Sunday, December 17, 2006

Rural Roots

This headline says it all about Ed Stelmach's, the new President of the Executive Council of Alberta, choices for Cabinet.

'This cabinet does not look like Alberta'


Nope it's all rural. And like the rest of Canada rural Alberta is declining in population and increasing in age, it represents the old guard, while urban Alberta booms.

"It's Christmastime. All the rest of the province got Play- Station 3s and Edmonton and Calgary got socks and underwear," lamented NDP Leader Brian Mason.


And the Deputy Ministers are even bigger unknowns from the backbenches reperesnting rural Alberta.

And it's 'Honest' Ed's first broken promise.....

'Nobody is going to get left out'

Stelmach was also asked how he would reach out to Calgary because his support was stronger in Edmonton and rural Alberta.

"As a minister I've always found balance in how I looked after Edmonton and Calgary needs, and rural needs, and I'll continue to do that," he said.

"Nobody is going to get left out under my leadership."

Along with short-shanging Edmonton and Calgary he forgot to have someone from Fort McMurray in his cabinet. So much for being honest.

The image “http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fa/Ed_Stelmach.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.The image “http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7e/HarryStrom.png” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

As I said this proves Ed Stelmach is the second coming of Harry Strom.

A second one party regime has ruled Alberta for thirty five years.And again political entropy has set in. The PC's are doomed like their Socred predecesors to repeat history.

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Karl Marx

See:

Alberta

One Party State

Conservative Leadership Race

Socreds


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Saturday, December 16, 2006

Chavez vs. Klein


An interesting post that was published in Alberta Views magazine and is now online, comparing Alberta and Venezuela. This was written prior to Ralph Klein stepping down on Thursday, finally.

Interesting how the U.S. media refers to Chavez as a dictator but they never refered to Klein that way, though in Venezeula there is actually more opposition in government than there is in Alberta.

Now this is the challenge facing our new President of the Executive Council of Alberta, Ed Stelmach. Bet you didn't know that Alberta had a President. Yep that's the Premiers official designation. CEO of Alberta Inc.

This aritcle reminds me of the Parkland Institutes reccomendations for a new energy policy for Alberta
A Made In Alberta Canada First Energy Policy

Auctioning Canada’s Future Under the Klein Government

While Venezuela has taken advantage of record oil prices to invest heavily in social spending, Alberta’s Klein government has moved steadily in the opposite direction. Private companies investing in Alberta’s tar sands pay just 1 per cent royalties until all capital costs are paid off. Because of incentives from the provincial and federal governments, corporate taxes are low on tar sands projects and declining in the oil and gas sector as a whole.

Nonetheless, Alberta government revenues have increased in tandem with rising global prices—from just $2.6-billion in 1998 to a whopping $9.74-billion in 2004-05. Yet this money has been spent largely on maintaining the country’s lowest income tax rate and paying off the deficit. Despite the oil-fuelled economic boom, Alberta continues to have the lowest minimum wage in the country. While social spending has increased slightly in recent years, it has not yet been restored to the levels it achieved before 1993, when the government cut social spending by 30–40 per cent.

Despite this enormous surplus, the Alberta government has pushed for an expansion of public-private partnerships in the health care sector. Critics argue that this is just a code word for privatization and that it violates the Canada Health Act. According to a recent report by the Edmonton-based Parkland Institute, the affordability of public health care is not at issue—the government has more than enough money from recent oil and gas windfalls. Rather, the report argues, funding social programs is contrary to the Klein government’s market-obsessed ideology.

Strategic Skeptics

Of course, there are those who argue that Alberta’s oil policy is preferable to Venezuela’s. They raise two main criticisms of the emerging Venezuelan model. The first is the fear that PDVSA’s newfound assertiveness will scare away foreign investment. “If competitive rules aren’t in place,” warns James Williams of WTRG Energy Economics, “they won’t be able to develop the heavy oil—unless Chávez does it himself. Foreign investors won’t be there.” British Petroleum (BP) CEO John Browne recently mused to an interviewer, “One has to question whether Venezuela wishes foreign oil companies really to be there in any big way.”

