Only in Canada you say…First:

Enfin: Un vrai aphrodisiaque canadien

Now some selections from Publius:

Sell Out

So here is your genial correspondent, shaking off the jet lag in a hotel in Southern California. At my door a complimentary copy of the Wall Street Journal. Glancing over the headlines two words jump out: Canada and Potash.

There can be nothing less sexy in the world of international business than Canada and fertilizer. Boring sensible Canadians making a boring and sensible product. So, why the front page treatment? In the American business newspaper of record, no less?

Well Tony Clement, you may remember him as an ex-member of the Mike Harris Common Sense posse, is now the federal Minister of Industry. Last week Mr Clement, who this past summer saved Canada from the authoritarian scourge of the long-form census, decided to violate the property rights of thousands of his fellow Canadians, as well as many assorted foreigners.

Hell. I leave the country for a few days and we’ve become a maple syruped Venezuela…

Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of Canada, former President of the National Citizens Coalition, a “conservative” think-tank. Mr Harper is widely regarded – by the editorial board of the Toronto Star – as a right-wing demagogue plotting to transform Canada into a snow-bound version of Texas, or at least the dystopian view of Texas many Canadians have.

A staunch advocate of small government, unless it threatens his chances of obtaining a long dreamed for majority government…

What Tony Clement has done is violate the private property rights of those Canadians who own shares in Potash Corp, to benefit other Canadians who, in his belief, would not benefit from the sale of Potash Corp to BHP. In other words, Tony has decided that selected Peter is to have his property partially nationalized, in order to help out collectivist Paul. It’s not theft exactly, since the shares have not been expropriated, it’s instead something akin to vandalism. Just as a vandal reduces the value of a property by damaging it, so Tony Clement, with his economic nationalist spray paint can, has reduced the value of Potash shares.

Patriotism, as Dr Johnson observed, is the last refuge of scoundrels. Since most politicians are scoundrels, or for practical purposes should be assumed as such, we find them frequently wrapping themselves in the flag…

Fellow has rather a way with words, what?  A bit more than mildly related to this post, I’d suggest:

First…all the politicians

Mark
Ottawa

Lovely, Brian Mulroney starting to see the light:

A Sacred Trust Revisited

Earlier:

Tommy Douglas not rolling in his grave enough/Ministers of cults [me]

The Writing On The Hospital Wall [Adrian]

Mark
Ottawa

Or, indeed, other large Canadian companies? Earlier:

The Dragon’s Weltmacht/Canadian angle Predate

Plus more on Sinochem and Potash Corp. Now excerpts from an article in the New York Review of Books (full text subscriber only):

The Party: Impenetrable, All Powerful

The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers
by Richard McGregor
Harper, 302 pp., $27.99

…as Richard McGregor shows in his book The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers, the Party is not increasingly irrelevant; rather, it is at the center of events as varied as shifts in global currency markets, New York stock market listings, and clashes over North Korea. And far from being decrepit, the Party is surprisingly vital, as McGregor convincingly demonstrates in chapters on how it influences China’s economy, military, minority policy, and understanding of history. Although many of its policies are not Communist, the Party is still Leninist in structure and organization, resulting in institutions and behavior patterns that would be recognizable to the leaders of the Russian Revolution. McGregor’s book is also proof that for all of its secretive tendencies, the Party and its power can be usefully analyzed.

Our failure to do so has led to spectacular misperceptions about China, a key one being that the government has been privatizing the economy. Back in the 1990s, for example, the government announced that it would “grasp the large and release the small,” which was taken in Western capitals to mean privatization. In fact, the plan was simply to turn state-owned enterprises into shareholder-owned companies—with the government holding a controlling or majority stake. Many shares were sold overseas to investors eager for a piece of China’s economic growth, but even today almost all Chinese companies of any size and importance remain in government hands.

…All have Party secretaries who manage them in conjunction with the CEO. In big questions, such as leadership or overseas acquisitions, Party meetings precede board meetings, which largely give routine approval to Party decisions. The Party’s overarching control was driven home a few years ago when China’s large telecom companies had their CEOs shuffled like a pack of cards because of a decision by the Party’s Organization Department. It would have been like the US Department of Commerce ordering the heads of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile to play musical chairs. For the Organization Department, which acts as the Party’s personnel department, it was normal; it often shifts senior Party officials every few years to prevent empire building and corruption.

…judges translate court decisions made by Communist Party legal affairs committees into rulings. Since judges are not allowed to rule independently, Western efforts to foster rule of law by training them are thus largely pointless [a Canadian government aid effort (see 1. here)--hah!--wake up, Conservatives].

…the reach of the Party’s Organization Department is so expansive that it would be like one group in Washington naming the members of the Supreme Court, all the members of the Cabinet, the editors of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the heads of all major think tanks, and the CEOs of major companies like General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, and Wal-Mart.

