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Neat piece in The Washington Post this morning …

The Frank Kent Hummer dealership — complete with an indoor waterfall and a massive curved roof reminiscent of an aircraft hanger — opened in Fort Worth in the spring of 2005 with hopes as high as the giant “H” that dominates its entrance.

Three years later, General Motors wants to get rid of its lagging Hummer brand. But what's good for GM in this case may not be good for its 400 Hummer dealers, who have invested millions of dollars with the expectation of selling a line of new products for years to come . . . [Read the rest]

Between October 2007 and October 2008 the U.S. economy shed roughly a million jobs while Canada's economy — inexplicably to most economists — added about 225,000 jobs. It seemed that every month when the new positive jobs numbers came out from StatsCan, economists would shake their heads and warn that this can't go on forever; that sooner or later unemployment in Canada would start to rise.

Well, that time has come. The November numbers are out and they're not good:

… employment fell by 71,000 in November, … The unemployment rate rose 0.1 percentage points to 6.3%.

In November, the employment declines were concentrated in Ontario (-66,000), where there was a large drop in full-time work. Nova Scotia (-4,400) also experienced a decline in November, …

The manufacturing sector was hard hit in November, with a net employment drop of 38,000. This brings manufacturing declines to 388,000 since the peak in 2002….

Technorati Tags: economy

Back in May, Auditor General Sheila Fraser released a report saying that 24 Sussex Drive, the official residence of the prime minister, was falling apart:

Fraser said Tuesday that 24 Sussex Drive has not undergone a major renovation in 50 years, and needs extensive work to fix the plumbing, air conditioning, windows and electrical system. The work would require the prime minister to move out of 24 Sussex for up to 15 months. …

No prime minister, including the incumbent, wants to leave 24 Sussex for the length of time required to do the repairs. In a scrum that followed the release of the AG's report last May, I asked Dion if he would be prepared to maek that sacrifice:

Me: Mr. Dion, if you became prime minister, would you spend the $10 million to fix up 24 Sussex and leave the place for 15 months? It is a green tragedy, there is a terrible waste of energy over there.

Stéphane Dion: Thank you. I like the question. I just want to say that it is a historic building. It belongs to the Canadian people. So if the NCC, the National Capital Commission makes it a priority and the budget exists, my family will not be the problem. We will do what the NCC is asking us to do because it belongs to the Canadian people. I’m very confidence that I will be prime minister. I don’t know if I will live at Sussex.

Earlier this week, the Citizen's Mohammed Adam reported that the National Capital Commission has started negotiations with the PMO to see if the Harper family can move out, likely to 8 Rideau Gate. That could be where Prime Minister Dion moves in, if in fact, he does what he said he would back in May.

Conservative MP Mike Allen said the errant e-mail sent by the NDP with details of their conference call did not go to him.
Allen's parliamentary e-mail is allen.m@parl.gc.ca while rookie NDP MP Malcolm Allen's e-mail is allen.ma@parl.gc.ca.
Asked Monday if he received the errant e-mail, Mike Allen said, "No. In fact, I've asked my staff to triple-check messages to make sure they have the right e-mail."

The other pair of Tory and NDP MPs who share the same surname are Vancouver Island Tory John Duncan and Edmonton NDPer Linda Duncan. John Duncan, so far, has not responded to questions on the matter.

David Akin
Canwest News Service
http://www.davidakin.com
Cell: +1 613 355 5347

I will no longer be able to receive tweets on my BlackBerry, Twitter said this week:

Canadian SMS service

Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).

The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the way folks want … regardless of where they live.

There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We’re working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress.

Technorati Tags: telecommunications, twitter

Nearly three-quarters of us think our banks are safe and sound — says a survey out today by the banks.

Seventy-two per cent of Canadians believe that Canada’s banks have performed better than other banks around the world, according to the results of a recent survey by The Strategic Counsel for the Canadian Bankers Association released today. In addition, 77 per cent of Canadians describe Canada’s banks as more secure and stable than other banks around the world. The Strategic Counsel survey was conducted between November 4 and November 9, 2008.