But the next day, not wanting to compromise his company’s substantial investments in Venezuela, Chevron’s Latin America director Ali Moshiri noted, “The name of our company is Chevron, and our Chairman is David O’Reilly. We have a different view [than BP] on Venezuela.” The fact is that despite raising the cost of investment for foreign companies, big oil remains in Venezuela—and, with prices surging, it’s not going anywhere.

The second critique is that Venezuela’s excessive social spending will doom the industry by ignoring crucial reinvestment. In late 2004, the IMF called on oil-producing countries to save profits from high oil prices rather than spend them. Oil industry analysts in the US make the same argument: Jenalio Moreno warns, “Windfalls from higher oil prices are enabling nations such as Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela to mask the mounting urgency for reforms and investments needed in the region's energy sector.” Moreno cites Ricardo Amorim, head of Latin America research for WestLB in New York City: “One of the effects that you have when you have high oil prices is you can temporarily solve structural problems. Those countries are not investing as much as they should in the future and that could create bottlenecks.” Funding social programs with high oil rents is all well and good, say these analysts, but if maintenance of industry infrastructure (wells, pumps, roads) isn’t kept up, these oil-funded programs will be unsustainable.

But, according to the Venezuelan government, the future is precisely what Venezuela is investing in. In the same year that PDVSA invested US$3.7-billion in social programs, it reinvested almost twice that amount back into the company. The conflict at root of the “re-nationalization” process occurring under the Chávez government is between the “old PDVSA”—a profitable multinational that gave highly generous terms to private companies but transferred little profit back to the Venezuelan government—and the “new PDVSA,” managed efficiently and professionally in the interests of Venezuelan citizens.

Bolívar North?

A better deal for Alberta depends on the involvement of the rest of the country. This can come about only as the result of a collective decision by citizens to force it onto both provincial and federal agendas. But nationalist politics are probably not enough.

Canada has been riven by conflict over Alberta’s oil wealth for decades. During the days of the National Energy Program, Alberta fumed as the rest of Canada ate up their profits during boom-time. Since the death of the NEP, and despite relatively small surpluses in a few other provinces, the rest of Canada has come to resent what they perceive to be Alberta’s greed in hoarding a national patrimony as a provincial right.

This tension is, perhaps, less potentially divisive than it first appears. When we consider the potential rents that the provincial and federal governments are handing out in incentives to private companies, it becomes clear that there is enough money to go around—it’s just kept to a very small circle. A higher proportion of windfall profits would permit Alberta to reinvigorate and expand the Alberta Heritage Fund (a rainy day fund to protect Albertans in case of future price drops, the fund has been stagnant since the 1980s), bring funding for social-programs at least up to pre-1993 levels, begin serious restoration and mitigation of ecological damage resulting from oil extraction, and share a significant amount of money with its poorer brethren in the rest of Canada. As we have seen with Venezuela, the claim is preposterous that big oil would no longer find the tar sands profitable with royalties at such a rate. Oil-producing countries have the upper hand.

Alberta is not just missing out on the windfall profits currently enjoyed by private companies; it is squandering Canada’s reimbursement for the exhaustion of a non-renewable resource. The extraction of tar sands and extra-heavy crude is more than three times as ecologically damaging as conventional oil extraction. The resultant increase in greenhouse gas emissions is already encouraging the Harper government to renege on our responsibilities to Kyoto.

The impact is arguably even greater in Venezuela, where environmental regulations have historically been less stringent. Indigenous communities in both countries may be the worst losers in the race to the dirty-energy throne: both Canada and Venezuela are currently negotiating pipelines through indigenous territories, threatening to displace whole communities, with little compensation, if any, on offer.

Why isn’t Alberta investing a portion of current oil profits in developing an alternative energy industry that could establish itself as a leader once fossil fuels are exhausted, or once we decide that the cost is just too high? By taking the lead in alternative energy, protection of the environment and equitable partnership with indigenous communities, Canada could establish itself as model for constructive, socially just development.

The Alberta model depends on the assumption that private profits will be reinvested back in the industry, with resulting job creation. But oil companies are having difficulty finding projects in which to invest; their record profits are currently being passed on to shareholders. The distinction seems relatively straight-forward; but, at root, separating the Albertan and Venezuelan models are questions of power, and ultimately of ideology.

