out on a major federal contract in Montreal in early 2007 at the same time as Julie Couillard started lobbying two senior Conservative officials in favour of another one of the company's projects in Quebec City, according to government records and sources. Kevlar wanted to spend up to $25-million to develop a large swath of land that belonged to Canada Post on the Montreal harbourfront. However, another Crown corporation, Canada Lands, used its right of first refusal and snagged the 60,000-square-metre property in a deal that was officially announced on May 2, 2007, a spokesman for Canada Lands confirmed. Kevlar was believed to be unhappy in Montreal when its postal-site bid was rejected, according to a real-estate consultant. "They [Kevlar] probably invested a lot of time, money and energy in their building proposal, which they thought was the best," said a source familiar with the project. "Then Canada Lands turned around and said, 'We'll develop the site.' " Print Edition - Section Front Enlarge Image More Front Page Stories Couillard pushed Quebec City project to Tories after firm lost Montreal bid About the same time, Kevlar was bidding on another federal project worth about $30-million for a building in Quebec City to house 750 bureaucrats. In the House yesterday, the Opposition expressed clear concerns that the company used Ms. Couillard to infiltrate the government in an attempt to ensure it would win that contract. Ms. Couillard was finishing her training as a real-estate agent at the time, and had obtained an affiliation with the firm's real-estate branch. In the spring of 2007, she started dating, in succession, two senior Conservative officials: Public Works adviser Bernard Côté and industry minister Maxime Bernier. According to senior federal officials, Ms. Couillard directly discussed Kevlar's bid in Quebec City with Mr. Bernier and Mr. Côté. Mr. Bernier has since resigned after classified documents were left in April at the home of Ms. Couillard, who had lived with two men with ties to the Hells Angels in the 1990s. Mr. Côté resigned this week after telling his superiors about Ms. Couillard's lobbying efforts and acknowledging he should have recused himself from the file to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. As The Globe and Mail reported yesterday, Kevlar co-chair Philippe Morin introduced Ms. Couillard and Mr. Bernier to one another in April in a restaurant in Montreal. A source added yesterday that Mr. Bernier and Mr. Morin might have known one another through their respective involvement in a group called the Young Presidents' Organization. Mr. Morin is the son of a well-known book publisher in Quebec. Kevlar officials refused repeated requests for comment yesterday, and did not expand on their previous statement that their link to Ms. Couillard was simply related to her real-estate licence. In the House of Commons, the Liberals accused Ms. Couillard of attempting to "infiltrate the Conservative government." "She tried to influence real-estate contracts at Public Works," said Montreal Liberal MP Marlene Jennings. According to news reports, Kevlar was founded by president René Bellerive in 1996, with Mr. Morin becoming a partner in 1999. The firm has acquired and built a number of commercial buildings and condominiums in Montreal and Quebec City, often with other financial partners. Kevlar and its owners have also donated thousands of dollars to federalist and separatist parties, in Ottawa and Quebec City, with the first recorded pledge to the Conservative Party, for $1,000, coming in the months after the Tories were elected to office. The government did not directly address the opposition's concerns in the House yesterday, except to say there has been no decision on the Quebec City project, on which Kevlar is one of about two dozen bidders. Conservative House Leader Peter Van Loan accused the opposition of wasting time by holding a parliamentary inquiry into the matter. "It is about finding sordid stories that can make for good news for those who are into gossip and that sort of stuff, but it is not about the important questions of public policy," he said. Regarding the Montreal project, Kevlar submitted an initial $25-million bid for the site in 2006. After several extensions to conduct due diligence, the firm submitted a lowered offer for the property on Feb. 28 of last year. Kevlar's deal fell through when Canada Lands matched its $18-million offer. "The company that bid on the site put in an offer, and we matched it," said Gordon McIvor, vice-president of Canada Lands.

