Month: August 2004

There are 600 million twenty dollar bills in circulation in Canada — more than any other denomination. Starting on Sept. 29, the Bank of Canada will start replacing every single one of them with a new bill. The new bill has a pile of anti-counterfeit measures. It also celebrates Canadian arts and culture and does so by including a quote from Franco-Manitoban author Gabriel Roy and by showing four pieces of art by Bill Reid. Queen Elizabeth II is on the bill, of course, and has been continuously since 1954. In fact, Elizabeth was on Canada's first-ever twenty issued in 1935. She was 9-year-old Princess Elizabeth at the time.
The new bill costs the Bank of Canada 9 cents each to print, up from about 6.5 cents from the current version, which debuted in 1991. The Bank, incidentally, spends more than $100-million a year on currency research, development, and printing. The design and development of the new twenty bill cost $12-million alone. I know all of this because I spent a few hours at a press conference on the subject yesterday for a brief report for CTV National News. My Globe and Mail colleague Peter Kennedy reported on the launch of the bill from Vancouver where the Bank organized its main news conference. Here's a direct link to the video.

Our company is trying to beef up our all-news cable channel, CTV Newsnet,but we'll need regulatory approval to do that. You'll get a chance soon to tell the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission what you think about the ideas outlined in this press release:

CTV News today filed an application with the CRTC that would enable it to overhaul CTV Newsnet to provide more original Canadian news programming and compete with the large number of foreign news networks that have entered the Canadian market in recent years. CTV Newsnet would still provide headline news service under the proposed plan.
“Since CTV Newsnet first went on the air seven years ago, there's been an explosion of news network choices for Canadians. Today there are nine English-language news networks, including American services CNN, CNN Headline News and CNBC, and the number is still growing, with Fox News being the latest to seek to enter the Canadian market,” said Robert Hurst, President, CTV News. “We believe more than ever that Canadians need and want strong Canadian news sources. That's why we want to enhance news programming for CTV Newsnet.
There is a strong, proven market for effective, clearly Canadian coverage of the day's headlines, with panel discussions, call-ins and live event broadcasts. That's what we want to do at CTV Newsnet.”
The broadcaster is seeking a change in its license conditions that requires it to maintain a 15-minute wheel format, subject to very limited exceptions. CTV Newsnet is the only English-language news service which operates under such a restriction; CNN and other American news network operating in Canada have no restrictions placed upon their coverage of the news.
“We are committed to maintaining a headline service,” said Hurst. “But we believe the current requirement is inflexible in the extreme — and in effect puts shackles on our ability to cover the headlines of the day and to give Canadians the kind of news programming they want. Moreover, in practice, it just doesn't make sense to shift from a breaking story to covering sports and entertainment headlines. What we're proposing is a sensible, flexible headline service that would permit us to make the basic newsroom, editorial decisions about what to put on the air and why — a right that every other English- language news service enjoys.
“What we are asking for is the right to compete fairly with other news networks,” said Hurst. “The right to make newsroom decisions based on news merit, not on stopwatch timings or other arbitrary criteria; the right, in this wired, globalized information age, to give our viewers a Canadian perspective on the news of the day.”
CTV News pointed to its successful experiment with the daily, hour-long COUNTDOWN: With Mike Duffy, election headlines show, hosted by Mike Duffy during the recent federal election. “The success of COUNTDOWN: With Mike Duffy proves that there is an audience for intelligent, fast-paced news programming,” said Hurst. “And that's the audience we want to serve.
COUNTDOWN: With Mike Duffy, with its panel discussions and audience interaction, is a template for the kind of headline programming we want to see more of on CTV Newsnet. We're not talking Antiques Road Show or Fashion File here — we're talking about hard news and current events in shows that have personality and point-of-view.”

Air Canada has been operating under court protection from its creditors for more than 17 months. Yesterday, in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Justice James Farley signed off on the papers that will get the national airline out of bankruptcy protection on September 30. Bizarrely — even though Air Canada's shares which will be worthless in a few weeks (and the company itself has been saying so for months), someone is still trading the shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Shortly before it comes out of its restructuring, those shares will be delisted. Then, a new entity will take Air Canada's place. It will be called ACE Aviation Holdings Inc. — ACE standing for Air Canada Enterprises. ACE will be the holding company whose assets will be the operating units that include Air Canada and its sister airlines like Air Canada Jazz. Shares of ACE will be issued this fall.
I did a story on the latest Air Canada developments for CTV National News. The video link is down the right hand side of the page, under related video.
My Globe and Mail colleague Brent Jang also reported on yesterday's Air Canada developments.

