http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/419365

Human rights lawyers often face intimidation, beatings, report says
Apr 29, 2008 04:30 AM
Bill Schiller
Asia Bureau

BEIJING–One fine fall afternoon last year, Li Heping was making his way towards a newspaper kiosk not far from his office when a man approached, grabbed him by the arm and said sternly, “Come with me.”

“I said, `I don’t even know who you are’,” Li recalls. “But he said, `If your name is Li Heping, you’d better come with me.’”

In a matter of seconds, Li had a cloth sack pulled over his head, he was wrestled into a car and driven to the outskirts of town where he was brought down into a basement and beaten.

Li is a lawyer – a partner in the respected Beijing Globe Law Firm.

He’s among a select group of lawyers in China who dare to take on politically sensitive cases.

“They were slapping me about the head, pulling me by the hair and striking me with electrical batons.

“They were yelling, `Sell your house, sell your car and get the hell out of Beijing!’”

Towards midnight, he was bundled back into the car and dumped in a forested area, from which he eventually made his way home.

Li is one of 49 human rights lawyers interviewed for a report released today by Human Rights Watch entitled, “Walking on Thin Ice: Control, Intimidation and Harassment of Lawyers in China.”

The 146-page report, issued as the Beijing Olympics loom, details how lawyers like Li and others who take on cases the government regards as politically sensitive, face everything from intimidation and threats, to disbarment and even physical assaults.

“These guys were professionals,” the 38-year-old Li said of his abductors during an interview in his downtown office. “I don’t think they wanted to hurt me as much as intimidate me. They just wanted to teach me a lesson.”

Li walked away from the beating with bruises.

But the “lesson” didn’t take: He’s still taking on human rights files.

At the time of his abduction, he’d recently finished a case with four other lawyers, appealing a decision in Hebei province against adherents of Falun Gong – a religious sect, also known as Falun Dafa, that is abhorred by the Chinese government. The lawyers’ appeal did not succeed. But the articulate argument they put forward on behalf of religious freedom still resonates.

Senior government officials routinely proclaim China to be a country of “the rule of law.” Even President Hu Jintao, at the 17th Communist Party Congress last year, stressed “the rule of law constitutes the essential requirement of socialist democracy.”

But many observers see China as a country of “the rule by law” – the law being an instrument that remains largely in the hands of the government.

As a consequence, it remains risky for lawyers to take on certain cases.

Earlier this month, for example, when 21 well-known human rights lawyers publicly offered their services to Tibetan protesters who needed legal counsel in the aftermath of riots and arrests there, the lawyers were warned by the ministry of justice “not to get involved.”

The lawyers were questioned, put under surveillance and their phones were tapped, according to reports.

Officially, the ministry said there were enough lawyers in the region to look after those needing counsel.

Still, over the last 20 years the Chinese government has laid serious groundwork to help China arrive at “rule of law” status. It has enacted thousands of new laws and regulations, founded hundreds of new law schools to graduate competent lawyers and is now setting up a new and modern court system.

But Human Rights Watch points out that even as this process proceeds, lawyers who take up human rights cases can still face surveillance, harassment, threats, intimidation, detention, prosecution and even physical violence.

Some lawyers have had their licences arbitrarily suspended. Others have been disbarred.

“Every one of the 49 lawyers we interviewed had spent some time in detention,” said Human Rights Watch’s China Researcher, Nicholas Bequelin.

These lawyers who form what is loosely called the weiquan, or “rights protection” movement, often represent the poor and indigent: farmers who have had their land taken away by local officials, residents who have been forcibly evicted and various victims of corrupt local leaders.

The key problem, from the lawyers’ perspective, is that the entire legal system struggles to operate within a one-party state demanding unquestioned loyalty.

Last October, for example, the vice-minister of justice in charge of lawyers told a gathering of the All-China National Lawyers Association that lawyers “must support the leadership of the (Communist) Party at all times.”

Given that kind of clarity, it’s small wonder many Chinese lawyers steer clear of taking on human rights cases that could bring them into conflict with the party.

“In the West, you have divisions in government: between the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judiciary,” says Li. “But in our country, all three are controlled by the party. As a result, every case that involves the common good always comes up against the one single power, that is, the Communist Party of China.”

The Human Rights Watch report calls on the government to release all lawyers currently under arrest or being detained – their exact number is unknown; to cease all attacks on lawyers; and to lift restrictions on press coverage of politically sensitive cases.

“Abuses of lawyers compound human rights violations,” says Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s Asia advocacy director. “Without due process and genuine defence rights, law remains little more than an instrument of state repression.”

For Li, the way forward might require a great leap.

