David Akin’s On The Hill

If inflation is to be prevented without massive unemployment, there remains only teh control of demand, which, when required, must be primarily achieved by fiscal policy — by the federal budget, with effective emphasis on increases or decreases in taxation … When demand is exerting inflationary pressure, it is far better to restrict consumption through taxes than to cut back welfare spending for the needful and the poor. And better such fiscal restraint than monetary policy operating through murderous interest rates to restrict (primarily) investment spending, with consequent effect on industrial productivity …

– The Affluent Society (4th edition, 1984), p. ix)

… wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding. The poor man has always a precise view of his problem and his remedy: he hasn’t enough and he needs more. The rich man can assume or imagine a much greater variety of ills and he will be correspondingly less certain of their remedy. Also, until he learns to live with his wealth, he will have a well-observed tendency to put it to the wrong purposes or otherwise make himself foolish.

– The Affluent Society (40th Anniversary Edition, 1998, p i)

And in other news … The new head coach of the Minnesota Vikings tells his team that no hazing of rookies will be allowed.

“I'm happy about the situation,” one Vikings rooke told an AP reporter. “I can actually go to sleep at night without being afraid about who is coming to get me.”

 

Boeing, the giant U.S. plane maker, is set to sign a multi-billion dollar contract to supply Canada's military with new jets and new helicopters. The federal government announced late today that it had rejected bids from Boeing's rivals for the aircraft. As a result, the federal government is expected to spend up to $8.3-billion on two contracts with Boeing, based in Seattle, Washington. Ottawa plans to buy four C-17 Globemaster (left) jets from Boeing for about $1.8-billion. These planes, among the largest in the world, are capable of moving immense amounts of equipment or materiel around the world. They can carry, for example, four tanks or the entire DART team. Canada has no such capability right now and rents rides for DART when it needs to move it.

Canada will also spend about $2-billion for 16 CH-47 Chinook helicopters (right) made by Boeing. Ironically, it was the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney that sold off Canada's last Chinooks, a so-called heavy-lift helicopter that can operate in difficult conditions like those in Afghanistan. And, in another ironic touch, the Chinooks that Canada sold were bought by the Dutch who are now using them in — where else? — Afghanistan where, as part of the NATO helicopter contingent there, they are sometimes used to ferry Canadian troops from place to place.

Canada wants the first new helicopters delivered by the summer of 2010 and wants the first jet delivered by late 2008 or early 2009.

Canada has rejected attempts by AgustaWestland and by a consortium led by Airbus to prevent the government from buying billions of dollars worth of aircraft from Boeing.

More later as I'm driving while posting this from my bberry.

The gov't press release on this came out on a Friday at 7:45 pm Ottawa time …

 

OK, Ok, that headline slightly distorts things but, on the eve of a major international AIDS conference to be held in Toronto, Canada’s New Government — as they call themselves everywhere but on this press release — announce that the government committed $150,000 to a Canadian Labour Congress initiative to help fight AIDS in the workplace. You’ll recall that earlier this week, we learned that Bill Gates will be donating $500–million (U.S.) over five years to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

The office of Jean Pierre Blackburn, Canada’s Labour Minister, issued this release Friday afternoon at 5:30 pm. (Check the time stamp on the release here and here). As a reasonably diligent reporter, I had some questions about this release but you won’t be surprised to learn that when I called both the telephone numbers at the bottom of the press release at 5:40 pm, there was no answer, it being late on a Friday afternoon in midsummer.

“Canada’s New Government” is already coming under fire for the failure of the Prime Minister to attend the conference opening this weekend in Toronto. More than 26,000 scientists and researchers and activists from around the world will be there but not Stephen Harper. Instead, he’ll be winning votes in Iqualuit and Alert.

I’m co-hosting CTV’s Question Period on Sunday and I can tell you that the Harper government’s support for this conference and for the fight against AIDS will be something we’ll be talking about.

 

More late-in-the-afternoon-on-a-Friday press releases from “Canada’s New Government”, as they like to call themselves. This time, the Treasury Board is announcing that it’s moving ahead, as promised, with new rules about the way advertising and market research contracts are awarded.

From the press release:

As part of its Action Plan commitments, the Government is amending the Communications Policy of the Government of Canada to: 

• provide written public opinion research reports and to make them available to the public through the Library of Parliament and Library and Archives Canada within six months of the completion of fieldwork;
• add a statement emphasizing that the bidding process for contracting of public opinion research and advertising activities must be open, fair and transparent; and
• include a new definition of advertising to distinguish it from non-paid messages such as public service announcements and from collateral services such as public relations and events management

Harper made a big point of promising written reports on the campaign trail at an event in Quebec City in which he posed with $132,000 of cold hard cash to make the point that taxpayers had paid that amount of money under the previous Liberal government and yet received only verbal reports from the contractors.

 

One of the big stories over the last year or so for the Ottawa media has been moving the headquarters of the RCMP. 