Prior to Chávez, Venezuela was pursuing an oil policy very similar to that of the Klein government. The transition was only possible by organizing and involving the populace while simultaneously implementing progressive policies from above. Similar changes in the Albertan context would depend on a corresponding mobilization of Canadian citizens—both here and in the rest of the country.

At present, this question isn't on the agenda in Canada—in 2005 it wasn't even an election issue. Making it one will require an ideological challenge to neo-liberalism, including a serious rethinking of our relationships with corporations at the provincial and national levels. It will also demand revisiting the relationship between natural resources located in Alberta and the broader Canadian social and political context. The popular mobilization needed in Alberta to develop a progressive oil strategy cannot occur in isolation from the rest of Canadian society. We must overcome the individualistic chauvinism that so often drowns out progressive voices in Alberta.

Jonah Gindin is an independent journalist and researcher living between Toronto and Caracas. He has written for Venezuelanalysis.com, ZNet, and NACLA Report on the Americas, among other publications.


See:

Chavez

Alberta

Oil


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Friday, December 15, 2006

Carnival of Anarchy



I have created a blog for a new Carnival of
Anarchy

A carnival for Anarchists, anarchism, anarcha-feminists, anti-authoritairans, anarchists of colour,libertarians, left libertarians, mutualists, libertarian-socialists, libertarian-communists, individualists, anti-statists, agorists,non-statist socialists, cooperative socialists, Free Market Anti-Capitalists, and Bugs Bunny.

And what the heck is a Blog Carnival well....

A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.





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Bad Cops


Why does this not surprise me.

Dozens of Police Act charges have been laid against 24 Peel police officers for their roles in an off-duty beer party last summer.Some of the charges involve a complaint by two young men who say they were chased, threatened and roughed up by several officers after they were discovered filming the bash. It's believed to be the largest number of police officers to ever face discipline at one time on a Canadian force.


Could it be because of this
Peel For the Police or this Police View This Blog

Wonder if the video of their bash will show up on YouTube.

As theRolling Stones said, "Like Every Cop Is A Criminal"

See

Police

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Surprise



Back to the drawing board. Time to revise all those hypothesis mascarading as 'facts'. And I like the cheeky commentary of this writer.

Scientists hope to dust off the origins of space and time

It's only a fraction of a thimble's worth of dust, but scientists around the world are buzzing about it altering our view of how the solar system formed and perhaps, depending on what else gets teased out of these tiny specks, of how life arose on Earth.

"For the first time, we have a sample of the material that was around when the solar system formed more than 4 billion years ago," said Don Brownlee, a University of Washington astronomer and lead scientist for NASA's $212 million Stardust mission.

Earlier this year, the Stardust space capsule returned to Earth (the Utah desert, to be precise) after traveling 2.9 billion miles over seven years. Two years ago, the spacecraft encountered a comet known as Wild 2 and collected dust by flying through its "coma" -- the cloud of ice, gas and dust at the front of the comet.

"We have found some amazing things," said the UW astronomer, citing as one example the discovery of a class of minerals known as calcium aluminum inclusions.

Holy cow! Calcium aluminum inclusions?

OK, even though most people likely haven't heard of this class of minerals, it turns out they are fairly interesting once Brownlee explains what they are -- and why finding them in an ancient comet was not to be expected.

"They are the oldest things in the solar system," he said, and they only form in extremely hot environments like that of a forming star, or the sun.

Yet comets such as Wild 2, according to the common wisdom, are formed of dust and ice to orbit out in the extremely cold regions at the edge of our solar system.

In short, comets shouldn't have any high-temperature calcium aluminum inclusions.

"That was, for me anyway, the biggest surprise," Brownlee said.

What this seems to imply, he said, is that the formation of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago was either much more violent or the swirling proto-planetary material in space was much more "mixed" than most theoretical models suggest.

See

Space

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Who Benefits From Telco Deregulation


Eric Reguly Business Columnist in yesterdays Globe and Mail (article is locked however this link is the Goggle cache) makes these interesting points about Industy Minister Maxime Bernier's decision to override the CRTC this week and give post Income Trust Kick Backs to Telus and Bell.

