Conservation groups put up $9.4-million to save Flathead Valley
Slow start: Sturgeon spearing season on Lake Winnebago
Average Canadian family debt hits $100000
The report, released by the Vanier Institute of the Family on Thursday, suggests the debt-to-income ratio is a record 150 per cent.
Leads to this:
Banks are finding us RRSP-fatigued
In the interview, Bieber also weighs in on the U.S. health care system.
"You guys are evil," he says. "Canada's the best country in the world. We go to the doctor and we don't need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you're broke because of medical bills. My bodyguard's baby was premature, and now he has to pay for it. In Canada, if your baby's premature, he stays in the hospital as long as he needs to, and then you go home."
Dangerous bacteria found on mall food trays
Wed Mar 10, 2010Call it germophobia news created by pandemic media outbreaks. But thanks to all that pandemic panic a simple solution to cleaning a tray, is to grab one of those ubiquitous ever present disinfectant wipes and give the tray a good wiping. And then do it again with a second cloth.Which Has More Germs - A Restaurant Tray or a Park Sandbox ...
September 15, 2009Back to School: Toilet Seats are Cleaner Than Cafeteria Trays!
Schools can be a hotbed of bacteria 10/03/06 | abc7chicago.com
October 5, 2005Where Germs Lurk in Grade School
September 16, 2005Millions of Germs and Bacteria Await Kids at School : Food Poison ...
* A cafeteria tray had more than ten times as many germs as a toilet seat (33,800 bacterial cells per square inch vs. 3,200 bacterial cells per square inch).
"We saw as many bacteria on some food trays as we saw on a toilet," said Hancock.
Swabs were taken from a gas station toilet for comparison and lab technicians did find similar types and amounts of pathogens.
Some speculate Mr. Harper’s protection of Ms. Oda, however characteristic of his government, may be compounded by another factor: The opposition alleges the decision to modify the memo originated in the Prime Minister’s Office.
“It’s an unfortunate fact that monetary penalties just aren’t enough. We believe that nothing focuses the mind like the threat of doing time in prison, which is why we need criminal penalties for employers who are determined to gamble with their workers’ lives and consider it merely a cost of doing business when a worker dies on the job.”
- Dr. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor (OSHA)
In the decade before the Deepwater Horizon, BP (BP) had a history of serious accidents. Each time its CEO vowed to avoid a future disaster. In 2000, after a string of fires and equipment failures, CEO John Browne announced plans to "renew our commitment to safety." In 2005, after a horrific explosion killed 15 people at BP's Texas City refinery, he swore there'd be "no stone left unturned" to investigate what happened and correct any safety issues. In 2007, after being named Browne's successor in the aftermath of more problems, Tony Hayward promised to focus "like a laser" on safety -- only to oversee the worst oil spill in history.
Fortune's investigation shows how Hayward, a fast-rising geologist once known as "Teflon Tony," fell tragically short of his goal. Despite efforts to change, BP never corrected the underlying weakness in its safety approach, which allowed earlier calamities, such as the Texas City refinery explosion. Perhaps the most crucial culprit: an emphasis on personal safety (such as reducing slips and falls) rather than process safety (avoiding a deadly explosion). That might seem like a semantic distinction at first glance, but it had profound consequences.
Consider this: BP had strict guidelines barring employees from carrying a cup of coffee without a lid -- but no standard procedure for how to conduct a "negative-pressure test," a critical last step in avoiding a well blowout. If done properly, that test might have saved the Deepwater Horizon.
Indeed, BP executives warned of serious process-safety "gaps" in the Gulf of Mexico, Fortune has learned, in a never-before-reported strategy document dated December 2008. "It's become apparent," the BP document stated, "that process-safety major hazards and risks are not fully understood by engineering or line operating personnel. Insufficient awareness is leading to missed signals that precede incidents and response after incidents, both of which increases the potential for and severity of process-safety related incidents." The document called for stronger "major hazard awareness."
But BP failed. "They just did safety wrong," says Nancy Leveson, an industrial safety expert at MIT who served on a panel that investigated BP's safety practices after its refinery explosion; she has since taught safety classes to BP executives and also advised the presidential panel that investigated the Deepwater Horizon disaster. "They were producing a lot of standards," she says, "but many were not very good, and many were irrelevant." Leveson says that she was so troubled by BP's approach that in January 2010 she told colleagues, "They are an accident waiting to happen."
Canada spent more than $41 million on hired guns in Afghanistan over four years, much of it going to security companies slammed by the U.S. Senate for having warlords on the payroll.Both the Defence and Foreign Affairs departments have employed 11 security contractors in Kabul and Kandahar since 2006, but have kept quiet about the details.
Now documents tabled in Parliament at the request of the New Democrats provide the first comprehensive picture of the use of private contractors, which have been accused of adding to the chaos in Afghanistan.
The records show Foreign Affairs paid nearly $8 million to ArmorGroup Securities Ltd., recently cited in a U.S. Senate investigation as relying on Afghan warlords who in 2007 were engaged in "murder, kidnapping, bribery and anti-Coalition activities."