In other bank news today, Canada's Privacy Commissioner issues this release:

Close to half a million people will likely never know whether their personal information was compromised in a data breach at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), according to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. The Commissioner began investigating after the bank informed her about the disappearance of a hard drive containing the personal information and financial data of some 470,000 clients of Talvest Mutual Funds, which were at that time a family of CIBC Mutual Funds.

More evidence to be suspicious of those who would build One Big Database in the name of our safety:

Glenda Hutton, 66, of Courtenay has never been arrested, doesn’t have a criminal record and over a long career as a school secretary never caused anyone trouble.

So it’s perplexing just how her name turned up on a U.S. no-fly list, but there it is. Hutton has been wrangling with U.S. and Canadian government bureaucracy for over a year trying to clear her name and regain her freedom to travel to the U.S. and beyond.

She first learned something was wrong in October 2007 when she was delayed at the Air Canada check-in counter at Comox from boarding a flight to Calgary.

She was dumbfounded while her husband Ken thought it was a joke. She was allowed on the aircraft but a month later she was flagged when trying to board a Japan Airlines flight to Thailand. “They said they could get me out of Canada but feared for my safety once I got to Bangkok, Thailand,” Hutton said. The couple decided to stay home and sort the mess out. Japan Airlines refunded their tickets.

Hutton was on a Canadian no-fly list but her name has been removed. She’s convinced that her name remains on a U.S. list. “Air Canada told me that there was someone else in the world with my name who is a very, very bad person,” Hutton said. … [Read the rest]

Technorati Tags: Big Brother, privacy

This just in:

Canada’s auto manufacturing sector is expected lose money for the third consecutive year in 2008, with losses ballooning to $1.7 billion this year, according to the Conference Board’s Canadian Industrial Outlook: Canada’s Motor Vehicle Manufacturing Industry.

“Canadian auto manufacturers remain caught in a maelstrom of cyclical and structural industry changes, a trend that is unlikely to improve until at least 2010,” said Sabrina Browarski, Economist.

As Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the other leaders of G20 economies meet today in Washington at an “emergency summit” on the economy — helpfully dubbed The Meltdown Summit by CBC yesterday — here is a sobering read in the latest issue of Vanity Fair by super-smart historian Niall Ferguson:

… we have lived through something more than a financial crisis. We have witnessed the death of a planet. Call it Planet Finance. Two years ago, in 2006, the measured economic output of the entire world was worth around $48.6 trillion. The total market capitalization of the world’s stock markets was $50.6 trillion, 4 percent larger. The total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40 percent larger. Planet Finance was beginning to dwarf Planet Earth.

Planet Finance seemed to spin faster, too. Every day $3.1 trillion changed hands on foreign-exchange markets. Every month $5.8 trillion changed hands on global stock markets. And all the time new financial life-forms were evolving. The total annual issuance of mortgage-backed securities, including fancy new “collateralized debt obligations” (C.D.O.’s), rose to more than $1 trillion. The volume of “derivatives”—contracts such as options and swaps—grew even faster, so that by the end of 2006 their notional value was just over $400 trillion. Before the 1980s, such things were virtually unknown. In the space of a few years their populations exploded. On Planet Finance, the securities outnumbered the people; the transactions outnumbered the relationships. [read the rest]

Just about any time these days that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty or Prime Minister Stephen Harper talk about the global fiscal and economic crisis, you will almost certainly hear them assert that Canada’s banks are “the soundest in the world.” Indeed, that was the first thing Flaherty said Wednesday morning just as he was announcing a suite of measures to help the banks do their job better.

It’s a claim Canada’s politicians have been making ever since the Geneva-based World Economic Forum published a report Oct. 8 that ranked Canada’s banking system the “soundest” among 134 countries surveyed.

But is Canada’s banking system really that sound? Should Canadians and politicians be putting much stock in the World Economic Forum’s report?

“If you look at . . . all these rankings, they’re meaningless,” Reuven Brenner, a professor in the Desautels faculty of management at McGill University told me. Continue reading Are our banks really number one?