…The big companies that are listed abroad are indeed giants but mainly because of their sheer size; they are essentially little more than partially privatized quasi monopolies—big telecoms, banks, and insurance and oil companies. That makes them large but not particularly nimble, inventive, or influential in international markets, except when trying to buy natural resources. [emphasis added].

…Foreign policy, for all the international efforts to engage China on global issues, remains focused on two narrow concerns: territorial issues like Taiwan and Tibet [and others: "Japan feels the Dragon’s fiery breath"], and resource extraction in Africa or Central Asia [see below]. And the state has become so adept at political control that no one seriously argues that civil society is becoming more robust; on the contrary, the Party’s new-found confidence has allowed it to roll back gains of previous years…

More on that resource extraction:

Rescuing Afghanistan’s Buddhist History

Even as once-secure parts of Afghanistan succumb to criminality and the insurgency, and the Afghan financial system hovers on the brink of failure, there are small signs of hope here. A spectacular Buddhist archaeological site is now being excavated by the Afghan government’s National Institute of Archaeology, near where Al Qaeda ran a training camp in the 1990s.

Work on Mes Aynak (“Little copper well”) has proceeded at a rapid pace since it began in May, because the archaeologists — 16 Afghans and two Frenchmen from DAFA (Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan) — are racing against time. Within three years, the site is slated to be destroyed by Afghanistan’s largest single foreign investment, a Chinese-run copper mine not 900 yards away…

Predate: The following appeared in, gasp, the Globe and Mail (China upsuckers extraordinaire) yesterday–but not from, natch, the news staff:

Why China isn’t fit to lead Asia

Mark
Ottawa

Anne Applebaum lays it out in the Washington Post:

China’s quiet power grab

…Why on earth should China shout, bully and push its neighbors around? Over the past decade, China has kept silent, lain low and behaved more like a multinational company than a global superpower — and garnered enormous political influence as a result.

The fruits of this success are everywhere. Look at Afghanistan, for example, where American troops have been fighting for nearly a decade, where billions of dollars of American aid money has been spent — and where a Chinese company has won the rights to exploit one of the world’s largest copper deposits. Though American troops don’t protect the miners directly, Afghan troops, trained and armed by Americans, do. And though the mine is still in its early phases, the Chinese businessmen and engineers — wearing civilian clothes, offering jobs — are already more popular with the locals than the U.S. troops, who carry guns and talk security. The Chinese paid a high price for their copper mining rights and took a huge risk. But if it pays off, our war against the Taliban might someday be remembered as the war that paved the way for Chinese domination of Afghanistan.

America fights, in other words, while China does business, and not only in Afghanistan. In Iraq, where American troops brought down a dictator and are still fighting an insurgency, Chinese oil companies have acquired bigger stakes in the oil business than their American counterparts. In Pakistan, where billions in American military aid helps the government keep the Taliban at bay, China has set up a free-trade area and is investing heavily in energy and ports.

…Americans are pouring vast amounts of public and private money into solar energy and wind power, hoping to wean themselves off fossil fuels and prevent climate change. China, by contrast, builds a new coal-fired plant every 10 days or so. While thus producing ever more greenhouse gases in the East, China makes clever use of those government subsidies in the West: Three Chinese companies now rank among the top 10 producers of wind turbines in the world.

…Why on earth are the Chinese playing military games with Japan, threatening Southeast Asia or entering politics at all? When they stay silent, we ignore them. When they threaten boycotts or use nationalist language, we get scared and react. We still haven’t realized that the scariest thing about China is not the size of its navy or the arrogance of its diplomats. The scariest thing is the power China has already accumulated without ever deploying its military or its diplomats at all.

Earlier:

Japan feels the Dragon’s fiery breath

Predate: China may also need more Canada:

Sinochem Said to Be Likeliest Rival to BHP Potash Bid

Mark
Ottawa

Further to the mild tone of optimism in a recent post of mine (with a major reservation), Publius looks to Alberta and describes a dark side:

…
This is not talk of freeing the market for health care – perish the radical thought – but allowing private entities to offer care with public funds. The hope is that by contracting out, the services will be delivered more efficiently, while keeping the provincial governments as paymasters. The latter part is suppose to reassure the electorate in some deeply mystical way. Because the government is paying for it, it will be good and humane. Repeat until numb.

