Heads Are Gonna Roll

Lisa Raitt might just be destined to join Maxime Bernier on the backbench over this one:

Secret federal documents reveal full AECL funding

Sensitive government documents left behind at a CTV News bureau reveal Ottawa has poured far more money into the aging Chalk River nuclear reactor than the public has been told.

The binder of documents was left nearly a week ago at CTV's Ottawa bureau by either Minister of Natural Resources Lisa Raitt or one of her aides. Some of the papers are clearly marked "secret."

Oops. Of course, it's unclear at this point which is worse: the fact that 'secret' documents dealing with our nuclear industry were left for a week in a TV studio without anyone noticing, or the actual information contained in those documents:

...In documents headlined "Background for discussion with chair of Atomic Energy Canada," the government lists funding for the Crown corporation at $351 million for 2009-2010. That figure was in the January budget.

However, it also lists $72 million to "maintain the option of isotope production." The public 2009 budget does not specifically mention funding for isotopes.

The documents also include a hand-written note that lists total funding for Atomic Energy of Canada, Ltd. since 2006 at $1.7 billion, and then a talking-point memo to characterize the spending as "cleaning up a Liberal mess."

...Publicly, Ottawa has downplayed Ontario's interest in the sale of AECL's Candu division. But included in the binder is background information for a May 25 meeting with Glenna Carr, who chairs the board of directors for AECL: "The government continues to support AECL's bid in Ontario, but the announcement will probably raise questions about this support. We will have to manage this very carefully."

On the bright side, this little faux pas has probably saved the government at least a year and a half of ducking freedom of information requests.

Meanwhile, according to a recent interview with our man on the nuclear beat David Akin, Lisa Raitt's plan is apparently to give up Canada's leading role in nuclear technology in favour of a "continental" approach. And by "continental", she means...

"We have to look to . . . the United States. For all the medical isotopes that they use — and it's 100 times more than what we use — they don't have a reactor to produce their own medical isotopes. So we are working with them as well because I think it's really important to approach this from a North American continent point of view and not have a situation where we're depending on five aging reactors in the world."

John Ralston Saul is whispering in my ear again: "...fear of owning...". I never thought I'd say it, but thank God for people like Frank Stronach, or this country would just be one big goddamned branch plant.

Spanish Highways, French Reactors. Welcome to Canada.

Government of Canada Moves Forward on Restructuring Atomic Energy of Canada Limited

“Our Government is acting now to inject strength into Canada’s nuclear industry by enhancing the culture of growth; the culture of efficiency; and the culture of leadership,” said the Honourable Lisa Raitt, Minister of Natural Resources. “The ultimate objective of this restructuring is to leverage Canada’s long-term investment in nuclear energy and strengthen Canada’s nuclear industry at a time of global expansion.”

I don't think I've ever heard so many corporate weasel words come out of somebody's mouth since Enron, but the upshot is this: The government is planning to split AECL, sell off its ownership stake in the profit-making reactor sales division (probably to a foreign entity like France's AREVA), and keep the leaky, expensive, isotope-producing NRU and all the financial and environmental liabilities that go with it on the public books.

Not only that, but they'll be selling AECL before it officially wins the expected multi-billion dollar Ontario reactor contract, but after the price has been driven down by the recession, the failure of the Maple reactors and a fresh new isotope crisis.

Private wealth and public squalor.

None of comes as a surprise to anyone, of course. The minute the government initiated its "strategic review" of AECL back in 2007, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that the review would tell Jimmy P.E. ("Privatize Everything") Flaherty exactly what he wanted to hear. And it's not like we haven't seen all this before. Those of us who suffered through his buddy Mike Harris' 'Common Sense Revolution' will recall their bargain-basement sale of the income-generating 407 toll highway to a Spanish consortium, as well as the (thankfully failed) attempts to privatize the LCBO and Ontario Hydro after carving the latter up in a very similar way to what's being proposed for AECL.