The point is that prices for Canadian telecom services are high by American standards and the changes announced by the government are unlikely to put a smile on your face when you rip open the phone bill. If prices were set to plunge, you wouldn't see the phone company bosses beaming like they had just invented Cheez Whiz. Bell Canada owner BCE predicted a 4- to 7-per-cent rise in earnings per share in 2007 on rising sales. Nice exactly a whack job on the industry, Mr. Bernier!

The new deregulation rules are designed to heat up local competition. Phone companies will no longer have to lose 25-per-cent market share to rivals before they are given the liberty to set prices as they chose. Instead, they will only have to show that at least three phone providers exist in the given market. The phone companies will also gain the right to use sales pitches to win back customers.

The Canadian wireless companies are making lavish profits. Rogers made almost 50 cents in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) for every dollar in revenue in the third quarter. Ditto Telus. Five years ago, the margins might have been half that amount. Forget finding a diamond deposit. If you want to get rich in this country, own a wireless business and maintain the fiction that there's enough competition to ensure customers get great deals.


And when it comes to real competition between these two and the cable companies, its only in two areas, broadband internet services including VOIP and cell-phones. And Berniers decision impacts both VOIP and the existing teleco monopoly of their local markets.

It's the cellphone and wireless market however where all the players are becoming filthy rich, and where the only real comptetion is occuring.

VANCOUVER (CP) - Telus Corp. (TSX:T) expects growth in its wireless, data and Internet businesses to outpace losses in its traditional phone service next year as competition looms in local markets. Canada's second-biggest phone company said Thursday it expects revenue growth of six to seven per cent revenue growth in 2007, an increase of about $550 million, to between $9.175 billion and $9.275 billion. Growth in earnings before income tax, depreciation and amortization was pegged at between four and seven per cent, with adjusted earnings per share between $3.25 and $3.45.




This article is locked at the Globe and Mail and so courtesy of Google I am reprinting it in whole.

Watchdog lacks telco bite


From Thursday's Globe and Mail, December 14, 2006



MONTREAL — Industry Minister Maxime Bernier has demonstrated he's either devilishly cunning or naively misguided in suggesting consumers will be the big winners with his accelerated deregulation of Canada's local phone business. After all, not even he can deny that changes he announced on Monday will favour big telcos, none more so than the recently soul-searching BCE.

So what if bolstering BCE is exactly what Mr. Bernier wants to do? What if, for the federal government, BCE is to telecom what Air Canada is to airlines? That is, our national flag voice-and-data carrier.

BCE is still the only Canadian telecom that even merits mention in global rankings, and just barely at that. But with more than 12.2 million local telephone customers, it still dwarfs, by a multiple of at least 20, all of its direct competitors. Its upcoming name change back to Bell Canada only underscores its national champion status.

That's not to say Ottawa doesn't have a love-hate relationship with BCE, just as it loves and loathes Air Canada. But in the end, the national flag carrier, whether it transports people or pixels, gets special consideration in Ottawa. There's too much at stake for it not to.

How else do you explain Mr. Bernier's eagerness to neuter the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission? Or his leaving the Competition Bureau in charge of making sure BCE and Telus don't abuse dominant positions in the local phone market?

The Competition Bureau is the same agency Ottawa charged with ensuring Air Canada played well with others after it swallowed Canadian Airlines. Just as Mr. Bernier has now promised the bureau will vigorously police big telcos, Ottawa under the Liberals pledged back then that the watchdog would keep Air Canada in line. It even equipped the bureau with the power to issue scary-sounding "cease-and-desist" orders to stop the quasi-monopoly airline from undercutting upstarts' fares in order to drive them under. The bureau even used the power -- once -- before a Quebec court took it away, saying it deprived the airline of its right to due process.

That one instance set the stage for a three-year, multimillion-dollar legal battle, not just before the Quebec Court of Appeal, but also the Competition Tribunal, the quasi-judiciary body that rules on charges brought by the bureau.

In 2001, the latter had accused Air Canada of engaging in predatory pricing on five Eastern Canada routes in order to prevent WestJet and CanJet from viably competing there. The tribunal ruled in 2003 that Air Canada had indeed set prices below its "avoidable costs," a key piece of evidence needed to prove predatory pricing.