“The best way, I think, is to separate the party from the government to allow true independence of the judiciary. Without the independence of the judiciary, the practice of law is of little value,” he says.

http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=396698

Eric Beauchesne, Canwest News Service Published: Monday, March 24, 2008

OTTAWA — The tax burden on wages has eased in most of the world’s industrial countries this decade, including here, but Canada is among a minority where most of the relief has gone to high-income earners and the least to lower-income workers, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

“Across the OECD, tax-burden changes have tended to favour low-wage earners,” the Paris-based organization said in a report on changes in the tax burden on wages in its 30 member countries.

“But in a significant minority of countries, tax reforms have mainly benefited high-income groups,” it said in the report, citing Canada, and a handful of other industrial nations, including the U.S..

“In Australia, Germany, Iceland, Ireland and Luxembourg, and, to a lesser extent in Canada and Norway, tax reforms tended to reduce the progressivity of the tax structure with high-earning employees benefiting the most from significantly higher tax reductions than those in the middle and bottom parts of the earnings range,” it said in the report. “Tax reductions … also tended to mainly benefit high-income earners in the United States.”

The report shows the tax burden on wages or so-called tax wedge, which is the difference between total labour costs to an employer and the net take-home pay of workers, eased by 1.3% in Canada between 2000 and 2006, which is significantly more than the 0.1% average reduction across the 30 industrial countries over that period.

However, in Canada most of that relief went to the highest income workers and the least to lower income workers, it said.

It noted, for example, that in Canada the drop in the tax burden for single workers ranged from a hefty 2.3% for those earning 150% to 200% of the average wage to a 1.6% reduction for those earning 100 to 150% of the average wage to just 1.0% for those earning between two-thirds and 100% of the average wage and to only 1.1% for those earning one-third to two-thirds of the national average wage.

The report shows that the tax-cutting agenda of governments is contributing to what other studies, including by Statistics Canada, have shown is a growing gap between rich and poor in Canada, said Armine Yalnizyan, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, an Ottawa-based economic think-tank.

“Those earning up to twice as much as the average wage are getting more of the benefits than those making half the average wage,” she noted.

Further, the report deals with the 2000-2006 period, and tax changes since, including the tax-free savings account in the latest federal budget, are tilted even more in favour of better off Canadians.

In contrast, the OECD reported that a half-dozen countries, including France, Belgium, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal have implemented targeted tax cuts this decade which have provided the most relief to employees whose wages were less than two thirds of the national average.

The report also shows that Canadian employers’ social security contributions are “far below” the average for industrial countries, Yalnizyan noted.

“So you’re giving most of tax cut package to the best off and doing nothing for the worst off,” she said.

http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/Environment/article/418707

Rise in population, more vehicles on road would offset billions spent to cut pollution: Report
Apr 26, 2008 04:30 AM
Tess Kalinowski
Daniel Girard
Transportation reporters

The Toronto region could spend billions a year on public transit and still not reach provincial targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

That startling conclusion emerged yesterday with the latest work from Metrolinx, the region’s transportation planning agency.

That’s because the influx of 2.6 million people into the region by 2031 comes with a corresponding number of cars on the road.

The most ambitious car-reduction scenario Metrolinx tested includes $419 billion in transit improvements that would cost $3.8 billion annually to operate. But even under that proposal, greenhouse gas emissions could still climb 18 per cent over 2006 levels or, at best, decline by just 4 per cent.

Queen’s Park, by contrast, has pledged an emissions decrease of 6 per cent below 1990 levels by 2014 and a 15 per cent reduction by 2020.

“If we’re going to win the fight against climate change, transportation is at the heart of it, so the proposals that come forward in the ultimate (regional transportation) plan have to be based around the carbon-reduction targets that the province has made and the city’s made,” said Mayor David Miller, who sits on the Metrolinx board.

He was responding to two Metrolinx white papers released yesterday. The papers are not a proposed plan. Rather they project a series of goals and scenarios for the region, everything from the status quo to a massive investment in subways, rail, buses and roads.

In addition to transit, other measures will be crucial, including more walking and cycling, carpooling, and changing the way communities are designed to accommodate less parking and better links between transportation modes.

The results come out of a computer modelling exercise by Metrolinx staff, who are looking at other scenarios, including a more aggressive, complete halt to road building.

“People have to accept surrendering some road capacity in favour of buses and other forms of rapid transit. There’s not an infinite amount of land, and you wouldn’t want to live in the kind of city that existed if you relied solely on roads. It always ends up being gridlocked,” Miller said.

Transportation Minister Jim Bradley called reducing greenhouse gas emissions a “significant component” of Metrolinx plans, but ridding the region of congestion and its $2.2 billion annual drain on the economy is also key.

“We have to address all of those issues,” he said after speaking to the Metrolinx board. “Transportation isn’t the only area where action has to take place.”

While nothing “is etched in stone at this point, we’re starting to circle in on some of the preferred options,” toward drafting the regional transportation plan, said board chair Rob MacIsaac.