I would love to be able to blame Lisa Raitt for all this. I really would. But really, now that all the renegades have been culled from the Conservative herd, you know that none of this was actually her idea. Besides, she is just doing what is in her reptilian corporate nature to do. Maximize profits. Divest toxic assets. And above all, don't think beyond the numbers to fuzzy, human considerations like quality of life or a national strategy or the long-term benefit to the nation. In fact, this situation is perfectly suited to her skills. You can tell when words like "restructuring" and "leveraged investment" drip so effortlessly from her lips - she's in her element.

Hear now the words of John Ralston Saul, from "A Fair Country". He's talking about the private sector, but he could just as easily be talking about AECL:

When you look at how Canada came to lose its entire complex and successful steel industry through a series of takeovers squeezed into little more than two years, ending in 2007, you conclude with the same answer. The industry leaders, financial market potential investors, regulators, civil service leaders and politicians all saw themselves as followers, as temporary holders of wealth. And since others wanted control of our industry in order to shape it to their own interests, it was our duty to hand it over as rapidly as possible. Why? In order that the new owners should derive downstream, complex, long-term benefits. Our reward for such passivity? Some handsome payouts to short-term, first-tier managers. And with luck the new owners would allow the second-tier and below employees to continue as their employees.


... [speaking of the owners and CEOs of Barrick Gold, Bombardier and other major Canadian businesses] All of them would agree that the statistics showing our legal corporate headquarters to be growing in number are nonsense. "A head office of a subsidiary is not a head office." Why? Because it is missing the leadership jobs, the key ser vice jobs, the research and development jobs.

These five men represent some of the most powerful business leaders in contemporary Canada. Yet Conference Board of Canada economists, who do not earn their living in the marketplace, accuse these most successful of our corporate leaders of "sentiment and emotion," of being "commercially xenophobic." These protected employees, who rarely leave their cloistered offices in Ottawa, hide behind the Conference Board to accuse a few Canadian businesses leaders who do well around the world of suffering from "fear of foreigners." They argue with a certain glee that foreign owners are better for Canada than Canadian owners.

... The economists in the Ministry of Finance use almost the same numbers and makes reassuring sounds about head offices, without analyzing the type of head office and what they do or do not contain. They reveal no understanding of economic strategy - the sort of strategy used by other countries. They use the old concept of foreign direct investment, which does not differentiate between real investment - that which works to create wealth - versus buying out fully developed corporations - or entire sectors - in which the purchase implies no investment in wealth creation. In fact, the buyer usually uses the wealth of the company bought out to finance his taking control. Often the buyers then treat the company like a car wrecking yard - they cut it up and sell off the pieces that can make them quick money. When you read the assertions of the finance ministry thinkers over foreign investment or corporate headquarters growth, it is as if you are dealing with the brain dead. Strong words? Not at all. The strong words are those of economists in positions of influence who refuse to think. For example, although the figures are available, they make nothing of the difference between takeovers and new investment. Approximately 97 percent of what they call foreign investment is for takeovers; approximately 3 percent is for real new investment.

What is frightening is that Canada's economic policies are largely shaped from the ideas and advice of Ministry of Finance economists.

Here endeth the lesson. God help us all.

Further Musings on Multiculturalism

I love all the responses I've had to my last post! I was going to reply one by one, but I realized that there were still a few more general things I wanted to say.

One is that part of my aggravation with my Mississauga customer and others like him (and yes, I'm thinking of you, Raph) is that I truly, honestly DO NOT understand what the problem is. Maybe it's that I always considered my exceedingly white, WASP family to be profoundly boring. In fact, when I heard an old family rumour from an uncle that one of our ancestors might have been Jewish, I was thrilled and determined to prove it was true. Otherwise, we're just straight western European Protestants all the way down the line. Yech!

Part of it may be that I've always been the sort of person who wants to be part of the minority. I've always figured if I look or dress or act like most other people, I must be doing something wrong. But I suppose there are other people who like being in the majority. They prefer to be around people who look and dress and act just like them, and anything else makes them uncomfortable. Ok. I guess.

Me, I'm happy to see the hijabs and the turbans and the tunics at my son's school - and I'm even happier to see those kids walking down the street in groups and cliques together with plain old white bread 'Old Milton' kids. Some of their parents may prefer to live in little segregated enclaves within our sprawling new developments, but from what I've seen that attitude is not being transfered to the next generation.