Montreal eyeing new tax on personal vehicles Under bill 22. Private swimming pools could also provide sources of revenue DAVID JOHNSTON, The Gazette Published: 7 hours ago City of Montreal residents probably will have to pay a new municipal tax on personal vehicles of about $75 annually under new tax powers the Charest government wants to give to the city. Senior government officials who spoke to journalists this week said a new "PVT" is the most likely new municipal revenue source to arise from the menu of options that Bill 22 would give Montreal. Bill 22 is the draft legislation tabled last fall to give Montreal new tax powers and make governance changes in the Montreal agglomeration. Email to a friendEmail to a friendPrinter friendlyPrinter friendly Amendments unveiled Thursday at city hall scrapped the idea of a new food and beverage tax or a return of the old Montreal amusement tax. But the amendments are now calling for open-ended, royalty-type levies in their place. Although Mayor Gérald Tremblay has refused to be specific about the new taxes he has in mind, bureaucrats did bring up the possibility of a new tax on backyard swimming pools. And Tremblay conceded that many of the new taxes he is considering are inspired by some of the new taxing powers the city of Toronto won from the Ontario government in 2006. Royalties are traditionally applied to the use of a natural resource, like oil or water, but Toronto has taken the idea one step further and is considering a new tax on billboards, for the use of public space. The Bill 22 amendments are said to have sufficient opposition-party support to be approved before the legislature recesses next Friday. If that happens, Montreal will get the power to tax movables and immovables, but sales and inheritance taxes won't be allowed. Neither will taxes on gasoline, income, payrolls or energy. The new tax powers would be given only to the city of Mont- real, not to the 15 demerged island suburbs. Any new personal vehicle tax in Montreal would apply only to residents of city of Montreal boroughs. The most notable difference between Bill 22 and the city of Toronto Act is that Bill 22 stops short of allowing Montreal to tax alcohol and tobacco. "We're going to take time to look at our options," said Renée Sauriol, an aide to Tremblay. No new taxes would be introduced before 2010, Sauriol said. djohnston@ thegazette.canwest.com - - - New municipal taxes Mayor Gérald Tremblay says the new tax powers that the provincial government is proposing to give Montreal are inspired by the new powers accorded in 2006 by the Ontario government to Toronto. Some highlights: In September, residents of the city of Toronto will begin paying a $60 annual municipal personal-vehicle tax. Only one car per household will be subject to the tax. A $75 tax for Montreal residents was mentioned this week by senior provincial and municipal bureaucrats as a possibility. Toronto hasn't yet determined what kind of new parking-lot tax it wants to introduce. The Tremblay administration is said to be leaning toward a new property surtax tied to the number of parking spots on a property. In February, Toronto approved new tax brackets for land-transfer taxes. The new regime has resulted in higher "welcome taxes" on properties worth $400,000 or more. The Quebec government has said it is prepared to let Montreal set its own new welcome-tax rates on properties worth more than $500,000. Below this value, provincially set rates would continue to apply. Toronto is still considering a new tax on billboards, justified as a royalty on the use of public space. This idea of expanding the notion of royalties to the municipal level is something that Montreal finds intriguing. Quebec is proposing to give Montreal a lot of leeway to come up with inventive new royalty schemes. In February, Toronto Mayor David Miller proposed a new toll on all provincial highways within the Greater Toronto area. The proposal hasn't been received well by suburbanites and nothing has happened yet. In Montreal, the Tremblay administration has similarly begun to regionalize its own original proposal for new island bridge tolls. Tremblay is now saying he wants to share any new toll revenues with off-island suburbs to help expand public transit. http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=508d2256-8e5d-4700-8815-fac8e5f43c1f&p=2