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/417336

Powerful council helping free-trade supporters win Round 3 of talks
Apr 23, 2008 04:30 AM
Linda Diebel
National Affairs Writer

Prime Minister Stephen Harper might have reminded the U.S. yesterday how much it depends on Canadian energy imports – and thus, on NAFTA – but he neglected to mention the onerous terms for Canada. Or that an even greater grab for northern energy continues apace, without public consultation.

Rather, elaborate machinery set up to facilitate greater “harmonization” with U.S. policy hums along, its creators coming from the most powerful conglomerates in the United States and its successes independent of such trilateral leaders’ meetings as this week’s confab in New Orleans among Harper, U.S. President George W. Bush and Mexico’s Felipe Calderon.

There’s already an energy downside for Canada. Under the terms of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, Canada can’t ease up on energy exports to the U.S., even temporarily and including in times of shortage. NAFTA partner Mexico said no-go.

The business group behind Free Trade/Round 3, known as the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), pushes the agenda and, for the most part, has got what it wants. The group, the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), works effectively behind-the-scenes and uses its reports to scold when countries lag.

The NACC is big, for example, on “intellectual property” protection, notably of Hollywood and the American music industry. In a report last August, it noted the Canadian government had “made progress” in enacting legislation to impose criminal penalties for illegally recording at cinemas. However, it added: “We strongly encourage the government of Canada to show greater progress in enacting strong (intellectual property rights) laws.”

Canadian organizations at a “People’s Summit” in New Orleans criticized the NACC agenda, as well as security measures that have been wrapped into the SPP process. One of the most worrisome, according to Stuart Trew, researcher for the Council of Canadians, are plans for identity cards modelled on the REAL ID security system in the States.

Already, B.C. and Washington state are involved in a voluntary pilot project to develop drivers’ licences that double as passports. The problem, Trew says, is “private information about Canadians will be available to Homeland Security agents in the U.S., and this is dangerous. It’s a threat to the right of privacy protection of Canadians.”

In contrast to Canada, however, there have been Capitol Hill hearings, accessible to the public, on the subject. Even so, the House of Representatives recently sent Bush a letter warning him to cease all SPP negotiations until full congressional oversight is in place.

If the NACC has a founding icon, it’s industrialist David Rockefeller. He’s the dean of economic and strategic hemispheric integration and, while not a NACC member, the organization links its website to groups he either heads or plays an integral role in, including the Council of the Americas and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Fourteen U.S. companies are part of the SPP process: Campbell Soup Company, Chevron, Chrysler LLC, Con-way Inc., Exxon Mobil, FedEx Corporation, General Motors, Kansas City Southern, Lockheed Martin, MetLife, NBCU/General Electric, Procter and Gamble, UPS and Whirlpool Corporation. The companies send 10 senior executives to every trilateral leaders’ summit.

Among Canada’s representatives are Dominic D’Alessandro, president and CEO of Manulife Financial, his counterpart at Yellow Pages Group Co., Marc P. Tellier, and Jacques Lamarre, president and CEO, SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.

Mexicans appear to have less clout. Instead of coming from heavyweight firms, they’re largely culled from think-tanks and business associations. PEMEX, the state-owned oil company, is not at the table.

Recent comments suggest the most serious negotiations in the immediate future will be between Canada and the U.S. In a recent analysis in The Globe and Mail, Derek Burney, former ambassador to the U.S. and head of a team studying U.S.-Canada relations, wrote: “A renewed bilateral approach needn’t abandon the benefits all three countries have derived from the North American agreement.”

But it’s clear the NACC still has its eyes on PEMEX. According to a 2007 report, the group wants the creation of “a benchmark analysis that illustrates PEMEX’s operating and financial performance gaps.”

Other energy goals are clear. One SPP group – the North American Energy Working Group – already has almost a dozen sub-groups and expands goals regularly. It wants to see greater production at the Alberta Tar Sands project and more exports to the U.S. than 2007’s 2.5 million barrels of oil a day.

If the first two rounds of free trade are any example, proponents will get what they want in Round 3.

Linda Diebel covered free trade in the Star’s Ottawa bureau, as well as in postings in Washington and Latin America.

New Environics poll reveals Canadians reject SPP priorities

Ottawa - As Stephen Harper prepares to attend the North American leaders’ summit on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) in New Orleans next week, a new Environics Research poll shows that Canadians disagree with key elements of North American integration. The survey commissioned by the Council of Canadians shows considerable opposition to regulatory harmonization, energy integration and bulk water exports. It also reveals that Canadians are not sold on security cooperation with the U.S. and would overwhelmingly like to see the SPP debated publicly and voted on in Parliament.