Since this is government-run health care by other means, there is little to cheer about. Its main advantage is circumventing the militant health care unions. Its disadvantage is that, in the Left hands, it can be used to discredit further reforms in the direction of the market. Just regulate privately delivered care in such a way as make it even worse than the purely public system, and wait for the Toronto Star – and its sisters across the Dominion – to denounce it as capitalism run amok…

As I’ve often said in this space, Medicare isn’t a government program, it’s a cult…

…Any sort of health care financing scheme will have to rely on the principle of putting a bit in and using as needed, something akin to insurance. The overwhelmingly majority of Canadians can afford private insurance premiums, if they could not the tax base would not exist to support the current system. Like with food and housing, those who could not afford the premiums would be subsidized. Such a system would have its abuses, as any system does, but it will allow the great majority of Canadians access to health care on their own terms, rather than those of the Minister of Health. It would also ensure that even the poor could get quality health care, since they would be just another customer of the hospital or clinic. While such an approach would be logical, it would challenge the sanctity of government delivered care. The Cult of Medicare is not interested in quality health care, it is interested in preserving state health care…

Cult. Quite. We have ministers, not of health but of cults.

Mark
Ottawa

A ray of reason in our mindlessly ideological health care “debate”:

Tasha Kheiriddin: Private health care comes to…. Saskatchewan

From the cradle of Medicare, hope for health care reform.   The Saskatchewan government announced this week that it will be contracting out dental and knee surgery to a private surgical facility.  While the public purse will foot the bill, the operations will be performed by the Omni Surgery Centre instead of a public hospital.

According to provincial health minister Don McMorris,

“the move will help shorten wait times for some day surgeries and the setting will be more convenient for patients.”

The move will not only save time, but money.  Surgeries done at the Omni Surgery Centre cost less than the same procedures done at a hospital. According to provincial officials, knee surgeries will cost $1,500, $179 or 11 per cent less per procedure. Dental surgeries, at $965, will be cheaper by $76 or seven per cent…

Paying for “one-tier” health care, Part 2

Update thought: As for the current federal government’s even touching on the private funding issue…hah!  Even private provision probably beyond their possibilities given their political pusillanimity (despite the hideously dictatorial habits of a certain prime minister). Ain’t alliteration and assonance awesome? Unless overdone, ça va sans dire.

Mark
Ottawa

The Globe and Mail ran an interesting article on Friday comparing questions on the mandatory long-form census to information extracted under torture or duress. Lawrie McFarlane, former deputy health minister in Saskatchewan, told a Parliamentary committee that Canadians lie on the census, citing 21,000 Canadians who registered as “Jedi” for their religion in the 2001 census.

Mr.McFarlane said that Canadians are prone to lie about questions they find uncomfortable, since they don’t want to be found in non-compliance of the mandatory census form:

“What you can guarantee by compulsion is a response: You put a gun to somebody’s head, they’re going to say something.

“It’s almost like the argument for water boarding: if you water board enough people, they will tell you something.

“The question is are they telling you something that’s reliable? Are they telling you something that’s usable?”

I think this is the best point made about the long-form census yet. Although one has to swear an oath that the answers one gives on the mandatory census are accurate, one can make the assumption that some of the information is unreliable because that information has been extracted through coercion.

Most intelligence experts agree that torture works in a similar way; not wanting to displease their captors, a person being subjected to torture will give the kind of answers they think want to be heard, rather than refuse to answer and potentially be given more pain. But that information is seldom useful. Unlike the television show “24 hours”, which depicted the usefulness of extracting vital information to save a city, most coercive testimony provides useless intelligence.

There’s something particularly offensive about being required by law to submit 40 pages of personal information to the government under penalty of fine or imprisonment. It could arguably lead some people to provide not just faulty information, but outright untruths, skewing and distorting the value of the data set.

But the census issue has been stirred up to deliver much political fodder. So much so that the opposition Liberal party intends to launch a private-members bill in the fall in order to reverse the changes made by the governing Conservative Party. The bill is unlikely to pass, so the reason behind the move is nothing more than political window dressing.

Curiously, the parliamentary committee also called to the stand popular Calgary radio talk show host, Dave Rutherford, who has been one of the few people to openly call the census controversy a contrivance of the media. His testimony here is classic:

“I am here because I have expressed an opinion which is in support of the government’s action [but] I don’t want to be considered a cheerleader for the government.

“I agree with the democratic process in this country … and because I participate in democracy, I am here. But other than that, I don’t know why I am here.”

He is there primarily because the opposition parties have tried to pigeonhole the census issue into one of an essential government service under attack by ideologues. Without an intrusive 40-page form, the statisticians argue that the government won’t be able to provide the level of services Canadians are accustomed to. And perhaps that’s the best reason of all to oppose the mandatory long-form census. As Stephen Taylor wrote in the National Post, the dismantling of the Canadian welfare state begins by removing the ability to measure the special interest groups they pander to. Good public policy should be good for all Canadian citizens.

Socialized and unionized health care at, er, work.  From Paul at Celestial Junk:

How about cash cow for “insider” scheduling. This is a result of healthcare for the employees, instead of healthcare for the sick…

Not exactly “one-tier” working conditions.

Mark
Ottawa