Every day, newspapers around the country print page after page of stock price tables and other market data. Not only does that cost a lot of money but it leaves reporters with less space to tell neat stories. Today, The Globe and Mail takes a relatively risky gamble but one, I suspect, that more and more papers are likely to take over the next few years. The Globe will reduce the amount of market data it publishes in its business section by as much as three full pages. Instead, it has beefed up its Internet-based investment tracking and market data tools. As Giles Gherson, editor of the Globe's Report on Business says in today's paper, “In today's fast-moving market, investors need immediate pricing information to make their decisions and that's why, increasingly, they're turning to the Internet, and not the newspaper, to get it.”
The Globe has an excellent family of Web sites for business news, market data, and other investor information:

• Globeinvestor.com
• GlobeinvestorGOLD.com (Subscription required)
• Globefund.com
• globeandmail.com/marketclose.

“Our substantial presence on the Internet offers far more financial market data than we could ever publish in a newspaper,” Gherson wrote.
“Over the past several months, we've contacted nearly 2,000 of our readers to find out how much they use the pages of stock and financial listings we print. What we learned was what we already suspected: More and more of our readers are now relying on Globeinvestor.com and other websites for up-to-the-minute market price.”
This initiative makes particular sense for the Globe as the paper's readership tends to be more affluent and have higher education levels. Those two factors, combined with the fact that more than two-thirds of Canadian households have an Internet connection and greater than 90 per cent of Canadians have Internet access at either home, work or school, makes the likelihood of Globe Report on Business readers having ready access to the Net highly probable.

Maybe. Maybe not. I kicked this question around in Saturday's Globe and Mail:

“We've had a big correction in tech, particularly since June. However, what you now have is a trade-off between more attractive valuation but the outlook isn't as rosy as you would have said a year ago,” says Ian Ainsworth, senior vice-president at MacKenzie Financial Corp.
So, is it time to rebalance your equity portfolio, picking up some cheap tech stocks in expectation of better days ahead? Or, is there worse to come for the tech stars, and should you look elsewhere?
Bob McWhirter, president and portfolio manager at Selective Asset Management Inc. says your view on the sector is likely coloured by your outlook for overall markets. As markets move up, tech stocks tend to outperform. But as markets weaken, tech issues tend to get punished a little more than other sectors.
“At the moment, we are cautious with regard to our outlook for 2005,” Mr. McWhirter says. “We think there are pretty good buys within the tech patch, but over all, tech is a market-neutral at best.”
Gavin Graham, vice-president and director of investments at the Guardian Group of Funds, takes an even more bearish view. He says investors may want to look at something other than technology.
“You want to be very cautious. The easy money has been made,” he says. If you want to overweight a particular sector, Mr. Graham likes consumer staples, financials or energy. “All of these are boring. Tech is sexy. But if you'd been boring, you would have made money.”
Mr. Graham believes technology won't be attractive again for another nine months to a year.
Duncan Stewart is not waiting that long. He's in technology full time, running some technology funds at Tera Capital Corp.
Mr. Stewart believes technology should be part of every equity portfolio, if only because the sector makes up about 20 per cent of equity markets and about 20 per cent of economic activity.
“You want to build your portfolio with a certain amount of discipline and even if you really hate a sector, you probably shouldn't zero-weight it. You might half-weight it,” Mr. Stewart says. He suggests that investors might still want to have 5 to 10 per cent of their equity holdings in technology. “Zero-weighting is always incredibly risky because you might be wrong.” [Read the full story]

IBM Canada and Accenture Ltd are hiring thousands this year, I say in today's Globe and Mail. It's a short piece and, among the things I couldn't squeeze in, was the fact that Hewlett-Packard Canada Co., EDS and homegrown tech stars like CGI Group and Cognos are also growing their employee headcount.