However, the bureau, under commissioner Sheridan Scott, abandoned the case in 2004, saying: "In light of the passage of time and the significant changes in the industry, we have concluded it would not be in the public interest to pursue the second part of this case." She was referring to Air Canada's bankruptcy filing and the arrival of Jetsgo as competitor. The only problem with this logic was that Air Canada's restructuring was not caused by competitive pressures, but rather its inability to juggle a bloated debt and cost structure in the wake of Sept. 11. Jetsgo, meanwhile, was toast only months after Ms. Scott's declaration.

The moral of this story is you can't count on the bureau to effectively police abuse of market dominance by companies in any sector. It takes way too long and almost always sides with the big boys. The London-based Global Competition Review has consistently concluded as much after several years of rating the agency poorly in its annual ranking of the developed world's watchdogs. In its latest report, it noted that 28 of 40 abuse-of-dominance cases were closed in 2005 with no fines or remedies issued.

It's not entirely the bureau's fault. It operates on the basis of competitor complaints and faces an almost unattainable burden of proof. Its budget has remained stagnant at about $30-million for about a decade, even though the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development called for a 50-per-cent increase in 2000. The workload is such that it has not even tabled a 2005 to 2006 report, almost nine months after its year-end.

In the 2004 to 2005 report, meanwhile, we are reminded it approved the takeover of Microcell by Rogers because "the transaction would not create or enhance market power in the mobile wireless market" nor "increase the likelihood of co-ordinated behaviour among the major cellular companies." Say what?

Now Mr. Bernier is promising us that the bureau, with a new power to slap $15-million fines on telcos, will keep BCE and Telus in line. Sorry, Mr. Bernier, you say rottweiler but all we see is lhasa apso.

Me thinks this author's Eastern Canadian bias is showing. Note he says that in Bell Canada is Canada's National Phone Company. Of course he would he works for a BCE owned newspaper, the Globe and Mail. He lives in Quyebec and Bell is dominant in Ontario and Quebec Canada's largest population centres.

That being said Telus is not just number two in Canada but a far more flexible player than BCE which is now encumbered not just with its Teleco business but with its ownership of other media, CTV, Globe and Mail etc. The irony of course is that if as he says the Conservatives are protecting Bell Canada in their recent move to tax Income Trusts, and to over-ride the CRTC, then they are protecting one of the largest corporate homes of Liberal Party movers and shakers.

Ask yourself if that makes political sense. Of course not.


In reality it is the Conservatives ideology of deregulation that is driving thier moves, which benefit both Telus and Bell. They hate the Wheat Board, and they hate the CRTC. Heck they hate the CBC so watch out. However the neo-liberal market ideology of the Tories does not help consumers, despite their rhetorical excuses, ironically it actually does the opposite of creating a competitive market it helps monopolize the market place.

How telecom reform topped Bernier's agenda

Mr. Bernier listened as the telecom review panel members argued that VoIP, a breakthrough technology that allows phone calls to be made through Internet infrastructure, is an important niche that should be left as unfettered as possible. They said there were also questions about whether governments can do much to regulate such border-free technologies, anyway.

For Mr. Bernier, a staunch advocate of free markets and small government, it was a critical moment.

Mr. Bernier, a lawyer and former executive with the Montreal Economic Institute, a free-markets think tank, would eventually open up part of the VoIP market while also charting a course that would put him in conflict with more pragmatic members of cabinet and within the senior ranks of his new department. Some in each of those influential groups would prefer that the Beauce, Que., native focus more on specific policy goals, instead of broader philosophical ideals.

This week, he added to his roster of telecom changes when he announced that he intends to overrule another major CRTC decision, this time the commission's move to continue regulating local phone services.

'Man of action' or just ignoring consumers?

Eamon Hoey, senior partner at consultancy Hoey Associates, has a different view. He says Mr. Bernier has done nothing but make the big telephone companies happy before the Christmas season.

"[Mr.] Bernier is looking at this problem through the eyes of the carriers and the providers, rather than from the perspective of the consumers," Mr. Hoey said. "He has to figure out the needs of consumers that aren't being served and why, rather than saying if we deregulate them all then we'll end up where we need to go."

This week, Mr. Bernier said the federal government was scrapping CRTC rules on local phone deregulation and proposing its own guidelines. His rules, which could be implemented as early as February, would see much of urban Canada deregulated as long as it can be proven there are at least two wireline phone carriers -- a combination of either Bell Canada or Telus and a cable company -- in a given market.