Tunisair May Sell Stake as Country Divests Assets (Update2) By Mahmoud Kassem June 5 (Bloomberg) -- Tunisair, the national airline of Tunisia, may sell a 15 percent stake as the North African country disposes of state assets amid an equities boom. ``We might sell more shares to a strategic investor, but the government will always want to hold a controlling stake,'' Adel Gaida, chief financial officer of Tunisair, or Societe Tunisienne de l'Air, said in an interview yesterday in London. ``We have been thinking of doing this for some time, though we don't have a timetable.'' Tunisia is selling assets to attract investment as buyers, particularly from the oil-rich Persian Gulf region, pour money into a country that isn't on emerging-market equity indexes and is commonly classed as a ``frontier market.'' Tunisia's main stock index, the Tunindex, has advanced 13 percent this year, making it the best-performing index in North Africa. Tunisair rose 0.8 percent to 4.05 dinars in Tunis trading as of 11:50 a.m. The stock has gained 6.6 percent this year, giving the company a market value of 329 million Tunisian dinars ($278 million). The airline serves more than 50 destinations in 25 countries and carried 3.5 million passengers last year. The government holds 74 percent. Companies on the Tunindex have one of the cheapest average price-to-earnings ratios in the Middle East at 13 times estimated earnings. The Dow Jones Arabia Titans 50 Index, a measure of 50 Arab stocks in 10 countries, trades at 21 times estimated earnings. The Tunisian government raised as much as $2.25 billion from the sale of a 35 percent stake in Telecom Tunisie, the country's largest telephone company, in 2006. Tunisair Expansion Tunisair is expanding in Africa and adding trans-Atlantic and Asian destinations, Gaida said. The carrier owns a 51 percent stake in Air Mauritania, which it formed as a joint venture in December 2006. Air France-KLM Group has a 5.6 percent stake in Tunisair, while 20 percent of shares trade freely. ``We are planning to add New York, Montreal, Beijing and Tokyo on our list of destinations, but that won't happen until we get our new fleet starting from 2011 because we would need A350s for the long haul,'' Gaida said. The airline's primary business is flying vacationers from Europe to beaches in Tunis. Airbus SAS, the world's largest planemaker, said on April 29 that Tunisair agreed to a 16-plane order valued at as much as $2 billion at list prices. Tunisia plans to acquire three twin- aisle A350-800 airliners, three A330-200s and 10 single-aisle A320s from the Toulouse, France-based manufacturer. ``We prefer to stick to one manufacturer because it saves us costs in maintenance,'' Gaida said. ``We will pay 10 percent of the cost of the new Airbuses and the remainder we will seek credit for.'' Tunisair's revenue rose 12 percent in the first quarter, compared with the same period a year ago. The company may distribute a dividend on 2007 profit this year, Gaida said. To contact the reporter on this story: Mahmoud Kassem in London at mkassem1@bloomberg.net Last Updated: June 5, 2008 06:06 EDT http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aXYjvLDxX8pg

Quebec opposes Harper proposals to alter Senate BILL CURRY From Thursday's Globe and Mail June 5, 2008 at 5:12 AM EDT OTTAWA — Quebec is threatening to haul Ottawa before the Supreme Court of Canada over what it believes are unconstitutional Senate reform measures proposed by the Harper government. Raising the ghost of the failed Meech Lake accord, Quebec Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Benoît Pelletier said the Senate reform proposed by Brian Mulroney in 1987 was preferable to Stephen Harper's two Senate reform bills, which require provincial residents to elect candidates from which Ottawa would pick. The Meech agreement gave provincial governments the power to fill Senate vacancies as an interim measure toward larger reform. Appearing before a House of Commons committee studying the proposed changes, Mr. Pelletier said the Meech model would be more in line with the Senate's original mandate to represent provincial interests. All three parties in Quebec's National Assembly oppose the two federal Senate reform bills and want them scrapped immediately, he said. Failing that, Mr. Pelletier said Ottawa should at least clear up questions of the measures' constitutionality with a reference to the Supreme Court. As a last resort, Quebec will consider taking the issue before Canada's highest court. "It's an option we have to look at," he said, pointing out that Quebec would not have joined Confederation had it not been for the assurance of a strong Senate voice. "It's an institution that goes to the heart of the federal compromise of 1867," Mr. Pelletier told MPs. The government legislation, known as Bill C-20, spells out a system in which elections would be held in each province to produce a list of names for the federal government to choose from in appointing senators to fill vacancies. It is separate from a second Conservative bill, C-19, which seeks to replace the current system where senators are appointed with term limits of eight years. Quebec's presentation in Ottawa on Senate changes took place the same week the province slammed the Harper government over its policies on climate change. Quebec Premier Jean Charest and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced they would be going it alone with a cap-and-trade system aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The increasing polarization between Central Canada and the federal government is in contrast to recent developments in Western Canada. Premier Brad Wall's new conservative-minded Saskatchewan Party government recently said it hopes to introduce legislation this fall that would allow for provincial elections of Saskatchewan senators. The process would be similar to the one already in place in Alberta, which has already sent two elected senators to Ottawa. The NDP government in Manitoba is also moving in that direction, with plans to hold provincewide hearings to consult residents on how to elect senators. British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell has said he'd prefer to see the Senate abolished, but could support Senate elections provided Ottawa pays for them. The one elected Alberta senator who is still in the second chamber, Bert Brown, has been touring provincial and territorial capitals to get others onside. Mr. Pelletier later told reporters that even if the Conservative bills go nowhere, Quebec's concerns could materialize if many other provinces start holding their own Senate elections to produce names from which the Prime Minister would choose. "That would completely change the Senate and would confirm our point," he said. "This reform is so important that it should follow the formal rules of the Constitution." http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080605.wsenate05/BNStory/National/home