“It’s been four years since the launch of the SPP, and while corporations have been given a seat at the negotiating table, the Canadian government has never asked the public how they feel about it,” says Maude Barlow, chairperson of the Council of Canadians.

Highlights:

* 87% of Canadians agree that Canada should be able to set its own independent environmental, health and safety standards and regulations even if it could limit trade with the United States.

The SPP commits Canada to widespread regulatory convergence which has already resulted in Canada adopting weaker standards, most recently through consumer product legislation.

* 89% of Canadians agree that Canada needs an energy policy that protects Canadian supplies and the environment even if it means placing restrictions on exports and foreign ownership.

The SPP calls for greater energy integration and a fivefold expansion of the environmentally destructive tar sands project in Alberta.

* 88% of Canadians want a national water policy that recognizes clean drinking water as a basic human right and that also bans bulk water exports.

But at an SPP-related meeting in Calgary last year, commissioned by all three governments, the issue of bulk water exports was firmly on the table.

* Only 47% of Canadians feel that improving the Canada-U.S. trading relationship would justify harmonizing our security policies with the US and sharing personal information with American security agencies.

This means that Canadians are not sold on the very raison d’être of the SPP, yet the last Harper budget committed an additional $165 million towards security initiatives in the SPP agreement.

* 86% of Canadians feel there should be an open, public debate on the SPP, and that the agreement should be brought to Parliament for a vote.

Four years after the launch of the SPP there has been no public consultation or any parliamentary debate. “How can the government continue to push this agenda behind closed doors, when the public overwhelmingly rejects it?” asks Barlow.

The organization is calling for public consultation and parliamentary debate on the SPP and an end to all talks aimed at promoting continental integration between Canada and the United States.

Environics Research interviewed 1,007 Canadians by telephone during the period: April 7th – 10th, 2008. The margin of error for a survey of this magnitude is +/-3.1 percent, nineteen times out of twenty.

- 30 -

For more information, please contact:
Meera Karunananthan Media Officer: Tel.: (613) 233-4487, ext. 234; Cell: (613) 795-8685; meera@canadians.org.

–
The Council of Canadians
700-170 Laurier Avenue West, Ottawa, ON K1P 5V5.
Tel: (613) 233-2773; Toll-free: 1-800-387-7177
Fax: (613) 233-6776
inquiries@canadians.org
www.canadians.org

http://www.thestar.com/News/Ideas/article/410662

Great Lakes levels are plunging yet we still treat water like it’s a limitless resource. We have to get our act together and start paying the real price. And soon
Apr 06, 2008 04:30 AM
Chris Wood
Special to the Star

The Great Lakes, and those who work or live around them, are witnessing profound changes in climate. No one knows that better than Linda Mortsch.

Her childhood was spent near the banks of the St. Lawrence River, at Cornwall, in a house built in 1958 from lumber salvaged from an historic inn that was due to be submerged, along with half a dozen riverside villages, to make way for the St. Lawrence Seaway. Today, she teaches geography at the University of Waterloo, investigating how the changing weather will affect the Great Lakes.

Mortsch walked me through the Lakes’ historic water calendar. Typically, the year begins with most smaller lakes and rivers – and large expanses of the great ones – locked in ice. Snow covers the land. As spring comes, the snow and upland ice melt, releasing a vast pulse of fresh water to the Lakes.

Superior, the largest lake, receives the biggest pulse. As the winter’s snow-melt flows in, the Lakes’ levels rise, with Superior reaching its peak earliest and the lower lakes peaking progressively through the summer until the annual pulse of winter runoff reaches Lake Ontario, usually around Labour Day. The Lakes are at their lowest in December and January, when the cycle begins again.

Now this timeless rhythm is changing. Average air temperatures in the Great Lakes region rose by nearly a degree Celsius over the last 100 years, faster than the world average. Winter and spring have warmed even more, with highs as much as 4 degrees Celsius above those of the last century.

By 2003 places like Sault Ste. Marie and the Kawartha Lakes were getting a month fewer days below freezing and nearly two months fewer of cold nights each winter than in 1950, but 30 more very hot days and nights each summer.

With less snow hanging around anywhere in the Lakes’ basin, the yearly pulse of melting snow and ice starts earlier and carries less water into the Lakes.

By far the greatest threat to the Lakes, however, comes from the insidious amplification of evapotranspiration (ET). Evaporation already extracts more water from the Great Lakes than all our human diversions combined.

Across Ontario, calculated losses to evaporation claim two-thirds of every centimetre of rain or snow the province receives. Scientists who monitored lakes in northwestern Ontario between 1970 and 1990 discovered that as temperatures rose by 1.6 degrees Celsius – more than twice the global average for that period – rainfall declined. But evaporation ballooned by 50 per cent. Annual runoff into Lake Superior plummeted by almost two-thirds, from 40 centimetres to only about 15.

