Water export legislation exempts bottled water

The federal government recently surprised skeptics like me with legislation to restrict bulk water exports. However, there's a problem here:

A federal government plan to strengthen a ban on bulk water exports is undermined by a loophole allowing significant water removal for exports of bottled water, critics said yesterday.

Ottawa MP Paul Dewar, the New Democratic Party's environment critic, signalled amendments will be sought to a proposed bill to strengthen the existing ban against bulk water exports by extending it to more than 80 rivers and streams that cross the U.S.-Canada border. "Canada will continue to export water in bulk, just in small individual containers instead of giant containers," said Joe Cressy of the Polaris Institute, a research and advocacy organization that is campaigning against bottled water. "The bill is a first step but it doesn't go far enough."

The new legislation is intended to thwart the diversion of river water south to the U.S. through such means as dams, aqueducts, canals and pipelines.

From the Montreal Gazette (h/t pogge). There may be other issues too -- the Council of Canadians is concerned about what else might not be covered:

Council of Canadians national water campaigner Meera Karunananthan says, “We don’t see Bill C-26 as a ban on bulk water exports. It does not appear to cover waters that are not boundary or transboundary waters.”

In other words, if someone were to draw water from the Churchill River and haul it away in supertankers, that would be just dandy under this legislation. Is this likely? Hard to say. The CoC's Maude Barlow notes here that the right wing think tanks have had their eyes on Arctic water for some time, though.

Council buys a pig in a poke

The Veolia contract passed today by a 9-4 vote. No word on whether the councillors finally got to look at the fine print on the contract before voting. Also no word on who the four dissenters were; I'm going to hazard a guess and assume Jenny Gerbasi, Dan Vandal, Russ Wyatt, and Harvey Smith, though I'd like to think John Orlikow would have voted against this too. Or did one of those five miss the vote for some reason?

Incidentally, the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation is now softening their criticism of the deal:

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling the approval of the contract a mixed blessing because the plants are in major need of an overhaul.

"It looks like a good proposal — what they're offering — but we're just asking for a little bit more in the way of details," Colin Craig said.

A condition of the deal is that Veolia must save the city money.

I guess Colin and company would prefer not to be remembered as having been on the losing side...

Edited to add: Turns out Orlikow did vote against it... but Wyatt, of all people, voted for it. And Lillian Thomas missed the vote.

Taking government secrecy to a new level

As you probably know, Winnipeg's esteemed mayor and his buddies on EPC are trying to get city council to agree to a wastewater treatment contract with Veolia Canada. Now it's pretty common for a government to keep the fine print of such contracts a secret from the public. This isn't good enough for Katz and his cronies, though; they're keeping it secret from themselves:

It's a deal so secret not even the mayor has seen the financial fine print.

It locks city hall into a 30-year contract with a multinational mega-firm and marks a big shift in policy.

Now critics from the left and the right are calling on councillors to step back from the brink of a $1.2-billion deal with Veolia Canada to privatize the renovation and parts of the operation of two city sewage treatment plants.

Council votes on the deal Wednesday.

"The partnership proposes to reduce rates and improve results for taxpayers so that's a good thing," said Colin Craig of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. "However, councillors should ask to see the final contract before it's approved. Like they say, the devil is in the details."

Craig said as much of the deal should also be made public as possible without violating Veolia's business interests.

Several left-leaning groups -- the Council of Canadians, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the union representing city workers -- agree, saying Veolia's reputation is "less than stellar" and serious questions about the contract remain unanswered.

From the Free Press. When the CTF agrees with the Council of Canadians and the CCPA, you know there must be something badly wrong somewhere...

An interesting take on securities traders

Mark Cuban compares them to hackers:

My last two posts were designed to stimulate discussion. But lets talk the real problem that regulators, public companies, investor/shareholders and traders face. The problem is that Wall Street doesn’t know what business it is in. Regulators don’t know what the business of Wall Street is. Investor/shareholders don’t know what business Wall Street is in.

The only people who know what business Wall Street is in are the traders. They know what business Wall Street is in better than everyone else. To traders, whether day traders or high frequency or somewhere in between, Wall Street has nothing to do with creating capital for businesses, its original goal. Wall Street is a platform. It’s a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible.