This is seen as a major victory for BCE Inc. and Telus Corp., which have argued they are constrained in efforts to compete against cable companies and Web-based players because of CRTC constraints.

It was the second time he dismissed CRTC guidelines in favour of more market-friendly options, as recommended in the blue-chip Telecommunications Policy Review panel report tabled last March.

Less than a month ago, Mr. Bernier said VoIP services, or Voice over Internet Protocol, would not be subject to regulation, as the CRTC had recommended. "It makes the CRTC look up toward the Minister and say, 'What do you want me to do next, boss?,' " Mr. Hoey said

Bernier rewrites CRTC's forebearance ruling

In a move to accelerate his desire to deregulate telecommunications in favour of market forces, Industry Canada Minister Maxime Bernier outlined new criteria for determining when the CRTC should forbear, or refrain, from regulating local telephone service provided by the former monopoly telephone companies. Business customers, for example, would have to have access to at least two fixed-line facilities-based service providers for forbearance to occur – an incumbent, for example, and a cable company -- while consumers would also have to have access to at least one wireless service provider.

“It’s an entirely different ideological mindset,” said Ian Angus, principal analyst with Angus Telemanagement in Ajax, Ont. “The CRTC had said a market is competitive when there are successful competitors – companies that have achieved enough success to survive in business. The minister is saying if there is facilities-based competition, then it’s competitive and we will deregulate.”

One of the areas left out of the proposal is any provision for re-establishing regulation if various geographic zones return to a monopoly, Angus added. “What happens in five years down the line if we have competition in most cities and the cable companies decide they can’t survive, that it’s just too expensive?”

And being the Party of Western Canada, as we have heard over the last few days from various Cabinet ministers and the PM himself (We represent Western Canadian Farmers who voted for us not the Liberals) I suspect that the Tories are as eager to see Telus benefit as they are Bell. In fact I think they see deregulation benefiting Telus more in the Telco market, in direct competition with Bell, than benefiting Bell. Bell's business is too widely distributed now, and their telecommunications business is their weak spot.

I do like his criticism of the Competition Bureau. And over all the business press has been far more critical of the governments moves to deregulate than those who simply are ideologically opposed to the CRTC (it certainly needs to be reformed to represent us the taxpayers and consumers and not the industry and corporate interests) or who have an unwavering belief in the neo-liberal myths that deregualtion and privatization are the be all and end all of reforming the market place.

See:

Telus

BCE


CRTC


Bernier

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Thursday, December 14, 2006

Tweedle Dee Tweedle Dum Petro Tales


One increases its investements in production and the other cuts investment in production and yet both can offer shareholders huge dividends. Without turning into Income Trusts.

In the case of Petro-Can shouldn't someone take the Liberals to task about the fact that they sold off our shares in the once crown corporation, for a one time attempt to buy votes by declaring a surplus under PM Paul Martin. Cutting one's nose to spite one's face.



Petro-Canada to raise capital spending by 15 per cent to $4.1B

Oil and gas giant Petro-Canada Inc. (TSX:PCA) plans to raise capital spending by 15 per cent to $4.1 billion in 2007 and grow output as major projects come onstream despite more problems or delays at its Terra Nova and Hibernia projects off the coast of Newfoundland.

Petro-Canada announced late Thursday it expects to boost oil and gas production about 15 per cent in 2007 to about 420,000 barrels of oil equivalent output a day from 390,000 barrels this year.

In another development, Petro-Canada said it's boosting its quarterly dividend to 13 cents a share from 10 cents, a 30 per cent jump in the cash payment to stockholders.

The increased dividend will be payable April 1 to shareholders of record as of March 3, 2007.


EnCana cuts capital spending by 6 pct for 2007
EnCana Corp. (ECA.TO: Quote, Profile , Research) will cut spending by 6 percent to $5.9 billion in 2007 as it grapples with cost inflation due to booming energy-industry conditions, Canada's biggest oil and gas producer said on Thursday. EnCana also said it planned to double its quarterly dividend next year, resulting in an annual payout of 80 cents a share. Stock buybacks could total 3 percent to 5 percent of those outstanding in 2007, compared with 10 percent this year.