Another thought: A video store is perhaps the perfect place from which to observe a community. I suspect that if I were to keep statistics on the customers who walk through our doors on a given night, I would have a perfect demographic profile of the town of Milton. So I can tell you that most of our new arrivals are South Asian in origin, but almost as many are Latino. And many of the construction workers in the new developments have come from Northern Ontario, often leaving their families behind to find work.

I can also tell you that a very high percentage - I would guess about a third - of non-white individuals who come through our doors are married or otherwise attached to someone of a different race. In fact, just on my own block I have a black man married to a white woman next door, and a French-Canadian fellow married to a Chinese woman from Sudbury a few doors down. In my own very WASP family I have one cousin who married a Filipino woman and anther who married a man of Pakistani descent. They've all got kids.

All of which makes me think of something John Ralston Saul said: We are a Métis Nation.

This is not 'mongrelization' or 'assimilation' or any other vulgar characterization. This is the natural tendency of a nation where, unique in all the world, French and English have co-existed for centuries without ever having truly succeeded in killing each other off. Where we originally respected and worked with and intermarried with the indigenous peoples of this land, before we got around to trying to assimilate and marginalize them. Where people still speak Gaelic on the east coast and Salish on the west coast, and that's all something to be celebrated.

Are the people of Newfoundland or Cape Breton hampered by clinging to their Gaelic heritage? Are the people of Manitoba less 'Canadian' because so many are blonde and make the best Pirogi in the country? Are the British-descended people of British Columbia being subsumed because some street signs are in Chinese, and the physical and cultural presence of the Haida and Salish and Nisga'a are all-pervasive?

What indeed is the difference between the current wave of black and brown immigrants from all the many tides that have swept across this nation for the past four centuries?

To those who feel uncomfortable with the number of non-WASP people who may be slowly filling their neighbourhoods - I'm sorry. I really am. But you have to understand, this is the way a lot of us like it. So maybe what you should be asking yourself is this: am I really experiencing a cultural discomfit or disconnect, or am I just going to have to admit at some point that it's simply a matter of race?

Linda Keen and Some Actual Scientists Weigh In on Chalk River

The most interesting thing I found about this article was not so much Linda Keen saying "I told you so" about the slow death of the Chalk River NRU, but the perspective she and others have on the now-mothballed MAPLE reactors - and why they think they still might be salvaged.

A project to build two isotope-producing reactors called the Maples to replace the aging NRU was cancelled a year ago when AECL could not solve a design flaw in the cores of the proposed reactors that would make them more prone to a meltdown. At that time, the infrastructure to house the cores had already been built.

Ms. Keen said she was told the Maples had problems in 2001, when she arrived at the CNSC.

“One of my staff who has since retired said, ‘You know, we are going to be bringing out the cement machines to fill that in,'” she said.

“The fact that it took seven years to decide [to scrap it] and many millions of dollars is because the AECL engineers tried their hardest to make it work. But the CNSC had really great physicists – and still has, I believe – and the CNSC said, ‘No, it is an inherently flawed design.'”

I tend to view the world through the lens of whatever book I happen to be reading, which at the moment is "Voltaire's Bastards" by John Ralston Saul. I admit to being a bit out of my depth with this one, having no background in philosophy whatsoever (I knew Voltaire was French...), but I read that last paragraph and instantly recognized the work of rational technocrats who truly believe that no problem cannot be solved through the application of hard work and a well thought-out plan - even if that plan is based on a faulty premise and the results are demonstrably catastrophic.

This is the same mindset that had kept the U.S. fighting unwinnable wars for the past five decades and has kept our leaders committed to the notion that Friedman-esque free market capitalism is the best way to run an economy, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I thought of all this as I envisioned these doggedly determined engineers slogging away at their project, all the while assuming that the problem somehow lay in the execution and not the design. And, of course, the government bureaucrats prodding them along saying, "You can't stop now - we have too much invested!"