The best analogy for traders ? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing. A hacker wants to jump in front of your shopping cart and grab your credit card and then sell it. A high frequency trader wants to jump in front of your trade and then sell that stock to you. A hacker will tell you that they are serving a purpose by identifying the weak links in your system. A trader will tell you they deserve the pennies they are making on the trade because they provide liquidity to the market.

I recognize that one is illegal, the other is not. That isn’t the important issue.

The important issue is recognizing that Wall Street is no longer what it was designed to be. Wall Street was designed to be a market to which companies provide securities (stocks/bonds), from which they received capital that would help them start/grow/sell businesses. Investors made their money by recognizing value where others did not, or by simply committing to a company and growing with it as a shareholder, receiving dividends or appreciation in their holdings. What percentage of the market is driven by investors these days ?

Source (h/t Chomsky in this iTulip thread).

The latest effort to destroy the Wheat Board

The fact that the Canadian Wheat Board is democratically run is a source of annoyance to the federal Conservatives, who would rather the whole thing just went away. So when prairie farmers kept voting to retain the Wheat Board's monopoly, the government has decided to try to limit who's allowed to vote on such matters:

OTTAWA — Wheat and barley growers who don’t produce more than 40 tonnes of grain a year would no longer be eligible to vote in Canadian Wheat Board elections under federal legislation introduced Friday.

Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said hobby farmers and former producers shouldn’t get a say in elections which send farmer representatives to the board.

"Everyone agrees these important votes must be cast by real farmers, not producers who have left the business," said Ritz.

The legislation would mean any producer who didn’t deliver 40 tonnes of wheat or barley to the board in either the year of the election or the previous two years would not be eligible to vote.

From the Montreal Gazette (h/t pogge). The fact that it's small farmers who need the Wheat Board the most is probably not a coincidence...

More on that "recovery" thing

It's become a mantra in the mainstream business press to say that we're in a recovery. But what does that mean? David Rosenberg has this to say (h/t pogge):

There are classic signs indeed that the recession in the U.S. ended last summer — output, sales, etc. But the depression is ongoing and the reason we say that is because real personal income, excluding handouts from the government, has barely budged. In fact, real organic personal income is nearly $500 billion lower now than it was at the peak 16 months ago and this has never occurred before coming out of any technical recession. It is a depression, as the chart below attests — that is the trendline for real household incomes, until the government comes in to top them off with handouts, subsidies and extended jobless benefits. The share of U.S. personal income being derived from Uncle Sam’s generosity has risen above 18% for the first time ever.

What's going on here? Simply put, a recession is defined solely in terms of overall GDP. If the GDP declines for two consecutive quarters, the economy is considered to be in recession; once it gets back on a solid growth track the recession is considered to be over. We normally think of a "depression" as simply a large recession, but I think Rosenberg is suggesting that it should be seen as a measure of how people are actually faring (what a radical idea!) So a "jobless recovery", or a recovery in which people are going back to work but at lower wages, would be a continued depression, because people's actual wages are depressed.

City enacts "living wage" policy

Interesting:

On Tuesday, New Westminster city council made history of sorts:

It passed a motion that would make New Westminster council the first municipal government in Canada to enact a "living wage policy."

Notice the terminology -- "living wage" not "minimum wage." The practical, and philosophical, gap between the two is huge.

Once the details have been worked out and the policy takes effect, all full-and part-time employees doing work on city-owned property, including those working for independent contractors, must be paid a "living wage" -- defined as enough to keep a family of two working adults and two children above the poverty line.

That figure for New Westminster, according to the motion, works out to $16.74 an hour -- a figure that includes benefits factored into it. That is more than twice B.C.'s minimum wage of $8 an hour, now the lowest in Canada.

"In an area like Metro Vancouver," said Coun. Jaimie McEvoy, who introduced the motion, "where housing costs are among the most expensive in the country, the minimum wage doesn't cover the cost of living. A living wage does, and maybe even allows people to save a little."

From the Vancouver Sun. The issue was debated today on The Current; unfortunately the proponent and opponent never really addressed each others' arguments.