Stocks advance as oil heads up

Oil prices rise after OPEC sets stage for possible cut next year

See

Encana

Oil


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The Fountain Of Youth

Is not a fountain. It is the Turtle. Whom it turns out are not only living fossils but the longest living teenagers. And we are it's only real enemy and the reason for its possible extinction.

“Turtles don’t really die of old age,” Dr. Raxworthy said. In fact, if turtles didn’t get eaten, crushed by an automobile or fall prey to a disease, he said, they might just live indefinitely

Turtles resist growing old, and they resist growing up. Dr. Zug and his co-workers recently determined that among some populations of sea turtles, females do not reach sexual maturity until they are in their 40s or 50s, which Dr. Zug proposes could be “a record in the animal kingdom.”

Turtles are also ancient as a family. The noble chelonian lineage that includes all living turtles and tortoises extends back 230 million years or more, possibly predating other reptiles like snakes and crocodiles, as well as birds, mammals, even the dinosaurs.

The turtle’s core morphology has changed little over time, and today’s 250 or so living species all display an unmistakable resemblance to the earliest turtle fossils. Yet the clan has evolved a dazzling array of variations on its blockbuster theme, allowing it to colonize every continent save Antarctica and nearly every type of biome nested therein: deserts; rainforests; oceans; rivers; bogs; mountains; New Brunswick, Canada; New Brunswick, N.J.

With its miserly metabolism and tranquil temperament, its capacity to forgo food and drink for months at a time, its redwood burl of a body shield, so well engineered it can withstand the impact of a stampeding wildebeest, the turtle is one of the longest-lived creatures Earth has known. Individual turtles can survive for centuries, bearing silent witness to epic swaths of human swagger. Last March, a giant tortoise named Adwaita said to be as old as 250 years died in a Calcutta zoo, having been taken to India by British sailors, records suggest, during the reign of King George II. In June, newspapers around the world noted the passing of Harriet, a Galapagos tortoise that died in the Australia Zoo at age 176 — 171 years after Charles Darwin is said, perhaps apocryphally, to have plucked her from her equatorial home.

Behind such biblical longevity is the turtle’s stubborn refusal to senesce — to grow old. Don’t be fooled by the wrinkles, the halting gait and the rheumy gaze. Researchers lately have been astonished to discover that in contrast to nearly every other animal studied, a turtle’s organs do not gradually break down or become less efficient over time.


Imke Lass for The New York Times, at the University of Georgia, Savannah River Ecology Lab

From top, a leopard tortoise, a South African land-based species and a common pet. Center, a New Guinea snakeneck turtle, a carnivorous species found in the river system in the southern part of the country. Above, a big-headed turtle, native to mountain streams in Southern China and related to North American snapping turtles.


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Baba Sitting


As I have said here before the childcare in Alberta is based on baby sitting provided by Baba. Which is now the Federal Conservative child care plan. And this is the result that Canadians can look forward to...

A report presented to Cochrane's town council last week concluded that the town has only 12 provincially approved child-care spots for its 12,400 residents, with private day homes and babysitters filling the gap.

At tip o' the blog to My Blahg

See

Daycare


Childcare

Whose Family Values?






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Tax Breaks For Some

Let's see the PM's son plays hockey so we have a tax break for sports.

Social Conservatives hate the Status of Women and so it's eliminated by the death of a thousand funding cuts.

They tax the Income Trusts but offer wealthy middle class retired couples income splitting, pandering for the Seniors vote.

Now the Conservative Government is offering a tax break for disabled children and their caregivers. Generosity, compasionate conservatism or opportunism? You decide....

Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty expects the next budget will include a plan to allow parents of severely disabled children to set aside up to $200,000 tax-free for their care.

The report, which was written by a panel established by Mr. Flaherty and led by Toronto tax lawyer Jim Love, also calls on Ottawa to provide parents of children with severe disabilities with cash grants of at least $1,000 annually over 20 years, and to double those payments to low-income families.

When asked yesterday if he liked the dollar amounts included in the panel's report, Mr. Flaherty, the father of teen triplet sons, one of whom has a mental disability as a result of contracting encephalitis when a toddler, replied, "Yes, I do."

And he offered hope to parents of disabled children that they may not have to wait long to see the recommendations implemented.




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Tax Cuts


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