[The combination of late-forming ice on the Lakes, and that invisible thief evaporation, may have been largely responsible for this past winter's record snowfalls in eastern Ontario and Quebec. With little ice to protect the Lakes' water, it easily evaporated into the dry arctic air that flows south during the winter, riding the wind to fall back to land later as snow. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, the record heaps of snow were not evidence of climate change slipping into reverse — but of it going into overdrive.]

If less water flows into the Great Lakes each spring, and more of it is drawn out by evaporation over longer ice-free seasons, exactly how much lower will the Lakes be at the end of each year?

If Mortsch and her colleagues are correct, Lake Superior’s seasonal low-water levels could fall 38 centimetres below present-day lows before mid-century. Lake Ontario could drop more, losing 54 centimetres from present-day lows, with the deepest impact in the spring. But Lake Erie, already the shallowest of the five, could fall as much as 85 centimetres below its current low-water level. Another study has suggested that the St. Lawrence River at Montreal could in some late summers be at barely half its present volume.

THE CONDITIONS that will give our society its best shot at flourishing through the new climate’s violent mood swings are evident. We must use less water whenever we can, extracting more work from every drop we do use. We must minimize our vulnerability to extremes of weather. To reduce our risk, we must “design in” flexibility and resilient adaptive capacity from the get-go. At every turn we should copy or employ the original and still best example of resilience to climate change: nature itself.

And one more thing: any response that would prepare us adequately and in time for the turbulent weather ahead must surely find a way to work with the aspirations, psychology and economy of our society, rather than against them.

Improvements to the water efficiency of industrial processes, cropping and livestock practices and our personal sanitation occur incrementally, in the small or large innovations each of us makes. They can’t be centrally prescribed, any more than one device could solve every industry’s pollution problem. At best they can be motivated.

So why are we so unmotivated to make our water last? Perhaps for the same reasons so many of us fail when we try to diet: we cheat. While praising water as “priceless” in the abstract, we value it at next to nothing at the tap. When we treat water that way, it’s cheaper to let it leak from old pipes than to fix the holes.

Our systemic dishonesty about the value of water is of a piece with the larger fraud we’ve perpetrated by failing to account in full for the myriad other services that natural ecosystems provide to our dollar economy. These range from the “free” fish in the ocean to the marsh-raised wild waterfowl that fill the larders in many northern communities; from the carbon dioxide that forests scrub out of the atmosphere to the forests’ moist exhalations that cool the local environs before returning downwind as welcome rain.

They include the waters bearing freighters through the Rock Cut south of Sault Ste. Marie and the crust of ice that shoulders the weight of winter traffic into Manitoba’s St. Theresa Point. At the grandest scale, they embrace the vast planetary distillery and filtering system that cleanses our water.

Sixty per cent of these critical services are now over-exploited and run down, the United Nations Environmental Programme found in its Millennium Assessment of the global ecosystem, precisely because they are undervalued in commerce.

“Technology and knowledge can reduce considerably the human impact on ecosystems,” the project’s scientific board underscored in a statement. “They are unlikely to be deployed fully, however, until ecosystem services cease to be perceived as free and limitless, and their full value is taken into account.”

We dare not carry on this way. The health of our habitat must become as automatic and seamless a consideration in our economic decisions as the price of money (which affects everything from billion-dollar takeovers to personal credit-card spending).

Far from segregating nature from human commerce, in other words, we must urgently reintegrate the two. Bringing natural services “onto the books” of our conventional economy would mean not only fully acknowledging their benefits, but also paying for their maintenance. It would give each of us a sharp new awareness of the load we place on the planet and an immediate reason to lighten it.

NO DEVICE CAN accomplish this task better than a correctly set price. Price includes an entire chain of costs that go into a product’s creation and supply, from raw materials to labour. There’s more to getting a mango than a Macintosh apple to Toronto in January, so the mango costs more.

Over time, multiple considerations have entered pricing: the cost of insuring the workers who make the product, the cost of taxes to pay for the roads over which it gets delivered, and so on. Increasingly, prices for some products, like electronics, include disposal costs.

Certain social costs that should be included in prices aren’t yet: in particular, the burdens borne by the “low-wage” societies that manufacture exports. Overall, however, the trend is in the right direction. But while we’ve made progress in integrating human social costs in prices, we’ve done extremely poorly at including nature’s contribution. A more inclusive price for water would dramatically change the incentives in the countless decisions we make in our daily lives

“People say you can’t put a price tag on the priceless,” remarks ecologist Gretchen Daily. “I agree – nature is priceless. But if we don’t (put a price on it), it’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet: People go whole hog and it’s gone.”

Those who advocate the public commons and a human right to water are correct that water runs through us all. It infuses every aspect of economic, social and cultural life and every hour of the day. For this very reason, neither government, no matter how powerful and intrusive, nor any self-appointed overseer from “civil society,” can possibly ensure its wise use.