Canada has made major public investments in research, primarily through universities, but private-sector innovation has remained relatively weak. The OECD ranks Canada as 16th in business spending on R&D as a share of the economy, despite having the second-highest level of government support for such investment. The overall policy and economic environment has become much more encouraging over the past decade. The marginal tax rate on new business investment has dropped sharply, making Canada more attractive internationally and opening a significant tax advantage over the United States.
Thomas d’Aquino and David Stewart-Patterson are the former chief executive and president and executive vice-president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and co-authors of the book Northern Edge: How Canadians Can Triumph in the Global Economy. Read more: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/01/25/unleashing-innovation/#ixzz1DCwwrEmV
A 2009 Industry Canada report found that 54 per cent of Canada's loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs since 2002 is due to the oil sands boom replacing good, stable employment with short-term construction work in the tar sands and low-wage service sector jobs elsewhere in the economy. Canada has lost one-third of its post-war gains in value-added (manufactured) exports since 1999/2000, Canadian Auto Workers senior economist Jim Stanford told the Institute for Competiveness and Productivity in 2008.
The problem is not worker productivity, since workers in Canada are highly productive, its investment in actual technology.
The Canadian manufacturing sector employed more than 2.3 million people in 2002. By last September, manufacturers had shed some 580,000 jobs - more than one in four – and most of these losses occurred before the recession. There are few signs that this trend will reverse itself soon.
the fall in manufacturing employment was largely due to attrition, not layoffs. And one of the surprises of the recession is that manufacturing unemployment is now lower than it was before the recession – although this result was largely achieved by workers leaving the sector altogether.But it’s a puzzle nonetheless: output per worker in the manufacturing sector has been increasing more than three times as fast as the economy as a whole. If productivity growth is the key to sustained prosperity, then shouldn’t manufacturing be increasing in importance?
Tax cuts have not created jobs, since corporations have used the break to accumulate capital which if invested at all is invested in the stock market and in mergers and acquisitions, not in workers wages, technology or pensions.
Corporations in this country are flush with cash and ready to grow.
"In some ways, corporate Canada has never been stronger than it is right now," Tal said.
"Better-than-expected profitability and a reluctance to spend in recent years has left Canadian businesses sitting on a record amount of cash and confident about the future.”
Swift and strategic downsizing during the recent recession paid off, Tal said. It allowed companies to withstand the downturn and ramp up hiring at a much faster clip than in the U.S.
In fact both private corporations and ironically our public pension fund the CPP have led the way in taking that capital and investing it abroad.
So rather than calling corporate tax cuts job creators, we should call a spade a spade; all that tax cuts do is reduce government revenue, social capital, while giving corporations more capital. Tax cuts are public funding of private profits, without having shareholder benefits. Tax cuts are corporate welfare.Foreign investment is a two-way street.
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Onex took top honours for the biggest global private equity acquisition of the year with their $4.4-billion purchase of U.K. manufacturing giant Tomkins.
PricewaterhouseCoopers suspects Canadian companies will continue look past North America to emerging markets for better deals.
Last year, Canadians made major “buys” in nearly every continent with deals in the fourth quarter alone stretching to the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
“These transformational deals are beacons for what will become the norm for Canadian deal making going forward,” Knibutat said.
Joint ventures and minority purchases will also become more popular, it said. These deals allow companies to test drive sectors while minimizing financial and political risk, PricewaterhouseCoopers said.
“Organic growth prospects within North America remain limited, so for many well capitalized corporates and funds, M&A may be the best and only tool for growth,” Knibutat said.
A “perfect storm” of companies flush with cash, improved access to financing and lacklustre organic growth prospects means the M&A outlook is even brighter for Canada in 2011.
Global public companies have an estimated $3 trillion in cash reserves. Private equity firms hold another $500 billion.
Competitive tensions stemming from strong takeover demands are likely to entice sellers back in the market and that should create a more balanced number of buyers and sellers, PricewaterhouseCoopers said.
All this means Canada will likely continue to outpace the globe when it comes to M&A activity, buoyed by a well-capitalized financial system, strong dollar and leadership in hot deal sectors.
A broad look at how corporate tax rates have changed Canada in the past suggests the impact of the small cuts planned for this year and next is marginal for most companies.
The larger impact is on the government's bottom line, not the corporate bottom line — even though corporate taxes have now become key in determining whether there will be a spring election.
Indeed, federal Finance Department documents show that the reduction of corporate income tax — from 18 per cent in 2010 to 16.5 per cent in 2011 and then to 15 per cent in 2012 — will be expensive for any government battling a deficit. The cost is about $1.6 billion in foregone revenue in the 2011-2012 fiscal year, $3.9 billion the year after, and a total of more than $10 billion over three years.
Canada’s largest telecoms don’t want to say how much it costs to deliver a gigabyte of bandwidth and have refused to disclose such data, arguing that information is both proprietary and competitively sensitive. They also argue that it’s difficult to calculate the specific cost of delivering bandwidth since the cost varies based on the technology being used, the user’s location and the time of day.