At first, the Harper government agreed to pay $600–million over 25 years to rent andd then buy for $1 a suite of buildings that once housed a technology company in Ottawa. But then word got out that the lobbyist acting for the developer was a well-connected Conservative.

So, in an attempt to avoid the appearance that it was handing out a mega-buck contract without due process, Public Works made one last call for offers. But in the end, Public Works still came back to the building at  3000 Merivale Road that once housed the Ottawa workforce of technology high-flier JDS Uniphase Corp.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, who is the cabinet minister responsible for the Mounties, just issued this release which seals the deal.

Here’s how The Ottawa Citizen described the property:

JDS Uniphase built the 900,000-square-foot complex for about $200 million and at the height of the technology boom, it housed most of the company's 11,000 employees. JDS sold the campus to Minto for about $28 million and it has been standing virtually empty since the purchase last summer.

… for the RCMP, which is squeezed for space, the former technology hub seems like a perfect fit. With several thousand employees in buildings scattered across Ottawa, including its headquarters at 1200 Vanier Parkway, the police force was looking for ways to consolidate operations at one site.

The RCMP considered several options, including renovating and upgrading the Nicholson Building on Vanier Parkway, constructing a new building at its headquarters and adding space to other RCMP locations.

But the force settled on the JDS complex which, featuring eight buildings connected by an atrium, a 300-seat auditorium, gym, laboratories and wiring to accommodate computer systems, has the space, technology and security to meet its needs

Witold Rybczynski reviews three books about the transportation of cargo, including two that focus on the container ship and has this statistical nugget: When the first container ship went into use in the mid-1950s, it cost $5.83 per ton to load loose cargo on a medium-sized ship. It was done “breakbulk”, which meant each of what could tens of thousands of individual items to be carried in the ship’s hold had to be stowed by hand. Once ships were loaded with standardized containers full of cargo, the cost of loading the same ship dropped to 15.8 cents.

“This has benefited coastal regions and penalized people living inland,” writes Rybczynski. “For example, shipping a container overland from Durban, South Africa, to Masera, Lesotho — a distance of 215 miles, costs three times as much as shipping it be sea to Durban from Baltimore. It is likely that without container shipping,  the economic upsurge of China would not have occurred as quickly as it did.”

 

 

The Government of Canada wants to buy some new aircraft for its military and is using a novel procurement process to do so. It wants, for instance, to buy strategic airlift — planes that can carry four or five tanks, for example, halfway around the world. The military looked at the current models on the market and concluded that only one plane was capable of meeting its strategic airlift requirements, C-17 Globemaster, manufactured by Boeing Co. of Seattle, Wash.

So the government issued a unique procurement document. It said it intended to buy the Globemaster but, if there were any manufacturers out there that could meet the military’s operational requirement, they were free to challenge the government’s assumption. Well, one has.

Similarly, Canada was ready to go to Boeing for new medium– to heavy-lift helicopters that it wants to buy and pick up a few CH-47 Chinooks. But another manufacturer has stepped in and told the government it wants that business.

The press release announcing this was issued at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend — the sort of timing that raises eyebrows among us cynical, suspicious journalists. After all, they had a five-star press conference in Trenton with three cabinet ministers and the chief of defence staff to announce the decision to buy this stuff. Why try to squeak an important update out late in the day before a long weekend? Who are the other companies that have stepped forward to compete against Boeing?

I’d ask the government myself but, as its 10 pm EDT as I sit here at Pearson waiting for my plane to take me home to Ottawa, the odds are I’m not going to have much like finding anyone around to answer this. Oh well, I drew the lucky straw at the office and get to work all weekend.  Maybe someone at DND or Public Works has some answers.

As Wikimaniacs gather at, well, Wikimania, an annual conference held this year in Cambridge, Mass.,  The Globe and Mail publishes a nice profile of Ottawa native Simon Pulsifer, whom the Globe crowns “King of Wikipedia.” Three cheers for Simon!

Prolific Canadian is king of Wikipedia
With more than 80,000 articles under his belt, Ottawa man is the on-line resource's busiest contributor
ALEXANDRA SHIMO

Simon Pulsifer has never really blended in with the crowd. In kindergarten, he began building elaborate, fantastical buildings out of Lego, already bored by the construction plans on the back of the box.

In Grade 8, he, attired as Stalin, and other friends re-enacted the Yalta conference on the balcony of a friend's house. In university, he became the Trivial Pursuit champion at his college, and even won when the whole residence took him on.

Today Mr. Pulsifer, 24, is known internationally as the world's most prolific author on the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia, with 78,000 entries edited and 2,000 to 3,000 new articles to his name. He can't remember the exact number.

“I'm always doing something for Wikipedia, even when I'm not writing entries,” he said from his home in Ottawa. “I'm always planning and thinking about how I can make the site better.”

[Read the whole article]