Only we can do that, through the decisions we make in our homes, fields, office cubicles, plant floors, schools and shopping malls or wherever else we spend our time. It’s what we each do daily in the marketplace that will determine whether collectively we protect our water and the natural systems that provide it, or despoil both.

The marketplace is the most flexible problem-solving institution we have. Adapting it to the smarter use of water veers away from the one-size-fits-all frame of last century’s “big engineering” and outdated eco-Marxism that sets disciples of Blue Gold on course toward a tragedy of the commons.

It directs us instead toward a liberating ecology of persistent innovation in which a diversity of solutions can prosper.

http://parentcentral.ca/parent/article/410900

Data analysis method urged for all provinces
April 7, 2008

Kristin Rushowy
TORONTO STAR

Poor students are doing far worse on standardized tests than the results themselves indicate, says a groundbreaking study that links children’s birth and health records to education data.

A study of Winnipeg children in Grades 3 and 12 in 2001-02 showed that while three quarters or more of those from lower socio-economic groups writing provincial tests earned a passing grade, when all eligible children at those ages from poor homes were included, only about one-third were successful test takers, says the study out of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy at the University of Manitoba.

By linking birth, health and education data, researchers were able to conclude how many kids from poor homes had left school, had failed at some point to place them in a lower grade, were otherwise absent or exempt from the provincial test or hadn’t completed it.

“The Manitoba data linking provided this most remarkable result,” said Clyde Hertzman, president of the Toronto-based Council for Early Childhood Development, part of a group of researchers pushing for every province to create such databases.

“Rather than using the classroom as the denominator, you use the population as the denominator. At the upper end, the pass rate drops slightly, but at the low socio-economic end, the pass rate drops in half,” he said.

Many of the children counted were “so weakly attached to the school system” they simply didn’t show up to write the provincial test, he said.

These were kids “off the radar system,” he said.

While such data comparisons aren’t available in Ontario, there’s no reason to think the situation is much different here, he said.

Manitoba’s shared data system is an example of methods all provinces should be using to monitor the well-being of children, he added.

The Manitoba research was one of four approaches cited in a recent report by early childhood researchers as “the building blocks of the system of early childhood development statistics that Canada needs.”

Dr. Kellie Leitch, the federal government’s adviser on healthy children and youth, recently called for better information management, calling it “invaluable in the development of public policy and programs which can have a meaningful impact on child and youth health.”

“Those kinds of things do put a shine on significant problems – problems you don’t see when you only look at school data,” added Dr. Robin Williams, chair of the early childhood council and Niagara Region medical officer of health.

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/410909

Canadians denied information to which they are entitled
Apr 07, 2008 04:30 AM
Richard Brennan
Ottawa Bureau

OTTAWA–Canadians are increasingly being kept in the dark by the federal government and its agencies on matters ranging from the war in Afghanistan to the most routine information, experts say.

Critics are alarmed at the growing trend to deny basic information that Canadians are entitled to, especially in the two years since the Conservative government came to power with a promise to be open and accountable.

Suzanne Legault, assistant federal information commissioner, says that government and its institutions have to “move from disclosing information on a need-to-know basis to disclosing information on the right-to-know basis.”

Legault said the John Manley-led panel report into the Afghanistan mission “hit the nail on the head when it said the government has to understand that Canadians have an interest in what is going on in Afghanistan and various issues that the government is tackling.”

“The government has to do a better job at disclosing information,” she told the Star last week.

Former Ontario Liberal MPP Sean Conway, who spent 28 years in politics before leaving in 2003, said the simple truth is that Canadians have a right to know.

“It is one of the assumptions of a democratic society that its citizens are going to be provided with timely, relevant and understandable information,” said Conway, a former cabinet minister and now special adviser at Queen’s University.

Conway said when governments frustrate that flow of information “they are doing something quite destructive to one of the key pillars of democratic society.”

During its more than two years in power, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has often been criticized for being unnecessarily secretive.

Just recently, Harper’s aides refused to confirm whether the Prime Minister talked with Mexican President Felipe Calderón. But Mexican officials released a page-long news release not only confirming the two leaders spoke but providing highlights of the topics they discussed.

Meanwhile, Legault said Canadian should not have to resort to using the Access to Information Act to get information that should be readily available.

“The Access to Information Act should only kick in as an exception. It should not be the norm,” Legault said.

“The norm should be that we proactively disclose information.”

Legault noted that complaints filed under the Access to Information Act have doubled in the past year, to 2,164 from 1,050. But she is quick to point out that 70 institutions, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, are now subject to the act, as a result of changes included in the Conservative’s Accountability Act.