Canadian multinational technology companies are adding thousands of employees to their payrolls this year, a sign of an improving environment for the sector in Canada.
“Our business is cooking on all cylinders,” said Bill Morris, Canada manager for Accenture Ltd. of Hamilton, Bermuda. Accenture, which provides technology outsourcing, consulting and integration services, had 3,800 employees in Canada in 2003, and will finish this year with more than 5,000 . . . [Read the full story]

I've enjoyed two great reads from Canadian journalist Clive Thompson in the last couple of weeks and that merits a blog entry. Today, in the New York Times Magazine, Clive writes about the way the U.S. military is using computer games and Silicon Valley programmers to help prepare soldiers for war. I once heard retired U.S. General Paul Gorman speak about some of these issues at a conference I attended a few years ago. He was involved with the America's Army initiative that Clive references.
Using computer games to train soldiers sounds gimmicky. But the U.S. military takes it seriously and so should more of us. Clive sketches out some of the issues that deserve more critical study.
The other piece of Clive's was published a while ago but I just got around to it recently. Writing in The Walrus, Clive profiled the work of a U.S. economist who argues that online gaming creates real economic activity. A great eye-opener of a piece, particularly for those who've never immersed themselves in Everquest and the like.

Industry Canada has a task force, as you may have heard, that is trying to figure out how to cut down on spam in the Canadian Internet space. If you've got an idea, they'd love to hear from you.

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office, an agency within Industry Canada, now has a newsroom at its site.
It's average-to-below-average as a resource for journalists.
There is no RSS feed for new information and no place to sign up for e-mail notification of new resources at the site. Do they really expect that journalists or anyone else interested in CIPO will drop in daily to see if there is anything new there? Note to PR practitioners: Push your stuff out to journalists. RSS is best; e-mail is a close second. Newswires are a distant third. Phone and fax failed to qualify.
The most important thing anyone setting up a Web site for the press can do is to put up a clearly labeled 'Media Contacts' section where they can find the name and phone number of someone they can right now (now means 'now' for the journalist. So if you're a North American West Coast journalist on deadline — say 5 pm PDT — that means there had better be media people answering the phones in New York at 8 pm New York time) for information. Web forms are no good. A journalist on deadline does not want a Web form when an editor is breathing down their neck. They want a real person who can answer their questions.
Journalists who want to contact CIPO have to do a little digging. There is no link at the 'Newsroom' that would direct a visitor to the name and number of a media contact. But journalists aren't (that) stupid. We simply open up a recent press release and, presto, down there at the bottom is a name and a phone number of a communications person.
Still, all I get is a name and phone number. Why doesn't CIPO and Industry Canada generally not include the e-mail address of the press contact. More often than not, all I need is clarification of a single fact on the release. Isn't that more efficiently and quickly handled via e-mail?

Canadian television viewers are not, American readers of this blog will be surprised to learn, able to avail themselves of Fox News. No Canadian cable or satellite TV company has received regulatory permission to carry Fox in Canada. But Canada's cable companies believe that Canadians should be able to watch Bill O'Reilly if we want to and so they have petitioned the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to be able to add Fox to the cable lineup.
In its application, Fox calls itself a cable news network “devoted to delivering objective coverage” of the day's events. I've never watched Fox News but I understand from my American friends that Fox may be stretching it a bit to say it is devoted to “delivering objective coverage.”
Regardless, the CRTC is taking the views of Canadians into account before it rules on the application and, today, a colleague writes to say the CRTC has extended the deadline to receive comments but the deadline is just around the corner — August 23. So, if you have an opinion on whether Fox News ought to be in Canada or not, you'd better tell the CRTC soon how you feel.
From The original notice, with instructions for filing comments”

“The (CRTC) has received two separate requests from the Canadian Cable Television Association (CCTA), acting as the Canadian sponsor, to add two non-Canadian satellite services to the lists of satellite services eligible for distribution on a digital basis (the digital lists). The CCTA described the non-Canadian services as follows:
Fox News: A 24 hour seven day per week national U.S. cable news network devoted to delivering objective coverage of the day's events. The service broadcasts original news and information programs including live breaking news stories and coverage of significant events in the United States and around the world”