Meanwhile, the actual scientists are looking at this problem and are stating what seems obvious to us non-technocrats:

But nuclear-medicine specialists are questioning why AECL and the government walked away from the project without a contingency plan.

Robert Atcher, the New Mexico-based president of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, said doctors are asking “Well, they've built the infrastructure, why don't they consider using some other reactor design?”

A committee struck by the U.S. National Research Council to examine ways of producing medical isotopes without highly enriched uranium – which the Americans fear could be used to build bombs – suggested in a recent report using a different kind of core for the Maples.

Thomas Ruth, a senior research scientist at the British Columbia Cancer Agency and TRIUMF – Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics – was also a member of that committee. He said the decision to walk away from the Maples was probably tied to political and business issues.

“To the non-expert, it looks like a solution,” Dr. Ruth said yesterday of the committee's recommendation to use different cores.

“They have the processing facility, they have the control room, the infrastructure is all there. What is involved with changing out the core? ... But government is supporting [AECL] in that decision. It's not like government is saying, ‘Hey, guys, get in there, fix it, find a solution.' They're not doing that.”

I'll have to add that to my list of questions for Lisa Raitt.

Ignatieff Speaks to Young Liberals

You can always find Michael Ignatieff at this Convention just by following the cheers and applause.

That's how I found him this morning as he ascended the escalator, and later when he stepped upon the stage to address the Young Liberals Commission. The room was completely packed with youth and not-so-youth, and I ended up backed into the door, videotaping above the sea of heads as my arm slowly went numb.

I'd show you the footage but I left my !@#$% firewire cable in the hotel room and can't upload it from my camera. Later, I promise.

The speech wasn't much different from what he's been saying all weekend. He did invoke the '68 Convention he attended as a Young Liberal, and spoke of the Liberal Party offering young people the opportunity to make history. He also spoke very passionately about the One Member One Vote proposal, and practically begged the people in the room to vote for it. He made no mention of the contentious YLC amendment, but the message was clear: with or without it, we must pass OMOV. All of us.

One thing I've been noticing recently: Iggy's been reading the same books I have. There have been several occasions when he's spoken quite directly about the ideas presented in John Ralston Saul's 'A Fair Country'. Like this:

"Because we are rooted in our land, and because we represent every ethnicity, every race, every religion, every part and parcel of our country, we are fit to govern - because we are anchored in the national life of our people."

He's talking about the Liberal Party and not the nation as a whole, but I'm still hearing a lot of JR Saul in that.

Anyway, I'll try to get that video uploaded some time tonight. Right now I'm going to try to get into the orientation for the fancy new voter database system (Esther's going to LOVE it!).

And Now, John Ralston Saul on Big Ideas

After I wrote all that yesterday, I finally finished reading "A Fair Country" and found a passage near the end where Saul sums it all up perfectly:

If you examine the way the state organizes itself, you find that utilitarianism has reduced creative economics down to instrumental economics and even further down to classic bookkeeping. In this mindset, every action is a cost. The concept of investment is merely another cost. It is a non-conceptual approach that would have made every historic Canadian breakthrough in public policy appear to be an impossible extravagance.

It is that corner-store approach to cost that prevents us from dealing with poverty or health care or education. This is what shapes our narrow and short-term view of the environment. What is presented as being careful with the public's money is more often than not a simple failure of imagination. That means those in charge are frightened to act because real action can only be presented as a cost. This is not really an economic theory. It is well below theory. But if it were theory, it could be described as a linear approach to cost based on the assumption that society is driven by self-interest.

We built our society in quite a different way. Our ideas of fairness and inclusion have been based on an economic theory of investment, in which you create new possibilities of wealth by changing the conditions in which our society operates. To do this does take courage, consciousness, imagination, a taste for risk and an ethical sense of purpose. It is about conduct not contract. It is a way of thinking and acting.

Indeed.

If you haven't read this book, read it. Every politician, every Liberal, every Canadian needs to read this book. Michael Ignatieff especially needs to read this book.

I am inclined to stand on a chair in the middle of the Convention hall in Vancouver and read the entire thing aloud.