Legault said the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada is investigating additional layers of approval needed before information is released that are creeping into the process, as well as the routine applications for extensions.

Critics say the access to information act is also proving to be less and less useful.

National security and other exemptions are cited to deny the release of information. And even when Canadians are lucky enough to pierce the wall of secrecy, the information is either so heavily edited that it is virtually useless, or is so dated because of delays that it’s no longer timely.

The Conservative government promised during the last election campaign that it would be more accountable and transparent in the wake of the Liberal sponsorship scandal.

Recent stories by The Canadian Press show the lengths the government or its agencies will go to restrict information.

The national wire service found that government refused to release information on compensation paid to Afghan civilians or their families for accidental deaths or injuries.

The Canadian Press’ access to information request was returned almost entirely censored.

The agency also discovered through another access to information request that the RCMP is now refusing to release information on the use of Tasers that must be recorded each time an officer draws the electronic weapon.

The information – such as whether the person on whom the Taser was used was armed or injured – used to be released, but the national police force unilaterally decided to stop.

Taser report forms obtained under the Access to Information Act show the Mounties have used the weapons more than 4,000 times since introducing them seven years ago.

“In the last 15 years, as governments advertise great openness often through legislated mandate like freedom of information and other such policies, … citizens get less information,” Conway said.

On Parliament Hill, access to Harper and his cabinet has been so restricted that it’s a standing joke among reporters. The Hill Times recently carried a story on how Harper goes to great lengths to avoid reporters by taking the freight elevator and slipping out the back door.

Harper runs a very tightly controlled government where MPs are expected to toe the line and where permission must be granted in many cases before they are allowed to talk to reporters.

Conway said he has been struck by Harper’s reluctance to make himself available.

“Mr. Harper, now Prime Minister for over two years, has certainly made no bones of his desire to run a highly centralized government and … intends to give the Canadian public such information as he thinks they should have at that particular time.”

With files from Bruce Campion-Smith and Tonda MacCharles

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT . . .

OTTAWA–Conservative MPs have been told to carry a card with them at all times reminding them what to do when dealing with reporters.

The wallet-size laminated card obtained by the Star instructs MPs to ask a series of questions before going to the PMO for permission to speak to the journalist.

Critics say this is just another example of the tight control that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office, and in particular his director of communications, Sandra Buckler, has over elected members.

Buckler did not respond to an email from the Star, nor did the Prime Minister’s Office.

The card was given to Conservative MPs during a caucus meeting in the summer of 2006. Along with the card came a lecture from Buckler, said Liberal MP Garth Turner, a former Tory MP.

Buckler, he recalled, told MPs that they were not to speak to reporters without the PMO knowing about it, warning that could mean straying from the government message.

While some Tory MPs privately grumble about the tight reins on them, they keep their mouths shut for fear they will not only be passed over for promotions but be tossed out of the party.

The heavy-handed communications strategy has worked for the most part, particularly with backbench Conservative MPs.

Richard Brennan

http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/408995

‘Utter nonsense’ to call city’s top-tier employees overpaid, Miller says
Apr 02, 2008 04:30 AM
John Spears
City Hall Bureau

Top-level managers at the City of Toronto got pay raises in the 4 per cent range in 2007, according to salary data released by the province.

City manager Shirley Hoy said the above-inflation increases occurred because the city’s top managers are given a salary range when they move into their jobs that allows them to earn extra money if they achieve set objectives.

Hoy’s own pay and benefits increased 4.8 per cent in 2007, to $320,208 from $305,495.

Some other increases for senior managers at the city and its agencies:

Chief financial officer Joe Pennachetti got a 4.4 per cent raise, to $258,207 from $247,225 and deputy city manager Sue Corke got a 3.1 per cent raise, to $237,331 from $230,129. Chief medical officer David McKeown got a 4.5 per cent increase, to $235,589 from $225,392, and emergency medical services general manager Bruce Farr got a 4.4 per cent hike, to $175,992 from $168,620.

Police Chief Bill Blair’s pay went up by 3.4 per cent, from $262,497 to $271,533. Hoy said in an interview that top managers’ basic increase is the same as city councillors – about 1.9 per cent this year.

In addition, most work through a salary range. When they first move into a job, they may be told the salary range is $200,000 to $225,000 and have a starting salary at or near the bottom. .

In subsequent years, they receive the same cost of living increase as councillors, but can earn up to 3 per cent more in a given year if they meet performance objectives. Performance bonuses can continue year to year until the top of the salary range is reached.

Hoy said a consultant who has been studying the city’s managerial pay scales is to report by summer.

Mayor David Miller told reporters yesterday that city salaries “in general terms” aren’t rising faster than anywhere else. He said any suggestion that city staff are overpaid compared with the private sector is “absolute and utter nonsense.”