Harper is on the second day of a three-day tour of Europe, with environmental issues at the centre of the agenda. Most European countries are wary of Canada's mixed record on the Kyoto Protocol for greenhouse gas emissions, with far more political and public support for reductions in Europe than is generally found in this country. Before he left, some environmentalists criticized the prime minister's trip for its own greenhouse gas emissions. They say the air travel involved in taking Harper's retinue to several European cities in three days will generate more than 400 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, as much as 100 cars produce in a year. But Harper and his officials say expressing Canada's position on climate change is crucial, as well as discussing this country's booming trade with Europe, worth some $110 billion in the past year. Speaking to UN delegates in Bonn, Harper said Canada was the first industrialized country to ratify a biodiversity treaty in 1992, and that this country took a varied approach to environment protection, involving all sectors of society, and not just government. "Canada has gone to great lengths to protect and preserve our rich and diverse environment," Harper said in Bonn. "In our country, this is not just a government enterprise. We are partnered with many private individuals, corporations and non-governmental organizations dedicated to environmental philanthropy." CBC's chief political correspondent, Keith Boag, travelling with the prime minister, said there was little about the address that was new in policy terms. "The speech was really just a once-over-lightly about how beautiful Canada is," Boag said. "How many lakes and rivers and streams and mountains and forests and fields and so on [the country] has." The Bernier resignation is still very much on the mind of the prime minister and officials and journalists travelling with him, Boag said. Canada could do more: environmentalists Environmental groups at the Bonn meeting say there is sometimes more words than substance to Canada's positions on biodiversity and other environmental issues. William Jackson with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature said Canada can be proud of its domestic achievements in environmental protection, but its international role in holding up agreements on issues like climate change has raised eyebrows. "I have not seen Canada blocking things to the point [that] decisions are not being made," Jackson says, "but I've seen them expressing their views strongly." Federal Environment Minister John Baird, who is with Harper, dismissed accusations Wednesday that Canada isn't doing enough to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Baird said the Canadian government actions include regulating big polluters, a hydrogen initiative in B.C., encouragement of carbon capture and storage efforts, an electricity grid between Ontario and Manitoba and support for tidal power generation in the Maritimes. Harper was hoping to convince European leaders that his plan for fighting greenhouse gases is a good one, despite criticism from environmentalists. Unlike most of Europe, Canada and the U.S. oppose any new climate change pact that would exclude major polluters, such as China or India. Harper is using this trip to lay the groundwork for the upcoming G8 meeting this summer in Japan, which will focus on climate change. On Wednesday in Bonn, Harper is also meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The two leaders pledged last year to increase co-operation between their two countries on a range of issues, including environmental policy and trade. Harper's next stop will be Rome for meetings with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi before travelling to London where he has meetings scheduled with the Queen and his British counterpart, Gordon Brown, as well as a speech to business leaders at the Canada-United Kingdom Chamber of Commerce. With files from the Canadian Press http://news.sympatico.msn.cbc.ca/abc/world/contentposting.aspx?isfa=1&newsitemid=harper-bonn&feedname=CBC-WORLD-V3&showbyline=True

(Courtesy of The Canadian Press)

Both governments are currently spending part of my money for stuff that does not interest me as much as say, having put the funds together to have saved the nordiques or expos. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't mind they spend some of my $$$ for museums, festivals, etc.. because I strongly believe that as a whole, we all win. However, not having the city of Québec on the NHL map is a disgrace and my heart aches every time spring training rolls around. The government should have done something...

(Courtesy of The Vancouver Sun)