He noted that Hoy runs a payroll with 40,000 people. “Find a company that has 40,000 employees and find what the president makes. You’ll find it’s significantly higher.

“It is true we pay our cleaners a decent living wage so that they can afford to live in dignity in this city. It’s true. We pay them more than minimum wage. I’m glad we do.”

Premier Dalton McGuinty, asked about the ballooning “$100,000 club” on his watch, defended the affordability of the Ontario public service: “We are now running the second most efficient operation, according to Stats Canada, when it comes to provincial governments.”

Brian Cochrane, who heads the union representing the city’s outdoor workers, noted his members got a 3.25 per cent increase on Jan. 1, 2007. (They get a further 3.25 per cent hike today, and 0.75 per cent on Oct. 1.) The contract expires at the end of the year, as does the contract for CUPE inside workers.

Cochrane said the union believes managers’ incentive system has led to an increase in worker suspensions without pay for disciplinary matters. He said imposing suspensions “becomes a tool in the bag” to achieve performance targets by reducing payroll costs.

With files from Robert Benzie and Vanessa Lu.

http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/408973

Owner of Markham St. bookstore specializing in architecture says she can’t fight zero margins, onslaught of online vendors and sudden rise in the Canadian dollar
Apr 02, 2008 04:30 AM
Christopher Hume
Urban Affairs Columnist

Toronto may be a city that reads books, but not one that goes to the store to buy them.

After 29 years on Markham St., Ballenford Books, the city’s best architectural bookstore, will close its doors.

“I was delusional,” says owner Susan Delean, “because I hear from people I like. But it’s got to the point where it’s become a personal thing. I’m putting my family in a situation where they’re in financial jeopardy.”

According to Delean, a store like hers can no longer survive the onslaught of the Amazon.coms of the world. For most buyers, their appeal lies in the lower price of books sold online, about 30 to 40 per cent lower than bookstore prices.

The fact that Amazon’s lineup doesn’t come close to Delean’s only makes things worse, she says.

Then there’s the sudden rise in the dollar, a crisis for the Canadian publishing industry. Add to that the slim margins available to booksellers that aren’t chains, even at the best of times.

“I’ve been in boiling water for so long I didn’t realize the extent to which I’ve been boiled,” says Delean, speaking from a point somewhere between anger, sadness, shock and relief. “We cannot compete, so it gets to be very difficult to rationalize your existence. It’s grown clearer and clearer. Booksellers are operating on less than nothing.”

Just last week, Canada’s oldest bookstore, the Book Room in Halifax, shut down after 169 years. Owner Charles Burchell told reporters that he knew it was time to move on when a book ordered by a tenant who lives above the shop was delivered to him by mistake.

“The book was on our shelf,” Burchell told the CBC, “so they could have come down in two minutes and picked the book up, but they chose to order by computer and wait five [to] seven days for it to come in.”

How’s that for convenience?

“I am very sad about this,” says Toronto architect and Ballenford regular David Dennis. “It is a treasure. Now I’m stuck buying stuff from the Internet sight unseen. And the Internet just doesn’t have the depth, neither do general interest bookstores. I guess it’s the way of the world, and the way of business.”

As Dennis also points out, Ballenford was a cultural centre as much as a bookstore. The store featured a continuing program of architectural exhibitions and regularly hosted book launches.

“None of that earnest work was amounting to anything,” Delean says. “But I do feel we got support from the architectural community.” In fact, a group of architects bought the shop in 1993 after it went bankrupt for the first time. Delean bought it from them in `94.

“The irony is that business was growing,” she says. “But in reality it’s a zero-margin business. The publishers set the store price, but Amazon sets the selling price, and it’s usually lower than ours. So we find ourselves in a bind because of cash flow; and no one’s giving an inch.”

Michael McClelland, architect and Ballenford fan, suggests that the store move to the Distillery District and “rebrand itself, perhaps as a bookstore/café/gallery.”

“It’s a wild card,” he admits, but worth pursuing.

Indeed, the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen combines all three elements.

Delean and her husband, Larry, both studied architecture. He works at the University of Toronto School of Architecture, Landscape and Design, where he runs the materials workshop. The couple has two children, age 4 and 8.

The irony is that architecture has never been more on people’s minds, especially here in Toronto. Toronto has been enlivened by some of the leading global practitioners, including Frank Gehry (Art Gallery of Ontario), Will Alsop (Ontario College of Art and Design), Daniel Libeskind (Royal Ontario Museum) and Norman Foster (U of T’s Leslie Dan Pharmacy Building). If that’s not enough, in Mississauga – Mississauga, no less! – developers hold international design competitions for condo towers.

In other words, architecture is bigger than ever.

But in the case of Ballenford Books, it seems this new interest in buildings doesn’t extend to what’s inside them.

Christopher Hume can be reached by email at chume@thestar.ca.